If work feels harder than it should—more exhausting, more fragmented, more misaligned—it’s probably not because people are failing. It’s because the system is.
Meghan French Dunbar, has spent her career studying organizations like an anthropologist, looking beneath policies, perks, and performance metrics to understand why modern work so often isn’t working for the humans inside it.
Meghan is a workplace strategist, speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of the bestselling book This Isn’t Working, which explores how working women (and men) and the organizations they lead can move beyond stress, guilt, and overload toward a more sustainable definition of success. Her work has reached more than a million people worldwide.
We dive into some of the juiciest insights from her book. We talk about why empathy isn’t a “feminine” skill”- or a soft one – and how the same patriarchal systems that burn out women also do irreparable harm to men. We unpack the difference between sacrificial leadership and sustainable leadership, and why research shows that holistic leadership – where performance and well-being aren’t at odds – is actually the most effective way to lead.
Meghan also shares the most powerful things leaders can do to access healthy leadership traits like empathy – and how empathy enables more customizable workplaces that truly engage younger generations. This is a conversation about redesigning work, so it actually works for people and for business.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- How to run a thriving organization while also thriving yourself.
- Why it is not about feminine or masculine traits, but rather about human traits.
- What holistic leadership means at its core.
- How vulnerability and authenticity lend credibility to you as a leader.
“Autonomy, having control and agency in your life, is one of our core intrinsic motivators, and when you strip it from people, it’s one of the primary causes of chronic stress and burnout.” — Meghan French Dunbar
Episode References:
About Meghan French Dunbar: Workplace Strategist, Speaker, Author, This Isn’t Working
Meghan French Dunbar is a “business anthropologist” who studies organizations to find solutions that improve work for everyone. As an author, entrepreneur, workplace strategist, and speaker, her work has touched the lives of over a million people worldwide. She’s the author of the best-selling This Isn’t Working: How Working Women Can Overcome Stress, Guilt, and Overload to Find True Success.
Meghan co-founded the first nationally distributed print magazine in the U.S. focusing on impact-driven business, Conscious Company Magazine, where she interviewed more than 1,000 business leaders worldwide. As a leadership and workplace strategist, she works with leadership teams at companies like Coach, Kate Spade, Leonard Green, Charter Next Generation, and more while writing for outlets like Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc. about her key insights.
Connect with Meghan French Dunbar
Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meghanfrenchdunbar
Instagram: instagram.com/meghanfrenchdunbar
Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
Book: This Isn’t Working: How Working Women Can Overcome Stress, Guilt, and Overload to Find True Success: https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-isn-t-working-how-working-women-can-overcome-stress-guilt-and-overload-to-find-true-success-meghan-french-dunbar/3775a58ced9d08f8
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:04
Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate, and here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. If work feels harder than it should, more exhausting, more fragmented, more misaligned, it’s probably not because people are failing, it’s because the system is. My guest today, Megan French Dunbar, has spent her career studying organizations like an anthropologist looking beneath policies, perks, and performance metrics to understand why modern work so often isn’t working for the humans inside it. Megan is a workplace strategist, speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of the best-selling book, This Isn’t Working, which explores how working women and men and the organizations they lead can move beyond stress, guilt, and overload toward a more sustainable definition of success. Her work has reached more than a million people worldwide. She also co-founded Conscious Company Magazine, the first nationally distributed print magazine in the US, focused on impact-driven business, where she interviewed more than 1000 business leaders across industries. Today, Megan works with leadership teams at companies like Coach, Kate Spade, Leonard Green, and Charter Next Generation, and writes for outlets including Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc. on the future of work and leadership. In our conversation, we dive into some of the juiciest and most confronting insights from her book, and I’ll be honest, I highlighted this book like a fiend. It’s that good. In fact, it should be required reading for every human leader in the workplace. We talk about why empathy isn’t a feminine skill or a soft one, and how the same patriarchal systems that burn out women also do irreparable harm to men. We unpack the difference between sacrificial leadership and sustainable leadership, and why research shows that holistic leadership, where performance and well-being aren’t at odds, is actually the most effective way to lead. Megan also shares the most powerful things leaders can do to access healthy leadership traits like empathy, and how empathy enables more customizable workplaces that truly engage younger generations. This is a conversation about redesigning work so it actually works for people and for the business, take a listen. Welcome Megan French Dunbar to the Empathy Edge Podcast. This has been a meeting of the minds in making, and I am just so excited to talk about your book and your singular mission to change the pattern of workplace culture and behavior, because it’s sucking the soul out of all of us, women and men alike. So, welcome to the show.
Meghan French Dunbar 03:27
I am so excited to be here. I feel like serendipity at its finest of us meeting a couple months ago and remembering our like-minded paths and things that we talk about.
Maria Ross 03:39
Yeah, and listeners, we met years ago, probably in passing, at a conference of Megan’s Old Company, which I know you’re going to talk about in a second. You were just someone I am so glad I connected with back then. I couldn’t let go of you. And then we showed up at the same heart-centered, purpose-driven finance conference a few months ago, and I’m like, you, I need to have you on the podcast, so I’m just so excited we’re finally able to do it. So, before we kick off on all the things around your new book, This Isn’t Working: How Working Women Can Overcome Stress, Guilt, and Overload Define True Success, which we should mention, we were both discussing this. This book is not just for women, it’s for anybody that has decided that the current state of workplace operations is not good for us as humans, whatever gender, so it’s jam-packed. We’re not going to get to everything, but we are going to get to it. But before we do, we’re going to start where we always start, which is, please tell us your story and how you even got here and why this book.
Meghan French Dunbar 04:40
Yes, and I will attempt to do so as quickly as possible. I imagine, like many listeners, I grew up as the consummate high achiever, very much addicted to all of the awards and the accomplishments and the things. I went to University of Colorado here in Boulder, where I still live. Five, and did journalism and English during undergrad. I immediately left, and just felt like I was throwing those degrees in the trash, because I still remember my last year in the journalism school, someone talking about how print media was a dying institution, and we had all completely wasted our money, and I was like, oh, thank you, Professor, while we were watching her go through her journey, so I imagined I, it was like this pipe dream that I would have met. I would work for a travel magazine someday, and then I was like, “Oh, that’s not gonna happen. So, fortunately, I decided the best thing to do would be to go into the nonprofit world. So, I started working at the Environmental Defense Fund, nice, had a corporate partnerships program, and there’s a part of the book that this becomes relevant to, because everything starts becoming this, like, I just get really interested in something and decide to follow it, and at EDF, they had the corporate partnerships program, which was learning how to use market mechanisms to incentivize businesses to incorporate some element of sustainability, and I was like, what is even happening? Wait, you’re like, business and sustainability can be simpatico, like, oh, this is the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard. So I decided to go to a business school here in the United States, Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco, which was at the time the only sustainable MBA in the world, and there’s many programs that have come online since, but I was just obsessed with the intersection of business and sustainability. Fast forward, there’s a couple things in between, but I won’t go too far into it. I ended up working at a couple of print magazines here in Bold, which were supposed to be dead. Yes, which was very strange. It was like I met a woman at a conference who we hit it off, and she, in just like a couple months later, was like, “Hey, are you interested in being managing editor of these magazines? And I was like, “Oh, wait, I have these degrees, I guess I’ll do this. There were a lot of things that I learned during that experience, one of them being how to put together a magazine, and I think it was like four or five months into it, I got fired, and it was the same night that I had been out to dinner with a friend, having a conversation around why a print magazine didn’t exist about sustainable business, and I got fired because I had turned my cell phone off and wasn’t responding to text messages after 5pm on a Friday. Oh my gosh,
Maria Ross 07:20
that’s very devil. Where’s Prada?
Meghan French Dunbar 07:22
Oh, like to the nth degree. Like, got fired via email at 1o’clock in the morning. Oh
Maria Ross 07:28
my gosh,
Meghan French Dunbar 07:29
I like woke up, I read it on my phone, and I said to my husband something insane, like I think this is the universe telling me I’m supposed to launch a print magazine about sustainable business, because I had this conversation with my friend the night prior.
Maria Ross 07:41
Yeah,
Meghan French Dunbar 07:41
well, I was childless, I was young, I was naive, like all the wonderful things that make for a good entrepreneur. We, I crowdfunded with my business partner the launch of the magazine. This was in 2014 Our first issue of this teeny tiny little crowdfunded magazine that was essentially just kind of like, I want to see if I can do this. Was picked up by every Whole Foods in the nation.
Maria Ross 08:05
Oh my gosh.
Meghan French Dunbar 08:06
We went from like, oh, like cute playing business to oh my gatos, like we are running a business. Like, the train left the station, and I didn’t quite realize that I was the conductor, and so we did the whole thing, we did the whole entrepreneur’s journey. I mean, first year of like beg, borrowing, pleading, figuring out any way we could to just like keep things together, and we consistently put out multiple issues a year, built into a larger media company with events and podcasts, and the whole thing. We did got investors, and then we ultimately sold the company at the end of 2017 and I stayed on as CEO until 2020 under a parent company. And during this entire journey, why this is relevant is I got to interview, like you get to do, like it was like my favorite thing in the entire world. I got to interview extraordinary human beings. I was like, yeah, what I was getting paid to do for a living was interview extraordinary business leaders, the people who had figured out how to build profitable businesses that did good for the world. Eileen Fisher, Chip Conley, I mean, just like my heroes, and I ultimately ended up interviewing over 1000 of them. Wow, and so I was having a ball doing the entrepreneurs thing and also doing the thing that many people do, of falling into the trap of tying my entire identity to my work, and I put off having children, and I worked all the time, and I never saw my friends. I finally ended up having a child, and I came back from maternity leave in October of 2019 and within like a month I was just like nope, I have no gas left in the tank, and because I was a CEO, and I had all these incredible team members who had come to work for me, I felt a sense of responsibility of like I am letting them down and they deserve something better, and so do so does our entire community. Be the people who subscribe to the magazine and come to our events and all the things, and so I resigned on february 1 of 2020 and my last day was march 13, and four days later we were in global lockdown. So I went from full-time CEO to full-time mom, right? And there is a lot of time to think, yeah, and I think the most important things during that time, besides surviving, was that I couldn’t achieve anymore. I didn’t have any vehicle to be able to accomplish things and show people how worthy I am,
Maria Ross 10:35
right? And be measured and graded.
Meghan French Dunbar 10:38
Yeah, like going from standing on stage in front of 100 plus business leaders, having them give you a standing ovation to like trying to do solids with your child for the first time, and having not seen another human being for five months, I would like the juxtaposition of those two things was stark. So there was an entire evolution of the throughout a couple of years there of me just relearning how to be a normal happy human without achievement, which was easier said than done, but it was something that was needed, and the other thing was when I had another baby, I, so in 2022 I like popped my head up and was like, I want to come back to work, but is there a way to do this and feel like I’m making an impact in the world, and I’m doing the work that I want to do without destroying myself in the process. So that was the seed of the idea, and then ultimately blossomed over the next year into a full on book proposal of being like, I want to interview as many leaders as I can find, many of whom I know who seem as though they are running successful organizations that aren’t destroying people and aren’t destroying the earth, right, and they aren’t destroying themselves, like people who are running thriving organizations, but they personally are thriving, like, is there something different that they are doing? And so that started the book journey. I interviewed nearly 100 more folks for that, and found a number of common denominator elements that I was like, yeah, this is people are doing something different here. So, right, that’s where the book, and then that came out in August of last year, and here we are.
Maria Ross 12:16
Oh my gosh, well, yeah, similar. It’s figuring out that there’s got to be a better way, you know. It’s like with my book, with the empathy dilemma. It was like, what makes those leaders so special? Those ones that are able to balance performance with empathy, they’re able to balance people with still being competitive and ambitious and building high-performing teams. They’re not slacking off, right? How do they do it? And it was talking to them and researching and deconstructing that recipe, which is exactly what you’ve done with this book. This isn’t working, and I told you before we started recording, I have so many highlights and sticky notes that if I actually talked to each of them in this interview, I would basically be reading the audiobook version of your book, so first of all, I just want people to know the practical nature of this book, where you talk about moving from where we are now to a vision that some of us are like, oh, there’s no way corporate America can get there, right, but you’re giving us practical tools in the book and exercises and mindset shifts of how to make that happen, so before we dive into the details, I want to talk about this whole kerfuffle around empathy being a feminine trait, and the fact that we forget that empathy is actually a human trait that every gender possesses, and so why, why have you seen it become labeled as a soft skill, I, I’ve got opinions, my listeners know my opinions, but I want to hear from your perspective. Where you’re like, when you’re saying this isn’t working, it’s again not just not working for women, but why are those concepts like work-life integration, empathy, compassionate leadership, even in for some people, sustainability, why are those seen as so soft in from your research?
Meghan French Dunbar 14:04
Oh, I have thoughts. I have lots of thoughts, and I will try not to go too far down this rabbit hole, because it is a favorite rabbit hole of mine. But the book journey took me all the way back to, like, looking at the history of business and how the entire system was set up, and the core foundational component that informed a ton of the why things are the way they are right now is the dreaded P word patriarchy, as the fact that for the last 10,000 ish years or so we’ve set up our cultures in a way in which men have more power than women, that is not a judgment. It is not saying that men are bad. It is just inherent. It is the factual state of most of the societies that we have been living in and continue to live in present day. There are definitely extreme examples of this, and less extreme, but that is the way that we are, in fact. Set up, so looking at men having more power than women, a huge element of that is that business itself was designed within it, within the last five to 3000 years. So business has only ever developed through the lens of patriarchy of men having more power within women, and so up until the last 50 ish years or so, that has meant men pretty much being the sole decision makers, designers, they’re the ones who are dictating how business evolves, and this is important, because I promise I won’t geek out too much about this, but when you look at what patriarchy essentially dictates, it is that women should be at home, they should be obey there, men, they should be the homemakers, they should take care of the children, all the things, and so the human traits that we’ve decided are the best to do that are things like being compassionate, empathetic, listening, being caring, being quiet, being docile, being agreeable, all of the things that women are often, and this is a generalization, but many young women are conditioned to actualize those traits, and when a woman dies, they’re almost one of the things that is almost always mentioned at their funeral as they, how well they took care of other people, and that is seen as like the highest virtue as a woman. And on the other hand, men have been conditioned to take the what the traits that we associate with power, power over and quote leadership of domination, aggression, being bold, decisive, all of those things we’ve described them all of a sudden as quote masculine traits, when again they are in fact just human traits. Yes, and so, and men have it even worse here, because most young men, again, generalization, but as young men are coming up, it’s not just that they are applauded for actualizing the quote masculine traits, but they are shamed and belittled if they express the quote feminine traits of a young boy who cries, you know, man up, boys don’t cry, like all the ways in which young boys are told to toughen up and be strong, and all these, like,
Maria Ross 17:19
and not feel their feelings exactly, which is, you know, causing other issues, as we know, high suicide rates among young men, and this is why, you know, this is what you’re saying right now, is exactly why people that are saying the patriarchy is bad are not shaming men, they’re actually saying it’s you’re suffering too as a man in this environment, you’re not being allowed to be the full authentic person that you are. And I will never forget, I gave a talk one time to a sales team around empathetic leadership, because it turns out empathy and ambition are the two highest success traits for successful salespeople, and someone came up to me after and said, “Thank you for bringing this talk today, because sometimes I feel like I can’t be who I am at work in order to succeed, and I have to be and act a certain way when I know being more collaborative and listening and being curious about other people has actually helped me be successful. I have to pretend that that’s not what’s helping me be successful, that it’s my bravado, that it’s, you know, all of these other things, and I was just so moved, but also felt so badly for him. Yeah, you know,
Meghan French Dunbar 18:38
yeah, and that’s that’s, I mean, it’s a women have, because we operate within male-dominated systems. A lot of us, in order to succeed within them, we’ve learned how to adopt the quote masculine traits that we should have had from the beginning. They’re just human traits, right? Many of us, you know, many young women, like, are brought up being able to express the wide range of them, but in order to, like, quote, succeed in business, you have to develop the masculine traits, because it’s male dominated, and when women express quote masculine traits, research shows that they are less, less liked less, and people feel as though they are being angry or over aggressive, or they all of a sudden associate them with negative labels, and men, it’s the same thing. If a man demonstrates compassion, they feel shamed. So, it’s like this: we just have to pull back the judgments around these traits being genderized in any way, exactly healthy traits, and the best leaders express a wide range of healthy quote masculine and feminine drugs. They take the gender binaries off of the traits and just look at the healthiest ones, and they lean into those and balance them, right? Like that’s, and that’s also why empathy is seen as a soft skill, is because we still need to make anything associated with women you. A career, right? When it is not a soft skill, it is 100% a leadership superpower.
Maria Ross 20:05
Yeah, I remember when I was first shopping around the Empathy Edge to agents, and I, one agent – this was my first Empathy book – who was really interested, but right around that time, the Me Too movement was gaining steam, so agents were looking for, obviously, for books that publishers wanted to buy, and they loved the concept of the empathy edge, of empathy being a competitive and a strategic edge, but they said, “Can you make the book more about feminine traits being an advantage, because that will sell? And I was like, “No, because the whole point is that this is accessible to men and women, and it’s not about feminine traits or masculine traits, it’s about a human trait. And so I passed them by, and I found a publisher who understood what I was trying to do, right? But, like, even in that scenario, the desire to pigeonhole it by gender was real, and also just, well, this is what people will digest.
Maria Ross 21:01
It’s like, not unless we change the paradigm, which is exactly what you’re doing with this book, with this idea of like, we don’t have to accept leadership and corporate structure as it is, we can change it, and we can be healthier for people, men and women alike, right? So I want to speak to that, because this kind of goes into, I just want to tell listeners the way you have the chapters outlined, like from imbalanced masculine leadership to holistic leadership, from assimilated leadership to authentic leadership, from overextended leadership to optimized leadership. Every chapter is a little golden nugget, starting with a section on leadership, a section on the workplace, and then a section on sort of redefining your own success. So I want to dig into this idea of holistic leadership, because it’s not hippy dippy, it’s not woo woo, and I want to share – well, actually, given our recent conversation, I just want to share this little nugget in here: holistic leaders wield numerous healthy feminine and masculine traits and discern which trait to lean on based on the circumstances, while also working to move away from as many toxic traits as possible. So, talk to us a little bit about what you mean by holistic leadership. What does it really mean, and why do people not need to be scared of that concept.
Meghan French Dunbar 22:22
Yeah, that is, I mean, building on what we were just talking about. It’s looking instead of looking at quote masculine and feminine traits, it’s looking at the healthiest, most effective human traits that make you the most effective leader, and trying to develop as many of them as possible. And then conversely, as I mentioned, there are in fact toxic quote feminine traits and masculine traits that degrade your leadership.
Maria Ross 22:49
What are some of those? Share with us.
Meghan French Dunbar 22:51
One of my favorite ones that I used to be afflicted with, as I would say, it was people pleasing to the point of martyring myself and also withholding truth, which is a because I wanted to quote be nice. I was afraid of hurting people’s feelings, and so that is in fact just being dishonest, and that was something that I had a really hard time understanding. I grew up in a very conflict-avoidant home. I never understood how to navigate conflict in any sort of way that was healthy, and so I just like stood back, and you mentioned one part in your book about miscommunication breeding resentment, and I would just get resentful, not communicate, and then hope that the issue just magically goes, magically solved itself, and instead it would compound and get worse, and all the things, and so there are those, but there are also toxic, quote, masculine traits, being micromanaging people is like one of the number one reasons that people leave employers, being abrasive, being overly competitive, you know, there’s lots of different ways that we take these traits to the extreme and they become toxic, and so it’s doing your best to let go or release some of the toxic traits and knowing what they are, embracing the healthy ones, and then balancing them as much as you can.
Maria Ross 24:20
Well, and I think you know, like in my model, self-awareness is the first step, because you have to recognize those patterns and those behaviors in your own, and also the detrimental effects it has on not just you, but your team, right? So, there’s this element of, like, you getting your own house in order for your own health, but also then, how does that model, and how does that spill over into the team that you’re managing, because you’re influencing all these people’s well-being, and I don’t remember what study it was that came out that said your boss has more of an impact on your mental health and your state of mind than your spouse or your family, especially if you work a lot, right, which makes sense, it’s like that’s the. Person that’s in your, in your sphere most often, but that’s the power of leadership that we, we don’t talk about, is that you’re not only, you might not only be be developing these habits that hurt you, whether it’s work-life integration, whether it’s, you know, you cut yourself off from friends and family, whether you’re, your physical or mental health suffers, but you’re actually impacting all these other people and their families and their communities because of the way you’re acting and the way that you’re operating. I guess I should say, so I don’t think we, we drive that point home enough that leaders have an exponential impact on others, even if your team is just three people, right? That’s three families that get impacted by the way that you lead, and is that the legacy you really want to leave? You know, do you want to be the.. you know, I don’t remember the name of the banker in It’s a Wonderful Life, but.. or, you know, think of Scrooge, right, Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. Do you really want to be that person? Is that really why you went into leadership? I doubt it for most people, unless you’re, you know, a sadist, but so, so what is, you know, when we talk about healthy leadership traits like empathy, where do you think that starts?
Meghan French Dunbar 26:18
I mean, you already, I think, mentioned this as self-awareness. It’s the capacity to listen to understand how you’re influencing others, but also read a room, and this again is like where empathy plays a huge component, and just being able to walk into a room and understand what might be needed, because they’re one of the stories I talk about is one of the women I interviewed, Ayla Schlosser. She was working, she had set up this incredible leadership training program in Rwanda, and she wanted all of our team to feel very egalitarian, and so she was like, “We’re going to make collaborative decision making, and within a few months the team came to her, and they were like, Ayla, thank you for taking our perspective into account, but it is too much, we need some someone to make a decision, we need you to set the vision, and so that’s where this, the discernment around balancing the things that, like, you 100% should be empathetic and compassionate with your team, but that can’t be overextended into people pleasing and being self-sacrificial. Like, there has to be compassion, and it has to be balanced with the ability to still drive things forward. You can be strategic and intuitive, like there’s a number of ways in which these things balance each other out, and more people understand the ways they work together, and the self-awareness to understand, like, oh, I’ve been leaning real heavily into, like, the it is great to have a vision, to be confident, to be strategic and bold, and all of those things, and be encouraging people to drive towards the goal. And when you’re like leaning too heavily into that, like pulling back, checking in with people, listening to their experience, like making sure that these things are balanced, is one of the things that I’ve seen, the best leaders I’ve ever seen and worked with.
Maria Ross 28:25
Yeah, yeah. Well, you can’t leave people without a rudder. I think that’s the thing. And I often say, when I’m talking about the decisiveness pillar, that the leaderly aspect of leadership is knowing when you’ve synthesized and heard enough input to then make a call, yep, and do it swiftly, right. You can’t keep the endless consensus democracy group, because what’s happening there is you’re trying to find the decision that’s going to make everybody happy, and that’s going to be the least uncomfortable for you, and for a lot of people, they’re more uncomfortable with ambiguity than they are with, oh, I might not love this decision, but as long as you, as a leader, can explain why and say, here’s why I made this decision, and I factored in your input, Megan, but here’s why we couldn’t go that way, that’s enough to get most people to disagree but commit, right, but we go into that trap of thinking there’s a perfect decision, and there never is, or there would never be, you know, people would never lay anyone off, they would never have difficult performance reviews, they would never, and that denies, you know, when you’re doing it in terms of that, like difficult performance reviews, you’re actually denying that person an opportunity for growth, you’re denying that person the opportunity to know that they could be more, that they could be better than they are right now, because maybe there’s a desire to improve, but if you don’t share with them that they need to, and how they can never evolve to the next level, and so when you kind. To think about it, it becomes a bit selfish, of like I am only delaying this decision or this conversation because I’m uncomfortable, and that’s where we’ve got to like take the blinders off and go, no, my actions impact and my inactions impact others, right? Yes, so you mentioned one of the stories from the book, and that was actually what I loved the most, was how you brought these all these tactics and these strategies to life in the examples that you gave, so can you share another example that’s maybe one of your favorites from the
Meghan French Dunbar 30:30
book that really stuck with you? I know it’s like asking you to pick your favorite child, but I mean, do you want one that’s not in the book or one that is in the book? I mean, either. I have a really good one that we didn’t put in the book, that I think was more one of the more poignant ones for me, and it was my own, it was my own personal one, so I can speak to it at length, which I won’t. We’ll get to the key points, but so, like I mentioned, I had been driving myself and, like, just exhausting myself to the bone, and I, after launching the company, I hadn’t taken a vacation in like four years, and when, so I, my husband and I decided to finally start having kids. I got pregnant a few weeks later. We went on our first vacation to Belgium. I was like imagining walking around the canals, doing the whole thing, talking about baby names, and a couple days into vacation, I unfortunately lost the pregnancy, and I remember being on the plane on the way home from Brussels, and drafting a note, you know, I had eight employees, and drafting a note to everyone that was saying, like, I have had a family emergency, and I know that I’ve been on vacation, but when I get back, I’m gonna probably need some. It was like a very vague just throwing the blanket term of family emergency down, and I had this like just looking at the screen, and I was like, this just doesn’t feel right. Like, these are the people I spend the majority of my waking hours with. They trust me, I trust them. Like, I don’t want to be like there’s that, like, what do you share and what don’t you? You don’t want to write inappropriate, you don’t want to be like airing your dirty laundry, and there is such a thing as like oversharing, and there is a thing we, we decide that for some reason human emotions aren’t supposed to be allowed in the workplace, with the exception of anger and pride, and so something in my soul was like, this is not right, and so I backtracked and wrote everyone an email said I know that I’m coming home, I land tomorrow, and on Monday I want to, I need an all team meeting, everything is okay with the business, but I need to just talk with everyone about something, and so everyone showed up, and I let them know what had happened, and I cried. I told them about my grief. I answered their questions, and it was the beauty for me of vulnerability, of that transparency and vulnerability. And this is something that we often encourage people to bring to the workplace, but to do it as the leader of the organization felt real taboo. I felt like this, like I am supposed to be the one who always has my stuff together. I’m, I can’t show weakness, like I need, you know, and but I was just like, I can’t, I need to be human right now, and there were things, the beauty of that moment. One, my team was extraordinary. They rallied around me, they set up like buffers around me to be able to take time off. They took all of the stuff that I needed off my plate and protected me while I was recovering from that, but then you see, and this is what you see with the beauty of vulnerability and also authentic leadership, as that my team trusted me more after that, and I could see it, people were coming to me and talking to me about personal issues that they were contending with that were impacting the way that they could show up in the workplace and things that I never would have known had I not modeled this for them, and as a leader, like all information is data that will help you, and to know that, like, one of your teammates is going through a divorce, or like one of your team members is thinking about going to grad school in seven months, and instead of just like ducking out and you being totally blindsided by them quitting, you’re like, “Oh, cool, let’s build you an off ramp, because she was like, “You, I trust you, you trust me, like I want to tell you about this, and I’m not worried you’re.. I’m not like concerned you’re just gonna like dump me, right? We are building, we have a mutually trust-built relationship here, and so that was like the power of watching vulnerability and action for me. It was something that I had talked about a lot, and I expected it of my team members, but then I wouldn’t like give them the gift of my vulnerability myself, and it changed our. Higher team dynamic,
Maria Ross 35:02
that’s amazing. I love that. Well, and it’s also about, like you said, the point of getting your team, and I recognize for some of you listening, maybe that’s not you, maybe you are a more private person, and you don’t want to bring that stuff to work, and that’s that’s cool too, right? As long as you’re being authentic, but the point is, when you do let your guard down in whatever way you’re comfortable with, to show your humanity, it doesn’t make you weaker, it doesn’t take away your credibility as a leader, it builds your credibility as a leader, and this is the paradox that leaders who are a little bit insecure inside, a little bit broken inside, have had poor models in their life, whatever. Don’t can’t wrap their heads around that. This is actually a way to catalyze your team, and to your point about information sharing, that’s the only way you will find out the real scoop of what’s going on. If you want your people to fear you and sugarcoat everything and hide problems and not take risks. Good luck to you as a leader, because you’re never going to innovate, you’re never going to grow. People are not going to be their best selves, they’re going to be looking over their shoulder all the time, and that you know the data. This is the thing I keep going back to, like, you quoted so much research in this book that backed up everything you were saying. The data and the research show us that operating in that way, while you might be able to get maybe short-term compliance and maybe some a quarterly bump for the long haul, you’re not actually going to be reaching the potential of the organization, which you know, people need a selfish reason, you’re not going to get promoted, you’re not going to get your bonus, you’re not going to be seen as a catalyst within the organization. And so this idea that, well, I see, you know, I’ve gotten this on my talks before. Well, what about this leader? What about that leader that is a horrible people leader? And look how well their company is doing. Yeah, you could probably show me lots of examples, but the point is it doesn’t have to be that way, and your book, your research, your conversations, the research and data from many of the folks I featured on the show show you that there’s another path to success. Yeah, so I got, I got tired of justifying the data at one point in a talk, and I said that could work for you. So, now I’ve given you the information, and you have the data, and you know this can work. And we’ve talked about examples. You have to decide what kind of leader you want to be
Meghan French Dunbar 37:32
exactly.
Maria Ross 37:33
Now it’s up to you, right? So that’s what I love about this – is you’re not only talking about these theories, you’re also highlighting these leaders and organizations who’ve made it work for them, and it doesn’t have to be the soul-sucking place that many people dread. So I want you to talk a little bit about customizable workplaces, because a lot of this is about understanding the people component and creating structures and processes and rituals within your organization to support people. What do you mean by customizable workplaces, and why is that so important right now that leaders think in terms of customizable workplaces?
Meghan French Dunbar 38:13
Yeah, this one is it’s like one of those things where you’re, we’ve normalized the traditional model so much that we don’t even realize how harmful it is, and one of the key elements of that is normalizing rigid hierarchical command and control management, where most people on a daily basis, there’s almost 4 billion people in the global workforce, and most of them are going to work every day and being stripped of their autonomy, they’re being told what to do, where to do it, who to do it with, when to do it by, and I mean, when we’re talking about lower levels on the hierarchy, the worse it gets, and people are as autonomy having control and agency in your life as one of our core intrinsic motivators, and when you strip it from people, it’s one of the primary causes of chronic stress and burnout, and so that’s what most of us are dealing with on a daily basis as a result of how the system is built, but then we’re told that it’s an us problem, you just need to like have better time management, or like go to the spa, or take a couple days off, when in reality, like autonomy is one of the core pillars of human dignity, and we, it is being stripped out of the workplace on a daily basis, and so customizable workplaces are the answer to this, and this is workplaces that are actually listening to people’s voices, they are letting people have choice and decision and control over everything, from like benefits packages to what they’re working on, where they’re working, when they’re working, flexible workplaces, and as building workplaces to meet people’s needs rather than building workplaces and expecting everyone to. Mold themselves to one specific way of working, and it is, I mean, the research is bearing out that this is the future of the workplace, that is why we’re seeing a lot of hybrid workplaces, but it also, it is good for our souls, it has also, it is good for business, and it is also good for a number of overlooked potential sources of talent, like parents returning to the workplaces, or people who are in caretaking roles and need some sort of like part-time hybrid work option, or
Maria Ross 40:32
neurodivergent individuals,
Meghan French Dunbar 40:33
exactly, yeah, people who are autoimmune diseases, people with invisible and visible disabilities, people who are formerly incarcerated. There’s so many ways in which customizable workplaces, where if you can trust people first, and this is, I mean, this is really where we get to the foundation of, like, one of the issues with command and control making all the decisions for people, as if you’re disrespecting your people and you’re also showing them that you don’t trust them, it’s like you show them that you don’t trust them until proven otherwise, and you just assume that if you give people freedom, they won’t work and they won’t do a good job, and they’ll slack off, and like they’ll take advantage of the organization. And sure, there’s probably examples where that has happened. Yeah,
Maria Ross 41:19
there’s going to be those outliers, of course, there are, but is that really what you want to optimize to?
Meghan French Dunbar 41:23
Yeah, yeah, and like, again, it’s like the type of leader and organization that you want to be, and the customizable workplaces, I mean, people that are reducing the number of work hours, four day work weeks, stopping days at three, they have the same level of productivity, increased levels of satisfaction, engagement, and retention, and all of those workers are proven to be having better mental and physical health health outcomes outside of the workplace as well. Like, there’s no reason not to do. Yes,
Maria Ross 41:52
and you profile some of these in the book, which is phenomenal. I’m just.. I’m laughing because a few years ago I was listening to an executive at a major software company that many people have heard of, and they were talking about the data that they were being very empathetic to their workforce, but they were also trying to get people back in the office, which I get the pros and cons, right, but the proof point they had around that was that they had done some surveys and they were like, well, productivity dipped between this year, this year, and you know, this x year and y year, and it was like right in the heart of the darkest days of the pandemic, and I’m like, did you maybe think it was because there was a pandemic going on that it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that people were working from home? Right, why don’t, why don’t you try and experiment and do it under sort of quote unquote normal circumstances, and then, but the blame of it on working from home rather than the fact that we were going through a global freaking pandemic just made me laugh, like that, that that was their justification for why you know we have proof that productivity goes down when you’re working from home, like when people had no childcare, when people were worried about their elderly relatives, like when people were worried about their own health, when no one knew what the heck was going on, right? Maybe that contributed to the lack of productivity.
Meghan French Dunbar 43:15
People do not like change, no, they will find any way that they can to confirm their biases and their traditional ways and hold on to all the old ways as long as possible, and yeah, this is also where I see up and coming businesses have such an edge, where I’m like the experience of working for a like garbage workplace that is toxic, cutthroat, overworking you, you have zero autonomy going from that to a workplace that is customizable as supporting your mental health and well-being. Yeah, supporting financial health, like it’s just like it’s very simple common sense. Yeah, as to like when people are like, “Oh, the great resignation, it’s like all these entitled younger employees, and I’m like, no, they’re just a smart time in history where they are just refusing to settle for toxic workplaces, and alternatives exist.
Maria Ross 44:10
Yes,
Meghan French Dunbar 44:11
and when they find them, they stay, and so, like, right.
Maria Ross 44:15
And you, and you can do this in any industry, because I’m gonna, I’m gonna put a link in the show notes to an episode I did with Michelle Feffernan of Equity at Work, she’s a DEIB consultant, but she talks about the fact that she’s starting to work in hourly workplaces like warehouses and operations facilities and places where you’re like, oh, we don’t have to worry about culture here, which a lot of companies think, and they did for this very large global manu apparel manufacturer, they did some experimentation within one of their plants, where they implemented lots of things to increase inclusivity and boost culture and create connection. In and belonging, and all the things, and that plant is outperforming all the other global plants for this organization combined, to the point that they’re like, yes, roll it out to all of them, and the justification is like, oh well, they’re hourly workers, we don’t have to worry, they’re replaceable, maybe there don’t have to be replaceable, right? Maybe they could be there for life, like if you treat them right, and you create a system around them that’s not just based on this is the way we’ve always done it, and you actually invest that extra time. They were getting it back, they were getting like the measurable ROI from it, and they saw it, they were like, yes, the pilot has worked. We want to do this everywhere in a place where many other companies would say, you know, whether it’s the restaurant business or hospitality or whatever, where it’s like, oh, hourly workers, they just come and go, we don’t have to worry about them. So there’s there’s these little bright spots around the world of different companies and different people understanding that you can break the model just like you’re proposing in your work.
Meghan French Dunbar 46:03
Yes, my Torani syrups. If you’ve ever had a flavored latte, you’ve had Torani syrups. Love Tourani. They invented the flavored latte, 100 year old company, and they are one of the largest manufacturers in the Bay Area right now. They invest intentionally in their people’s financial health and well-being, people’s shared success, so employee ownership, profit distribution, all the incredible things that build a mutual win-win company, investing in people’s continued growth and learning, and in people’s autonomy. Those four things they’ve grown over 20% annually, year over year, for 34 years in a row, and are on track to be a billion dollar company in the next three years after starting as a million dollar company 34 years ago. They double in size on average every three and a half years, because they invest in their people, because they don’t treat hourly workers as replaceable. Yes, and their tenure rates, their retention rates, like it is there through the roof, and it’s like it’s all the data is there. Yeah, one of my favorite case studies in the country is
Maria Ross 47:12
that the company in the book that you profile that actually went back and did research about what impacts employee well-being, and finding that one of the biggest impacts to employee well billing was debt
Meghan French Dunbar 47:21
that was not that because the Impact Finance Center in Denver, which is one of my favorite minds.
Maria Ross 47:29
Can you tell that story quickly?
Meghan French Dunbar 47:30
Oh my gosh, Steph Gripney, Dr. Steph Gripney Impact Finance Center. So she essentially said, as a someone who is running an organization right now, my goal is that every single person on my team successfully makes it back into the middle class, and what do we need to do that, and so the key drivers of that, home ownership, getting rid of debt and having a living wage, and so she has examples where her team members didn’t have someone who could co-sign or didn’t have the person that would be able to provide enough, like collateral work. Yep, and so she personally went ahead and co-signed on people’s homes and helped people get their mortgages. And then she.. this was the practice that, like, I went to.. and I was..
Maria Ross 48:16
this like Zen level..
Meghan French Dunbar 48:17
like, I was like, “Can you repeat that? Because she went to all of her employees and said, “Tell me about your debt, your student debt, your whatever debt you have. Tell me about all your debt, and what the percentage is like. What are the interest rates on everything? She consolidated all of that debt, took it to her investors, and said, “Hey, who wants to refinance this at a much lower rate? And they, her investors said, “Oh, absolutely, they consolidated and refinanced all of her team members’ debt, and so, like, saving them 1000s of dollars in interest a month, and then she found a way, again going back to her investors, to say, ‘Here’s what, instead of a living wage, I want to pay a thriving wage, and so there’s a minimum wage, which very rarely covers our basic needs, right, living or minimum wage, and then thriving wage. She was like, I want people to not be able to own a home, go on a vacation, eat out two times a week, like she came up with all these markers of what a thriving life would be, and now pays everyone on her team a thriving wage, which she completely made up, so that everyone on her team can be firmly in the middle class and on their way to building wealth, like
Maria Ross 49:26
me, and so many leaders, so many leaders would say that’s not my problem, but like I bet you her attrition costs were zero, right?
Meghan French Dunbar 49:36
Like, if I had worked for that woman in college, I would never leave for that woman, like now. I like, I like, I would, I would run through a plate glass woman window for that woman, like,
Maria Ross 49:46
I like exactly right. And the proof is in the growth, the proof is in, in all the other, all the other metrics and KPIs you want to look at. And this is the thing I love about this, Megan, because this is about, like, even. When I talk about the leadership paradigm, I feel like you’re talking about the organizational paradigm, the workplace paradigm, whatever paradigm we’re trying to break. They’re all constructs of humans, they’re not laws of physics that we just have to accept. And so we made them, we can break them.
Meghan French Dunbar 50:17
Yes, and we saw this during Covid, yeah. Overnight, we were like, oh, we can change all of the systems and structures of society, right? Like, flip, flip, and then we decided to try to get them all back, even though, yeah,
Maria Ross 50:30
we snapped that was all that fear based, yeah
Meghan French Dunbar 50:31
But, like, it doesn’t, it is not a foregone conclusion.
Maria Ross 50:35
No, it’s not, because we can make them whatever we want, right? There’s no law of gravity that’s tying us to these models. I just want to leave off with a passage that you wrote in the section from assimilated leadership to authentic leadership, because I just, I loved this again, kind of speaking to the model at the heart of all this is the reality that the more of us who stand up and choose a better path, the harder it is for harmful business practices to continue. Every time we stand in our truth and refuse to abandon ourselves, we chip away at the harmful layers that encrust the business world. We also model to others that they can stand in their authenticity too, helping to tear down patriarchal expectations for how women should behave inside and outside the workplace, you never know who’s watching or what impact your actions might have. Slowly but surely, though, as more of us refuse to accept the status quo, we shift what’s considered acceptable and how business is done. We feel more aligned, happier, and healthier as we do so, and we experience better results to boot.
Meghan French Dunbar 51:44
I wrote that
Maria Ross 51:45
you wrote that.
Meghan French Dunbar 51:46
That’s pretty good,
Maria Ross 51:47
girl. No, I mean, this is the point about why there’s people like you, there’s people like me, there’s people like hundreds of others we know that are doing tangential work to this, is that if enough voices provide support and cheerleading, and also like your book, practical ways to get there. We can chip away at this. This is not insurmountable. So, what’s your last gem you want to share with us based on that? What’s your last little motivational nugget you might have?
Meghan French Dunbar 52:18
I mean, I know that this is something that you talk about a lot, and so it’s nothing new, but the connection between how you take care of yourself and treat yourself and your ability to show up as your best self cannot be understated, and a huge part of that is having boundaries as prioritizing the right things, as just paying attention to the basics, and also a huge thing that I felt real, real weird about for a while, but is cultivating your own joy, and this is something that gets subsumed, especially, I mean, again, to generalize, but for women, for moms, for there’s like this, if you’re a working mom, it’s like, if I’m not taking care of everyone and everything, then I should be working, and if I’m not working, then I should be doing something, like, there’s this right, I, it is a quote luxury, or it is, you feel like selfish, or like you’re doing something wrong, or you feel guilty for just doing things that make you happy, and if you need research, there is research around this, but the more that you access your joy, the more you can show up as your highest and best self, and if you need another reason to do it, besides just it makes you frickin happy, there are a lot of reasons to do it, but that was a disconnect that I was having for a long time, and the more that I’ve been able to just unashamedly embrace things that make me really freaking happy. The better my work becomes, and the better my relationships with the people who matter become to me as well. I love
Maria Ross 53:52
it. I love it. Well, thank you so much. I, we could talk for another five hours, but we gotta go. So, thank you so much for your time today, your insights. Thank you for this book. It’s called This Isn’t Working by Megan French Dunbar. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Meghan French Dunbar 54:08
Thank you. Your work is incredible. I’m so, so grateful.
Maria Ross 54:12
And thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of The Empathy Edge Podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review, and share it with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care, and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit The Empathy edge.com There you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
