L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Domino Effect Leadership: Leading Teams that Surpass Others and Yourself

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

In this episode of L&D in Action, we speak with Jon Westover. Jon is a Professor and Department Chair at Utah Valley University’s Woodbury School of Business, as well as the host of the top 0.1%-ranked podcast Human Capital Innovations. He addresses the challenges that managers and business leaders feel during a time where characteristic chaos means that employees struggle to feel the psychological safety necessary within a thriving creative and agile business.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by GetAbstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. With an eye on the future and a preference for the practical, we address the most important developments in edtech, leadership strategy, and workflow learning. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with John Westover. John is an author, professor, and host of Human Capital Innovation's HCI podcast. John, thank you so much for joining me today. It is a pleasure to be with you.

Thank you. Real quick, do you want to just give our listeners an overview as to who you are and what you do in your own words? Yeah, I consider myself a scholar practitioner. So I am a professor. That's my day job. I've been a professor at the local university here, Utah Valley University in south of Salt Lake in Utah now for over 14 years, I'm the chair and professor of organizational leadership

in the school of business. And so that's my academic career, but I've always strived to be one that connects practitioner orientation with the academic orientation. I've always done consulting work on the side and really how I got into the HR space before becoming a professor. I was a practitioner. I was a training and development and organizational development professional, both internal and external consultant for various companies, and then decided that it would be really cool to go on, get a PhD and become an academic. So my consulting work, things like my podcasting, writing for a practitioner audience in many of my books, that informs, of course, my teaching and my research. My research informs my

consulting work. I feel like it's a good symbiotic kind of a relationship. I think it provides better opportunity for students, but also real research grounding, a rigor in my consulting work that I think is also useful. So that's my general approach. On a personal level, I'm a father of six children, been married for about 21 years, and I'm a family man and I love the outdoors. Great. Thank you so much. I read through your book, The Future Leader.

That's your most recent book. And I also listened to a handful of your podcasts. By the way, I saw season 45 is where the podcast is right now. Do you know how many episodes you've done with the show for HCI? Oh, there's, I don't know, over 1300. There's a lot. Yeah, it's been fun. Well, I'm at eight right now with L&D in action. So thank you so much for joining me at this early stage where we are. If you don't mind. So I read through your book, like I said, and I would like to actually start toward the end. So the third part, the chapter is dedicated to psychological safety. This is a big question for me and for a lot of

business leaders right now. I think that it is a very difficult time to practice psychological safety. We are dealing with not unprecedented, but you know, in recent history, larger levels of job insecurity than we're used to. We're dealing with the onslaught of AI and new technology, which a lot of people have anxiety over. And when it comes to teams and insular psychological safety, that's one thing, but I feel like it can be very hard to practice that when the sort of grand scope of industry and business is in such a tumultuous time right now. So do you have any specific action items or ways that we can actively address creating psychological safety in the workplace and among your team sort of practices

that we can take? Yeah, it's an interesting question. And you're right, the upheaval, the turmoil. I mean, it's not only the technological disruptions that are impacting the workforce, but it's the social, it's the geopolitical. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff that's just adding to the complexities and nuances and the challenges that organizations are facing. So there's no question about that. There's no easy answer to that either. But I am a believer that within your own sphere of influence, again, backing up for a second, I can't control everything in the world, right? I just can't. There's going to be upheaval regardless of what I do. But I do have a sphere of influence. And within my sphere of influence, within my stewardship, within my team, whatever that looks like, whether it's a team of, you know, a couple people that report to me or I have, you know, a large team or I'm a middle manager or upper level executive and I have a really large team, I have influence over that team and I have disproportionate influence and ability to shape the culture and the environment for that team, regardless of what else is going on outside.

And I've often said, you can actually work for a pretty sick organization, a pretty toxic organization. But if you have a really great leader and you're working within that kind of a smaller substructure of the organization, you can be insulated from it and you can actually have a very positive culture within a much larger toxic organization. And I would say the same thing, you know, in terms of the geopolitical, the societal, the labor force, labor market disruptions. Within all that context, I believe you can still very much have a very psychologically safe workplace with your team. Now, of course,

they were not in a bubble. They still have to interact with other people in the organization. They still have to interact with other stakeholders outside of the organization. There's still going to be messiness, complexity, nuance, all of that that we have to lean into and we have to learn how to navigate. But if I can create an environment where members of my team know that not only do I allow for, but I actually expect for them to push back, for them to challenge and really dispel this idea that we were expected to sit with the status quo and kind of do things as normal. If we can get past that and we can actually shift those expectations around helping everyone on your team to know that, no, actually the best way forward for all of us to

be most creative, to be most innovative is for everyone to feel safe, to speak up, to speak out, to challenge, to push back, to share their ideas, even if they seem kind of crazy, to try things and fail, as long as we frame it around learning and iteration and experimentation, right? And when we can create that kind of an environment, it becomes transformative for individuals in the team. Certainly, typically what happens, especially if you get past kind of the early stage transitions, learning curves, discomfort, if you get past that stage, typically these teams with higher levels of psychological safety outperform other teams in the organization. So then they start to influence, you know, outside your sphere of influence starts to expand and you start to

influence others. And you can be a catalyst for shifting what may be a toxic organizational culture or system outside of your own, you know, control and empower your people to do the same. So that's kind of how I approach it. Yeah, that domino effect of good leadership, I guess. One of your recent or not recent, I guess, but you recorded an episode on your podcast with Murad Salman Mirza. And he had a very unique perspective on leadership. I mean, he's had many different perspectives on leadership roles. But he works primarily, I believe, with companies out in the UAE, and you know, in the Middle East, that sort of thing. And he had a comment about how a lot of leadership roles tended to be expats, you know, working with locals in those companies. And while this isn't, you know, directly relevant,

obviously, to American businesses and businesses, you know, that we are speaking to right now, I do think that there's something about higher level leadership that those sorts of folks really need to also heed your call that you have in your book. Because it feels to me like those that are the leaders that are hiring leaders, treat leadership almost as a mathematical equation, or, you know, a skill that is just distinctly held by certain types of people that can then be just powered down on those below them. And it's not so much about, you know, self awareness and connecting and mutual understanding with your direct reports. So do you see that sort of thing where leadership is not treated as, you know, the social role that it is, is that more of it? Even Salon Shara and another conversation that

you recently had, she mentioned that just as simple as, you know, paying a living wage, like again, from the higher up leadership that are making those larger decisions. Do you see that those C-suite and higher level executives and leaders are making challenges in some cases for the middle managers and those leaders that are directly working with individual contributors? there are very, you know, quote unquote, enlightened, progressive, forward-thinking senior executives, CEOs, C-suite level people who are leaders, the types of leaders that I would hope everyone would strive to be. There are many of those and they do exist. They may be unicorns. They may be a little bit more rare, but they do exist. But I do think the predominant style of most who have progressed to that stage in their career is not one that's always healthy. And so what you end up having is this real battle, you know, whatever we want to define middle management as, but, you know, let's for the sake of this conversation, let's say anything that's below the C-suite,

but above like line level supervisory, We can say that's a pretty broad middle management, depending on the organizational size and the layers of the hierarchy, that could be a whole bunch of layers, who knows. But the people in the middle management roles, they can have a lot of challenges in trying to shield their team from what can be the toxic, shield their team from what can be the toxic either leadership approaches or policies, practices, and procedures or whatever that might come down from top leadership. I've been in that position, and I know some listeners may totally disagree with this, but I see it as a responsibility if I'm in a middle management kind of a role to be an advocate for my people.

So people on my team need, they don't have voice. They need me to utilize my privilege and speak up for them and to advocate for them and to play interference for them and to clear pathways for them to be able to do cool stuff and to succeed and to push back on upper level leadership. If they're doing things that I feel are unethical or not sustainable or whatever the case may be. That's a really important role of a leader, a formal leader within a hierarchy. And if I'm not willing to do that, if I don't have the courage to do that, what ends up inevitably happening is I kind of end up towing the line. I kind of just pass along

whatever nonsense I might get from up the line and I push it down to towing the line. I kind of just pass along whatever nonsense I might get from up the line and I push it down to my people. And if I have, you know, other middle managers that are below me that report to me, I just push it to them and the cycle continues. And then you end up ultimately with, you know, the toxicity spreading through the organization with people not really being engaged, not trusting the organization, not having a lot of commitment or loyalty to the organization. And that causes a whole other slew of challenges and problems. I do believe that all organizations can become more healthy. Some people will argue, it just is what it is. Organizations and human beings are messy and complex and faulty,

and it's always going to be that way. I don't believe that. I do believe we're human and we will mess up. But I don't believe we have to just throw our hands in the air and say, you know, we're basically doomed to live a career working in ways where we have to constantly sacrifice our own integrity, exploit those around us to get ahead, you know, et cetera. Like, I don't believe that. exploit those around us to get ahead and et cetera. I don't believe that. And I've seen so many great examples of people who have pushed against that narrative and have created amazing environments for their team. But I do also note that it's hard for them. They bear a burden because they're playing interference. And I felt that as well.

The moniker that you've given the style of leadership that you're loosely describing now or your preferred style of leadership, bluer than indigo leadership. I like that term a lot. Would you mind just explaining that real quick? Yeah. So it's built on this idea of servant leadership. So many listeners may be familiar with that. Bluer than indigo is a Korean proverb.

So I've spent a significant amount of time living abroad in different countries, but particularly I spent about three years in South Korea. And I wouldn't say I'm fluent anymore, but because it's been a while, but I was pretty fluid and, you know, studied the language and was pretty good at it. And one of the things I really enjoy about the Korean language is, you know, the embedded cultural, it's probably this way with every language, but the embedded cultural elements within the language itself, right? And these proverbs are really rich in meaning. Bluer than indigo, if you think about the color indigo, it's not in the rainbow, right? We don't always talk about indigo as a primary color or whatever. And so people may not always right off the top of their head even think about what color indigo is, but indigo is a really deep, vibrant blue,

the bluest of blues, even almost purplish, very, very vibrant. And in the Korean culture, and it's this way in many Eastern cultures, they have a lot of reverence for the elders. They have a lot of reverence for teachers and for leaders, a lot of deference even to them. And so the idea behind this proverb is that the best teacher or the best leader is not the one who is always trying to get ahead themselves and make themselves look good, you know, and perhaps even at the expense of others around them. But the best teacher and the best leader is the one who invests in their people. And their goal is to help those around them become better than themselves or bluer than Indigo. So the teacher or the leader would be Indigo, the deepest,

most vibrant blue, the bluest of blues, which we're holding up as like the ideal, like that's amazing. But the teacher doesn't see themselves as it's not about them. It's not, they're not amazing. It's about how do they help the next generation become better than they are? How do they help them to become bluer than indigo? And that's, you know, how I would like, I mean, I know that's a bit of a pie in the sky ideal, but I would like to at least strive for, have that kind of aspirational goal in my own leadership. And I would love to see that more in people around me that, you know, it's not about me. It's about my people. And if the reality is, if I invest in my people that way, if I put their needs first and I help to develop them and support them and empower them, they're going to succeed and they're going to make me look good. So, you know, through that approach, I actually look amazing as a leader. But the whole

point is, it's not really about me in the first place. Whether I look amazing as a leader or not is not the most important. What really matters is that my people have the opportunity to be fulfilled, to find meaning and purpose, to maximize their own potential, and ultimately accomplish great things far more than I could ever accomplish. And I think for anyone listening who has children, I mean, that's what you hope for with your kids, right? You want to develop your children, love them unconditionally, support them, and help them to have a better life than you ever had. And sometimes that means there's a little bit of tough love there. Sometimes that means you're listening and supporting. Sometimes you're paving the way and you're removing obstacles.

Other times you're supporting them as they're moving through their own obstacles. It depends on the situation. It depends on the individual. But the whole point is I want to develop this person and I want them to have more opportunity than I ever had. It's a fundamentally kind of servant leadership mindset. And I believe the Korean proverb just kind of enriches kind of how I understand that approach and that mentality. Speaking of working in Korea, Korea is not a particularly diverse

place, relatively homogeneous when it comes to, you know, global matters. But in your book, you refer to and cite the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and belonging is a term that you use a lot as well. Virtually in every part of the book, every section, one, two, and three, and multiple times, I'd say each, probably two or three chapters each, you're talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. I'm curious as to how the diversity of work experiences that you've actually had impacts that. you've seen, you know, scenarios where it was just really poorly handled. Obviously, you know, Korea is just a radically different historical, you know, context than what America is. But I'd like, you know, just a quick statement

on kind of your your view on DEI, as they say now in belonging, and how your history has impacted that. Yeah, for sure. All of my experiences definitely have influenced. I come from a very Midwest, meat and potatoes, white family. I'm a white cisgender dude. I have all those privileges. I didn't experience tons of diversity as I was growing up. And I had ways of thinking about the world that have shifted dramatically since I was a child and a teenager, as I think that would apply to most people. And as I've, you know, grown up and matured and experienced new things and met new people and worked in different parts of the world and done, you know, my research I do academically is comparative international research. And so I'm exploring and analyzing and looking at the experiences of workers across the globe, across dozens and dozens of countries. And of course, all of that influences it, you know, because what you quickly

start to see is, you know, whatever dogma that influences your worldview that you may have, and it could be a social dogma, it could be an economic dogma, it could be religious dogma, it could be whatever, Whatever types of dogmas influence the way you view the world, you go to other places and they have their own dogmas. They have their own influences. Who am I to say which one is really right or wrong? I know which ones I lean towards because of my experiences, but ultimately what I want to do is try to embrace of my experiences, but ultimately, you know, what I want to do is try to embrace the difference around me to try to better understand the people I'm interacting with, to listen hard, you know, and to really try to understand rather than move to a place of judgment, which is, I think,

human nature. We tend to do that. We tend to be tribal. We tend to like things that are comfortable, quote unquote, comfortable and similar to who, and similar to how we're used to things. So if we can push outside of that comfort zone a little bit, it becomes really enlivening and enriching to all of a sudden realize there's so much more going on out there than I ever could have considered before. And you're right. In Korea, in comparison to a lot of places, it's not a particularly diverse place in and of itself. And so there are some challenges associated with that. When I was working there, this was almost 20 years ago. And so I hope, and I'm kind of assuming things have improved over time, but there were serious gender issues in the workplace at the company where I worked. There are some

racial biases. That's true of a lot of companies in America today, still an even entire industry. Sure. Yeah. There's still challenges across the board. There were definitely challenges there, but you know, I think as we start to seek better understanding and are willing to self reflect ourselves on kind of our own upbringing and why we view things the way we view things, then that can help us to get outside of kind of the more narrow framings that we might have held on to. And so there's actually a proverb that I talk about. I can't remember, maybe in my second book, The Frog in the Well, Umul Anegegori. And that is really, it's kind of like Plato's allegory of the cave. It's kind of an Asian

version of that same approach. And it really fits with what I've just been talking about. The whole idea is if you're a frog born at the bottom of a well, you don't know any different. That's just your whole world. That's your whole experience. But at some point in life, you start to mature. You start to experience difference. And it's like the frog kind of climbing out of the well.

And what ends up happening for a lot of people is they peek their little frog head outside the well and all of a sudden they realize there's an expansive sky. There's all the different animals and plant life and scenery. And there's all the different things that they've never experienced before because they've always spent their entire life, their whole world was this well. And people have different approaches to how they deal with that. Many people simply get a little bit nervous and scared and they just retreat back down to their well. And you think of each well as kind of your own dogma. So whatever that dogma was that they were raised in, the cultural norms, the societal norms, the religious or social context, that's what they're used to.

That's what they're comfortable with. They want to surround themselves with people that think similarly. They just retreat back into their well and they try to live a good life. But there are others still who look around and they realize, wow, this is really cool. I want to explore. I see now how limited my own upbringing was, how narrow it was. I want to explore. And they start to look around and they realize that there's actually wells all over the place. So it's not just my well, there's like thousands of wells and everyone, and there's frogs peeking their heads out of all these other wells. So they start to go explore and they start to look in other wells. What often happens is the biggest segment of the population from a developmental psychology

kind of a perspective, they retreat back into their own well. The next biggest chunk of humans tend to explore around a little bit and then they find a new well and they just trade dogma for dogma. They trade whatever the dogma of their upbringing was and they move into a new dogma and they go into their new well and that becomes their new home. It's safe. It's protected. You get comfortable there. It's a relatively small portion of humanity that's willing to live within the discomfort because they also see the opportunity that arises if they're not retreating into a well, but they actually are living out in the world more holistically. Of course, there are more dangers there. There's more messiness, more complexity, there's more nuance. There's going to be other animals that are going to try

to attack you. Maybe it's not as easy to get food, et cetera, but you can live a more complete and fulfilling life. So that's the general framing that I have that's influenced the way I approach diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Ultimately, I recognize that many people, inclusion and belonging. Ultimately, I recognize that many people, most people actually, tend to really find comfort in their dogmas and they're going to bring those with them into the workplace. And I'm fine with people having their own perspectives and their own beliefs and their own dogmas, as long as they can respect those who have different beliefs and dogmas and that we can openly share together and better try to understand. But there is always going to need to be some people who are kind of

the intermediaries who are willing to be bridge builders who aren't getting stuck into these dogmatic silos to help these conversations happen. And my hope is that the proportion of society and of human beings that are willing to do that is growing over time in that more and more people are just accepting of difference and less tribal, et cetera. But we also know like in the U S right now, politically, it's incredibly divisive and tribal and I don't know. So that's an ongoing challenge for sure. Yeah. I think my upbringing is not totally dissimilar to yours. New England, not Midwest, but very similar, probably sort of well before I, you know, moved up and out.

And of course, just, you know, moving to various cities and going to university, you meet different kinds of people that really open you up to those other wells. And I do think that that is just very critical. If you don't mind, I'd like to pivot to the idea of future literacy. You bring this up, I want to say, in one of your earlier chapters in the book, and you talk about scenario planning. I think we got to talk about this right now because of the state of technology and where AI is going. We don't have to dive too deep into the actual AI question. But when we're talking about scenario planning, you know, you have the utopia,

the dystopia, and sort of the middle ground there is what you talk about. First of all, I guess my first question is, what exactly does this planning look like? Is it, are you sitting with your team and you're storyboarding out? Are you actually crunching numbers and trying to figure out like statistically what this would take? A premortem is another term that I've used in the past to do this sort of thing where you, you know, you look at a failure of a thing and you say, what exactly would be the conditions that would lead to this failure? Is it something looser where you're just sort of talking about it?

And then the second part of the question is, how do we deal with the already made predictions of the future? When I think about the future right now, the dystopian is Skynet and the Terminator because of the potential of AI to go wrong. We're really talking about proper dystopia. So first of all, what does it really look like in practice? And second of all, how do we deal with the already existing predictions and what do we, how do we treat those? Yeah. I mean, it's, first of all, we just need to acknowledge that nobody has a crystal ball. So there's lots of people who are self-proclaimed futurists and, you know, they have their predictions and there's lots of reports out there. And, you know, I, I'm part of that, you know, I I'm in that space and I put forward my

predictions, but I also acknowledge as long as there's some intellectual humility there, and we can all acknowledge that we don't actually know what's going to happen, but you look at trends, you look at what's happened in the past, you look at what's been happening in recent decades, in recent years, you look at the various stages of the industrial revolution and technological disruption and how that's influenced things. And you can make some reasonable inferences and guesses about how things are going to move into the future, but we don't know exactly how it's going to play out. Are we going to move into a dystopian, rise of the machines kind of a future where AI takes over and a Terminator kind of scenario? Or is it going to become more of like

a Star Trek utopian kind of a future, probably somewhere in between? I was just the other day talking to someone about the technological singularity and AI and what happens if AI gets to the point where it can self-produce innovation faster than we as humans can or are even capable of influencing it or controlling it, then all bets are off. We can't actually influence what happens. And we don't know. We just have to see what technology does on its own. But we're not there yet. And we have opportunities to influence it. And so with all that said, how do you go about scenario planning? Yeah, I don't have a prescriptive approach. I would say yes to everything you just

said, depending on the circumstance, depending on the team, depending on the size of the organization. I always like to make data informed decisions as much as possible. So to the extent you have good data, absolutely, you should look at it and you should forecast and you should try to understand what the numbers would look like in terms of success, what it would look like in terms of failure and what some of the drivers of those would be. You can play with the different elements that feed into success or failure. It can though, it can honestly look like just having open, honest conversations consistently amongst your team in a more informal format where you just talk, you just shape your thinking and your framing of the world around this idea of continual growth,

continual development, continual planning, you know, the days of like sitting down and hashing out your five-year strategic plan and then maybe revisiting it once a year. Like those days are long gone. Like you can't do that. So it has to be part of just an ongoing process and you have to be able to sift through like, what is possible. I'm a big believer in design thinking and rapid iteration. And so to the extent you can just have an experimentation culture amongst your team

and try out, like come up with different possible scenarios and then test them, see what is, seems to be working because we can never fully understand all the different variables that are going to influence success or failure. And sometimes it literally is just timing. Sometimes it's just completely things outside of your control. And so just making sure that you're always making that part of the conversation is the most important thing, regardless of whatever structure, however, formal or informal it may be. I would argue that some of this needs to be formal at this point, especially when we're dealing with new technology, like, you know, access to certain kinds of education. I say this a lot on this show, but as new technology emerges, fewer and fewer and a more

exclusive group of people really understand what's going on behind the scenes. And, you know, that category of capital investment with all these new tools that's happening right now, like that's a very select group, you know, Silicon Valley is kind of historically active, you know, segment that's really making all these things. And I think that it's really important to really as a leader, to pass on a serious education for what could come next, or how to understand frameworks for understanding what could come next, or how to understand frameworks for understanding what could come next, especially if, as you say, we're advocating for rapid iteration and experimentation. Those things can create a lot of anxiety from a business perspective, especially with individual

contributors. You know, how do you convince people that it's worth doing these rapid tests that fail? Is it really going to result in them maintaining their jobs and that sort of thing? So would you agree that there's a modicum of, you know, formal education that probably needs to be implemented at this point in terms of, you know, the future of technology and what potential paths we could see? Sure. Yeah. And I do think it'll be a mix, but yeah, there's going to be some formal elements there. And it really does come back to the psychological safety

question that you asked at the beginning. If you have a team where people worry that if they try to experiment on something and rapidly iterate and it doesn't work, that they're going to lose their job. That's not a psychologically safe team. Right. And I totally get that. And there are many teams where I would feel that way. Like I would feel like I got to be reserved. I got to be cautious. I got to be careful. I really am only going to try something once I'm pretty darn sure it's going to work. All of that, though, slows down creativity and innovation. And so the whole point is, yeah, make sure that you create the environment where people

know that not only are they allowed to, but they're expected to try things. I mean, don't be stupid. Don't repeatedly do the same mistakes over and over again, but learn from what you're doing, improve. It's the scientific method. It's like what I do when I'm doing research. Sometimes things don't work the way I thought it was going to work. I have an hypothesis. I test it. I have an assumption of what it will be, but then it turns out to be

something different. And then I have to go back to the drawing board or have to revise my approach. Like that is the scientific method. That is the approach I think we all take to try to get to further levels of advancement. And particularly in this day and age of rapid technological disruption and advancement, the only way we can navigate this, I think successfully is if we're agile and we're ready to, we have to get past this idea of like change moments of change or change initiatives that are a point in time. And we just have to create agile change organizations like where it's just part of the culture. It's part of the environment. And that only works when you have psychological safety. If you don't have that trust and that psychological

safety, people become fearful. It's like a turtle going into their shell and all of the creativity and innovation is going to slow dramatically. So with all this talk about, you know, the darker future and, you know, the potential things that could go wrong, I'd like to end on a positive note. There's a lot of talk about IQ and EQ and how that impacts business from an individual perspective. You say LQ in your book, which means love quotient. And I think this is a, frankly, I think it's a kind of radical, but necessary and almost, you know, now it feels obvious, like, why think it's a kind of radical, but necessary and almost, you know, now it feels obvious, like, why don't we treat each other this way idea? But would you mind really quickly just explaining the love quotient?

Sure. And this isn't my idea either. There are other thinkers and writers who have talked about love quotient, and I do really like the idea and it fits well with, you know, what we were talking about earlier in terms of servant leadership. Basically, if I'm taking a really human approach to my connections and my interactions with people around me, I'm not talking about romantic love. I'm talking about the love where you have genuine compassion and empathy for those around you, where you want to be there for them.

You want to support them and help them to become their truest, most dynamic, fulfilled self. That is love in my mind. And I know some people get a little bit nervous about talking about anything related to love in the workplace, but we're just talking about human compassion, human connection, right? And the humanity behind the workplace, especially in the age of technological disruption, AI, etc., I think is even more important. are vibing with each other, like where they actually are in sync with each other. And you don't have middle management spending half their time just trying to shield the people and their teams from the nonsense and the exploitation and the abuse that might be coming from above. If we can have an organization where everyone is not only paying attention to the

business case of what makes sense in terms of the bottom line, but what's the human case? Looking at whether it's a triple bottom line, but what's the human case? Looking at whether it's a triple bottom line or ESG or corporate social responsibility kind of a framing around the organization. Let's look at the people within the organization as a core asset that deserves to be treated well, to be invested in and to be maintained. And if we can take that kind of an approach, I think that's a loving approach. I think that's a business environment where people can thrive. And it doesn't mean it's not utopia. It's not everything's not going to be great and all the time and we're not running around singing Kumbaya and whatever. Like there's still hard stuff you got to do and there's still

going to be conflict and there's still going to be disagreements and there's still going to be setbacks. All that's still going to happen, but you just approach it in a different way from a place of genuine caring. And if I, as a leader can genuinely care for my people, they notice. People can tell if you are just going through the motions or if you're there to try to leverage them to get ahead yourself. People know this and it creates different types of behaviors from your team. And if you want people who are going to be committed and trust you as a leader, the best surefire way to do that is to have mutual accountability and to show them that you genuinely care for them. Thank you for that message. It's something that we all need to hear

truly. So I really appreciate that. Before we wrap up, can you just let our listeners know where they can learn more about you and your work? Yeah. As was mentioned at the beginning, I do have my own podcast, the Human Capital Innovations Podcast. Check it out if you haven't had a chance. I do have books on Amazon or in bookstores, so you can check that out. Just search Jonathan H. Westover. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Jonathan H. Westover. If you search that, it should pop right up. Or you can go to innovativehumancapital.com. That's the consulting website. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, though. That's probably the best place. Great. Well, John, thank you so much again for joining us. To all of you listening at home, thank you for joining. We'll catch you on the next episode. Cheers. Thank you so much.

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