Ellen left her corporate job less than a year ago to strike out on her own… and I knew there was a story there. Read on for a transcript of our conversation (lightly edited for length and clarity.)

In part 2 of this piece, I’ll connect the dots between what we covered and the Existence-Relatedness-Growth theory, which is all about what employees need to feel motivated and grow in a workplace. Let’s dig in.

About Ellen: Ellen Griley is the founder of Equilibrious Communications and the creator of Internal Calms™ and The STEADY Framework, a trauma-informed approach to workplace communication. She helps organizations navigate uncertainty and polycrisis by improving how they communicate, support, and connect with employees. Ellen writes about surviving work in a state of permanent instability at internalcalms.substack.com. Learn more about her work at internal-calms.com.

Part 1 - Ellen’s story

“Would you tell me a bit about your work-life in the middle of 2025? I’m wonderng about the time right before you left your job at the big tech company,” I asked Ellen as we chatted over a video call. “You can focus on a particular day or just tell me what was going on for you.”

“It was about this time last year that everything started to change. I had a new boss. She was a person I had advocated for, someone I really believed in.

“And then I started hearing rumblings. It was the true definition of a sentinel species… a canary in the coal mine. One of my high performers, a brilliant human, came through the grapevine pretty shaken by a skip-level one-on-one she’d had with this new leader. And I thought, isn’t that strange? She’s such a high performer, and this new leader is so good.

“I was wildly unprepared for what was about to happen, because I’d been in survival mode. We’d come out of a very hard, really brutal layoff. It was my first time having to lay people off, I had to lay off three people, in a terrible market, in Silicon Valley. It just reordered my DNA.

“So we were coming out of all of that, plus the Trump administration, plus the cultural change inside the company. And I remember getting passed an article — literally dropped to me in a DM: ‘This needs to go up on the intranet tomorrow.’

“It had been written by our Government Affairs team, which we normally were not in the business of publishing from. The subject was, basically, how the company would benefit from the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’

“I said, ‘I have some feedback on this.’ And I was told: ‘Your feedback is not needed. This has been reviewed by the chief legal officer, the chief communications officer, and the chief people officer. And you need to turn comments off.’ Which I’d never done before either.

“It was the first time where I knew that if I’d had my old boss, there would have been a fight. And if I’d been in her role, I would have made the fight. But my new boss basically said, ‘You’ve got to do what they want.’ And I thought: ‘oh… we are in a new space.’

“My partner eventually said, ‘You’re your own case study’ — beyond the trauma-informed methods we’d implemented in real time, the removal of the ability to implement them, when leadership of the company changed, and leadership of the country changed, it was its own kind of inflection of trauma.

“And it just broke me. I had my first anxiety attack in a very long time. I don’t think I even had one during the pandemic. It’s not that I hadn’t struggled with anxiety, but an actual anxiety attack, I hadn’t had one in a very long time, and I had one that day.

“It was the confluence of everything: at the individual level, within my body, the things from the U.S. government impacting my personal life. People I love work for the government, so there’s an intersection there…and then this institutional thing within my organization.

“And the frustrating thing was, I still would have published the article. It wasn’t irredeemable. It was the way it was written. It was not employee-focused at all. There was a way to say, ‘There is good stuff in this bill that will benefit our company from an R&D perspective, and here’s why we should pay attention.’

“There were genuinely redeemable qualities in it — but not the way it was written, which made it sound like we’d just been lobbying. It gave an impression about alliance. And the fact that they knew employees would have a response, and wanted to remove comments — that was when I realized: I’ve had a good run, but I think I’m ready to break up with corporate. It took me about five more months to get there.”

I was struck by how clear Ellen was. This was the moment she knew, though it took a little more time to get ready to make the leap into working for herself.

“That’s true of a lot of break-ups right? It takes time to fully get there…” I said. Ellen nodded. “And now you’re working for yourself. You are your own boss. Your own workplace. What’s that like for you?”

“I’m not a very good boss,” she said, and paused, thinking. I waited, knowing she’d have quite a bit more to say, if she wanted to.

“My motto to my team was: ‘I’m always going to assume you’re doing your best, that you’re trying your best. And I’m never going to assume you’re feeling your best.’ So if you need to step away, step away.

“If you need to go touch grass, go touch grass. If it’s Friday at 3 p.m. and you’re done for the week, don’t be online. If you want to take part of your day and go to a museum or a movie — if it involves a story, I consider it work, because we’re storytellers and it’s professional development. I really tried to live by the principles of job crafting and transformative leadership. I was a really, really good boss.

“And I am not that to myself. I never tell myself, ‘We can think about it tomorrow.’ I never tell myself, ‘It’s okay if you’re not feeling your best.’ I’ll go to my bedroom to take a nap, take my laptop with me, then not nap and just work in bed.

“I’m never not thinking about work. I’m never not thinking about communications. I’m never not thinking about whether I’m going to fail.

“I said this to a friend a month ago, after the end of May. May was an exceptional month for me. I put out a research report, I had 150 downloads. A ton of well-respected people in this industry co-signed it without any ask from me.

“They just posted it and said, ‘This is an incredible report, everybody needs to read it, Ellen is doing something very different.’ If I’m going against a model like PESO — paid, earned, shared, owned, I ticked a lot of those boxes on my own, just doing this thing.

“And I didn’t have a boss at the end of that month to come back and say, ‘Look at all this incredible stuff you did. Don’t you feel proud of yourself? I hope you feel proud. Look at all the things that happened — and you made that happen.’

“No. All I could think about was: I’m not making any money. How am I going to make money? How does this turn into something that can sustain me? It’s not about being super wealthy. I just want to keep doing this, and keep playing.

“When I started to get into a groove as a leader, I drew a lot of strength from an unexpected place: the years from 8 to 18 that I played sports, a lot of them at very competitive levels. I was a very competitive volleyball player.

“You take that, plus lean management, plus all these things I gravitated toward, and I was the scrum queen. I was red, yellow, and green all the time — motivating people, showing where the delta was and how we were going to get there, staying on strategy, bringing people along. I don’t do any of that for myself.

“I never give myself a day off. It’s very hard for me to give myself grace. I don’t set boundaries at night — I’m literally writing notes to myself all night about my work. I’m not identifying SMART goals for myself. I’m not prodding myself along, and I’m not rewarding myself, not recognizing the good work I’m doing. So I admitted the other day: I miss having a boss.”

“I think that’s a really common experience when a person shifts from working on a team to going solo. We don’t have folks built in that will reflect us back to ourselves,” I said.

“I know so many people find that in coaches,” Ellen said. “But I have a hard time when I work with coaches, because oftentimes they’ll say, ‘Well, you’ve got everything figured out, you don’t need me.’

“And I’m like, no, I just literally need someone keeping me in the game. I’m a super high performer. I just need someone to be my coach. I don’t need you to transform me. I just need you to make sure I’m conditioning, all of that.” Ellen’s sports background was apparent in her language here.

“Bosses you’ve worked with have done that for you,” I summarized. “That’s amazing, Ellen. Not everyone has had that experience…but it sounds like you know you need that.”

She continued. “A great coach or a boss will also make it okay that something didn’t happen, okay that there was a setback. And they’ll remind you to bounce back and to keep going. It’s really hard to be that person for yourself.

“Unless I’m hiring someone for a bigger lift, I’m my own writer, my own editor, my own content strategy, all of it. I don’t have a middle manager. I don’t have a number two who can make sure everything gets done. And I don’t have a visionary who can clear hurdles. So I’m just this really horrible boss — trying to get better at it.”

“Here’s my last question…it has two parts,” I told her. “Design your ideal workplace — structurally, manager, team, the whole thing, through your trauma-informed comms lens. And personally: what does Ellen need right now, given she feels like she doesn’t have a good boss?”

“I’ll take the personal part of the question first. I’m looking up at this thing next to my desk, an infographic of the feminine economy. The more I dissolve this identity I assumed over time in corporate — being a high performer, being really good at ‘corporating,’ which really just means being really good at navigating and, in many cases, upholding the patriarchy — the better off I’m going to be.

“For me, that looks like putting much better boundaries around what’s truly the most important part of my day, and what comes second and third. The most important part of my day is the time I spend with my partner and the people I love. The second is the time I spend with myself, my body, and my breath — prioritizing movement every day. And it’s letting myself say goodbye to things that just don’t work for me.

“I bought a package of videos on how to be a consultant, and I got to the third video because it was a wall-to-wall sample Google calendar with every minute of the day accounted for, and I thought, I don’t want to do this, I’ll lose my mind.

“So for me it’s personally dissolving that identity of being very good at the masculine economy, and figuring out ways to increasingly make my career a feminist career, a feminine career — inviting in time for pausing, time for play, space for joy. The things you don’t normally get, that I try to create inside organizations, and that I haven’t yet created for myself.

“The second answer: if you turned over the keys to me — let’s say you gave me the keys as a VP of internal communications — I have such a clear perspective on how this works. It all starts with understanding the business priorities.

“From there, it’s how you make decisions to achieve those priorities, how you communicate the criteria for those decisions to the people you lead, how you keep them informed on the progress, and how you tell them the difference they can make in getting you there.

“And there’s a way to do all of that through the lens of safety and trustworthiness and empowerment, voice and choice — being reflective of cultural, gender, and historic issues, inviting collaboration and dialogue.

“All of these trauma-informed principles we already see show up in healthcare, in education, in clinical work. And it’s not hard. It’s just being willing to be accountable.

“I would love the opportunity to do that and to have my own thing, because it’s so gratifying. I think Gen Z — coming into the workforce having already started side hustles, being business owners themselves, with no illusion they’ll stay at one company for their entire career — opens up an opportunity.

“I’d love to run the kind of shop that says, ‘If you come in through these doors, we’re going to give you everything you’ll need to become a CCO. We’ll teach you, we’ll do rotational job programs, we’ll allow job crafting. We’re going to be as transparent as we possibly can — how many promotions we do each year, what the criteria are. You’re always going to know where you stand. And when you’re ready, if this isn’t your home, you can fly.’

“If you train them and invest in them and give them all the skills they could possibly need to succeed in their career, then at different points in their life, they’re going to want to come back. So it’s a thing that feeds itself.

“I just don’t know that corporations are ever going to be in a place to hold themselves accountable like that.”

“Tell me about how your early career in newspaper publishing informed your later work.” I asked.

“I started as an editorial assistant, then a calendar editor, and eventually managing editor. I led the paper through a digital transformation; we went to a digital workflow with InCopy and InDesign.

“I can see now, looking back: oh, I was interfacing with IT, I knew how to do project management. I was doing all of these things, but I didn’t process it at the time, because it was just a newspaper, doing what I’d been asked to do.

“That paper led to a different paper — half of us left and started our own. I started as managing editor of that, and ended as editor-in-chief. And I was 28 years old. I think about all the 28-year-olds I meet now, and I’m like, I cannot believe they put a 28-year-old in charge of a paper. We had an office, but it wasn’t huge — I was basically running a weekly newspaper as editor-in-chief for about 15 months from my studio apartment.

“So I think about that job all the time — the foundation it gave me. When you do anything on weekly deadlines, you become very good at it. I hadn’t gone to journalism school, but I learned everything on the job, over a cumulative number of years living my life by Wednesdays. That formed the foundation for everything I know about editorial strategy — but also for treating people like humans.

“And the shift I felt when I stepped out of that job was the initial spark that radicalized me about corporate America: that it was so wildly different from the life I’d spent the majority of my 20s living, in terms of hierarchy and employee voice — all of these things I didn’t have words for.

“The downside, though — I’m of the opinion that not everything inside a corporation is inherently terrible. The notion of feedback and performance reviews, in a vacuum, is not inherently terrible. And I didn’t have that in the newspaper setting; our HR teams were very lean.

“So what that meant was: at 28, I had a list of accomplishments I couldn’t verbalize. They were all internalized. I didn’t know the value of them, and I didn’t know how to represent that body of work. So I felt like my only option was to throw it all out the window and reset. Everything I did there was my first strength.”

“Did you have any culture shock entering corporate America?” I asked her.

“Well, every corporate job since then was a shock to my system in different ways. I went from construction management to a hospital, from a hospital to global technology company based in Japan, and from that company to a Silicon Valley tech company.

“The hospital was Catholic-run, so there was everything from the healthcare plan to the dress code. The next company I worked at had a very mature workforce, so that’s where I got radicalized — at 33, the young kid on the block. And then I entered Big Tech — a publicly traded company that had been managing its bottom line through layoffs. That was its own shock. So there were shocks at every point.”

“Did any of those jobs have a positive impact on you?”

“Oh my God, unquestionably, yes. The person who hired me at that large tech company. I will never forget seeing that job description. I was in the bedroom of the house I was living in at the time, and I read it and had this whole-body feeling about it. I walked out and looked at my then-husband on the couch and said, ‘This insane job just went up on LinkedIn, and there is absolutely no way I’m going to get it — but I’m going to try.’

“And then it was one next-best decision after another. I mined my network and found someone on the inside — someone in employee relations at a company they had acquired — and had her read the internal job posting to me over the phone, because I didn’t think to do a video call. I had her look at it because I couldn’t even tell if it was a people-leader role. She said, ‘No, it’s leading nine people.’ And I thought, okay, I think I can lead nine people. I ran a newspaper — how hard can it be?

“Then she pointed me to the hiring manager. I researched the heck out of her, messaged her on LinkedIn, impressed her, and she brought me in for an interview.

That interview changed my life, for two reasons. One: it was the first time I’d ever done a remote interview. As an elder millennial, I’m so much more comfortable with a screen between me and another person — I could have my notes, I could have everything. And this was during the pandemic, so it was a remote video interview.

“Two: meeting my manager on that call. I remember logging in, waiting in the room, and this woman appears on screen, and she takes a deep breath and goes, ‘I’m so excited to meet you.’ And I’ll never forget how that made me feel. That feeling sustained for the close to five years I worked under her — about four and a half years reporting to her. She completely changed my life.

“On paper, I had never officially managed a team in the corporate sense — performance reviews, all that infrastructure. But she could tell there was talent. I had eight or nine interviews at a company like that, so it wasn’t just her. But the thing she did — her wholehearted, unending support of me — I’ve never experienced anything like it.

“She championed me, she challenged me, she didn’t always agree with me, but she recognized my talent. She saw everything I couldn’t see in myself, and then when I got to the point where I could see it, she just opened the door and let me keep walking through it.

“It’s part of what led me, eventually, to the worst professional experience of my life — in part because, how does anything match that? She sat and had weekly one-on-ones with me for four and a half years, which is a lot of time to give someone.

“And in many cases they were two-hour ones. And in that time, I quit drinking, and I got a divorce, and I found this calling to trauma-informed communications — and she supported a master’s degree for it. I literally would not be where I am today without the support of that manager.”

“She helped you see yourself differently…” I said.

“Coming back to that moment of being 28: there was no one in my life saying, ‘Hey, you did a really incredible thing — you ran a newspaper, you had the respect of legends in the industry, award-winning journalists who looked to you as their captain.’

“There was no one at the end of that road sitting there with a mirror, reflecting it all back to me. So the story I wrote in my head, in the absence of that, was: luck. It was just luck. I was good at the interns, and good at that one IT project, and I just kept going.

“What my manager did for me — early on, there were moments when she was surprised by the hire she’d made. She’d be like, ‘I knew I made a good hire, but I didn’t realize — no one expected you to come in and do what you’ve done.’

“But even then, it’s funny: in answering this, I don’t think she was ever exactly that mirror for me. In my life now, when I give people feedback, I get very, very specific, because I want to be that mirror. I don’t know that she necessarily was — because at that point, in my early 40s, it was a thing I had to eventually see on my own. If I hadn’t seen it by then…

“As I was figuring out my leadership style, as I was trying to bring the team to a place I knew they could get to, she’d say, ‘Wow, I wish I could think like you. I wish I’d thought of that.’ That’s a way of reinforcing to someone how good they are.

Ellen seemed to be working out, in real time, why there were times her manager’s praise never quite landed, even though she did great work at a massive company. Maybe because the feedback she got was great, but not specific enough to really sink in.

“This manager was impressed with you. She believed in you,” I said.

“When I turned 40, I needed to fix myself. I was so absolutely broken in so many ways. It was the year I threw everything at it — the kitchen sink.

“One of the things I tried was an executive coach who was an astrologer. An astrologer with an MBA. You don’t see that every day. I paid out of pocket for three sessions with her, and I told my manager, and she said, ‘Okaaay….’ She was slightly skeptical.

“Then I said I wanted to keep going, and asked if she could help pay for it, and she went, ‘Okay!’ and she got me about 10 more sessions.

“About midway through that, I came to work one day and said, ‘I think I’m really good at my job.’ And my manager said, ‘Well, yes — we’ve all seen that in you for a very long time. But I’m glad you finally see it for yourself.’

“And I said, ‘I think I could be a CCO.’ And she goes, ‘Unquestionably, you can be a CCO.’ And then she told me exactly why she felt all of that. That was my mirror, and I could really believe it.

“But underneath it all, I felt her support. Her approach was really like, ‘I am all in on you, and whatever you need, I’m going to figure out how to get it’ — because ultimately it was very good for the company, too.”

Part 2 – Workplace needs can be met, and suddenly unmet, in record time.

Ellen’s amazing boss, her ability to lead others well, and her creativity and autonomy all satisfied her workplace needs. The needs in Alderfer’s ERG theory, were on full display in her story: Existence (pay, benefits, job security), Relatedness (connection to her boss and team members), and Growth (continued learning, creativity, autonomy, clarity about her growth path).

Once her new boss came on board, Ellen’s experience of the workplace changed dramatically. Her strongest relationship with a manager had been replaced by someone who wanted compliance (Relatedness needs) instead of leadership, creativity, and future ownership of her function (Growth needs), someone who needed a Human Doing instead of a Human Being to lead. It impacted her quickly, bringing on an anxiety attack and a question about leaving corporate life altogether. She left within five months.

Now that she’s struck out on her own, leading Internal Calms, Ellen owns everything from top to bottom. She’s on fire with creativity and growth.

“I put out a research report, I had 150 downloads. A ton of well-respected people in this industry co-signed it without any ask from me.” She’s getting fantastic feedback on her work, and she still connects monthly with that influential manager, which meets some of her Relatedness needs. But she doesn’t yet have connectedness or mentorship in the way she once did.

What’s most pressing, now that she’s her own boss, is the Existence need. “I’m not making any money. How am I going to make money? How does this turn into something that can sustain me? It’s not about being super wealthy. I just want to keep doing this, and keep playing.”

We’re all at our best in places built for Human Beings, not Human Doings. But finding that role, that company, that self-employment situation, is rare. Not impossible... just rare.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

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And if you have a personal story, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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Cody Taymore describes himself as a survivor with receipts.

“Six years sober. ADHD. CPTSD. A vice president in financial sales. A standup comic. I am in active civil litigation against a licensed therapist whose conduct was serious enough that the state of Michigan issued a formal consent order against her. I rebuilt from a $126,000 betrayal, and I hit 195 percent of quota while it was happening. By rights I should not have walked out of some of what I went through. I did, and I wrote about it the whole way.”

In his writing for Kill the Silence, Cody is incredibly sharp and articulate about feelings, experiences, and what can happen when relationships turn into betrayal. He’s also someone who offers solutions, so I was curious about him. I wanted to know, naturally, about his worklife and how his previous jobs and bosses impacted him. I also wanted to know about how he experiences work now.

Cody joined me virtually on Saturday, from the same room where he usually has his live chat sessions with his readers.

Cody and I talked for over an hour about managers, past jobs and current ones. What I’m sharing below is excerpted with light edits for length and clarity from the transcript.

When we talked about managers, Cody had quite a bit to say.

“There’s this quote that goes something like ‘if you want to know who has power over you, just look at who you’re not allowed to make fun of.’”

“That’s powerful…tell me more,” I said, wondering if making fun of your manager is ever a good idea. And then I remembered a few past managers with funny personalities, where gentle ribbing was part of our relationship. So sure, he was right. Some people, managers or not, are fine with a joke at their expense. Some aren’t.

“There are certain managers I’ve worked for whose egos are so fragile that they can’t take any feedback. They can’t take anybody saying, Hey, you know, like, you need to improve a little bit actually, like in your management skills.

“I’m thinking about this one manager who felt like I was challenging his authority if I gave him any feedback if I didn’t put it in the softest, most indirect way possible. Like, I don’t know if this guy’s just not getting love at home or something’s going on with this person. But it’s unfortunate. They got into these positions and, well, candidly, my experiences with people like that made me not respect anybody’s title anymore.

“Like if you say ‘I’m a therapist’ I used to think instantly that you’re a great person. You must be, you want to help and all that. Now I’m skeptical as hell.”

All of this made sense given Cody’s experience with a therapist that he said crossed many ethical boundaries and exploited him. He’s written about it here.

“I’ve had managers who were great though. They singled you out, as an individual in a good way. Like, I’ve had managers that say, hey, I’m gonna take each guy on my team out to lunch, get to know them, and make that a regular part of like every quarter.

“But the ones who are more fragile turn it around on you. And I gave regular feedback to a manager and it turned into me being targeted, like with disciplinary action using words like ‘insubordination.’

“I feel like, the bigger the company, the less they care about you. I worked at this big, well-known company, and I was one of the top performers. Everyone was performing well on my team, but I was doubling and tripling other people’s numbers. So there was a lot of attention on me.

“My manager, who I got along with, was switched out.

“I got a new manager who was like micromanaging because he didn’t know how to be a manager. And then things started getting more and more bizarre.

“He just would make comments like, man, I wish I was making the money you’re making when I was your age. And I’m like, it’s a really bizarre thing to be saying to a person that you’re supposed to be investing in their success, not like envious. Right?

“And I brought up that I got diagnosed with ADHD at like age 30 and he was very dismissive of it. As a manager, he could have been offering like workplace accommodations. Instead, he was just borderline insulting. He’s like, ‘well, I get distracted too. You know, I might have ADHD.’

“All of this at the same time as the company is having like ‘Neurodivergent celebration week’ which just makes you feel like that’s all a performance.

“I reported to this guy for two years and it was painful. I told him I’m a recovering alcoholic countless times and he kept offering me alcohol.

Cody having to refuse drinks from someone in a position of authority who knew he was in recovery, over and over, was hard to sit with. I stayed quiet, listening as the story unfolded.

“I finally went to HR and was like ‘can I report to a different manager?’ I didn’t even go into detail, I just said things weren’t really working out. I was trying to get what I wanted without being perceived as a problem. I was trying to keep it professional and high-level because everybody at the company was telling me, don’t rock the boat.

“HR gave me the runaround for two months and long story short, they ended up firing me and putting flags on my license where I had to sue them later to get those marks removed. We went through arbitration and eventually I had those things removed.

“But that job pops into my head a lot because I didn’t do anything wrong except attempt to advocate for myself. And the company was like we’re going to try to destroy this kid’s life and shut him up.

“You know, after I left, that same manager went after another top performer at that office and successfully destroyed that guy’s career. Eventually, several people at that branch went to HR, and the company removed him. But there were careers that suffered because of him all along the way.

“It taught me that if I’m under a manager who is intolerable, it’s better to leave than to try to change things. I’m not gonna be a hero and try to like, uh, change the culture, change things for the better. They don’t want it better.

“And these companies have so much power,” he said.

“But you ended up going into arbitration with them. You went up against the big company,” I asked. ”You fought for your license to be restored without the flags. What made you feel like you could do that?”

“Because they were lying. They lied. They lied about me, and it was preventing me from being able to get employment in the financial industry because of what they put on my license. And I did the calculation, you know, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, I’m not going to look back and go, man, I really wish I had that 30 grand or whatever the severance was that they offered me.

“I would rather have my opportunities available to me in the financial industry. Because that’s where I started when I was like 19 years old. I started my career getting these licenses and took that path because I didn’t have the luxury of going to school. So, I worked very hard for these licenses. I have like 10 or 11 of them. And I just thought to myself, like, I’ll be goddamned if you think you’re gonna take my licenses without a fight.”

I sat with that, and took a breath, taking in how important the licenses are to Cody. “How do you think this experience impacts your work today?” I asked.

He told me about his current role. He’s in sales and feels good about his work. He feels secure when he is performing well.

“But the truth is that anyone who struggles with depression or anxiety, you have times where it feels like you can’t function. I’ll get scared that I’ll feel that way forever. I get scared that if that happens, I wouldn’t be able to keep my job. So that does run as an undercurrent of something that could risk me performing at work.”

“At the company where I work now, I think I can be myself, but I choose to hold back. I don’t speak much in meetings. It’s not my passion to be there. I feel like no one at my job really knows me, and that’s on purpose.

“And maybe people will be like ‘that’s sad’ because it’s isolating. But, I work fine on my own as well, my company’s in another state, and I work from home.”

“Do you think your colleagues feel that distance from you?” I asked.

“I think at times, yes. And I think I’d rather remain a mystery than be judged to death.

“In my life outside of work, I’m very outgoing, and at work I actually like to getting to know people. I like making people laugh.

“Not to the point where I don’t get my work done, but I like to be part of making the environment where people feel seen. I say hello to people, make people laugh, things like that.

“I had a mentor, Rob, who told me when I was around 19 or 20 that ‘the reason you’re so good is because you’re so fucked up.’ He said these words when I was already showing like really amazing potential, and beating all these people at numbers at my job, and like I hit the ground running with like closing business.

“Looking back, to reframe those words in a better way, I think he was telling me I’d developed a skill for reading people because I’d had a lot of trauma. In sales, I can see the moment I’ve lost someone, and adjust how I’m working with them.

“Rob noticed that I had a lot of drive, but he also noticed there was more to it than that. Like it wasn’t just, oh, here’s an ambitious young kid. It was like, oh, he, there’s something about him that I think is different. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but I do now.

“Rob got to know me on a personal level, and he framed me as sort of having a superpower.”

I was curious if Cody thought this kind of “seeing” and understanding could be possible in a large workplace in a structural way. “Do you think a big company can make employees feel truly cared about? That their unique talents, or differences, are an asset to the business?” I asked.

“I think it’s possible,” Cody said without hesitation. “I think it starts with leadership at the very top, and obviously it depends on the industry. But it’s all something people feel in the environment, like I said, if employees are all saying ‘don’t rock the boat’ that is telling. I was in a company where I wasn’t trying to rock a boat, I was just saying something wasn’t working that I thought was also blatantly obvious.

“I think it’s possible, but I don’t know how that would work. I guess I don’t believe much in these corporations at all.”

“If you were to work in a company that had everything you needed to be the most successful at your job, to perform at the highest level, what would that look like?” I asked Cody.

“That’s a great question. I would say from a standpoint of structure, I like having autonomy. I’m not big on being told what to do all the time. Like, I want to know what the task is, and I want to know, like, I want to, I don’t need to be spoon-fed per se, but I want to know that there’s a structure to a degree. There’s a process that we can work within. So some structure. If there’s not one, I typically will create one for myself.

“As far as leaders go, you want to work for people that you admire and respect. A lot of times it’s people that have done the job and worked their way up themselves.

“And if it’s something that you want to do, right? Like for me, if I, you know, let’s say I say, okay, I want to be an advisor, whatever it might be at this company and I want to make X amount of dollars. This guy did it and he’s in management now. He can teach me how to do it, while letting me put my own personality into it.

“So, you know, I think sales, I’ve been in sales since I was 18 years old. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t in sales. I like the aspect of being able to work harder, get better, and make more income if you’re bringing in more deals.

“From a benefit standpoint, there are some companies that will pay for your health insurance entirely that I’ve seen. Some will give you a 50% match on your 401k. I think the benefits are important. Medical insurance and being able to save for retirement, and them helping you…that’s all important because things are getting more expensive and pensions don’t exist anymore, really.

“In my life, in terms of my needs, I want to have a safe income floor. And I don’t need much to be satisfied, I don’t need some crazy big home or anything like that.

“I just need a secure kind of baseline of income, and if I enjoy what I’m doing, if the right infrastructure’s in place, which from a sales standpoint, I think you need marketing, right? To hopefully have people calling your company, requesting your services. It’s not just outbound trying to convince people.

“And you know, it takes time to figure all that out.”

“Maybe some trial and error,” I offered.

“Yeah, which I’ve done a lot of the errors side. I’ve learned enough. Yeah, no more lessons. We’re done with lessons now.”

One of my biggest takeaways from this chat with Cody was how he keeps a deliberate distance from his current colleagues. He said he’s fine being a mystery. He knew he could speak up more in meetings, but his job doesn’t depend on it, and he said he doesn’t feel much passion for the work, so he doesn’t. He does what’s needed to keep the job and get paid well, and that’s how he keeps it from having too much influence over his mental and emotional state.

This is a pattern I hear across a lot of these interviews. When people have had bad experiences that came from caring too much, they pull back in their future positions.

In terms of Cody’s situation, he described several areas where his workplace needs weren’t being met, and even worked against him. Let’s break it down with three categories from the ERG Theory of Workplace Motivation (it’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy for workplaces).

Existence — Cody said his jobs provided financial security and benefits, but that security was threatened when he advocated for himself and it backfired.

Relatedness — Cody described a manager who monitored and reported on him, and an HR process that felt more protective of the company than of him. He said trust broke down to the point that he no longer believed in his leadership or felt like part of a mutual, good-faith relationship.

Growth — Cody felt boxed into a script rather than given room to develop his own way of working. When he disclosed his ADHD, he says the response was dismissive rather than accommodating. This was a huge gap he felt between the company’s stated values and his actual experience.

When I asked him what kind of job would be ideal for him, his answer touched all three categories.

Existence — Stable base salary, good benefits, career tracking, resources needed to do the job successfully (marketing, customers seeking the product).

Relatedness / Growth — A manager who can show him how he got into that role and let him put his own stamp on it. Leaders a person can admire, believe in, and learn from.

When someone is this clear about their needs, it helps them identify more quickly if a workplace is meeting those needs, and the theory says that clarity should translate into real motivation and engagement.

But there’s a ghost the theory doesn’t account for. If Cody’s current job checked every box on that list, would his past experience still keep him from showing up with real passion and creativity? That’s the common thread I see across these interviews: the current employer, however good, doesn’t get a fully engaged person, because that person is still protecting themselves from the last one.

***

If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

***

And if you have a personal story, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

I reached out to because she has this incredible energy. (Which is evident when you learn that her Substack is titled The Hype Department.) Her posts and notes are encouraging, especially to folks who are in career transitions. They often go like this:

With Alicia’s background working at LinkedIn, Mastercard, Gartner and other major companies, I was curious about how she experienced those years.

I asked Alicia several questions about her time in these companies… Here’s a transcript of what she said, edited for clarity and length.

“Looking back on all the jobs you’ve had, is there one that you keep coming back to in your mind?” I asked…

“Well, one of the companies I worked at was very tough. I had tough targets right in the beginning. I was onboarded by September and was working on my biggest client who was up for renewal in December. I was making really good progress, and I convinced them to sign on for a three-year agreement, but it wasn’t signed yet.

“So by the time November came around, my manager told me I was demoted into a smaller team. They justified it by saying, I haven’t secured any big renewals yet, and they weren’t sure I would hit my targets.”

I was thinking… but what about that huge client?

Alicia continued, “I was too scared to show them that I was already working on it. That I had something in the pipeline that I was sure would come in. I played it safe.”

This all sounded incredibly stressful. “Safe? What do you mean?”

“I didn’t want it to overpromise something, and then have it not come to fruition. In the end, that deal actually did go across the line, while I was still working on the account, after I had been demoted, that deal also allowed me to outperform my targets. It was a huge achievement.”

Relief.

“But by that time, I was already demoted. It was a hard lesson to learn, that I need to speak up. It’s almost better to overpromise. I need to always show what I’m working on and consistently show that I’m delivering value because I can’t expect that my work will show for itself.”

“So that workplace sticks with you,” I said.

“Yes. There was a huge toxic culture where whenever some internal changes were happening, like, for example, my demotion, I was not allowed to tell anyone. And that was putting a huge strain on me because it was a hugely emotional topic.

“People, my direct team could sense something was going on, but I was not allowed to talk about it. The same happened when I handed in my notice, two years later. I was not allowed to tell anyone that I was leaving, which, again, is ridiculous.

“It ended up sparking rumors because people can feel shifts and changes are happening, but nobody’s confirming what is going on.

“So yeah, there was also an enormous amount of pressure that the managers are under to hit their targets. So that rolls onto their employees. There’s just a constant fear about not hitting quota.

“It’s almost shameful not hitting quota. Yeah, it was very, very high pressure.”

I wanted to know if there was ever a workplace where she didn’t feel like she had to armour up.

“I’ve had great managers and worked on great teams. One was a small team that was incredibly supportive. I felt I was able to show up as my true self. I felt like I could voice whatever I was thinking, and I was being appreciated.

“In a way it felt like I was becoming more fully myself. In that job, I felt like I could drop the mask and the facade. I mention masking because I’m diagnosed with autism and ADHD. So I’m very good at masking and it is the biggest belief for me personally when I can unmask. And that only happened fully when I was on that team.

“In another company, I disclosed my diagnoses. Which meant I felt like I wanted to unmask there, too. However, I still felt the environment was not quite the right one. It was very clique-y and I thought I never fully belonged in the right clique. And therefore, I never fully unmasked.

“So I think it was more like an internal shift after I got that official diagnosis that I felt I could show up as my true self because I allowed myself too. But yeah, that company wasn’t an environment that allowed me to fully do it.”

“Did you ever have a manager that helped you see yourself more clearly?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “I had a manager tell me that I have insanely high standards, that I’m very strategic.” She paused. “That was something I always kind of felt, but I never truly believed. And I just loved that my manager was openly saying this, over and over and over. And now I know it. I’m strategic and I have high standards.”

Alicia has moved on from all these companies, so I wanted to know about how she felt on the way out.

“Endings say a lot about how a workplace views talent as they are leaving. So could you tell me about yours? Were there exit interviews?”

“I’ve had multiple exit interviews, and sometimes companies don’t even bother scheduling them — even big companies. That’s frustrating and disappointing. When I did have them, I sometimes felt I wasn’t properly heard, and that made me lose trust in the process.

“After that, I stopped taking exit interviews seriously, which is a bit of a shame, but it is what it is.”

“What do you think decision-makers should know about how people are feeling at work these days?” I asked her.

“There’s so much individuality in how people like to work. Managers need to understand that the way they like to work isn’t the way everyone performs best.”

It was a great point. She paused.

“Managers also need to appreciate people’s strengths and their weaknesses. Weaknesses are the areas to either restructure around or develop, not something to fixate on tweaking. The focus should be on honing strengths rather than sanding down weaknesses.”

Alicia Teltz doing her own thing now and embracing that journey.

***

A few days after connecting with Alicia, I’m sitting with what she said…her takeaways across all these companies. That exit interviews never felt genuine. That people were specifically told not to share about team changes or resignations. That individual teams and managers were what helped her see herself and feel supported in being more fully herself, in her ADHD/autism diagnosis.

Seems obvious, but I want to shine a light on it because it’s so clear in this conversation: even when the company itself is lacking, the people we work with every day can make or break our experience there.

Unfortunately, the way a company is run will either nurture its people and make space for real connection, or it won’t.

In one of Alicia’s examples, the fear and shame about reaching quota was real. That same company told her she couldn’t talk about her demotion or resignation. There was a block to the connection that is usually the saving grace for a workplace.

In another example, the company wasn’t perfect, but the team and manager made her feel seen and valuable. It was a big deal and one she still talks about today.

In a third example, the cliquiness of the people at work (an outcropping of the culture) made her feel less able to unmask as someone with ADHD and autism.

People talk about situations like these as just the “culture” of that workplace, but they are actually the result decisions made by leadership.

In The Case for Good Jobs, Zeynep Ton outlines what happens when a company is stuck in a vicious cycle deprioritizing employees which leads to high turnover, operational failures, and poor customer service. The Good Jobs Strategy was developed to help companies break out of that cycle.

Here’s what good versus bad looks like from Ton’s point of view: a “good jobs system” (what I’d call a workplace built for human beings) invests in people, considers the impact of change on existing employees, and leverages employee talent. A “bad jobs system” (a workplace built for human doings) standardizes and designs work to minimize labor costs, requiring people to do too much, often leading to burnout.

In this world where jobs for “human beings” seem to be the exception to the rule, people are finding their own ways to cope. For Alicia, she’s found a way to create her own workplace for herself as a human being. Others do what they can to keep the job, but keep themselves emotionally distant and very boundaried. While others grind it out for years, saving as much as possible to retire early, essentially spending more time and energy now, so they can quit as soon as possible.

All of these are reasonable responses to a system that wasn’t built for our human-ness. But there’s a cost buried in each of them.

Building your own workplace also means becoming solely responsible for the connection you used to get for free, colleagues you have to seek out and build from scratch, especially as a solopreneur. Staying distant and boundaried means staying, but withholding the part of yourself that might connect with someone.

Working alongside other people toward something bigger than yourself can be one of the most rewarding parts of a job. That’s why I hold onto hope that as more leaders start asking why people are pulling back, instead of just demanding they re-engage, our workplaces might start to change. I want to keep hope alive that people like Zeynep Ton will get through when she writes “It is CEOs and their management teams who will have to take the steps described in this book. These are the steps that are within their power — and no one else’s — to take.”

None of this means workers should stop protecting themselves. It means the protecting shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.

***

If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

Share Human Doings / Human Beings

And if you have a personal story, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

I was in a room with the leadership team when someone raised a problem.

This was about five years ago, and employees had banked huge amounts of unused PTO. It was sitting on the books as a liability, and it was making finance leaders nervous. The instinct in the room: start cutting back how much PTO we give people each year.

I knew that wouldn’t land with employees, not given everything they were already carrying. In fact, it would sink morale lower during a very stressful time.

But the liability was a real problem the CEO and finance team wanted solved, and they were ready to ask HR to lower the PTO allotment so that it wouldn’t keep accruing at the same rate.

I lead communications, not HR. But that means I often have a seat at the leadership table. In comms, we bring the audience’s perspective into the conversation, find solutions that work for the organization and the people on the receiving end of the program or comms plan, and ask really good questions.

What if we solved it another way? Instead of cutting PTO, encourage people to take it. Have the CEO say plainly that he values their wellbeing and wants them to use their time. Have him take his own time off to model it, and tell his leaders to do the same. And let me run a campaign across the company: take your PTO, here’s how, here’s by when.

The balance of unused PTO came down. The liability resolved. And people took time off they hadn’t felt they could take before. The solution was better for employees and the organization.

I haven't yet found an organization perfectly built for human beings (vs. human doings) in every sense. But every workplace can be better. If you're in the room with leaders, aware of how a decision will land for employees, a clear point of view about their daily experience can shift it toward something better.

I talked about this on the Massive Change Show: how, inside an established org, sometimes you can’t go for Massive Change all at once. You have to hold a vision for what a more human workplace could look like, and the persistence to keep making the case, one decision at a time.

If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

Share Human Doings / Human Beings

And if you have a personal story, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

Adrienne has experienced three layoffs in her career and is one of the most steady people I know. She is warm and solid. The kind of person who goes on service trips with her church, keeps money set aside for emergencies, and leans on her friends in recovery when things get hard. Three layoffs, and none of them knocked her loose. I wanted to know how.

We met for a quick breakfast before she headed to an AA meeting. The conversation below is from a transcript that I’ve edited for length and clarity.

“I’m curious about your work-life, Adrienne,” I took a bite of my fruit.

She laughed. “Well, you can ask me whatever you want.”

“Did you ever have a boss, or a colleague who really saw you?” I asked. “Someone who appreciated your personality, your talents…beyond what you could do for the work.”

“Oh yeah. I had this boss at the hospital, and he really saw me for me. Not only that, but he helped me. Because I used to operate like everything had to look good on the outside. I had to do everything perfect. Everything right.

“And I remember I was doing something with a patient’s chart. And I kept saying that I’d done it right. And my boss was like, ‘No, you did not do it right.’

“But I was debating with him. And what he did, and he did it very nicely, he opened me up and said, hey, Adrienne, you’re not always right. But he did it in a nice way. You know?

“And so that helped me bring my pride down and helped me bring my ego down, because I thought, like I said, I thought that I had it all together. I thought I knew the right answer, I knew how to do it. But he brought me down to earth.

“I remember going back to my desk, and it was like the glass had broke. My pride and my ego were shattered by that one idea that I’m not always right. You know? It changed everything. And it made me feel like he cared about me. And he saw me for who I was.”

“So you learned a lot from him,” I said.

“Yeah. I remember I always used to call him Mister. Everytime I spoke, ‘Mister, this, Mister, that.’ And he pulled me aside again and he said, ‘Adrienne, you don’t have to call me Mister.’ And I was like, ‘But that’s the way I was brought up, you know?’ But then, when he said that I realized he was down to earth. This was a boss that I could talk with. You know, if anything’s going on inside of me.

“I really thought he would have made a good teacher. I used to tell him ‘oh, you’d be an awesome professor’ because he taught you as you were working. And he loved to have fun. He would dress up crazy for different holidays. I remember when I first started working there, I made my macaroni and cheese for the holiday party, and it was a big hit. Other hospital departments started requesting my mac and cheese for their gatherings. As soon as I put it on the table, it was gone!

“People were like, ‘who made this macaroni and cheese?’ and my boss would always say, ‘Adrienne made it.’

“When these other hospital departments started asking for my macaroni and cheese, they were people I didn’t even know, or work with. I told him I didn’t mind making it, and he said ‘you should charge them. And if you give them the recipe, you should charge for that too.’ He was showing me to be proud of my gifts and value them.

“I worked there for 12 years. And then one Thursday, I’ll never forget, this was when COVID happened, me and this boss, and my nine co-workers were all on a Zoom call with this guy from the hospital, Mark.

“And all of a sudden Mark says, ‘Oh, you guys don’t have a job anymore.” We were like ‘Mark, stop joking’ and then slowly realized he was being serious.

“And then just to see my coworkers crying, because it just came out of the blue. It was the saddest thing. He was the coldest man to just say it like that. ‘Y’all don’t have a job no more.’ It was so cold.

“Eventually, we got together to discuss amongst ourselves because we were devastated and we had to come in at different times to have exit interviews and turn our computers in. All nine of us had worked together for 12 years. We knew each other well. We knew about each other’s families, and they were there for me when my mom passed.”

“That’s so intense,” I said, looking at her. She seemed really measured though. LIke she’d processed all these feelings already. There was some emotion as she talked, but it wasn’t a tidal wave. She was really just telling me how it all happened.

“But thank God, I listened to my parents, because like I said, we never know what the future’s gonna hold, and nothing is written in stone. And so I did have some money to the side throughout my years.

“In one way, I knew I was going to be ok, but the fear of the unknown was coming in and taking a toll on me. Mentally and physically. I’m getting up in age and thinking ‘Is anybody going to hire me?’

“And what I did… I doubled up my AA meetings and I stayed close to my sponsor to help guide me through this. Because I was really hurt. It was hurtful. I had all this experience and knowledge… I had certifications. I could technically go to a different department, but they put a freeze on hiring. So it really took a toll mentally.

“Because of my savings, I was able to pay my rent every month. I was able to pay my bills every month and still live comfortably. And I took a couple of months and then decided I was ready to start putting myself back out there.

“I got hired at another hospital and stayed there a few years, but eventually wanted a change of pace.

“I knew this doctor who asked me to come and work for his office. His wife was running the office.

“I got in there, trying to be part of the team. I love to learn and to add things into what I know. The more knowledge the better. But they had me doing three jobs. Secretary, office assistant, bringing the patients in. I was doing good…I know I’m a good worker, and a positive person. But they didn’t have enough patients coming in. They laid me off.

“I went and found another job. I moved on. And the doctor came calling again. He asked me to come back because I’m a reliable, stable worker. And I said, they’d have to put my job agreement in writing if I was going to come back.

“And when I came back I saw more about what was really going on in that office. They were charging more than the insurance said they should. They were driving a Tesla and finding ways to make more money than they were supposed to.

“It didn’t sit right with my heart. I wasn’t sure what to do. And this one morning I came in. The doctor’s wife was standing up front. She had come in early and brought me a gift bag with a bunch of stuff from her house. And she said ‘We don’t need you anymore. We’re going to let you go.’

“And I’m like, ‘what’s going on?’

“And she said ‘Well, you’re not keeping up.’ And I asked her, I said, your husband asked me to come and work for him. But she said, my husband doesn’t have anything to do with it.

“I tried calling him right then. But he wouldn’t answer my calls.

“So I went back to my desk, and I got all of my stuff that I brought in, and I went and put it in my car. I was 62 years old. I called my sponsor. And I was sitting in my car and I said, ‘it happened again.’ And it was like someone had pulled the rug from up under you twice.

“I really hit bottom mentally. And thank God for my sponsor. She said, go find a meeting. So I was scrolling through my phone. And I went to a meeting and I shared what was going on. And again, I thought I was less than. That I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t fit in. Going to the meeting set me right again, though.

“The truth is that in that job, I had carried my weight and I did my part and I learned the best that I could. But they wanted to cram three jobs into one person and then expect them to maintain it. It does not work like that. Not in the working world.

“You know, today, companies and jobs want a person to do 10 jobs in one. And they don’t care about the person’s mental health. They don’t care about the patient, period. They don’t have no concern. It’s all about getting the job done. About them making money, making them look good, and not giving you any type of credit or even saying thank you. The simple things of life.”

She was circling back to the themes of that great manager she’d worked with for 12 years.

“How did working with that great manager years ago shape who you are at work today?” I asked.

“Today I have an open mind. I don’t settle. And I don’t put myself down. I know that I’m worth it.

I am a proud and educated African-American woman. That I deserve it. Because before that job, I didn’t have that much self-esteem for myself, or confidence in myself at work. But having someone else who did have confidence in me, made me have it more in myself. And I was taught that, yes, I can do this. Yes. I’m worthy of this.

“And so, more recently, I transferred to working in surgery. Pre-op and post-op surgery. And I loved it because it was busy, and I got a chance to meet a lot of people, a lot of doctors, and I was able to get even better at communication in that job. Which I really needed. Communication was not one of my superpowers. But learning how to communicate with different types of people enhanced my relationships. It helped me be a better friend.

“And I’ve been working there awhile, but I think I’m ready for something new. I need to keep my brain moving. I need to challenge my brain. I know and I recognize in my life today — and even back then with that great boss I told you about — I have to keep challenging my brain. Because if I don’t challenge myself, if I don’t challenge my brain, I get stuck. And it’s like the walls are caving in.

“So I’ve applied for a medical coding and billing specialist certification, and I’ve been taking classes at the local college. I mean I could start thinking about retiring, but when I asked myself, ‘what do you want to do?’ it was clear. I want to keep going.”

***

In many ways, Adrienne, like all of us, was growing inside and outside of work. But that manager, the one who cared enough to give her feedback that was both kind and true, did something that followed her into every job after. He showed her that continuing to grow and change wasn’t a luxury. It was the thing that made her feel alive.

Humans have needs at work. There’s a quiet little theory for this, a workplace cousin of Maslow’s hierarchy, called ERG: Existence, Relatedness, Growth. Existence is the floor and provides money for rent, food, the lights staying on. Relatedness is the people, which includes the colleagues, the recognition, the sense that you belong to something. Growth is the reaching, the part of you that wants to build, learn, and become more than you were. It’s also connection to a greater purpose than your own.

Now, plenty of leaders will tell you a job’s “job” isn’t to meet anyone’s needs. It’s a transaction. The employer pays, the employee performs. But I’d argue that an employee who isn’t getting their needs met will give you exactly that, the basics. The transaction and nothing more. If you want investment, creativity, respect, loyalty ( the things you can’t actually buy) you have to provide the conditions where they grow.

And here’s what Adrienne understood on a deep level.

When the layoff came, the cold Zoom, Mark and his announcement that everyone lost their jobs, her existence was buffered. She’d listened to her parents and saved money, so she could pay her rent. The injury didn’t land where you’d expect and she wasn’t afraid of going hungry.

What really devastated her was that nine people who knew her, who were there when her mother passed, got dismissed by a man who couldn’t be bothered to be human about it. The loss wasn’t existence. It was relatedness.

And what she reached for to survive it was not a recruiter. She doubled up her AA meetings. She stayed close to her sponsor. After the second blow, with a weird gift bag and a “we don’t need you anymore,” she didn’t call a headhunter. She called her sponsor, who told her: go find a meeting.

That’s not random… When growth gets walled off (the hiring freeze, the door closing, the walls caving in) we reach for the people who remind us we still belong somewhere. The theory has a name for this. Clayton Alderfer, who built ERG in the early seventies, called it frustration-regression: when the higher need is blocked, we double down on the one below it to keep ourselves whole. Adrienne never took a management class. She just did it on instinct, twice.

But she doesn’t stay there. From relatedness, she climbs back toward growth. Today, she takes community college classes and keeps working toward a medical coding certification. “I need to challenge my brain. Because if I don’t, I get stuck, and it’s like the walls are caving in.”

She fell, she steadied herself on the people who loved her, and then she reached up again. The whole ERG triangle, collapsing and rebuilding itself, inside one woman.

Gallup has found that career wellbeing, liking what you do every day, is the single strongest predictor of whether someone is thriving in life overall. People who have it are more than twice as likely to be thriving, period. But Adrienne’s life is arguably the better evidence. She’s the woman who, twice, sat in a parking lot, devastated, and chose to keep growing anyway.

Which is the legacy inside this story. An employer who takes growth seriously is actually influencing whether a person gets to feel alive in their work… and that goes far beyond the office. It goes home and it reaches their families, their communities, the next thing they reach for. That manager who told Adrienne she didn’t always have to be right, who told her to charge for the mac and cheese, never knew he was doing motivational theory. He was just paying attention to a person and it followed her for the rest of her working life.

***

If you’re interested in sharing an anonymous story with me, please reach out. Email me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com. Let’s set up a Zoom chat so I can hear about how your work life has shaped who you are today.

When you talk to Maya, you can tell she’s alive-capital-A. Her true love is writing fiction (and she’s always writing). She’s published several books and a few years ago one of them even sold 13,000 in six months. But that doesn’t like…pay the bills.

These days, she works several types of jobs to make ends meet, but they all revolve around her writing, and trying to stave off the debilitating depression that has come and gone over her lifetime.

I met Maya through mutual friends and adored her instantly. We’re now in a writer’s group together, working on our books, which is how I knew she had a story worth hearing.

This conversation is pulled from a transcript of our conversation. Edited for clarity and length.

“My most traditional job was when I went into the schools. I became a teacher, taught Kindergarten through fifth grade for ten years. I love children. I don’t have any. It was wonderful.

“At the time, we had real freedom to teach in Florida schools. I had about 30 kids a day, the usual suspects. These were the kids who were left behind. Kids who had moved six times in a year and lived in their auntie’s car. Drug raids in their neighborhood. These kids were way behind, and I loved working with them. It was a great gig, but it paid next to nothing.

“I was only able to do it because I had saved some money. I was 15 minutes short of full time — it was a federally funded program, and they structured it that way deliberately so there were no benefits. So I depleted my savings.”

“You did this for ten years?” I asked. Surprised that she’d made it work.

“Oh, yeah. I could be creative every day. We co-created theater for the rest of the fifth-grade class. It was amazing what these drama scenes would do for the kids. It lifted them up. Gave them self-possession and self-reliance. They each had to be in charge of something — props, script. “With freedom comes responsibility” was always my phrase for them. If they forgot a prop, that was on them. I wasn’t their mama. Actualization. Self-actualization — which is a big word for fifth graders.

“There was a time when it all changed and became more data-driven.The freedom to actually teach where the child was taken away. Children are not data. I used to go into the school and say, “Okay, 20% academics today, 80% behavior.” Parental involvement was basically nonexistent, so we had to meet them where they were.

“The teachers were being pushed to churn out numbers. Kids needed to operate at grade level, but you can’t just can’t take a kid who’s been living in a car and make them operate at grade level. My boss — who was smart and had been in the business thirty years — said to me, “If he trusts one adult, you’ve done your job.” Not what’s coming out on the data. And yet the data drove the funding.”

Maya paused to sip her coffee.

“I remember you mentioning one time that there was one school that did it right.”

“Oh yeah. The schools got graded, A through F. There was one school I worked at that went from a D to an A.”

“Fascinating,” I said. “What changed?”

“The principal actually created a physical space with coffee, a copier, all the mailboxes. A true teacher’s lounge. So the teachers could actually confer about what was going on with their students, because that is their product. A first-grade teacher knows Johnny. She can help the fifth-grade teacher that Johnny is new to. That communication was critical. When it came together, you could see the relief.

“She also knew what the school needed and how to delegate. She had a behavioral support manager with a walkie-talkie who roamed the school and helped in classrooms when needed. She had a data manager who handled all the state requirements.”

“There was a K through eighth-grade school I worked at that had a F grade and remained at an F. They turned the teacher’s lounge into a gym. It was tiny. Nobody went in there. The teachers had no way to discuss things. They were alienated from each other. They couldn’t coordinate, couldn’t collaborate. It was a breakdown.

“At the end of the year, graduation rates were too low. The school was shut down, funding was shifted to the local high school, and the teachers’ jobs were cut.”

Listening to her reminded me of this book I’m reading, The Empathy Advantage (by Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley) which is all about what empathy, baked into a workplace, looks like. They looked at health systems as an example: certified nursing assistants and pharmacy techs, often paid well, but treated poorly and undertrained. Most quit within a year.

The authors asked this, “What would happen if an empathetic leader invested time on a nursing ward to understand daily work environment and endeavor to build a culture of support, understanding and respect?” And they cited research that showed workplaces that invested in understanding and meeting employee needs increased revenue and profits by nearly 50%.

Not surprising that Maya’s school with the teacher’s lounge and an engaged principal, who understood people, got an A grade. The students performed better when the teachers had a natural place to connect and collaborate.

“Can you tell me about what you’re doing these days? How you’re making it all work with housing, food, everything?” I asked.

“I had to get over myself,” she said. “I clean Airbnbs — that’s where the majority of the income comes from. I sing, so I make good money at certain events. I sell the band.

“I had to see all things as work. Everything provides for the machine. I also have an Airbnb room in my own house.

“Everything is spokes on the wheel — it all feeds to the center. Just because something is mindless cleaning work doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. It actually gives me time to do the writing. I listen to my research with an AI voice on the laptop while I clean. I might be mopping the floor and working on a scene in a book.

“The center of the wheel is my health and well-being. Because I have coped with severe, chronic, recurring, debilitating depression since I was five years old. That has really determined much of my work. There are times I’ve been almost catatonic — I can’t read, I can’t speak, I can’t process language. So my health has determined my work choices.

“Thank God for the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare made it possible for me not to deplete my savings. I have the best healthcare I’ve ever had.

“Fifteen years ago, I was spending nine hundred dollars a month on healthcare because of pre-existing conditions. You could have a mortgage for that. I finally found a balance. All my choices are related to keeping the wheels on the bus. I have to manage my health, or I have nothing.

“What about people?” I asked. “You said you’d really enjoyed working at the school when there was a teacher’s lounge and the collaboration space made all the difference in the work. Do you find ways to collaborate now?”

“I do have a writing group that’s important to me. And with the cleaning, I feel part of a team, though I don’t fully trust them. I found out my male coworker was getting paid more than me. So even being ‘part of a team’ doesn’t necessarily mean the relationship feeds you or helps you grow…

“Gig work has more respect these days than it used to. But yeah, I regret not having comrades to share the journey with, celebrating a victory, or changing the toner together. I really need more of a team. I do have an artist I work with on book covers, and an accountant for my taxes. But on a daily basis, it’s a solo effort. It’s really lonely.”

Maya was quiet. I was quiet with her. Letting the space breathe to see what came next.

“I do have mentors and friends outside of work who encourage me that I do enough, I am enough, I have enough. These are people who are going back to school, starting small businesses, taking the risk to go in for a big corporate job, it allows me to take risks.”

“In all those people, in your work-life or outside of it, is there any person who helped you see yourself?”

“My dad. He made me a shingle, a cypress shingle, like the old-fashioned ones you’d hang outside your place of business with your trade on it. Mine said ’Artist.’

“He carved it with a wood carving knife and then shellacked it. He could see me when I couldn’t see me. He knew I was an artist even when I was little. And I was too afraid to embrace that. I didn’t go to art school.

“But the other thing he did was — when my brother and I were in business together, he would come to our little tiny office and put stamps on envelopes for our marketing campaigns. He believed in me. He never put us down. He was an attorney. He saw me when I was afraid to see myself. And I have that shingle in my bedroom over my door to this day.”

“Do you own it today? The artist identity?”

“I do it every time I sit down and write. I give a lot of time to it and a lot of thought. I’ve given up other things to create space for it — to have the imagination be free. I guard against negative influences and time sucks. And there comes a point of do it or don’t. Is this ever going to make money? I don’t know. But I’m going to do it whether it makes money or not.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s fun. Because I’m actually good at it. And why not? I’m as good as anybody else. When I sing, I’ve got an octave and a half range, I might as well sell it if it feeds me.

“And being an artist keeps me from being dead in depression. When I’m working on a new fiction story, it’s a grand obsession. It’s a joy. It’s endless research. I learn about the whole world. I was studying emeralds in Colombia. Betrayal in Miami. Yesterday I was studying Looney Tunes characters and Moana and Disney characters because they’re part of my story. It’s a constant evolution of learning. I’m always traveling through my imagination.

“And it costs, because that’s what I’m supporting with my income. Not a 401k. Not a two-week vacation. But on a daily basis, it’s really fun. And it gives it back to me.

“I don’t know. If there’s one thing I could say about all the work I do, it’s that I don’t compartmentalize. Work is not separate from life. It all contributes to one thing… your family, your business, your health, it makes up your life. This is it.

“How do you spend your day?” she asked. “It better be something that works for you.”

When I got to my car I sat in silence for awhile, feeling so many things all at once. Not trying to make sense of it, just trying to let it move through. I felt sadness for the depression that had disabled Maya throughout her life and the determination with which she wrote her books because it kept her moving. I felt grateful to know her, because she has a way of inspiring you with just a turn of phrase or with stories about her days researching for her current book project. She takes road trips all over so she can meet people, see specific buildings, and decide on details for her characters. She holds my dream of this project, Human Doings/Human Beings. I’m glad she agreed to be in it.

If you’re interested in sharing an anonymous story with me, please reach out. Email me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com. Let’s set up a Zoom chat so I can hear about how your work life has shaped who you are today.

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• Alice Shin worked at Flatiron School, a WeWork company, during peak IPO chaos

• Her boss, Eli Bohemond, created a rare environment where it was safe to say “I need help.”

• Now, with AI advancing fast, the world feels like it’s moving at startup speed. Alice explains how to stay grounded.

Why it matters:
This piece is a real-world look at how trust can fuel performance.

Human Doings / Human Beings is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Boss Who Made It Safe to Say

“I Need Help”

Originally posted on Flllow with Alice

It was 2019, and I was working at Flatiron School — a WeWork company. That summer, Adam Neumann announced a “quiet period” at our all-hands. IPO ambitions were in full swing.

At Flatiron School, we were developing future tech talent. And as a WeWork company, we were also part of something bigger: a movement to redefine how people learn, live, and work.

At least that’s what I believed. And the story the media told.

Inside, we were paddling full speed to stay afloat.

A few years earlier, I was on the other side. A founding member of a small startup, crammed into WeWork’s very first location in Soho — an unassuming red-brick building on 154 Grand Street in New York City.

I remember walking the long hallway, breathing in the scent of La Colombe cold brew and ambition, catching glimpses of dreamers and builders through glass walls. There was a quiet energy in the air — a mix of excitement and nerves. We were taking big bets and building something from nothing.

So when I joined Flatiron School, it felt like a full-circle moment.

💁🏻A Masterclass in Compressed Chaos

During my 23 months at Flatiron, I experienced eight major changes — nearly triple the industry average.

We expanded markets, restructured the organization, changed ownership, went fully remote — and rode a rollercoaster of hiring and layoffs.

Externally, we faced a pandemic and cultural reckonings like Black Lives Matter — reshaping our customer behavior overnight. “Business as usual” stopped making sense.

It became a masterclass in what I call compressed chaos — a Harvard Business School case study, unfolding in real time.

In the thick of it, I learned something I still carry: speed matters in the startup world. But speed paired with psychological safety? That’s golden.

🌊 Today’s AI wave feels eerily similar — but it’s global, and faster.

One week, I’m deciphering multi-agent systems.

Another week, I’m learning about “vibe coding.” At first, I thought it meant casually coding together, given Gen Z’s slang, “it’s a vibe” is their catch all for anything cool. But as of last month, it’s now Merriam-Webster official, and it means prompting AI to build software for you!

This sort of rapid evolution can still feel overwhelming. But instead, I’m experimenting and learning with a sense of play.

But it wasn’t always this way.

✅ From Threat to Safety

Early on, I didn’t have the capacity to dive deeply into AI. I was managing product discovery, driving feature adoption, and adapting to shifting priorities.

I entered the world of tech to be at the forefront of innovation, and share knowledge and access to others.

But the daily AI breakthroughs made me feel increasingly behind.

That pressure triggered a familiar anxiety.

Fortunately, I had experienced years ago at Flatiron School how to overcome this and thrive.

Understanding how the brain works under pressure gave me a roadmap.

🧠 The Brain’s Organizing Principle

At the NeuroLeadership Institute, I learned in the face of threat - the amygdala fires, cortisol spikes in our brains.

We get tunnel vision.

We become reactive.

Decision-making and collaboration suffer.

We enter survival mode.

This is called an away state. In an away state, even high performers underdeliver. Sometimes, a robot might do better — unbothered by emotions .

But we have a choice.

We can build the conditions to thrive in uncertainty — psychological safety, a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes (Dr. Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization).

Psychological safety shifts the brain into a toward state, where we’re open-minded, cognitively sharp, curious, creative — and far better collaborators.

What that meant for me was to prioritize, focus, and build the conditions to learn AI.

🧔🏻 The Human Variable — Psychological Safety in Action

In the midst of compressed chaos, it would’ve been easy to slip into an away state .

But at Flatiron School, we didn’t — we had Eli Bohemond

Eli didn’t shield us from challenge.

He was honest.

He didn’t have all the answers — but he made it safe to say “I don’t know” and “I need help.”

He acknowledged reality and supported us through it.

Fear was minimized, not ignored.

That safety made us sharper, and faster, because we weren’t stuck in survival mode.

That made all the difference.

Many leaders dismiss psychological safety as too soft — or too slow. But let’s be honest: it’s easy to write it off if you don’t know how to build it.

🙈 So Why Do So Many Leaders Get It Wrong?

Many leaders dismiss psychological safety as too soft — or too slow. But let’s be honest: it’s easy to write it off if you don’t know how to build it.

Blame and control often feel easier than vulnerability. But that’s the paradox: the higher the pressure, the more safety matters.

Especially in startups, where a founder’s personality often defines the culture, psychological safety must be built deliberately — for stronger teamwork, faster learning, sharper decisions, and more creative problem-solving.

Eli modeled it masterfully:

• He was transparent and courageous. He named the challenges ahead — and what he didn’t know.

• He knew our personal and professional goals, so he linked our personal growth to business goals.

• He set clear expectations.

Not all people in leadership positions are leaders. Eli was an exception.

But even without one, you can build psychological safety for yourself.

👏 PAT Yourself on the Back

When I found myself in an away state — falling behind in AI — I felt anxious.

To shift into a toward state, I used a process I call PAT:

1. Purpose → Anchors you.

🧠 When you know why you’re doing something, it calms the threat response, and gives your brain a sense of control.

For me, the purpose was clear: I wanted to learn AI, because I believe it’s a game changer — like the internet and social media were. It will reshape the future of work — my domain.

2. Asset → Reframes the discomfort.

🧠 By identifying how an experience adds value — even when it’s hard — you shift away from fear and anxiety, towards curiosity.

I saw AI as a way to save time, improve workflows, and boost creativity.

3. Tools → Leap you into action.

🧠 Structure, systems, and support reduce cognitive load, build a sense of agency, and turn intention into momentum.

For me, safety meant gathering what I needed: a learning community to stay motivated, a strong foundational course, and a project to test and apply what I was learning.

PAT helped me reduce the cognitive load and shifted me into a toward state — one fueled by confidence and curiosity.

🤝 Growth Bonding — Our Team’s Legacy

Psychological safety made our team at Flatiron resilient. We trusted each other.

At our peak, our team of six supported 150+ coaches, who in turn guided over 5,000 students — many navigating identity shifts and stepping into the unknown of tech.

That kind of transformation required real connection. And we could only create that for others because we had it within our team.

Some might call it trauma bonding.

I call it growth bonding.

In a previous post, I introduced SSCALE, my framework for building connection.

The first “S” is self awareness. The second, safety.

Our team was one of the most self-aware groups I’ve worked with. And Eli’s leadership created the conditions for us to stay in a towards state.

We built trust, resilience, and clarity — together. And we emerged stronger for it.

To this day, our leadership team of six keeps in touch.

💙 Sharing is Caring

I’m sharing my AI learning journey to create a space where it’s safe to be curious — to not know yet, to ask questions, to learn out loud.

If you’re leading a team, I hope you consider Eli’s model when you start conversations about AI adoption. Because safety isn’t just about moving slower — it’s what makes deeper learning, faster adaptation, and real connection possible.

And maybe, in reading this, you feel a little more connected — to your own journey, to your team, and to me.

👀 Next Up in SSCALE: Curiosity and Adaptability

Next week, we’ll explore how these two skills helped me connect with a bodega storeowner in Barcelona — and how that small moment challenged my assumptions and deepened my empathy. In an AI-driven world, where algorithms often reinforce our biases, curiosity and adaptability are how we keep our humanity — and stay truly connected.

Alice Shin, Product Strategy & Change Management in Learning & Development Tech who writes the blog Flllow with Alice

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

Share Human Doings / Human Beings

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.



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Jackie went on to describe a routine team meeting that made her point especially clear.

Nothing on the agenda had suggested anything unusual was coming up. Then a senior teammate publicly blamed a very junior teammate for an issue that wasn’t theirs to own. “It wasn’t subtle,” she said. “It landed hard. And everyone in the room felt it.”

“The junior teammate was thrown under the bus in a really horrific way, and they just shut down. The rest of the team went quiet, too.”

She went on. “I think there was some shock at the more senior person’s behavior. But it was also quiet watching. Everyone was waiting to see what leadership would do next.”

Jackie knew immediately this wasn’t just about a comment. It was about what the team would learn from it.

Her leader didn’t address it in the meeting or make an example out of anyone on the spot. They moved on in the moment and followed up privately with the senior teammate. They were direct about how that senior teammate’s actions weren’t up to the company’s expectations around communication. No ambiguity or hedging. “They basically were like ‘That’s not how we do things here. Our culture is kinder and more generous. You don’t get points by throwing people under the bus.’ ”

At the same time, Jackie reached out to the junior teammate, who she’d mentored in several projects. She reassured them about the team’s standards, the company’s values, and how development was handled there. She made it clear that this moment didn’t define how things ran at the company.

Then her team’s leader did one more thing that mattered for the rest of the team.

They sent a message to the full team that reinforced the culture they were trying to build and what good communication looked like in practice. It didn’t name names or rehash the situation.

“It was fast,” Jackie said. “And it was clear. Everyone knew we meant what we said about our culture.” That clarity stuck with the team, and there weren’t any more incidents like the one they experienced.

Jackie has lived through the opposite, too. A major reorg where people were reassigned or laid off, but little else was explained. Folks were moved to new teams without introductions, guidance, or a sense of where they fit. For weeks, people were trying to orient themselves, unsure who they reported to or what success looked like.

“It honestly felt like that John Travolta meme,” she said. “Everyone was looking around, trying to figure out where they were supposed to be. It was wild how much time was wasted. And how much confusion there was. It all could have been prevented.”

“Good communication,” Jackie explained, “could have created better guardrails. It could have helped people understand expectations and anticipate what was coming, even during times of change. That visibility makes it easier to stay grounded and do good work.”

The difference between her two experiences wasn’t talent or intelligence… It was care.

When I asked her about the times she felt most valued for her individual perspective at work, she told me about improvements she made to her team’s process. Not only did the improvements help her own team, but they were adopted by other teams. “It was super validating to see my work scale like that,” she said.

The best managers Jackie has worked for shared a few things in common. They were clear about expectations. They allowed room for mistakes. They didn’t try to mold people into copies of themselves. They listened, gave thoughtful guidance, and were generous with praise.

“They paid attention to how it felt to work there.”

When leaders get that right, people don’t have to spend energy protecting themselves. They can spend it doing the work.

Jackie is in her early forties and queer. She’s spent twenty years in the same industry, moving between companies of all sizes. She’s seen how leadership shifts as organizations grow…and how communication, for better or worse, shapes what it feels like to be on a team.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

I met Eric on Substack, where we read each other’s writing. He spends his days in a tech company doing the corporate thing. His Substack, I’m sure you’re right, is where he writes under a pen name, so he can take the corporate guy mask off and publish things like “New Guy, New Rut - Figuring out why the new guy bummed me out so much” and “How to avoid your job stealing the prime of your life.”

I expected him to be loose and irreverent, the way his writing is. But the Eric I met took his time. When I asked what something felt like, he stopped to think. When I pushed a little, he went there.

Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

“You’re an interesting guy,” I started. “You have this split that a lot of us have. The person that has to perform at work, and then you have this strong internal voice that’s often at odds. But when you talk about it, you don’t sound conflicted… Are you?”

Eric paused and thought for a moment. “I have this thing that I say to customers sometimes, and it’s a sports analogy. Basically, there’s the name on the front of my shirt, which is my jersey name, right? This is the team I work for, the company…”

I nodded to the letter E on my screen. Eric agreed to meet with me virtually, but he kept his camera off. “And then there’s the name on the back of my shirt. These are two different people talking to you. So there’s the stuff I gotta say to you based on the name on the front of my shirt. And that, in my mind, is like, it’s my job. I’m here to represent that name. So I take a lot of pride in doing that. That’s what I consider a good job, making my team represented well in the world.”

“Right, got it.” I said.

“But it doesn’t stop me from knowing I have to take care of the name on the back of my shirt. I’m going to have certain relationships that run in contrast to those, or in tension with that. So there are moments I have to be like, look, me as a reasoning human person — name on the back of my shirt — I understand what you’re saying. Me as a representative and team member — name on the front of my shirt — this is how we feel. And I guess I have learned to exist with that cognitive dissonance.”

He truly didn’t seem in conflict. Maybe because he had such a clean tidy metaphor... But there had to be more to this, because his Substack publication existed as a place for him to take the “team jersey” off. I wanted to know more about that.

“Tell me a bit about why you write on Substack?”

“Having to keep a mask on at work, it’s like playing chess. I’m just thinking, what am I doing to maximize the chances I get more out of this? But if I’m in that mode all the time, I can lose track of what I actually think or feel about a situation.”

“I can get too focused on what I would do to maximize my chances of a promotion or a raise or whatever and not even ask myself ‘What do I actually like or dislike about this person?’

“I started my Substack because I needed a place I could go to just be authentic and really work things out and decide what I actually feel. I needed to try to find that true north again. What’s moral, what’s not. Not what do I have to do, but what do I want to do. And because there’s not a lot of room for that in the world — let alone at work, which is taking up so much of my life anyway — the Substack has really done a lot for me.

“I feel like authenticity can be a muscle. And if you don’t use it, you start to lose it. And I think being able to find that true north and really reinforce who I am outside of work — knowing more about myself by just exploring that — has made it easier to navigate a world where I can’t always be that way.

“Because I don’t have to sit there and wonder, okay, I’m saying this because I think it’s what I need to do for right now to be successful at work, but have I lost track of what I really think? Have I lost track of what I really feel about this? With Substack, I’ve had the opportunity to explore those scenarios and find that compass again. And that part has made it easier. It’s definitely taken weight off those hard interactions I’ve had at work.”

“This makes so much sense to me,” I paused and glanced at my list of prepped questions for Eric, but decided to follow my curiosity instead.

“What would the best possible workplace be for you? From benefits to management to leadership…what would it have in order for you to feel like you’re thriving?”

“Well, I recognize it’s not necessarily something that works for everybody, but for me — I would like to be someplace that is absolutely transparent. The good, the bad, the ugly. I want to know if we’re losing money, I want to know if we’re making money. I just want to know what the deal is from all sides…”

“It’s really hard to tell what’s going on in a lot of companies in corporate America, it’s just so opaque. It’s a lot of like reading tea leaves and wondering if you’re okay.

The guessing and wondering can waste a lot of energy, I got that.

And then Eric went into personal dynamics and culture. “And if someone thinks I’m doing a terrible job, they should just tell me. We’ll just talk about it. I thrive in that degree of honesty. Maybe it’s just I’m from the northeast, so I’m kind of used to that environment. So for me, it would all start with that.

“From there, trying to find a place that is about mutual gain. I worked for a couple of places where, and some people hated this — when you talk behind someone’s back, they say, hold on, let me get that person on the phone and so we can hash it out right now. I love that. That to me is such an essential part of a successful work culture that’s going to actually grow. Because I just feel like people get stuck and it’s easy to get complacent in an organization that isn’t adapting in a way it needs to. You end up with people in the same position having the same problems and complaining about the same shit 10 years from now that they’re dealing with today.

“And it’s one of the funny things that puts people off a little bit when they interact with me, even in my current job, because I really have a hard time with that. If people want to complain about someone else, I’m just like, look, anything I’m saying to you right now is something I would say to them, and anything I would say to them is what I would say to you. I just want to work it out with you.”

“There’s just so much opportunity to find common ground with people and recognize that you feel the same things. I just feel like it doesn’t happen enough.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like, I have a guy that I work with right now. I’m feeling really bad for him because he is being so punished right now for being so authentic. He has a very common name, right? We’ll just say his name’s Danny…”

“Danny gets on calls — these giant calls — and we had one not long after I started this job where the senior leader of our biggest enterprise customer, his name was Dan, basically the same name. So we’re getting on a call. There’s like 200 people on this call. Dan, the senior leader, is like, alright, I’m just waiting for this one other person. Danny, the person I’m referring to — the person getting punished for his authenticity — he gets on the line. He’s like, ‘Oh Dan, don’t worry. Danny’s here.’ Zero sense of being afraid to joke to a higher-up in that moment.

“He treats everyone the same — from the janitor to the CEO. And because of that, he doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t put the mask on. And for that reason, people are afraid of putting him in front of certain types of leaders and customers.

“But this dude Danny and I have crushed it. Like everywhere that he goes, he’s the mayor of that place. He’ll be talking to the person at the Dunkin’ Donuts and in the bureaucratic offices in the back and everyone’s like, oh, Danny. He’s charming. And then you come back into our internal corporate world and people are just like, oh my god, Danny put his foot in it again. He’s going to say something embarrassing. And I don’t know, I just think it’s a story that’s very reflective of one of the things that I think is the easiest to change and the most in need of change — people being more forgiving of others being real like that.”

The Danny story made me think about job security and if Eric had ever been on the wrong side of a layoff himself.

“You know, I worked for a large insurance company that ended up moving a lot of our staff to like two hours away from where it originally was in a major city, and then they had us start training a remote office — I think it was the Philippines. And of course, all along, they’re like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll never have layoffs. We’ll never have layoffs.’ And lo and behold, a year later, the whole crew is laid off.”

He clarified. “It was one of my first jobs. I had gotten the job in the mail room, moved up into some of these, like, sort of adjacent positions, doing still, like, menial sort of administrative tasks.

“And for me, I was very young at the time, so being a little bit brash — I felt this coming, and I would ask in, like, town halls, ‘Isn’t this gonna mean layoffs?’ I would never do that now, right?

“But at the time, I wasn’t as keen to how much that could negatively impact me. And obviously you get the answers you’d probably expect, which is, ‘No, of course not. You know, we’re just trying to maximize and optimize and all of the efficiencies and things that come with that.’

“So having somebody stone-faced telling me one thing and knowing intuitively that it was something else — I mean, this was one of my first real corporate job, so I knew that that was a thing, but it’s not until you really see it that you’re like, wow, that’s real. That’s actually how it is.”

“And then, you know, we moved the office to a cheaper location and a lot of the people ended up uprooting their whole lives to move to this place. And I remember kind of feeling like a fool on a pulpit at the time, trying to tell people, well, you know that we’re also training our replacements. Like, this has gotta be just a step on the way to that outcome, you know?

“I started looking for another job back in the city where we were originally working, and eventually I did move back there before the layoffs came, so I was fortunate for that. But it was tough. It was hard kind of seeing the punch coming, and seeing so many people that I cared about not getting out of the way.

“I ended up leaving right before the layoffs but I took a huge demotion to do so. I ended up jumping into a job at a company where we did legal documents. I was like, driving a truck and then going into law firms and stuff. It was just kind of out of my field. But I knew I needed to go. It was one of those, like, even if this wasn’t great, it’s better than the nothing I see coming.”

“It sounds like your inner voice was louder than what everyone around you was willing to hear,” I said.

“You know, one of the people I worked with in the mail room — he ended up being my boss in the mail room. His wife was the head of HR for the whole insurance company and he had worked there for 20 years or something. He was still convinced, ‘Oh, there’s no way they’re going to do these layoffs.’

“And I remember saying, you know, ‘Tom, like, come on man. All the writing’s on the wall.’ It was sad when the layoffs happened. I was so early in my career, it didn’t cost me nearly as much as it did a lot of these folks that were close to retirement, or had been there 15, 20 years in some instances.”

“What about today, in your current role?” I asked. “You’re doing well... You’ve been promoted a few times in a handful of years. How secure do you feel?”

“I think it’s a really tough time to feel secure,” he said. “I work in technology.”

On Substack, Eric Bourgeois is , and he publishes: I’m sure you’re right. He also collaborates with on As Per My Last Newsletter and As Per My Last Podcast.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a personal story, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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I was out to dinner about six months ago with several friends. One friend, Devon, had been laid off from his job that week.

He was a bit in shock, fluctuating every few minutes from “I’ll be ok” to “I should move to a less expensive place next week…” and back to “I know I’ll be ok.”

I realized, as we listened and shared stories of encouragement with him, that every single one of us had been laid off in the past 2 years. None of these layoffs were personal or a reflection of our work (as everyone’s manager stated at the time, per legal instructions); they were the result of reorganizations and company cutbacks. But each layoff hit each of us REAL hard.

“Something will come of this time,” I told him. “We can’t know what it will be but…” I paused. “This ending will bring you a shake-up and…eventually… you’ll be better for it.” I felt this. I said this. I’d had my own experience with this. But I also questioned my own words as they came out of my mouth. We can never know what a layoff will bring for another person.

When you are passionate about the idea of work (a weird passion to be afflicted with, to be sure), you can’t help but zoom out and see the patterns. I looked around the table at my friends…one had worked in education and nonprofit organizations and had been laid off twice, even with his Ivy League education and high standards. Another friend, who has worked in dermatology offices and was downsized out of her office manager role, was out of work for nearly a year. And Devon, who had worked at major health insurance companies. Each layoff was like a long-term romantic relationship break-up that had taken time to work through. We had all been on that journey to some extent, and now Devon was beginning his.

“I was unhappy there, I know,” said Devon. “But I’m still so pissed. It’s like I wanted to be the one who broke it off.”

I know I always write about how work should be more than a transaction. That employees should be seen, paid, and treated as human beings, not “human doings.” That’s my thing.

But I’ve never talked about why it’s my thing.

The truth is that every job left fingerprints on me that continued into the next one. Sometimes I was proud of the way I’d been shaped. But I also carried some scars. Jobs can do real damage and make it harder to show up fully in the next one, just like romantic relationships can.

Our jobs shape us in ways we don’t always see coming… through the culture, through the people who notice us or look right past us, and through the way it all ends.

My 25-year-old self at work was fearless. My 40-year-old self, after a layoff, felt suddenly unsure about all I had done and accomplished. I had to rebuild with the help of people who knew and loved me. I even bought a nameplate for my desk where I did job searches and applications. Instead of my name or title, it said: “I’m kind of a big deal.” I needed the laugh. I also needed the reminder.

I write because workplaces don’t have to inflict damage in the first place. I write because there is always the possibility of another way.

Several weeks ago, Devon and I met for coffee. Sitting outside, with the spring sun warming us, he seemed pretty relaxed. Still between jobs, but interviewing.

I found myself curious about the jobs and people in his past work life that had shaped him before this one. So I asked. And he let me hit “record.” These are Devon’s exact words, edited for clarity…

“Well, I was working in a call center at [company name removed], and there was this call center leader. Rarely to never had she ever said hello to me. She was professionally nice. But it was like she didn’t see me.”

“Until I started having more access to leadership, and she needed me in order to be seen by some of the VPs. And she just came right out and asked me to take a suggestion directly to Michael, a VP. Just said it. Point blank.”

“And I thought: this is a woman who never even spoke to me when I was on the calls…”

I asked him if others had built him up instead of trying to get something from him.

“Alicia saw different things in me that I didn’t even know existed. And she was high up in leadership. I worked with her on some of our company’s charity projects. And I didn’t want to let her down because I felt like she had given me a shot that not everyone gets after working in a call center for six months.”

“And I saw that as: okay, she believes in me. There’s something she’s seeing in me that I’m not believing in. So I need to maybe think a little differently…about myself.”

“I’ll never forget this one time when I walked in about eight minutes late to one of our meetings, and I was so embarrassed. There were two seats directly next to Alicia, and I walked all the way to the end of the table and sat off to the side. And she said, in front of everyone, ‘You don’t have to be afraid to sit next to me. Ever again.’ Lesson learned.”

I could hear the gratitude in his voice as he talked.

“She picked up on this drive, this hustle, in me, and she molded it. When I started there, I didn’t know how to express it or go about it. And she just... molded it.”

I loved how Devon described this relationship with Alicia. He saw her seeing him — and growing him into a team member who was even more confident.

Devon sipped his coffee and looked toward a noisy flock of birds that had just taken flight from a tree nearby.

“These stories are so interesting when you tell them back-to-back like that,” I said.

“Well, Alicia really saw me, and how I could potentially be successful and good for any company in any future role. The call center lady didn’t see me at all until I was useful to her.”

Mic drop. That was the major truth under all of it.

“And as I grew, I was afforded many opportunities. I’ve learned through the experiences that I’ve had since that time. One, that I’m valuable. Two, that I should believe in my own abilities. Three, it helps to know people. And four, success is also a double-edged sword. Because there’s gonna be knives out for you, and you have to be able to see.”

“See what?” I asked.

“It taught me to be able to see through that bullshit. That fakeness at work. I’m able to read people on a corporate level now. Whereas before, I wasn’t. Before, I thought everyone was just a friend.”

I drove home thinking about how much he’d learned — about power, about who sees you and who doesn’t, and about what kind of person he wanted to be on the other side of all of it.

If you know Studs Terkel, you know that he created an amazing book in the 70s called Working. It’s a book of oral histories from people talking about their jobs…everything from stone mason to barber to janitor to ad executive. In the introduction, he tells a story that has been haunting me as I write this.

A college president decided to take a sabbatical. Rather than vacation or work on a book, he wanted to try out a variety of “menial jobs.” He did fine in most of them, but in one job as a porter-dishwasher, he was actually fired. Not laid off. Fired.

“I’d never been fired and I’d never been unemployed,” he said. And he was devastated.

“For three days, I walked the streets. Though I had a bank account, though my children’s tuition was paid, though I had a salary and a job waiting for me back in Haverford, I was demoralized. I had an inkling of how professionals my age feel when they lose their job and their confidence begins to sink.”

He eventually finished his sabbatical as a ditch-digger, then returned to his role as college president — and later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He described white-collar work as surreal after his experience. I’m guessing he returned with newfound empathy for people who grind versus people who decide.

Studs Terkel knew that stories were data. They provided almost photographic proof of what working in the U.S. was like. And now, with my Inside Voices series, I’m attempting to do the same. The anonymous stories you share with me will live in this newsletter and my in-progress book as part of a bigger picture about working in the U.S. today — and the way our past jobs have shaped us.

It’s all in service of the idea that stories are the only way to make people who lead truly understand how their power and decisions impact their employees. And that a mindful, conscious business can have ripple effects that extend beyond each employee’s life to their family, their community, and eventually the world.

I don’t know if these stories will be read by the people who need them most. But I’ll keep collecting and keep shining a light. Not because it’s easy, but because I have a hope that things can be better. I’m not sure they will be. But I have to do what I can to try.

If you’re interested in sharing an anonymous story with me, please reach out. Email me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com. Let’s set up a Zoom chat so I can hear about how your work life has shaped who you are today.

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Obstacle 1: Investor & Board Pressure

One of the biggest blockers to human-centered workplaces is the pressure to continually deliver short-term shareholder returns (often from a company’s board). Too many get stuck in a loop: cutting costs, slashing programs, and chasing quarterly numbers because that’s what boards and investors expect.

This pressure filters down into every policy, reorg, and layoff cycle. It erodes trust, fuels burnout, and weakens a company from the inside out.

The broader shift we need is a reevaluation of how success is measured at the top. Employee trust, cultural sustainability, and long-term value creation must count.

Boards, VC firms, and private equity groups should track employee experience metrics alongside financial ones. Turnover, internal mobility, employee thriving metrics, and trust scores should be regular points of discussion, not afterthoughts.

When we expand how we define success, we give CEOs permission to lead with clarity instead of fear.

Zeynop Ton, the MIT professor, researcher, and founder of the Good Jobs Institute, describes the “loop” as a vicious cycle. Here’s more from her:

”The cost of low pay and high turnover means leaders tend to operate in a vicious cycle, where low pay results in understaffing, which leads to operational problems. Operational problems reduce profitability and sales. When sales are lower, then companies can’t invest in employees and then that vicious cycle continues.

“There is a virtuous cycle, which is heavy investment in people, low turnover, strong operational execution, higher profitability, higher sales, and, as a result, you can invest more in your people. But what I found early in my research was that the virtuous cycle didn’t operate on its own. It was supported by a quartet of operational choices: focus and simplify; standardize and empower; cross-train; operate with slack – that enabled that virtuous cycle, by design, to improve the productivity and contribution of workers and set them up for success.”

Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, knew this and changed the company’s approach to business, along with its investor strategy, ultimately creating a more profitable company. More on how he did it.

Obstacle 2: Viewing AI as a cost-cutting tool vs. a quality booster

AI can absolutely take on the boring, brain-draining admin that eats up hours and give everyone more capacity for higher-value work or work-life flexibility. But if the goal is “ok, now let’s everybody do more,” we’ve missed the point.

We have a rare chance to reset how we work. We can use this moment to let AI support people and provide more space for creativity and thinking.

I want to caution against thinking “fewer hours” is the magic solution to work-life balance. Balance isn’t about offering a four-day workweek, full stop. Fewer hours don’t help if the culture is chaotic or the manager causes harm. The quality of the hours and the systems where we work matter just as much as the quantity.

If we use AI to eliminate friction, clarify workflows, reduce unnecessary meetings, and remove redundant reporting, we create capacity. Capacity for deeper work. Capacity for coaching. Capacity for actual strategy.

If we use AI only to extract more, we reinforce the very loop that erodes trust and burns people out.

The technology itself isn’t the deciding factor. The incentive structure is.

And that brings us back to how success is defined at the top.

AI will either amplify fear-driven leadership or free leaders to build better systems.
The difference is not the tool or the technology. It’s the intention behind it.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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A friend of mine told me about this weird dynamic at her previous job.

She worked two levels below the CEO. The VPs in between were hit or miss. Some were excellent. Others, one VP in particular, were… rough. Harsh with their employees. Dismissive. Intimidating.

When feedback surfaced, the defense was familiar:

“If I were a male leader, my style wouldn’t be questioned.”

There are absolutely gendered double standards in leadership. That’s real… But here’s what complicates this one.

Employee engagement surveys flagged issues.
People left. One employee filed an EEOC complaint.
And on the way out, that employee sent an email to the entire organization calling out the VP’s behavior.

After that, the CEO had her do an apology / listening tour.

But the question I keep returning to is this… What’s a CEO’s responsibility when toxicity lives two layers down? Because here’s what I’ve observed over and over…

Toxic leaders are rarely toxic upward. They are controlled and polished upward. They are harsh downward.

So a CEO can be seeing performance while employees experience fear… and those two realities can coexist for a long time.

And when they do, everyone learns something whether it’s stated or not: performance matters, but how you treat people is negotiable.

CEOs often hesitate to dip into the management style of their leadership team. They don’t want to micromanage, and they need to trust their leaders and delegate to them.

They may not have a trusted team member to ask them: If your highest performer is consistently destabilizing the people beneath them, are you protecting performance… or protecting yourself from discomfort?

But I would argue that if you are getting red flags from a department under one of your leaders that they are transactional, harsh, and dismissive of their team members, then you don’t just have a “style difference.” You have a cultural fracture point.

You’re signaling to the rest of your leadership team that this is a culture of performance (human doings) over human dignity… and that signal spreads faster than any apology tour ever will.

Because once leaders see that results insulate behavior, the message is clear: deliver, and you’re protected.

And that doesn’t just erode trust… it ultimately erodes performance, too.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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I came across a post on Reddit. “Yes, we do it for money.” The poster said. “Get over yourself.”

He was responding to a job interviewer who said she ended a conversation with a candidate because they said they wanted the job, transparently, “for the money.”

Nearly 10k upvotes and hundreds of comments show what a live wire this topic is. One commenter wrote:

“I assume she ‘wrapped that interview real quick’ to offer them a job due to their honesty and ability to break a problem down to its core fundamentals.”

Another mocked the buzzword expectations:

“They want someone who works hard and plays hard… craves the hustle culture… seamlessly creates symbiotic relationships between clients and users!
Did I miss any of the shitty buzzwords people need to force into their cover letters so that the AI program allows their application to be viewed by actual people?”

It’s funny, sharp, and telling… because they’re calling out something real. Work is a transaction between employer and employee. Employees are often aware that they’re expected to show up with excellence, while employers don’t always examine their end of the transaction as closely.

This backfires for employers, though they don’t quite realize it. Here’s why…

1. Yes, work is a transaction. People work to meet basic needs: money, food, safety, healthcare.

2. When work stays only transactional, it flattens. It’s like a black-and-white movie. Functional, watchable, but stripped of the thing that makes it feel more like LIFE. This is what happens when we work at a place that’s built for human doings (rather than human beings).

3. Bare minimum engagement and emotional reservation are rational responses to transactional relationships. When people feel that caring and respect go only one direction, they will naturally retreat to “just pay me.”

4. The burden of meaning starts with the employer. If leaders want employees to go above and beyond, and to show creativity, loyalty, and heart, they have to create conditions where those things are actually possible. You can’t ask for a full-color, 3-D, IMAX-level performance while offering black-and-white working conditions.

What Work Can Be (a tiny example)

I’ll never forget one of my part-time jobs while I was in college. I worked at a hair salon as a receptionist.

I cleaned and tidied the front. Dusted the products. I made confirmation calls and helped people make appointments. I did laundry, mopped floors, and folded towels. I got coffee, wine, and water for customers. I ran reports and balanced the register at the end of the night.

Were there stressful moments, nasty entitled customers, times when my register didn’t balance, and I didn’t know why? Did my feet hurt regularly? YES.

But I brought my all to that work. When the front desk phones chilled out, or the lady with the always-angry demeanor left, I would go to the laundry room and fold and fold and fold towels. The repetitive motion and warm fabric in my hands calmed me.

The salon owner, who was also a stylist, would check on me and give me a wink or short hug. “You good? Taking a minute for yourself?” I’d nod and take a few more minutes and then go back to the front, where I would rearrange the beautifully packaged shampoo bottles and think about my next hairstyle. (Red? Maybe short?)

That job wasn’t my purpose, and the paycheck wasn’t enough to support me forever. It was a bridge while I searched for better pay waiting tables, and I found meaning and growth there. I learned I was good with customers. I liked chit-chatting. I enjoyed having a boss who felt like a friend, and I wanted my work to be part of making the business successful.

When I started waiting tables, I enjoyed the rhythm of it, and could work well with the hiccups that came along with it. Hungry customers, late food, order mix-ups–I could handle it all and create meaning.

But I could only do it because I had enough stability and connection to do it. I was finally making enough to support myself, my co-workers and supervisors felt like a fun group that I wanted to spend time with, and there was always room to grow and advance.

My basic needs were met enough for that season. I had relational support. I had room to grow.

Why this matters

Now, someone who is strapped, sleep-deprived, and dealing with health issues or instability may only be able to show up and perform the tasks they’re being paid for. I don’t fault anyone in that position.

But employers have more power here than they often recognize.

• They can pay a livable wage.

• Provide predictable hours.

• Offer health benefits and real job security.

• Prioritize healthy management and mentorship instead of punishment.

• Invest in internal communications that help people feel connected to strategy and leadership.

These are the ingredients people need even to have the bandwidth to bring more of their heart and care to the work. The care and kindness and “more” beyond the transaction of work should start with the employer.

When it does, the workplace becomes something closer to color. To depth. To IMAX.

A Framework for This

Psychologist Clayton Alderfer describes motivation as relating to three human needs: Existence, Relatedness, and Growth.

A workplace built for human beings is one where the employer is aiming for a high level of employee career wellbeing. They do this by meeting employees’ basic needs (living wage, healthcare, job security), relational needs (good management, connection, collaboration, trust), and growth needs (learning, purpose, meaning, and mastery). Alderfer’s ERG Theory shows this in simple terms.

In Alderfer’s world, if higher needs aren’t met, people feel frustrated and focus on the more basic ones (it’s literally called the frustration-regression principle).

When I read the Reddit thread, I didn’t see cynicism. I saw frustration-regression. When people aren’t getting the growth and a healthy workplace they need to thrive, and they live in a world with an ever-increasing cost of living, they regress to the most basic part of the transaction (the paycheck).

And they resent having to pretend that work is more meaningful than a transaction.

A Workplace Built for Human Beings Pays Off

Workplaces that are built for human beings (not human doings) outperform. Period. They retain talent and generate better ideas. They recover from disruption faster.

Research backs this up: “Workplace burnout is reduced to near zero among engaged, high-wellbeing employees who also work in a culture that honors individual strengths,” the Gallup website reported back in 2020. Another publication from Gallup points to a similar correlation: “When you like what you do, you do more of it, get better at it, and increasingly reap the rewards of your labor. It’s a virtuous cycle of personal growth and professional development.”

None of that starts with a lecture about passion; it starts with the basics. Yes, we do it for money. And when the money, safety, and dignity are handled well, something much better becomes possible — work that moves beyond the black-and-white version and into something with color, depth, and a three-dimensional quality. That’s what defines a workplace built for human beings.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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It’s nearly Super Bowl weekend, which made me think about how, just a few years ago, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) ran its first anonymous employee engagement survey to get a sense of which NFL teams had better conditions for their players. They asked questions about training facilities, meals provided for players, space for families at home games, the trainers, and team owners.

And just like most engagement survey results, the comments were the richest source of information. Jalen Reeves-Maybin, a professional linebacker (formerly with the Detroit Lions and now with the Chicago Bears) and president of the NFL Players Association, said in an interview that players reported “a rat infestation in a locker room. There’s guys who don’t get fed after practices — like, the team was charging them for food. I know sometimes these things might seem like, ‘Oh, you got enough money to pay for it.’ But we are operating at the highest level possible. They demand excellence from us. And I think that we should be demanding excellence from the teams.”

And then they published the results as the NFLPA Report Cards for all the world to see.

The amazing thing about putting that information into the public is that responses and changes started rolling out almost immediately. Following the release of the 2023 report cards, the Atlanta Falcons revealed plans for a $30 million upgrade to their locker room, weight room, and cafeteria, while stressing that the renovations had been scheduled before the team landed 23rd out of 32.

Those of us who work in employee communications and experience are never surprised when we hear stories like this. It’s common for companies to conduct anonymous employee engagement surveys. But it’s also common for leaders to stop short of sharing results with employees or making real plans to improve the work environment.

They don’t ignore employee feedback outright. It just sort of gets softened, averaged, explained away, and rendered unnecessary to share. Here are some of the ways I’ve heard employee feedback dismissed over the years.

Common Ways Leaders Dismiss Employee Feedback

“That’s just a vocal minority.”
What’s really happening: Discomfort is being treated as a sampling error.

“People always complain in surveys.”
What’s really happening: Employee voice is being reframed as noise, not data.

“That’s outside our control.”
What’s really happening: Constraints are being used to end the conversation.

“That’s a manager issue, not a leadership issue.”
What’s really happening: Systemic patterns are being pushed down the org chart.

“The scores are still good.”
What’s really happening: Averages are being used to neutralize nuance.

“We’ve always done it this way.”
What’s really happening: Longevity is being mistaken for legitimacy.

“People don’t understand the full picture.”
What’s really happening: Lived experience is being discounted as uninformed.

“We can’t fix everything at once.”
What’s really happening: Prioritization is being avoided by doing nothing.

“That’s not what they meant.”
What’s really happening: Feedback is being edited to feel safer.

“We already communicated this.”
What’s really happening: Transmission is being mistaken for understanding.

It’s easy to understand the rationale that underlies the words above and why organizations might hesitate to share employee survey data internally. I’ll go out on a limb and say that the NFL and team owners probably didn’t want team “grades” shared in a public forum.

Leaders resist sharing results because once you do, you’re on the hook to respond. And to go even further…you have to do something about it.

This response–pulling back for fear of exposure–is natural but short-sighted. We want employees to understand their strengths and areas for growth when we give performance reviews and feedback. Employers have an obligation to do the same. To understand where they’re doing an amazing job, and where they can get stronger. That clarity almost always improves how employees show up for customers, partners, and the public.

In a basic transparency scenario, leaders understand their survey results, identify strengths and growth areas, and communicate those clearly back to employees. This builds trust between employees and leaders and strengthens the culture overall.

A better-case scenario is that results are shared alongside an action plan with three clear focus areas leadership will work to improve over the next year. Leaders delegate real responsibility to move those projects forward so that when the next survey comes around, employees can see tangible progress reflected in the results. The employee experience will improve and have a positive impact on employee engagement.

The best-case scenario is that an employer goes beyond thinking about employee engagement and starts thinking seriously about how employees can thrive at work. How to make career wellbeing a real priority.

According to Gallup’s global research, “People with high career wellbeing are more than twice as likely to be thriving in their life overall.” That translates directly to productivity: “Thriving employees have 53% fewer missed days due to health issues. Suffering and struggling employees have a substantially higher disease burden due to diagnoses of depression and anxiety, among others.”

So as you party this Super Bowl weekend, if you celebrate, think about the power of surveys as communication tools, trust builders, and ultimately a pathway to thriving — and to a healthier, more productive business.

Years ago, on the Freakonomics podcast, former NFL Players Association president J.C. Tretter made a point that still holds. After the league’s first survey, he said, “Year two is going to be more important than year one. Because year one, owners could claim ignorance. … But year two, now that this is out there, if some things aren’t changed, you can’t claim ignorance anymore.”

That’s the real power of employee surveys…Not the score or the benchmark. It’s the moment when leaders have the clarity to see what’s working and what isn’t—and they make the commitment to put real energy behind making things better, knowing the results will be better for everyone in the end.

I’ll leave you with one final quote from the revered coach, the late John Wooden, “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” In the case of employee surveys, this is a call to face and respond to the real data you get, so that your business can continue to improve and get stronger.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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Sinners, the 2025 film, rocked the Oscars nominations by breaking the record of nominations for a single movie. (16 nominations!) And I love this. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time, not only because of it’s genre-bending, creative story-telling, but because Ryan Coogler showed what a visionary, courageous, leader he is.

There’s a lot to be learned from Ryan Coogler that can be applied in a workplace leadership context. Let’s break it down.

Cynical thinking and critical thinking are different

When Sinners was released, some critics openly acknowledged how risky one of its most symbolic, spiritual scenes felt. On The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Alex Schwartz described a moment when he “sat up” in the theater. “He is going for it,” Schwartz said. “And I’m here for that.” He added, “With kind of corniness, heart on your sleeve… it’s very corny, I gotta say.”

Naomi Fry didn’t disagree. “It could not be more obvious,” she said. And then she finished the thought: “But somehow it works.”

That exchange matters because it shows the difference between cynical thinking and critical thinking.

Cynicism stops early. It sees earnestness and calls it naïve. It labels sincerity as “cringe” and moves on. Critical thinking stays longer. It acknowledges risk, names the corniness, and then asks a harder question: does it work?

What’s striking is that the critics weren’t mocking the scene. They were surprised by it. We’re simply not used to being trusted with sincerity anymore…especially not sincerity paired with ambition.

In workplaces, cynical thinking often disguises itself as sophistication. Leaders dismiss ideas as “cringey,” “too much,” or “not polished enough,” believing they’re protecting credibility. But what they’re often protecting is emotional distance.

I can remember being in a meeting where a senior leader shared that her CEO told her a video presentation she made, speaking directly to the camera, was “cringey.” As a communications professional (and as a human) I disagreed. Not because it was perfect, but because it was sincere. The instinct to swat that down wasn’t strategic. It was defensive.

Cynicism feels safe. It helps us avoid disappointment, embarrassment, or being seen trying too hard—especially in times of economic uncertainty or organizational stress. But that protective posture comes at a cost. It shuts down creativity. It teaches people to play small. It replaces judgment with reflexive dismissal.

Critical thinking, by contrast, asks leaders to tolerate discomfort long enough to evaluate meaning. It requires discernment instead of detachment. And like Coogler’s decision to go big rather than pull back, it often means backing ideas that feel alive, even if they’re a little raw.

Recognize when something is BIG and deserves BIG treatment

In a conversation with The New Yorker Radio Hour, Ryan Coogler described a moment of recalibration while developing Sinners. What he initially thought would be a contained genre film began to reveal itself as something much larger.

As he immersed himself in the Delta blues—its history, its spiritual roots, its global influence—he realized the story wasn’t small at all. “This movie’s big,” he said. “This movie’s bigger than I thought.” What followed wasn’t restraint. It was alignment. If the subject was epic, the treatment had to be too. “Okay,” he concluded. “IMAX.”

That decision matters. Coogler didn’t scale the idea down to fit existing expectations. He scaled the execution up to meet the idea.

This is a leadership moment more than a filmmaking one. Recognizing that an idea is structurally significant—culturally, emotionally, historically—and then giving it the resources, space, and visibility it deserves is not excess. It’s discernment.

Too often, leaders do the opposite. They sense an idea is meaningful, but respond by shrinking it: trimming ambition, sanding down edges, lowering emotional stakes to avoid risk. Coogler did something harder by trusting his judgment and committing fully.

That kind of alignment between insight and investment is rare…and it’s exactly why Sinners feels the way it does.

Champion the work and the terms that let it matter

Ryan Coogler’s commitment to Sinners was strategic and economic. When studios vied for the film’s distribution, Coogler looked for a better contract than the standard contract.

As he has explained in interviews, he had been in the industry long enough to know “what kinds of deals are possible,” and because the project was so personal, he “asked for terms that reflected its importance to him and his family.”

He secured creative control and negotiated first-dollar gross participation and future ownership rights, which means that he shared in revenue from the start and will own the film outright in 25 years. Those terms weren’t handed to him because he was lucky. They were won through confident negotiation rooted in belief in his big idea. The same kind of belief that makes him trust audiences with sincerity on screen.

Applied in a workplace, this is a reminder that leaders not only advocate for big ideas… they advocate for the conditions in which big ideas can thrive.

Business leaders can learn from innovation research that shows that leaders must set strategic direction, empower teams, provide resources and tolerance for experimentation, and ensure people are not punished for risk in order for innovation to thrive.

Likewise, organizations that cultivate conditions like psychological safety and invite ideas from every level see stronger creative performance and competitive advantage.

Wrapping it up

What Ryan Coogler demonstrates is that belief is a material force. It shows up in budgets. In contracts. In formats. In how much room a leader is willing to give an idea to become what it actually is. Sinners didn’t succeed (and get nominated for an extraordinary number of awards) because it played it safe; it succeeded because someone recognized its weight and matched it with commitment. That’s our invitation to think about the leadership gap many organizations are living with right now. Plenty of ideas with not enough courage. Cynicism that masquerades as judgment. Restraint framed as rigor.

People trust leaders who know when to commit. Not blindly or loudly... But with intention and care. And with enough respect for the work to let it fully breathe.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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I’m obsessed with Pluribus on AppleTV+, and I’ve gobbled it up. Some episodes twice.

I have so many thoughts and… I have so. much. to. say.

At its core, Pluribus is a meditation on the difference between human doings and human beings.

The show imagines a world where most people are psychologically joined into a single shared consciousness. Everyone moves in sync. Individual identity only matters if it serves the larger goal. People refer to themselves as “we.”

It’s efficient. It’s elegant.
And it’s deeply unsettling.

The joined get a lot done. They preserve resources. They operate under a strict ethic of doing no harm. There’s no conflict. No war. They work like a hive, coordinated and calm, without a queen.

And yet, something essential is missing.

There’s no joy. No pleasure. No sweetness in the act of bridging our separateness to connect with one another. The friction of being human is gone, and with it, something vital.

Carol, played by Rhea Seehorn, is immune to the joining process, which makes her the perfect guide through this world. We stay with her throughout the show, feeling her loneliness and her deep desire to un-join everyone, to restore something that’s been lost.

Watching it made me think about how easily workplaces drift toward what I think of as Pluribus logic. Alignment over individuality. Output over inner life. Efficiency over everything that makes humanity feel alive.

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The show ultimately made me ask myself these questions:
How much do we expect and allow work to hold friction and healthy conflict? Isn’t bringing people together to further a common mission worth it?

Work is messy because people are messy. And that mess is not a bug. It’s where judgment gets sharpened. Where creativity emerges. Where real collaboration happens. Tension, disagreement, inefficiency, even frustration are often the price of working with actual humans instead of abstractions.

It’s tempting to fantasize about perfect efficiency at work.

Perfect alignment. Even obedience. And Pluribus takes that fantasy to its logical extreme and shows us the trade-off clearly.

When friction disappears, so does joy. So does individuality. So does the strange, beautiful alchemy that happens when distinct people build something together.

Employees, managers, and teams are not meant to function like a hive. They are individuals. They will create tension and inefficiency that can be improved, yes, but they will also create brilliance that could never exist without that friction.

That, to me, is the real warning and the real gift of Pluribus.

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OK so now you may be thinking… Business leaders are trying to remove friction and inefficiency these days. Not celebrate it.

So let’s pause for a moment and examine a couple different types of friction… namely Mechanical friction vs. Human friction.

AI is extraordinarily good at removing mechanical friction:

• searching

• drafting

• summarizing

• scheduling

• pattern matching

• repetitive execution

That friction is pure tax. Removing it is a gift.

But what AI advocates often blur, intentionally or not, is the difference between:

• mechanical friction (waste), and

• human friction (meaning-making)

They are not the same thing.

Human friction is not inefficiency. It’s value creation.

Human friction… the kind I’m defending…the kind I think belongs in every workplace is

• disagreement that sharpens thinking

• tension between perspectives that produces insight

• emotional nuance that prevents bad decisions

• relational negotiation that builds trust

• the pause that keeps a team from optimizing itself into harm

That friction is where judgment, ethics, creativity, innovation, and trust live. Without it

• Teams stop surfacing risk

• Bad ideas move faster

• Ethics lag behind capability

• Groupthink looks like alignment

• “Efficiency” produces brittle systems

• Innovation declines

• Trust erodes

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight Operational friction (which is different, and should be reduced as much as possible within reason)

• confusion

• bureaucracy

• misalignment

• unnecessary meetings
  poor process

Those should be eliminated.

The bottom line: Use AI to remove waste so humans can do the work only humans can do.

And let’s tie it up with a bow…. Pluribus. My favorite show right now. I don’t see it as a warning against efficiency (in life or in a workplace). It’s a warning against efficiency without interiority.

Let that sink in. We can have efficiency. But efficiency without interiority looks like this:

joy disappears

meaning disappears

moral agency disappears

consent becomes irrelevant

creativity collapses

We can build workplaces for human doings.
Or we can build workplaces for human beings.

Pluribus shows us what it costs to forget the difference.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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Lately, I’ve been noticing something shift in how people talk about work. And I don’t just mean employees.

I keep stumbling across company leaders’ perspectives. CEOs. Founders. Executives who did what they were told to do, hit the goals, climbed the ladder — and still found themselves asking, Is this really it?

Some leaders respond to that discomfort by tightening control. More pressure. More urgency. More fear, dressed up as “performance.” But others are doing something different. They’re slowing down. Asking bigger questions. Rethinking what success actually means and what kind of impact they want to have.

That tension is everywhere right now. You can see it in how companies talk about engagement, how leaders show up (or don’t), how communication is handled, and which old workplace myths are finally starting to crack. You can feel it in reorg fatigue, in burnout that won’t resolve with another perk, and in the growing sense that something fundamental needs to change.

What I’m watching isn’t a single trend. It’s a set of shifts happening unevenly and in real time. Some are subtle. Some are messy. All of them matter.

Below are five shifts I believe are shaping the next chapter of work — and where leaders, communicators, and culture-builders have a real opportunity to intervene, influence, and do better. (I originally shared these in my interview w/ Authority Mag.)

1. From Control to Consciousness: CEO Mindsets are Shifting

It’s not just employees who are asking “What is it all for?” when it comes to work. It seems that there’s deep existential questioning happening at every level of many organizations. While some business leaders think chaos and fear are the key to success, others are asking the big questions, seeking big answers, and taking time out to reflect.

CEO loneliness and pressure are making headlines, and in January 2025, CEO resignations hit an all-time high. There’s been a surge in spiritual and psychedelic retreats for executives seeking new ways to unlock business success.

Groups like Conscious Capitalism are gaining momentum, not because doing good is trendy, but because, as co-founder Raj Sisodia says, it “creates an entirely new superstructure for business and its reasons for existing.”

That approach to business will continue to attract innovative, expansive thinkers. As more executives embrace this mindset, they’ll need operational systems, internal messaging, and human-centered norms that reflect those values. New technology and ever-climbing profits have their place. But deep down, most leaders want to be part of something that matters.

2. Career Well-Being Joins the Chat on Employee Engagement

For years, companies have measured “engagement” like a mood ring, assuming that if people felt good, business would follow. But engagement numbers in the U.S. have been flat or falling, and we’re now seeing the lowest levels in a decade. What’s more, we’re realizing that engagement alone isn’t the golden ticket it was once made out to be. Highly engaged employees can still burn out when their drive comes from fear, people-pleasing, or the pressure to deliver “sprint-level” work for a marathon-length stretch. Add in change fatigue or an abusive manager, and engagement can become a fast track to exhaustion.

Gallup’s global research is reframing the conversation.

As they put it: “When you like what you do, you do more of it, get better at it, and increasingly reap the rewards of your labor. It’s a virtuous cycle of personal growth and professional development… it doesn’t mean that work isn’t hard, but it does mean that the hard work feels worth it.”

That kind of purpose-driven effort benefits the business. On the flip side, employees nearing burnout are more likely to take sick days and report negative ripple effects at home.

While many employers are beginning to embrace the concept of employee well-being, most still haven’t operationalized it enough to make an impact. The real test will be whether leaders move from endorsing well-being in theory to embedding it in systems, policies, manager behaviors, and everyday culture.

For comms and employee experience folks, this is where we come in. We can keep socializing these ideas with leaders, and keep naming the drivers that might be impacting well-being: unclear roles, unmanageable workloads, poor communication, lack of support, or unfair treatment. We can help leaders see these as fixable, not personal. And we can help build structures that support people instead of draining them.

3. Internal Comms and Culture Are Strategic Levers, Not Support Functions

The internal comms function is being rebuilt in real time. Once seen as the email and intranet team, today’s comms leaders are being asked to influence behavior, shape culture, and drive trust across the employee experience.

Data shows that when employees feel well-informed, they’re 4x more likely to trust leadership. And Axios HQ reported that 77% of comms pros say their execs now expect comms to impact how people act. That makes internal comms a high-leverage function and a behavioral design tool.

Admittedly, some companies are going the other direction right now, with executives relying too heavily on AI to draft their messages, or they’re stripping down their internal comms teams, assuming that AI tools will simplify employee comms. In terms of building trust with employees, this can backfire. HBR research showed that removing human expertise from employee communications and replacing it with AI, or just the perception of that, erodes leaders’ credibility.

Like all trends, there will be some back-and-forth on this. In the end, if you’re communicating with humans, you need great comms and EX people who know how to turn information into connection and action in the org. They help leaders craft stories that stick and shape cultures that feel coherent and real.

4. Executives assist in breaking down the “ideal worker myth.”

The “ideal worker” myth imagines a person who’s always available, always performing, and rewarded for long hours and total devotion to the job. But that model has never reflected real life, and the myth is starting to crack.

Researchers and authors like Brigid Schulte have long argued for workplace models that account for caregiving, health, and human limits. This is where leadership behaviors and policies can carry real weight.

A Harvard Business School survey found that more than 70% of employees are also caregivers, and many feel those responsibilities are holding them back at work. The ideal worker myth encourages people to stay quiet about their needs around parenting, health, or anything else that makes them human. When leaders model their own boundaries or caregiving realities, it normalizes those conversations.

There are many examples out there, but one I like is Jennifer Barnes (CEO, Optima Office), who has regularly brought her toddler into the office and created a formal bring-your-child policy for times when childcare falls through.

Jennifer Barnes is modeling caregiving as part of work life, not something to apologize for. Her team sees her example of leading and parenting at the same time, and that flexibility is possible in a high-functioning workplace.

Another CEO, Ryan Breslow (Founder & Chair, Bolt), recently took a bold stance in mandating that employees take PTO. He wanted to reinforce the company’s belief that time off is a requirement for people to perform at their best. “When time off is undefined, the good ones don’t take PTO. The bad ones take too much… If we’re asking people to move fast… we need to protect their recovery time with the same intensity.” By treating PTO like performance, he signaled that rest is essential.

Those small signals from leaders do more than shape internal culture. They offer a blueprint for others who want to build high-performing workplaces without clinging to outdated ideals.

5. Small Teams, Big Shifts: Rethinking Culture in the Entrepreneurial Era

As more people leave traditional workplaces, small teams and solo ventures are multiplying, but these organizations run lean, and they are not immune to the pressure to overperform with limited resources. That’s a setup that’s hard to sustain forever, as we know. Solutions are emerging, and the need is real, but the ecosystem hasn’t quite caught up yet. So we will need to keep an eye on this space. What I’m seeing so far isn’t one major solution, but here are a few encouraging trends within the larger trend.

Values-based leadership models: Next-gen founders like Amanda Litman (Run for Something) are running their orgs with four-day workweeks, values-based norms, and a belief that people can “work hard while they’re on the job and rest hard when they’re off it.” As people like Litman normalize healthy work practices in smaller organizations, I think more leaders will follow her lead and adopt practices like she’s outlined in her recent book, When We’re in Charge. Consultancies like HmntyCntrd help founders stay centered in their own humanity and build their business that way.

Collective solutions and shared infrastructure: Small businesses and organizations already come together to share resources and knowledge, and there’s room for more of this, especially when it comes to building sustainable, human-centered workplace practices. Some teams use benefits co-ops, or join culture-forward coworking spaces to access community and shared infrastructure. Others are experimenting with worker-sharing models, where an employee splits time between two or more businesses but still gets the stability of full-time hours and benefits.

Early-stage founders can also plug into bigger movements like Zebras Unite or Conscious Capitalism, which offer a sense of shared purpose, peer support, and practical tools for building businesses that are better for people and the planet.

Outsourced HR and culture partnerships: Small businesses can already outsource the basics like payroll, benefits, compliance through platforms like Justworks or TriNet, which offer big-company infrastructure without the bloat. That frees up time and energy for founders to focus on the human side of things. Some bring in fractional HR leaders or consultants to co-create values, train managers, or build internal comms systems. While it’s not common (yet) for two tiny orgs to team up for better pricing, there’s growing interest in shared solutions, like joint culture projects, that keep overhead low and make the employee experience stronger.

This list originally appeared in my interview with Authority Magazine.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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Business does not have to be at odds with humanity.

I know it’s tempting to roll your eyes at language like “human-centered leadership” or “workplace dignity” … especially when you’ve been burned, gaslit, or laid off by people who used that language as cover.

But I keep talking about it because it’s still true.

This is not idealism. It’s strategy.
It’s supported by oceans of data, thousands of stories, and the lived experience of leaders who decided to do it differently… and in the end, they did it profitably.

The numbers back it up. The humans do too.

Workplaces that are built for human beings (not human doings) outperform. Period.
They retain talent. They generate better ideas. They recover from disruption faster.

And here’s the part I keep meaning (and forgetting) to say out loud:

I’m not writing about this from the sidelines.
I’m writing about it because I’ve lived the difference.
I’ve worked under panic. I’ve felt the silence when leaders chose fear.
I’ve also seen the change that happens when someone dares to lead with clarity, calm, and care.

That’s what this Substack is about.
More than ideas.
More than values.
More than “just work.” Work that doesn’t erase who we are. Workplaces that work for humans.

Thanks for reading. And sticking around.

Want data? Examples?

1. Sam’s Club: Profitability through Dignity
The Good Jobs Institute’s work with Sam’s Club resulted in a 40% increase in sales, 15% higher labor productivity, and a 25% drop in employee turnover.

Why it matters: These results were achieved by improving work, scheduling, and pay, not by squeezing harder. It proves that treating employees with respect and providing real stability drives measurable business performance.

2. Gallup Research: Culture Reduces Burnout
Workplace burnout is reduced to near zero among engaged, high-wellbeing employees who also work in a culture that honors individual strengths.
— Gallup, 2020

Why it matters: Burnout isn’t inevitable. Culture is the antidote. Investing in people is measurable… and it pays off in retention, creativity, and sustainable output.

3. Retention Through Human-Centered Onboarding
A famous study showed that onboarding employees in a way that encouraged them to bring their unique perspectives increased retention by 33% compared to those who received only generic brand messaging.

Why it matters: People stay longer when they feel seen. This isn’t soft… it’s sticky. Retention translates directly to saved hiring costs, knowledge continuity, and cultural stability.

4. Amazon’s Cost of Burnout
Amazon’s high turnover rate reportedly costs them $8 billion annually, and yet they have announced plans to cut 14k management jobs to save $3.5 billion.

Why it matters: This flips the usual ROI story. Cutting costs at the expense of people often costs more in the long run. Burnout is expensive. Panic is expensive. Culture debt is expensive.

5. Employee Wellbeing Boosts Productivity
Gallup’s Wellbeing at Work found that employees who are both engaged and thriving have 53% fewer missed workdays due to health issues.

Why it matters: Healthy, engaged employees perform better. That’s a core business driver.

Bonus: Unilever’s 300% Profit Jump
Unilever CEO Paul Polman made his company 300% more profitable through human-centered workplace strategies.

Why it matters: It reinforces a simple truth: visionary leadership plus thoughtful culture design creates exponential returns.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

Share Human Doings / Human Beings

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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“Across companies that had launched formal culture initiatives since 2022, 72% showed no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention one year later.”
- Harvard Business Review

That’s a wild statistic... So can we agree that companies have a blind spot when it comes to how to improve culture? And through culture—engagement? And through engagement—performance?

In my experience, it all starts with the vaunted employee engagement survey.

Here’s what happens:

• Run engagement survey

• Engagement scores are low

• Divide and conquer—task your corporate teams to address their relevant metrics (example: Talent Development asked to improve sentiment around career growth)

• Spend the year building and socializing solutions for executive approvals

• Develop your communications plan for said solutions (often all landing on Internal Comms’ plate around the same time)

• Launch solutions (usually new apps, platforms, guides, or intranets)

• Frontline adoption is underwhelming

• Repeat

We named this The Survey Trap (clever, I know).

But like every good trap, it doesn’t feel like a trap. It feels like human-centric leadership.

So why doesn’t it work?

We have another clever name—Experience Blindness.

Engagement surveys tell you what your teams think, but they don’t tell you why.

And for whatever reason (I have theories but I’m not a psychologist so I won’t subject you to them), this assumption is made over and over again, by most cdepartments, in most organizations:

“It’s an awareness issue. We have to communicate [your thing] more/better.”

And in the six+ years I’ve been fortunate enough to work with companies eager to escape the survey trap, and in the hundreds of hours I’ve spent talking directly with frontline leaders—it’s almost never an awareness issue.

It’s an experience one.

It’s not that they don’t know career development happens at your company.

It’s that they don’t believe it’s accessible to them because they don’t experience or see it firsthand.

It’s not that they don’t know you have annual rewards and recognition programs.

It’s that they don’t feel recognized day-to-day.

It’s not that they haven’t read your core values.

It’s that 20 practices and policies they experience every shift contradicts them.

“59% [of employees] told us that senior leadership actions contradict stated values at least weekly” —Harvard Business Review

That’s Experience Blindness.

This is so common. But it’s not normal.

It’s not normal in any other industry or function to pour endless time and money into a solution when you don’t really understand the problem.

And when you don’t understand the problem, what was meant to signal we see you ends up proving the opposite: we don’t understand what it’s actually like to work here.

Over the years this tireless activity creates engagement bloat & fatigue—a costly buildup of disconnected efforts that overwhelm teams, stall performance, and breed organizational cynicism.

Programs aren’t unimportant. But they don’t matter if the basics aren’t there. Employees want to finish their shift without systems that set them up to fail, policies that imply mistrust, or contradictory priorities.

There’s got to be a better way.

If culture is what happens in the day-to-day, then improvements have to impact that.

Borrow our framework and focus on the three “channels” that matter most:

• Managers: 70% of the variance in team engagement and performance is determined solely by the manager.

• Operations: Often overlooked but this is Where Promises are Kept (or Broken) Daily

• Then Comms & Info Hubs: Reinforcing the experience with consistent, unified messaging.

Put each of the above in a column and for each value or brand promise, ask yourself:

• What daily behaviours do managers need to carry out for this to be true?

• What needs to be operationally true to achieve this perception?

• How do our communications support this directly and indirectly?

Important note: do that all the way up the ladder!

“69% of middle managers said they felt solely responsible for delivering on cultural commitments. Yet only 14% believed senior leaders were modeling those same behaviors themselves” —Harvard Business Review

There can’t be any broken links in that chain from Frontline Manager to CEO.

The Outcome

When you fix the day-to-day systems, all the things you’ve been trying to do with campaigns finally start working:

• Recognition feels real, not performative.

• Employer brand promises actually line up with employee experience and can actually be used by talent attraction.

• People stay long enough to grow in the company.

You turn the trap into self-reinforcing system that improves retention, reduces friction, and turns daily work into a driver of profit—not a risk to it.

Engaged teams deliver:

• 17% higher sales

• 13% higher productivity

• 10% higher customer loyalty

• 78% lower absenteeism

• 26% lower shrinkage

And those are wild stats we can all get behind.

Bekki Cait is the founder of CATO Creative. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along — to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.

Share Human Doings / Human Beings

And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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Gallup’s global research on employee engagement has been grim for years. In the U.S., engagement hit a 10-year low. Whatever companies are doing (if they’re doing anything at all) it’s not moving the needle. “Employee engagement” has become a vague, overused term, and it’s lost its punch as a meaningful metric. As communications professionals, it’s worth asking if the concept is still serving our stakeholders: the organization, it’s leaders, employees, or the larger community.

Is it time to walk away from the metric altogether? Maybe. Here are a few signs.

There’s a definition problem.
Mike Klein’s research, as part of LumApps Future of Work Index shows that while most agree engagement drives business results, comms pros and business leaders don’t agree on what the term actually means. That makes it hard to improve (or even study) engagement consistently across industries. Gallup defines it as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace,” which aligns with the top-ranked definition that professionals cited in Klein’s study, but not the second or third.

Engagement with company comms is often mistaken for true employee engagement.
But they’re not the same, and in some cases, all that clicking and reacting can actually undercut the real thing. As Shaun Randol points out, the sheer volume of platforms and channels eats away at employees’ focus and psychological bandwidth. It leaves less room for deep, meaningful work, the kind that feels rewarding, drives results, and keeps people truly engaged.

Monitoring engagement as a score misses the point
When leaders fixate on engagement scores, they risk treating survey data like a surface-level morale check, or an employee wish list for perks. That framing can create us-vs-them dynamics, instead of prompting meaningful conversations about what employees need (and maybe aren’t getting) that would allow them to thrive and do their best work.

Engagement (alone) isn’t always good for the business
Sometimes, high engagement masks real harm. In 2020, new data showed that employees could appear highly engaged while burning out, driven by stress, anxiety, and overwork. Today, they might be fueled by AI panic, economic fear, an overbearing manager, hustle culture, or imposter syndrome. On the surface, they look committed. But underneath, they’re struggling.

When we define engagement too narrowly, we miss these risks. It used to be common wisdom that high engagement meant employees were doing well. But research from Stanford found productivity gains drop sharply after 50 hours a week (and after 55, they flatline). Beyond that, extra hours often lead to fatigue, errors, and wasted effort. That’s not engagement. And it’s not sustainable.

Recent research also shows that burnout costs U.S. companies $4,000–$21,000 per employee per year, or about $5 million annually for a 1,000-person company. That includes lost productivity, absenteeism, and turnover: clear signs that extreme employee engagement hurts both people and performance.

Employee engagement isn’t hopeless, but we need a reset

Improving employee engagement to benefit the business is possible, but as communicators, we know that definition and approach make all the difference. The data and strategies are there, but we may need to help leaders better understand and apply them to get the results they actually want.

A quality engagement survey should help curious leaders dig into what’s really going on. The best-case scenario sparks conversations about the why behind the data, and what’s getting in the way of employees doing the jobs they were hired to do. One of the most respected (data-backed) models comes from David MacLeod and Nita Clarke’s Engaging for Success, which outlines four enablers: Strategic Narrative, Employee Voice, Engaging Managers, and Organizational Integrity. Internal communicators play a vital role in bringing all four to life.

This is where internal comms strategists can really shine. We’re positioned to influence and demonstrate our value far beyond tracking Slack clicks. With the right approach to employee engagement surveys and action plans, we can partner with leaders to shape culture, connection, and clarity across the org. And if they’re stuck in a transactional mindset, it may be time to shift the language, and tweak the focus from “engagement” to something new…

Employee Experience, Needs, and Wellbeing

Internal comms has a unique opportunity to co-lead the shift, alongside HR and other partners, toward a more human-centered workplace, especially when the CEO is an engaged sponsor. We’re in a strategic sense-making role, helping leaders interpret what’s happening inside and outside the organization and how it’s affecting employees.

There may be no more strategic comms work today than helping shift the focus from just tracking engagement scores to understanding the full employee experience, and identifying where there’s a gap between what employees need to thrive and what they’re getting.

Gartner defines employee experience (EX) as “the sum of all interactions an employee has with their employer, from recruitment to exit. It encompasses the work environment, culture, technology, and support systems.” These factors influence employee perceptions, engagement, and productivity. When employees have higher EX, they also have higher retention, satisfaction, and performance, ultimately benefiting the organization.As internal comms pros, we’re woven throughout the organization, and we have insight into how culture, workflows, systems, and technology impact the employee experience. That gives us a valuable lens for interpreting survey themes and advising leaders on what’s helping or hindering employees day-to-day. And what will make the organization stronger over time.

This work almost always begins with reviewing previous engagement surveys with this lens. Partner with HR to explore employee needs with a structured framework. Options include Alderfer’s ERG model (a workplace-adapted version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), the Gallup 10-part job quality index or McKinsey & Company’s 12 factors that affect employees’ satisfaction and commitment levels.

The insights that surface from an employee needs assessment will almost always point back to the same core areas: work environment, culture, technology, compensation, and support systems. And they should—because employees don’t engage or disengage in a vacuum. They’re deeply affected by the conditions of their workplace.

Tuning into employee experience and needs helps leaders see that their systems and structures are directly shaping how people feel at work, which impacts how they perform.

According to Gallup, “career wellbeing — liking what you do every day — has the strongest impact on overall wellbeing.” It provides financial stability, but also social interaction, physical activity, and connection to community. Work, done right, gives people meaning. Well-being at work is the foundation of a life where people report they are “thriving.”

If you’re looking for a practical way to support executives in shifting from score-based engagement to a deeper focus on employee experience, I’ve outlined a flexible framework, CTRL/Shift/Connect, designed specifically for internal comms professionals. Read it here. (There’s a companion piece for CEOs as well.)

The Business Case
Business leaders don’t have to choose between people and performance, but sometimes the shift to a new culture can seem like uncharted territory. But it’s not. Many companies have done it–proving that a more human-centered approach is a competitive advantage.

At Unilever, former CEO Paul Polman made sustainability and stakeholder well-being core to the business model, and shareholder returns rose nearly 300%. As he put it, “We were in a world not to make things worse, but to make things better.”

Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, replaced a cutthroat “know-it-all” culture with one rooted in empathy, collaboration, and a “learn-it-all” mindset. The result was a stronger, more innovative company, now valued at $3 trillion.

And back in the 1980s, Toyota partnered with GM to overhaul one of the most dysfunctional plants in the U.S. They didn’t replace the workforce. They just replaced the approach. With 85% of the same employees, absenteeism dropped from 20% to 4%, labor hours per vehicle were cut in half, and product quality soared. When leaders shifted the culture to meet people’s needs, performance followed.

Employee engagement, as we know it, has lost its edge. What we need now is a more honest, human approach, one that values insight over scores and positions internal comms as strategic translators and business advisors. It can be part of a broader shift from transactional workplaces to environments that meet human needs and help people do their best work. There’s no better time for this shift: AI is reshaping how work gets done, and leadership norms are in flux.

If we want our companies to be adaptable and sustainable in a changing world, we need to bake that into our workplace systems, too. Simplistic engagement metrics won’t do it. Real understanding of employee needs, and real responsiveness, will.

This piece was originally published on Strategic.global a publication for communications leaders around the world.

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And if you have a story of your own, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.

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