Alla Weinberg
Designing a Culture of Safety
In this episode of Brave UX, Alla Weinberg constructively unpacks unsafe workplace cultures ☣️, shares her thoughts on how we can change them 💪, and why we should do just that 🧠.
Highlights include:
- Why is the opposite of fear safety and not courage?
- What do you focus on first when changing a culture?
- How can people read between the lines to better understand a culture?
- What have corporations forgotten about the humans that work for them?
- Can you create safety only as long as you don’t make your boss look bad?
Who is Alla Weinberg?
Alla is the CEO and Culture Designer at Spoke & Wheel, the specialised culture design company that she founded in 2019 🌱.
Through Spoke & Wheel, Alla provides culture consulting and leadership development expertise to companies like Docusign, Uber, Salesforce, Target and Zendesk; helping them to create work environments where people can think, collaborate, and innovate 🚀.
Alla is also a Principal of Design Operations at Harmonic Design and before starting Spoke & Wheel, she worked in executive leadership development and learning and development at Salesforce, in the Bay Area 🌁.
The author of “A Culture of Safety”, Alla has leveraged her own personal experience, that of others and the latest research in neuroscience to produce an actionable guide for leaders who want to create safer and more innovative work places 📕.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Alla Weinberg. Alla is the CEO and culture designer at Spoke & Wheel, the specialized culture design company that she founded in 2019. Through Spoke & Wheel, Alla provides culture consulting and leadership development expertise to companies like DocuSign, Uber, Salesforce, Target, and Zendesk, helping them to create work environments where people can think, collaborate, and innovate.
- Before starting Spoke & Wheel, Alla worked in executive leadership development and learning and development at Salesforce in the Bay Area. Alla has also worked as a leadership coach for BetterUp and in leadership development and service design for the world famous in UX circles, Adaptive Path.
- The author of a Culture of Safety, Alla has leveraged her own personal experience that of others and the latest research in neuroscience to produce an actionable guide for leaders who want to create safer and more innovative work environments.
- Alla's Wisdom has been shared on stages across the globe, including at Business to Buttons in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Innovation Summit in Lincoln, Nebraska. And now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Alla, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Alla Weinberg:
- Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation specifically.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Me too, me too. Alla, it's really great to have you here. Now, I mentioned in your introduction that you spent some time at Adaptive Path and it was about two and a half years before the Capital One merger. As far as I understand, before Capital One acquired Adaptive Path. That was a big period of change in the design industry around about that time with lots of companies like Adaptive Path being acquired, the talent moving in-house, and a bit of a sea change in design as far as that was concerned. What was it that brought you to Adaptive Path and what stands out from your time there as the leading memory or the most lasting memory from that period?
- Alla Weinberg:
- What brought me to Adaptive Path is culturally, this was an organization that shared everything that they've created out publicly and so elevated the entire field of design and I've always really admired that they didn't just keep the methods and the tools and the approaches and their thinking in-house, but they had learning experiences and they shared them with any designer or even publicly out and I wanted to be a part of that and because one of the things that I love to do is to innovate new approaches, new methods, new frameworks. And so I wanted to do that through that vehicle of adaptive path and also learn from all the folks that highly intelligent, very innovative folks that were there as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In your experience there, how closely did that align with your expectation of what it would be like before you started?
- Alla Weinberg:
- It actually was very close and it was one of the best companies I ever worked for personally, and they really walk their talk. That's the big thing that is really important to me and I haven't experienced that much in my career and I've been in design for almost 20 years now and I started as an information architect that was the only title available back then and went through every single other title, user experience designer, service designer, product designer, every kind of designer, and I found that the folks there really had a really deep understanding of design and practiced it internally as well as externally to clients as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What would you say that depth of understanding of design, what does that look like when contrasted against a more shallow understanding or appreciation of design? Are there obvious signals or behaviors or things or is that difficult to quantify or describe?
- Alla Weinberg:
- I think it shows up behaviorally. There aren't steps that we skip. There aren't shortcuts. We're going to go research and have deep understanding about the audience or whatever we're doing. We're going to co-design with our clients. We're going to try out new methods and see if they work and also if they work for the organization that you're working with, that's the most important. What I find in slightly newer or more less mature organizations is, oh, we know the process of design, we know the double diamonds, so we're going to go approach every problem that way. But when you're more experienced, you start to understand, well, how does that fit in culturally, systemically in the work that's being done? And it's not trying to force it, but trying to see how can we adapt but not skip anything, but adapt our approaches so that they work for the people and with the people that we're trying to serve basically.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's a really clear articulation of that difference. I want to ask you about something that's a little different, perhaps quite different actually now, and that is about four years ago you made the brave leap out of enterprise design and leadership development and you started your own company Spoken Wheel. Now your focus and spoken wheels quite, I dunno if it's remarkably different, I'd be keen to hear about your thoughts there as to how it's changed between your role internally to as a consultant, but you work as a work relationship coach and a culture designer and that's quite a specific focus and you're serving quite an important as far as I perceive it to be a quite an important need that exists out there in enterprise. So before we get into why you made that leap and the types of things that you are doing at Spoken Wheel, what's the story behind the company name?
- Alla Weinberg:
- The story actually comes from a poem by Mark Nepo who I personally consider my spiritual teacher. He's a poet, but to me he's my spiritual teacher because in his poetry he speaks to specifically and he's able to name the nuances and the paradoxes and the tensions in life so beautifully. And in this specific poem, and I don't have it up, but maybe you do and you could read it, there's this little chunk of it he talks about, it's called The Spoke Wheel, and he talks about how we're all spokes as individuals. We can think of ourselves as all spokes of a wheel, but we are not separate from each other. We are connected in the hub. And so for me, when I was thinking about my company name and why I called it this way is because I really want to honor the individual in the work environment, but I also want to honor the system and that we're all part of a greater whole and that the sum is greater than just the individual parts, but not to forget either the individual or the whole that we're all a part of.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I really liked that. And I think you touched on tension earlier on, the word tension came up and there is this tension in our culture between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective. I also really like how you've acknowledged that it's not about one subsuming the other. There is this necessity, I suppose is what I heard when you were describing that in relationship that exists between us as individuals and the thing or the other people that we are connected to. So thinking about what you are doing in your practice, I understand that there's quite a powerful personal story that sits behind your decision to leave enterprise and to start the company. And I understand that culminated after you had a pretty difficult time after giving birth. What was it that you experienced that moved you to do what you've done and start spoken wheel?
- Alla Weinberg:
- It started honestly from the beginning of my career because I was very early on in the UX field, in tech kind of at the inception and the birth of the field, but I was usually the only woman in those environments and it didn't, maybe as a younger person, it didn't register or bother me that much, or at least I thought at that time and fast forward 20 years and I had a baby and I had severe postpartum anxiety. That was part of my experience with that. And I did have very generous maternity leave for the United States. I had very generous maternity leave, but when I came back I was still struggling with that piece and my direct manager is a woman and my skip level manager was a woman and they were not supportive of that and basically let me know that I was underperforming because I was struggling with mental health and emotionally as a result of giving birth, and both of them have children, so none of these things made sense to me.
- And at that moment I would come home crying every night and I was like, I can't continue on this. And then I think it kind of hit me retrospectively. It kind of hit me the harm that I feel. That was my lived experience as the only woman in tech for a long time that I brushed off and I was like, oh, this is the way it is. I'm just breaking into the field. I'm new. I don't know what I'm talking about. It all sort of culminated for me in that moment. And in my book I even write about that there was another individual and it was at this company that was trying to undermine me, but I wasn't believed and I wasn't supported and I was really struggling and I didn't feel safe there. And I realized also historically I haven't felt safe in a lot of the environments that I worked with.
- But actually even coming back to your original question about adaptive path, that was the first environment ever that I felt safe in and that's what I really loved about it and I could really innovate and I could really be myself and I could really contribute where and the last bit before I went and did my own company, I felt like I was contracting and unable to even show up at a mediocre level, let alone at a high level to work. And this is also where I feel a lot of organizations miss this. They think emotions don't matter at work, leave those at the door, just get the work done. But that's not human and that's not possible. I mean a lot of people even right now currently in this moment are struggling with burnout, are struggling with exhaustion, are struggling with mental health issues, depression, anxiety, anxiety attacks, panic attacks, all sorts of things, and this kind of pervasive mindset that human beings just need to continually perform and sustain at a certain level without end that should never waiver that there or it should always continue to go up in some way is not humane, it's not human, and it's not how people work.
- In that moment when I decided to leave, because honestly it was really affecting my health, I couldn't continue from a health perspective that I just didn't want anyone else to be in this situation. I really wanted to be the change and take this really difficult, really challenging moment that I was in and hopefully make it better for others and make a change in cultures and help create even within a team environment better and cultures and environments where people can feel safe and truly be human beings and not have an expectation that you're a robot that can continually sustain to perform and sustain performance forever.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I can relate to that framing as humans, as robots. Personally, I feel like I worked like a robot maybe for the first 15 years of my career until I hit a wall and then I had to confront some behaviors, my own personal behaviors and how I was framing my abilities I suppose. But coming back to what you were saying there around the wanting to be the change, now it strikes me listening to you describe this situation and I can obviously feel and hear in your words the gravity, the still very, how personal and how close this is still. I mean, this is only a few years ago you had the, and I'm going to use my own words here. You had the strength to want to be that change even when you'd had to leave because you realized you couldn't continue for your own health. So it strikes me that you were tapping into something deeper here. Maybe it was anger, I don't know what it was, but what was it that even when you sounded like you're at one of your lowest lows that gave you the strength and the will to be that change?
- Alla Weinberg:
- I do feel it's anger, but in a protective sense, not angry at, but angry for all the other people that I know and I've interviewed and I've talked to and I've coached personally that have experienced similar environments continue to this day, obviously I haven't changed the world yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, being the operative word,
- Alla Weinberg:
- And I guess I felt called more to protect people and hopefully reduce harm to people where I could and where companies were open to that rather than, oh, I'm going to fight against you and this horrible system. It's fighting for something for someone, for people, for humanity in that sense and taking the pain that I've experienced and the hardships that I've experienced and basically saying I don't want others to experience that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, so definitely it sounds like there's not a rage as such there, but there's been a channeling of that anger at the status quo that you've been able to bring through into your practice, these sorts of environments. And I haven't worked in enterprise, so I just have to make that clear. I imagine that these sorts of environments aren't obvious from the outset. They're not necessarily obvious when you are sitting there across the interview table, you're doing your meet and greet of all the people that you may be working with. These things it strikes me, are not necessarily above board because everyone's on their best behavior when they're being interviewed and while they're interviewing, I would assume that may not be the case, so please let me know if there are really obvious red flags. But if they're not for people that there's a lot of change in the job market right now. Yes. So for people that are looking for that next opportunity to find a really great culture and environment to work in, to thrive, to design, to innovate, to be human, what are some of the ways that they can evaluate the safety of the culture that they are considering joining?
- Alla Weinberg:
- It's a little bit hard in the interview process because people want to just put on the best face that they have and represent the company in the best ways. But questions to ask, and it could be even of your current role that you're in and the current company that you're in is to ask questions about the how. So a lot of times people ask questions like, well, what am I going to do? What are my responsibilities? It's the what questions, but how questions are actually the ones that are going to get you a little bit more. So it's like how do you do work around here? How does work look like? What happens if somebody makes a mistake? How do you talk about that? What if you feel someone is not performing? How are those conversations had? How often do you take, do you the person you're interviewing or talking to take breaks?
- How often does leadership take breaks? How often do you have really hard, difficult conversations about things that aren't working in the company? What would be something that would never happen here? Trying to kind of dig in a little bit. I really like that one to how are people relating to each other? So my definition of culture, I know there's a lot of definitions of culture. I have a very simple one. My definition of culture is that culture is the outcome of how people relate to each other. And so the main question really is to try to dig into the relationships. How do people interact with each other? How are decisions made? How do we convince people? How do we get buy-in? If somebody's struggling, how is that handled? So it's all about how we treat each other, how we interact with each other, how we relate to each other and not, I've worked for multiple enterprise companies.
- I haven't found that that size of a company Enterprise is a very large size company. Salesforce was 60,000 I think when I left to 80,000 now something of that scale, massive, that humanity starts to get eroded at that size. People start to become numbers, people start to become resources. People start to get evaluated as to how much value add or revenue that they're bringing in. And so it starts to become mechanized and industrialized in that respect. And so asking those questions about each team is so different. There's subcultures because it's so large, you're going to absolutely have subcultures. And so to understand for each team, how are things handled In my situation, I wish I would have known ahead of time that if somebody's struggling emotionally, how would that be handled? Well, putting me on a performance improvement plan was not the right answer for me that did not feel supportive.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- These questions, they seem really critical, really smart, really savvy things to be asking hiring managers and others that you may encounter in the hiring process about. I don't want to suggest that people are willingly disingenuous in their responses, but I am curious to understand just what you might need to read between the lines in terms of people's responses. What sort of things should you be listening out for in research, for example? And in these conversations, I find the role of the supplementary question is quite useful for getting more depth around an answer. What sort of things should people be bearing in mind when they're posing what could be considered quite provocative or challenging questions from what also may be perceived to be a position of less power in the relationship when you're going for a job? Generally people feel like they have less power than their employers. What sort of things do people need to be conscious of and careful about or aware of?
- Alla Weinberg:
- I think the way that people answer is more telling them the content of the answer. So that's where you kind of have to read between the lines so people don't have an answer, huge red flag, oh, we've never talked about it. We've never thought about it. Well, this organization doesn't think about how people work together. They don't think about teaming, they don't think about culture. That's not top of mind for them. Or if folks are talking in very general terms and being abstract about it, then you can tell I'm actually, they're not feeling safe to disclose what's really going on. And we as human beings are natural lie detectors to be honest. And so you can kind of tell if somebody's holding back, but also I know a lot of people will feel scared to ask such a question. I guess I would invite people to be scared and do it anyway, that it's okay to feel scared because if those types of questions are not okay in this culture, that's the biggest signal for you to stay away if you're not getting the job because you asked that question, they just saved you from a really terrible experience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, they did. Yes, they did. And I know that your focus isn't necessarily solely on the individuals or the individual contributors in this ecosystem of enterprise. It's also very much, or I understand, it's also very much placed on the leaders that want to enable better cultures that are committed to creating safe and innovative work environments. One of the stories that I've heard you use to illustrate what culture is and how people can go about changing culture is back in 2018 when you gave your talk at Business to buttons, you started with a really powerful story about a woman named Linda Kle Wayman. And I wanted to give you some space here to tell people about this story because it's a really positive and powerful one. So who is Linda and what is it about her story that you felt was important for enterprise leaders to hear?
- Alla Weinberg:
- Linda is a principal and an under-resourced underprivileged school in the United States, and she's part of a larger ecosystem in a community that has a lot of violence, a lot of trauma, and also generally serves people that have been historically oppressed, especially in the United States. And the way that she really turned the school around was how she related to everyone that she met. And she did that by relating to everyone with love. And she would get on the school announcer every morning and she would say, in case no one told you today, I want you to know that I love you. And then she would come and she had a lot of tasks to do. She had a lot of things to clean up and a lot of problems, but she solved them through interacting with people through love and not punishment or reward, which is what most corporate environments do.
- They motivate people through the carrot and stick model. And there is research that shows that this is harmful and traumatic for people. It can cause trauma, a workplace trauma for people. And yet we still have this pervasive mindset that the way to motivate people is through this carrot and stick model where in actuality and in neuroscience, just the way our nervous system and our brain works, people are motivated by connection. People are motivated by love, people are motivated by people that they know, they'll be seen, they'll be heard, they'll be understood, they'll be cared for, they'll be supported. Then I can relax and I can bring my best self and I can be innovative and I can be creative and I can come up with new approaches and new solutions and new frameworks. But if I'm scared every day, then I'm going to lose my job or I'm scared like I was every day that I'm going to be punished or put on a PIP plan or things like that.
- I'm going to give you the bare minimum. And this is what I tell leaders is that you want psychological safety in your environment because you are paying these people and you want, you want to get what you're paid for from them. And to do that, you need to care about them. You need to feel safe, and they need to feel relaxed enough to be able to do their job. But if I'm spending my energy worrying, creating workarounds, fighting, avoiding doing all of these things, I'm not working. I'm not innovating, I'm not being creative. I'm spending all my energy on all that other stuff.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The turnaround in Linda's school is remarkable, and I don't actually unfortunately have the statistics at hand, but the results in terms of attendance, the results in terms of scholarships, test scores for senior students, test scores, all of it is absolutely remarkable. And I've heard you say about what Linda did, and I'll quote you now, you said Linda set the context of the school, not the content. So why does that difference in focus matter?
- Alla Weinberg:
- The context is the environment, it's the being of who we're being as leaders. How are we being together again, how we're relating to each other. The content is what are we working on? What's the design challenge we're wanting to solve? What is the behavior we're wanting to engender from our customers or our users? What people forget is that both are important. There's always this misconception or maybe a myth, we have to focus on one or the other. We can only focus on how people work together and how people are being together or we have to focus on what they're doing and the actions that they're taking. But they're actually, it's an and it's not an or. In order to accomplish what you want and to do what you want, you also need to focus on how are you showing up together and to each other and how are you being and when you're taking the action, because that actually affects if you're being loving, that affects how that action is going to impact the world, impact your customers impact, whatever it is you're doing. If you're taking that action from cynicism, from anger, from burnout, it's just going to look, it can take the exact same action and it's going to look and you're going to get so different and you're going to get completely different results from it as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've only heard of one design leader before speaking with you that was able to talk about love in the context of the enterprise, and that's PepsiCo's chief design officer, modal Pacini. And he's written a book effectively around Love, and he talks about the role of love in design, and he's been able to do this because he has had a track record over 20, 30 years that he's been in these positions of building proof points, Proofpoint after Proofpoint after Proofpoint. It's in a different context though, to which you are talking about love and why I'm interested in this word is you touched on before, for example, how the culture that you experienced when you returned to work after giving birth, even though your manager and your skip level manager were women there, it seemed to me at least, and I'm projecting here, but it seemed that it was very devoid of love or care even at a lower level maybe or depth of care, but definitely of love there.
- And I wonder if this is partly to do with the overall patriarchal type approach that our organizations have adopted, their stance, their posture, and how that might play out in terms of what's acceptable and what's not acceptable to talk about at work. And I promise you, I'm getting to a question here. So the question is, how does one in an environment such as that begin to introduce a more loving way of being in order to foster a safer culture without being shut down or without running into such strong resistance to such a seemingly out of place concept in the enterprise? How do you start? Where do you begin to turn the tide?
- Alla Weinberg:
- And I mentioned this in my talk at business and buttons. You start closer in. You always start close in. So start with your team, your organization, your reports, your peers, start as close in as possible and then work out, oh, maybe I can be more, just even be more kind. We don't even have to use the word love, be more kind to my cross-functional partners. Maybe I can listen to them and understand what their struggles and pressures are. Maybe they can feel really heard by me and that will build trust. Trust is something that all organizations is a word they use all the time. And what I find funny about it is what they really mean is love. They just can't say the word love. So they trust. In my head, whenever somebody talks to me and says, oh, we did an engagement survey and we see that our employees really don't have a lot of trust in their managers and in the leadership, in my mind, I just substitute the word love for it.
- And so it's always starting closer in. And again, it's that being part what you can be loving. You can show up without ever saying the word. You can just show up and be loving to other human beings. And we have so little of that at work. And this is why I do this, what I do, this is why I do what I do because we spend 90,000 hours of our life on average at work of our life than we spend more time with our colleagues than we do with the partners that we choose to live with and to spend our life with. And it's devoid of the main nourishment that we need as human beings. We're biologically wired for love. We have to have it. It's biologically wired into our survival, and yet it's devoid and it's missing at work. That's not okay with me. That's why I do what I do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And when you were describing that and I was reflecting on the conversation so far, I couldn't help but wonder why is this, and maybe this is an impossible question to answer.
- Alla Weinberg:
- No, I have an answer for that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You have an answer. Yeah. Okay, cool. I
- Alla Weinberg:
- Do. I do. I've been wanting to talk about this and I've been scared, so I'm going to even admit that I've been scared to post about it or to talk about this. But there's, the reason goes back to it's actually historical in America, which is where I'm based and where I know more of the historical context, and I don't know as much about New Zealand or Australia or other countries, but in America, historically we've had slaves and we've had slavery, and there were certain practices that masters of slaves did, such as measuring productivity and how long a slave could live and how productive they could be over their lifetime. And again, using punishment and reward for getting people to do what they do. But also the mindset was that slaves aren't humans, they're not human, they're slaves that never went away. Those exact mindsets and beliefs were present in the industrial revolution where factory workers were cogs and not human right?
- They're cogs in a wheel. And we wanted to use scientific management, which is an entire hoax to increase productivity for them and increase output. And that's made it into modern management. Same thing as well. We have performance reviews. And I read every day leaders wondering, well, why are folks unproductive? Well, you just laid off 10% of your workforce. What do you think is going to happen? And it has its roots in the belief that some people are not human and nobody goes around this consciously, but all of our structures, our systems, our cultures, our practices, our processes are based in that mindset. And what happens in the corporate world is same thing that happened in factories, same thing that happened on the plantations. There's the leaders that do the thinking and there's the workers that do the executing. And that is still true to this day. And the people that are executing that are implementing are somehow less than the people that are doing the strategic leading and the thinking. And it all goes back to forgetting that people are human beings and treating them as completely inhuman. And that kind of brings me to, sorry if I'm going on a little bit long, but No,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Not at all. Continue. It
- Alla Weinberg:
- Brings me to where I am right now in my thinking, which actually has evolved since I wrote the book. One of the biggest deficits or missing pieces in the corporate world in how we work together is remembering that people have a body that's biological and that body gets sick and the body gets tired, and that body has feelings. And that we have up seasons in our life where sometimes we're really productive and great and doing well, and sometimes we go down and we need a break and we can't continue, but then we'll go and go back up. And that's how humans and nature and natural beings work. And where I am right now with my work is that our bodies have a nervous system, and every human being has a nervous system, which is connected to our brain. And our nervous system is really the thing that determines how safe we feel in an environment. And our nervous system, if we're treated as an inhuman, as not a human being, as a cog or a property of someone, our nervous system will be every single day we'll be stressed out, dysregulated, feel threatened, and then we get sick because we live in human bodies, we get sick, our bodies get sick. And that's what happened to me and that's why I stopped working.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There is so much in there, so many I
- Alla Weinberg:
- Know. I just like,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really interesting. I really mean that. Not just a flippant way of using the word. Interesting. It is really interesting what you're saying here and what's been going on for me is you've been talking about, this is a few things that I've listened to or read recently. One of them was, I believe it was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, which is an old text. Viktor Frankl was very familiar with it. Yeah, very familiar with it. So for people that aren't Viktor Frankl was a survivor of the Nazi death camps, and he's also a psychiatrist, Vien from the School of Vienen Psychiatry, I think in Austria. Anyway, a really great short read, very powerful read, very provocative read, very dark and very light read, and I highly recommend it. He talks about in the camps, in the concentration camps he talks about and many things.
- But one of the things he talks about is that the people that were able to find meaning in their existence were the ones that survived. And the people that couldn't were the ones that didn't. But he also talked about the role of the collaborators. So people that were in the camps as prisoners, but that were afforded extra provisions and better conditions than their peers by effectively working with the Nazis to keep an eye on the prison population. And eventually those people sadly also meet the same end most of them anyway. And why I'm talking about this is because it seems to me that you are scratching at the shared belief that we hold in society of the relationship between capital and labor.
- However, and I'm no Marxist philosopher, I don't have any real depth of knowledge here, but what is interesting to me about this is that it strikes me that a lot of middle and upper management, unless they're in the C-suite, and this isn't damning this, I'm not trying to damn these people, but unwittingly perhaps, are playing the role of the collaborator to enforce the status quo and this lack of love that you're speaking about potentially in the system in order for the system to perpetuate. And it's also making me think of a lyric or a song, I dunno if you're familiar with the Band Muse, but they're a British heavy rock band, and they have a song called Resistance. And it's a really great song, actually, the lyrics worth having a read, but it says, one of the lyrics is Love is our resistance. They'll keep us apart and they won't stop breaking us down, but touching on this idea that love is the thing that will see us through. And anyway, I'm kind of going a little bit off track here, but it really does strike me that you are touching at this unwritten acceptance of the way in which we have to be in these institutions that exist outside of our homes, which you've pointed out, we spend a lot of time at.
- Alla Weinberg:
- I agree that middle management and even more senior management, but not in the C-suite, our collaborators, and I think this is what happened to me and my managers, is they've internalized this way of working, this unconscious belief that it's been intergenerationally, irrationally inherited. I'm not blaming anyone, it's just been an inheritance. And then people are like, well, this is how it is. This is what has made business successful, so I'm going to continue it because that's what we know. And that's it. That in many ways, like women, even people of color in positions, other historically oppressed groups, more leadership positions start to internalize this and act sometimes even in a more harmful way than their white colleagues. And because that's the way to stay in the position and to get ahead in these organizations perpetuating this is how, this is back to the how's, how you progress, how you go up the ladder. And for me personally, I decided I don't want to climb the ladder. I don't want that ladder. It's not for me
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yet. It seems that you want to, and this is a bloated word here, you want to disrupt, you want to try and change this culture that exists. And about this, I've heard you say before, and I'll quote you again, culture is notoriously difficult to shift, to design, to change because you are working with collective identity, you are working with a collective ego. And we of course, we've just been taking a 10,000 foot view of all of Western business practice and some of the behaviors that it leads to. So if we accept that culture is notoriously difficult to shift, is it even worth attempting? Is this a situation that is so far removed from our control as individuals to influence that we are better off not expending energy in an attempt to change it?
- Alla Weinberg:
- I like this question. It's a good challenging question. Clearly my answer is no, because it's not okay to be a collaborator and continue to knowingly be part of a system that harms human beings. And I do think all by slowly, I do think macro collective level, we are shifting. We are moving to something different. And I'm just one person, and I know there's many working in this kind of field and in this industry that are hoping to least point it into the direction of love versus more greed or more harm to human beings, more distraction, more separateness. And this is, again, going back to the name of my company, spoken Wheel. We're not separate from each other. And there's this pain, I think so many people feel, especially at work that I'm just an individual contributor. I'm just an individual and I'm not part of anything and I'm separate.
- And there's all these studies by Gallup that says, oh, purpose at work, having a shared purpose is so important to engagement. Well, there's a reason for that. Nobody actually wants to feel separate. We want to be part of a collective, and we are part of a collective of a human race. We have to be really honest with ourselves and say the way that we have been working is harmful to human beings and we need to change that. And it's not okay, just like other systems we've had slavery, feudalism, other systems of the ways that people have collectively worked together have been harmful to a set of people. And we can continue to evolve that that can continue to change. And there are some things that are not okay, and we can't be throwing our hands up in there and be like, oh, can't change it. Too bad. I guess I'll just put my head down and that's it. We can't stand by and just let people be hurt.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We've seen a glimmer of hope as far as white collar jobs were concerned through covid and coming out the other side of the tail end of the pandemic, the worst of it with this shift to flexible working arrangements. But now we're also seeing a reversion backlash to the mean, right? Yeah. We're seeing this freedom. I would say it is a freedom. It is a luxury and a freedom that we've been afforded. But there are some very big companies that are now saying, that's no longer, okay, you need to think very carefully about whether or not you return to the office. It's, it's a veil threat. I mean, let's be honest. Oh yes. Yeah. There's no mincing words here, right? If you want
- Alla Weinberg:
- To be read between the lines, here you go. Yeah. I mean
- Brendan Jarvis:
- People aren't even being subtle about it.
- And you've encouraged previously people to reflect and culture, as the world changes, culture and organizations, things shift. Things merge. So they're not static. You've encouraged people to think about their organization's culture critically. And you've said, and I'll quote you again here. You've said the key question to ask yourself is how is the current culture serving us now? I think that us in that question is possibly the key word. And why I say that is a culture might be serving some of us more than it serves the rest of us, which disincentivizes those people who it's currently working best for to change it. Now, again, this is kind of a thorny question to pitch you, but what is it about a situation like that where there is clearly culture working better for others that how do you navigate situations like this? I mean, you touched on earlier, starting close in, I think that's the words you used. Yes. How do you start to tackle a situation where the incentives or the power structures are, or leaned so powerfully one way rather than the other?
- Alla Weinberg:
- That's a great question. You do it collectively. That's where that us comes in. What corporate cultures, and again, I can only speak in America, what they've traditionally done is say, oh, you Brendan are having a problem, so you need to go get some help, or here's a benefit and you need to solve it. They don't ask the question of what is happening systemically in our organization that is causing this experience. For example, for me, always feeling as the only woman in the room and feeling both invisible but also highly visible at the same time. My opinions are invisible, but it's very visible that I'm the only woman in that situation. And what has traditionally happened is, especially at the C-suite and the leadership level, problems have been pushed down to the individual, but they're not individual problems to solve. And kind of taking a little bit from the union playbook, the way that problems get changes when a group of people, not one person, a group of people says This is a problem and we want to see change, and we demand change.
- And I worked for Salesforce before going off on my own. And one of the things that did work in Salesforce is people would put together petitions and they would petition Mark Benioff. And so it would be a collective voice if you wanted to. You could sign it as an employee, and it'll be a collective voicing. This is not okay with us. For example, there were people that were not okay with Salesforce being used on the border of the United States and Mexico as part of the border control. They didn't feel that that was a values aligned or moral thing to do. And so created a petition, and I think this is the biggest mistake that people make. Even more senior leaders, they say, oh, I have a problem. I can see on my team the impact of not enough love of impact, of continuing to drive for productivity or the impact of laying off 10% of the workforce, but not changing any of the workload, just piling it onto to the folks that are left and saying, oh, I'm going to go have that.
- I as an individual, I'm going to go have that conversation. No, no, no, no. It has to be a collective conversation. It has to a group of people, hopefully a good size number of people have to say, no, this isn't working. This is harmful. This environment is not working for us, for this group of people. And so collective voices is what truly creates change. Not representatives and not individual voices, collective voices, because there is a lot of power in the collective, which is why in most large companies, they want people to believe it's an individual problem that you can solve with some benefits or some other support from HR or something like that, where it's not a collective, it's not an individual issue. It's a systemic issue that many people are impacted by. And we need to raise the alarm as a collective.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, that's a strong alarm bell to be ringing. That
- Alla Weinberg:
- Is a strong alarm bell to be ringing. Yes. And I know a lot of unions are used in more labor type of work, and it's less so in white collar tech work. Work where UX has done in product design, those types of work. But that's actually missing that collective action is what's missing and what the problem is, why things aren't changing. And people who are disincentivized to change don't, because again, they can say, oh, I'm sorry. You're having that experience here, some resources to help you as an individual, versus this entire group of people is being harmed by this environment and this culture, and things really need to change here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's take that thread and bring it forward into a conversation about fear, which sits alongside a lot of your thinking and previous things that you've talked about in regards to cultures that are conducive to innovation. And look, reading between the lines, this whole conversation, our broader benefit as humanity, as people that spend a lot of time in these places that we call workplaces. You gave a talk, I think it was last year called fear, the human barrier to innovation. And I thought this was a particularly brave and potentially subversive in a good way, framing of fear in the organization and the things that you were saying in that talk, it's definitely worthwhile. People have a watch of that. And I would link to it in the show notes. And you referenced a study from McKinsey in there that 85% of the executives who responded said that fear holds back innovation often or always at their companies.
- And the study also found that in low innovation companies, the following fears were the most prevalent. And I'll talk to those now. Fear of career impact, fear of criticism, fear of uncertainty. Now, you talked also about the importance of realizing collective strength or the importance of not trying to change everything as an individual, that we can through our relationships with others, we can actually affect change on large structures and systems. I want to ask you about a famous quote from an American president, F D R, when he was office. I think during the Great Depression is where this comes from. And he said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. How do you feel about that statement in our current context as workers in this world today? Is it as simple as choosing not to be fearful and therefore enabling this positive change that you would like to see at work happen? Or is it more complicated than that?
- Alla Weinberg:
- We can't choose to feel or not feel something. We do feel it. For me, it's not stepping over fear or ignoring fear. It's acknowledging I feel scared and it doesn't have to hold me back. It doesn't have to be a barrier to me, and it actually loses a lot of its power. The fear loses a lot of its power once it is acknowledged. And in my book, I even have an exercise which is called the fear inventory, which I tell every coach, every leader I coach, I make them do this, is write down all the fears you have on a daily basis. I call it emotional hygiene. Just like you brush your teeth every day, you have to acknowledge and see the fears. There's nothing wrong with fear. That's again, a natural human biological neurobiological response to life, totally normal. But what we do is we pretend there isn't fear, and that's what gets us into trouble.
- And even in my book, I say fear is the opposite of safety, not danger. Fear is the opposite of safety. And why all of these really outdated slavery based practices are so entrenched in modern management is completely due to fear. Well, if I change it, is my business going to the fear? My business is going to end? This is going to cause us to lose revenue, profit, all the things that are important to us. We're not going to get the results. Fear, we're not going to give results that we really want. So this is going to be the end of us if we don't do things the way everybody else has done them for a century. And so fear is the thing that's driving the lack of love at work, that's driving toxicity, that's driving harm. And it's not that people feel fear, it's that they're not even acknowledging or aware that they have the fear. And that's when fear is driving you versus you being able to look at it to name it, and then to choose how you want to act. When you're in fear, you're not choosing anymore fear's, kind of pushing you to act, to show up, to behave, to relate to each other in different ways in harmful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I want to ask you about some of the ways that we can run fear rather than fear running us. But before I do that, I want to dig into what you just said there about the opposite of fear being safety. This is something that this really sort of made me stop and think because the first thing that came to mind for me is the opposite of fear is courage. And I wanted to explore this with you because obviously I've got a default that's set to the opposite of fear is courage rather than the opposite of fear is safety. How is the opposite of fear, safety as opposed to something perhaps more romantic like courage?
- Alla Weinberg:
- I love the word courage because the roots of courage is core, which means love in French. So we're still talking about love. So courage is about if you do a literal translation of courage from French, it's you throw your heart over the fence first and then you follow it. So it's really a heart-based kind of thing, which I think is really fun. And that's why it's one of my favorite words in general, but why it's not the opposite of fear. It goes for me. It goes back to biology. Fear is a state of our nervous system. It's a dysregulated state. It's a survival state of our nervous system. Safety is a connected state of our nervous system. I feel connected to you, to the world, to other people, to nature. I feel a connection to something greater than myself and to other human beings, to other nervous systems.
- And so when we are in fear, we don't longer have that connection. We feel that separateness when we are in safety, we do have that connection. And even from a cognitive standpoint, when we're in safety, we're able to literally, our mind can think broader. We have a broader perspective and more thought power available to us than when we're in fear. Because when we're in survival mode, our body literally will shut down parts of our brain that are not necessary, like analysis, like rational thought that are not necessary for our survival. And I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but I've had moments where I felt very anxious and it almost felt like I've been in a tunnel, even my peripheral vision kind of darkens a little bit. I feel like I'm in a tunnel. I feel it's a bit narrow and in my thinking, I can't get my way out of it there.
- There's no possibilities that are available to me. The option seems so limited. When I can reconnect, when I can regulate, get back to safety, that's when things are possible. And that's from safety. I can have courage and that from safety, I can run fear, not fear running me, but if my nervous system is dysregulated, I'm in fight or flight mode, okay, I'm in fear. Fear running me now. Now I'm going to go shoot off that email to my manager that I will regret later, right? Yeah. Now I'm going to just reply all to some people and be angry about some things. Those are not courageous actions. That's fear running you. Your nervous systems feel safe when inside your body, you can feel a sense of relaxation. Then you can throw your heart over the fence first and follow it and have courage to do that. There's nothing wrong with feeling a little bit of fear because that little bit of stress is good for us as human beings, but chronic fear is what really hurts us and makes us sick. And so we actually can't have courage if we're in fear, but we can, when we feel safe.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You can't engage in a courageous action without there being an element of real or perceived risk. And so what I'm hearing you say there is that your ability to take better risks, even though you may still feel some fear, whether it's in a corporate innovation context or just in anything in your life, you are able to take better risks and make better decisions when you start from a position of safety, then from when you're starting from a position of fear. A
- Alla Weinberg:
- Hundred percent. Well summarize. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're welcome. I think you did a pretty fantastic job yourself.
- So thinking about this, then, thinking about needing, well, optimally needing or wanting to operate from a position of safety for many reasons, like you said before, there's some incentives aligned here for companies, right? If their staff can operate, their people can operate from a position of safety, they should therefore by accepting the definition we've just been discussing, be able to be more effective, bring more of their self to their jobs, make better decisions, and let's not beat around the bush here. That should translate down to better revenue, better profit, better company performance, rightly so. Is this a case of us just needing to engage our logical and rational brains to decide or to evaluate situations and then decide that we just are going to operate from safety? How does one, if you are operating from in an unsafe nervous state, how does one bring oneself to that place of safety? Is this just off one's own volition?
- Alla Weinberg:
- It can happen at a few different levels. As an individual, you can recognize, oh, I'm not feeling a sense of safety. I feel chronically stressed out. And stress is a euphemism for fear. So I feel chronically in fear and start to go out and build more one-on-one connections and supporters in your organization. So a lot of that is a signal that you don't have enough social support. And I know a lot of people face that, especially in the remote world where we don't talk to each other unless we create a meeting. And that's intentional. And so part of that is if that's true for you, be more intentional and start to have conversations with folks not about work, just to get to know each other, just to build those connections and those relationships. Super important for our sense of safety at the team or organization level can evaluate what are our practices?
- What are our rituals? What are our processes? Are they creating more connection or less connection? And start to change those. And then at the organizational level, what are our policies? What are organizational structures where, and honestly, I have not to this day have not had an organization that's been willing to do this, but to ask yourself the really hard question of how is this organization causing harm and to whom, not if, but how are we causing harm? And to whom? You can find out the answer to that very qualitatively. You can find that quantitatively. There's many ways to approach that and then acknowledge that and speak to it. And not in America, people like to, especially organizations like to do this toxic positivity thing, but it's okay, we're still great. No, we can say we care and we want to acknowledge that we are causing harm in X, Y, Z way, and then start to make changes and put money behind it. An organization, what they value is not what's on their value board or their poster. They value what they invest in, what they put their money behind. And so if you as an organization like C-Suite leaders, ask yourselves that question, are willing to have and see that hard answers put money behind it to start to make those changes, we're going to see some real change in the corporate world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about leaders. Well,
- Alla Weinberg:
- That takes courage. I think
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It does take courage. A hundred percent takes courage, takes courage for those leaders in the C-suite that you were touching on there. It takes courage for people to band together in some form of collective, large or small to agitate for change. Courage is nothing meaningful, and this is a broad sweeping generalization, but I feel like nothing meaningful would've ever happened with our human race if we were devoid of courage. I want to talk to you about, and I'm mindful of time, so that's probably one of my last questions for you. Sure. I want to talk to you about the courage that exists between those who are in IIC roles or lower management roles to have hard conversations or perceived to be hard, difficult conversations with those in the status hierarchy that are above them or have greater status Now, you were interviewed a couple of years ago, I think, not long after your book came out by Jeff Health, who is effectively one of the co-owners of the publishing company that published the book.
- And at one point Jeff said, and I'll quote Jeff now, he said, and most of the clients that I work with, we can say whatever we want as long as it agrees with what the boss wants. And then you said, while laughing or doesn't make the boss look bad in front of his boss. Now that was a light moment in that conversation. It was clear that you were having a moment there together, but you were also touching on an unspoken truth, I suppose, right? You were talking about something here that's well understood from anyone that operates in any form of hierarchy, and this is really the law of the corporate jungle. So is there a rule here for trying to create this culture of safety at work that you can go and do this as long as you don't make your boss or your boss look bad, that there are definite boundaries on the actions that you can take to foster a culture like this. And one of these boundaries or red lines that you must not cross is do anything that makes your boss or your boss's boss not look the greatest.
- Alla Weinberg:
- I don't think that can be a rule if you're trying to create safety, because then that would just be performative and it wouldn't create true safety. For the most vulnerable or historically oppressed are people that are harmed or not being served by the culture. It doesn't mean you have to burn it all down. It doesn't mean you have to grenade anything. What it does mean is you have to have, again, the courage to have the hard conversations to say, Hey, this isn't some of your actions, dear leader. Some of your actions manager are what's causing the lack of safety in this team, in this organization. And it's also on the company itself to not tolerate leaders that are causing harm but are high performers. Oh, they're bringing that department's bringing in the good revenue, so we don't care if this person's racist. Well then it's no longer a safe environment.
- And so actually crossing those lines and having, again, a really, you can have a kind and loving conversation with people. It doesn't have to be accusatory. It doesn't have to be threatening to look at their role in it and what's happening and look at reality. Although it might be harsh and it might be hard and it might be unsavory. Look at it together and work together to solve it, not be against each other. That's the key. Even in this quest to change culture, people create adversaries. I'm against these leaders that are causing this, but that won't change it. Now you're creating internal conflict. What you want to do is to say there's a systemic problem. We're both going to look at it together. We're both going to be on the same side looking at this thing outside of us together. It's not between us. It's not your fault.
- I'm not blaming you. It's outside of us and how are we going to change that? And that may not be an easy conversation and there may be tension there between. Well, if we change that, we might see a dip in revenue for a short, maybe in the short term, maybe that will have a business impact. I'm not going to say it won't, but the goal is to have the conversation. If you tiptoe around or you try to make sure that the manager doesn't get upset or safe space or their job is not on the line and they're okay, you're never going to get to the root cause of really what's going on and having the honest conversations that I've yet still to this day waiting for people to be willing to have.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm trying to tie together a bunch of thoughts that are going on for me in this moment and what they are. I feel what I'm trying to stitch together here is if you're operating in a culture that's unsafe, you need to be able to, from a place that may be objectively from a place of fear, have the courage to ask the right questions, have the kinds of conversations that are needed in order to shift that culture to a culture of safety. But in order to do that, you do have to take a risk. You do have to run your fears. It's not going to happen if you play it safe or pretend that you're safe. It's not going to happen by itself
- Alla Weinberg:
- A hundred percent, and it's not something you should do as an individual by yourself. And there's more courage when we do it together. There's more safety when we do it together than I as an individual go on a crusade to try to change it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a key point. Alla for my final question today. There are likely many people who are listening to this conversation who aren't in the safest of work cultures. So for those people, what is it that you want them to remember about their situation and perhaps themselves?
- Alla Weinberg:
- I want them to remember that you are not failing as an individual in any way. You are not causing this as an individual in any way. There's nothing that you as an individual are doing wrong. What you need to remember is that there is a systemic issue and problem that is causing this, and you need to reflect for yourself, how much harm is this causing me? So you have to flip it. There is this, again, kind of mindset that perpetuates where a lot of folks think it's just me or it's my fault, or I'm not doing something right, I'm underperforming or I can't figure out how to have a better relationship with my manager. All of these things, I don't know how to do the politics game well enough, and I just want every individual to know it's truly not on you as an individual. What you are feeling is a symptom of more systemic problem. And the first step to addressing it is to ask yourself and to start having these conversations with your teammates, with your peers, with your managers. What is going on in the system that is causing this? Who else feels the same way? How is it impacting you and being honest and putting the responsibility where it really belongs, which is at that systemic level? There's nothing wrong with you as a human being.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a great place to leave things. Alla, this has been such a thoughtful, deeply, personally provocative conversation for me, and I really want to say thank you for so generously sharing your thoughts and your insights today.
- Alla Weinberg:
- Thank you Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Alla, what is the best way for people who want to follow the great work that you are doing for the community who may want to learn more about your expertise to follow the provocative and very thoughtful challenges that you are making out there towards our current work cultures?
- Alla Weinberg:
- I would say LinkedIn is the best place, so please follow me or add me as a connection. I'm happy to connect with people on LinkedIn and I post everything there and always provide invitations to recordings or my thoughts on LinkedIn. So that's the best way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks Alla. It's been really great to have this conversation with you and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great to have you here as well. Everything that Alla and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Alla and all of the things we've spoken about. They'll be chaptered on the YouTube video for you to hop around various places.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe so it turns up every two weeks and tell someone else about it as well. Pass it along if you feel that there would be just one other person in your network that would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my bio on the show notes. You can find a link directly to me or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.