Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Before we dive in today's episode, I want to take a moment to share something that's been on my heart, something I've been working on behind the scenes for a while now. I'm officially writing a book. This book is called let's Be A Practical Guide to Leading Through Change. And it's deeply personal to me. It's built from real experiences. The uncertainty, the challenges, the moments where I didn't have the answers but had to lead. This isn't just a leadership book filled with theory. It's about navigating uncertainty when there's no clear direction, building internal clarity when everything around us feels unclear, having courageous conversations, even when they're uncomfortable, and leading with value, especially when it's the hardest to do so. I'm also going into topics that don't get talked about enough, like what it feels like to be challenged, overlooked, and even bullied as an adult in a workplace. And how those moments shape the kind of leader you become. This book is for anyone who's ever thought, how do I lead when I don't feel ready? How do I show up when I don't have all the answers? And how do I stay true to myself in environments that challenge me? If this is you, this book is for you. I'll be sharing more about the journey behind the scenes moments, and opportunities for you to be part of it as we go. So stay tuned, because this is more than just a book. It's a movement around how we lead through change together. All right, let's get to today's episode.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Opinions expressed in this episode are personal. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this streaming platform.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Good day, wonderful people, and welcome to another edition of let's Be Diverse. I am your host, Andrew Stout. This episode is dedicated to all my loved ones who supported me through this journey. Those who have left us will always be in our hearts and will never be forgotten. Our topic today is Trust Gap in Leadership, why Employees Don't Always Believe leaders. And our guest today is an inspiring human. Her name is Nicole Eisdolfer. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: I'm excited to be here, excited to have you here. What's been energizing you these days? Give us the tea, give us the deets, give us it all. What's going on?
[00:02:11] Speaker B: So the universe seems to have conspired to prove everything I've been saying for the last two years, Right. Which is sort of weirdly energizing and weirdly terrifying because I predicted a lot of collapse and a lot of distrust and a lot of this sort of moment of reckoning for businesses as they have been sort of systematically disinvesting in their employee relationship. So it's been this sort of really fascinating moment to be in that is super interesting.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: I'm seeing that as well with many leaders that I'm speaking to and people who are working in organizations. It's something that's topic of mine for sure.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, it's, it's just a, it's a hard time to be a leader. It's a hard time to be an employee. It's just a hard time to work.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: Certainly is. Well, thank you so much for letting us know what's energizing you. I'm super excited to get into this conversation, but before we do, I always have a fun thought provoking question that I ask all my guests to get things going. Are you ready for yours today, Nicole?
[00:03:09] Speaker B: I am, and I'm excited because you sent a few questions ahead and I can tell you I've already changed the answers 15 times.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: So your question today is why do people say in a movie, but on tv?
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Why do people say in a movie?
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So why do people say that they're in a movie? Why do actors or actors say I'm in a movie but we're. But I'm on tv?
[00:03:31] Speaker B: My gosh, I don't know. I don't think I've ever even heard that. I can't be a very useful guest with that question. I'm so sorry.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: We will chop it down as a good question that I stumped the guest today. We'll put it at that.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: 100% stumped. I am very, very into movies and I am not very, very into TV and I almost never watch this sort of entertainer interviews. So.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: I'm a little bit useless when it comes to that.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Oh, well, thanks anyways for having fun with us to get us started. Who are you and what really drives you to do the work that you do?
[00:04:06] Speaker B: So about four years ago, I changed my headline on LinkedIn to HR Philosopher. And at the time I did it a little bit as a joke because I had this thought that it was really there to play with ideas and to explore the different ways different fields connected to my field. And also I didn't want people selling to me and I figured no one was searching for HR Philosopher. And then as I've sort of lived with that, it's become really evident that I accidentally created a category that perfectly describes what I do. I'VE spent nearly two decades inside HR and people systems work. I mean in leadership development, employee relations, organizational development, people analytics. And so I've kind of lived my career in the exact places where what organizations say they believe and what their systems actually produce either match or they don't. And a pretty shocking amount of the time they.
So what drives my work is figuring out why that's true and what that does to the people and to the leaders inside those systems.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Super interesting that you're talking about this and I love the, the that you change your LinkedIn to HR philosopher. In my mind an HR person is I find has changed over the years. So people that are working in hr, I find that jobs change quite a bit and they've become to me people who are not only trying to figure stuff out, creating strategies, creating training and development for employees, but they're also people who are, I would say philosophers but also great listeners as far as situation go. Because there's a lot of things that have come up for people especially in the last few, five or six years and people are always looking for somebody to listen to them and they're kind of been like they've kind of turned into what a hairdresser does or if you go to the, the local bartender, bartender is listening to what you are dealing with. So I find that that kind of job title or that the way that they're doing things has changed quite a bit.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think to some degree that's true.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: Because HR has this really weird catch all phenomenon of a function. And so some people who are doing the exact same HR that we were doing in 1947 like they are, they are you know, doing people OPS work and they are just managing compliance and managing paperwork and, and that's just their existence and they're very happy with that. And then you have all of these other fields that have been absorbed. The training and development piece, the Org development piece, the Org strategy piece and, and then so many others. I mean employee relations is its own whole ball of wax and it takes a really special person to hang out in that world and not burn out. I'm not that person of doing that work before I was ready to leave HR as an entire field and maybe burn down the world while I was at it. So it's, it's very, very mentally draining work and very emotionally demanding work. But it's also the kind of cool thing about hr. I didn't go to school to be an HR person. I mean I didn't actually know what I was going to school to be. For most of my bachelor's degree, I majored in literally everything that wasn't math. I started in political science and economics. I took detours through interior design and graphic design. I majored in business. I majored in chemistry. I major in, I finished in organizational behavior and communications. And it was really cool because I learned this, hey, there actually is science behind the things at work that don't intuitively make sense to me. And so that sort of started this long term love affair for me. And HR was the function that made the most sense for me to land in. But I've never been the most comfortable fit there either. I ask too many questions.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Well, questions are okay in my mind. I don't think there's anything wrong with questions. I feel like years ago people were afraid to ask questions or because of what reaction that someone was going to give them for asking the questions. And I've become someone who's not afraid to ask them. And I always look for the answers of how someone delivers their answer. So you can always tell if someone's bothered by the question or someone is actually looking to give you a good response. And you can always tell by their answer, you know, how they do it.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Well, yeah, and a good question is really good data.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: I mean, if you can understand what people are curious about, if you can understand the things that are like, bothering them enough that they're willing to raise their hand and ask the question, that's tremendously valuable. And we overlook that a lot in organizations.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
So Nicole, why do you think so many employees struggle to fully trust leadership, even when leaders have good intentions?
[00:08:48] Speaker B: So I mean, the obvious answer to this, right. Is that you can't see a leader's intentions. And so that's the sort of surface level answer. Going beyond that. When employees are thinking about trust at work, they are not only evaluating the leader, they are evaluating the entire system. And frankly, in most cases, in most organizations, the employees aren't wrong to distrust the systems that they are working in. So there's this whole, there's this whole framework that Peter Senge, it's called the fifth Discipline. I'm sure you've come across the book, it's from the late 90s, early 2000s. He built this whole framework on the idea that beliefs live in people's heads. You surface the assumption and then you can shift it. And that's really true, really good work. But our systems, the infrastructure of our organization, have also been encoded with beliefs. And even if you have the best leader on the planet, they cannot outperform the system that they are in by more than a very small margin. So what will happen is if you have a really, a truly trustworthy leader who has the best intentions and they are in a bad system, the employee will, in fact trust the leader. And they will also know that the leader cannot operate outside of the system. So they will know that the leader cannot use those intentions for long without being removed. And so it's not, again, it's not cynicism. It's not that the leaders are inherently untrustworthy, but the leaders are operating within the limits of the system, and the employees can see that. The words may say one thing, the leaders may truly believe one thing, but if the systems don't support that and they work in opposition, then the system can't be trusted.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I think leaders have to understand that employees know that there's certain things leaders can tell them and certain things that they can't. And I think that employees are understanding that way, way more than they did years ago. So they're a lot smarter, a lot more intelligent. They're listening to podcasts like this, and they're also reading a lot, and they're able to find the answers to things a lot easier than they did before. So they're a lot smarter.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: I think they're smarter. And the gaps between what we say and what we do are much more evident. And some of that is actually driven by these cloud transformations and the AI transformations. Because you cannot, I mean, for years and years and years, right. If we, if leadership said one thing, but the system protected a different thing, the humans in the middle, the managers, could sort of soften that gap. They were the shock absorbers for that gap. But we've begun to remove those humans and we've begun to overstress those humans and overstrain them. And so they have run out of capacity to be the shock absorbers. Absorbers. And what has replaced them is a computer. And I don't know anything on the planet stupider than telling a computer one thing and expecting it to do a different one.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Right, exactly. Like, I mean, well, perfect example is when you use, you know, people that use chat GPT, you have to be very specific what you're putting in, because if you wanted to spill, spew out stuff, you have to be very specific on what you're looking for and what you need. And I've checked it out a little bit myself, and I've done things a little bit differently and wrote stuff a little bit differently, and the stuff I got back was different. If I do it once and then the second time I did it a little bit differently, it came out a little bit differently. So I think we have to just, with ChatGPT, when we are dealing with our, working with our teams, we have to be very specific for sure. What are some of the common leadership habits or behaviors that unintentionally damage trust with employees?
[00:12:16] Speaker B: So I think to a large degree, the thing that I see the most commonly are leaders who will host these big, huge events to talk about what they believe. They'll, you know, make a big part about it in a town hall, or they will send out emails that talk about, you know, employees are our greatest asset. Or, you know, that's my favorite little. I call them corporate billboards. Right. They're trying to tell you one thing while the experience that you're experiencing is telling you a different thing. And listen, if that's what you truly believe, great, then evaluate your systems and fix the things that contradict that. But if you don't truly believe it and you are not going to change your systems, then saying it is actually more harmful than not saying anything at all. Because you are teaching your employees that you're going to lie to their faces. And I don't, I don't know anyone who thinks that's a great idea. I mean, I can't imagine if I were teaching my 8 year old that I was going to lie to him all the time. And I did it really obviously by saying, hey, Micah, the grass is pink. He can look outside, he can see that the grass in fact is not pink. And it doesn't matter how loudly and how much passion I say it with, he can see the difference. And the employees can see the same thing.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah. If you're not fooling anybody, for sure. But by doing that again, we're, they're smarter. We understand things a little bit differently. We're reading, we're studying a little bit more. So yeah, we're not fooling anybody by the stuff that we're, we're saying. So, yes, I think it's intentional, but also the way we're communicating, I think it's super important as well because they're hanging on every word that we say.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And they're, and they're judging every word based on what they also experienced. Right. And this is, this is the other thing that is happening in this specific moment. People don't come into work as naive receptacles. They come in carrying their prior experience and I don't know a Lot of people in today's economy who haven't been burned themselves or who haven't had a loved one who has been burned by what has been going on. And so people are not primed to trust. They are primed to find every piece of evidence that doesn't match what you are saying for sure.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: So this is a great segue to what I wanted to ask you next was can trust be rebuilt once it's been broken? And if so, what does that process realistically look like?
[00:14:29] Speaker B: So there's actually some really, really fascinating research on, on trust repair. The last names are Kim, Farren, Cooper and Dirks. I think I'm so terrible with names. And I will find a source for you and send it for, for notes. But if you apologize and you don't immediate immediately follow through, that apology actually backfires. And we actually know this from our personal life, right? Because how many times have we been in an argument with a loved one and we've said, you don't care, you don't. You're not actually sorry. If you were sorry, you would have changed what you did. And so if you, if you apologize and you don't have an immediate behavioral follow through, you've now announced that you recognize the problem and you're changing nothing about the system that produced the problem. That's actually a whole new data point for the employees and it's a worse one. It actually makes rebuilding trust harder the next time. Right. And so you're actually better off changing the system first before you announce it. Change the system. Let the employees begin to encounter the change through their normal interactions and then start talking about what you're doing differently and building the trust again.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: I love that you said that. I know people will talk about perfection. And I think if you were to do what you suggested, to apologize, but immediately follow through. If you're, if the follow through is not perfect, I, people will still see that, right? They'll still see, okay, it didn't work, what they're trying to do. But I could see that they're trying their best to, to fix the issue. So let's give them the benefit of the doubt here.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: So how does a lack of diversity and inclusion contribute to the trust gap between employees and leaderships within organizations?
[00:16:11] Speaker B: So most organizations have a gap between what their stated values say and what the system actually produces, or a gap between the way they talk about a system working and the way it actually works. The sort of backdoor workaround way that it actually works, navigating that gap, figuring out in real time, which version is real versus which version is just the way we talk about it actually costs you cognitive energy. I call it a translation tax. And that tax is not evenly distributed. The employees whose ways of working match the system, the way the system was built, they don't pay that tax as highly. The employees who are different, who don't match the standard profile, pay it on every single signal. And so I've seen this in the workplace around promotions or around job transfers. For example, I've worked in an or, I've worked in several organizations actually, that have this, this rule. So you, you can apply for any open internal position. That's the stated way it works. Except if you apply for an internal position and you don't tell your manager about it beforehand and your manager hasn't set up a coffee chat with the other manager and they haven't had their little confab moment and your manager hasn't been the advocate for you. And like, then, then your, your application actually gets flagged and they start to see you as a flight risk and they start to see you as a problem. And navigating these unspoken rules is automatically more punitive on those who are not diverse or, and sorry, more punitive on those who don't match the dominant profile of the employee. And so you have to be able to talk about these things out loud to even notice it. And if you don't have people who don't understand the system, if you don't have any diversity, you don't have anyone who's raising their hand and saying, I don't, I don't get it, like, why, why do we say it this way and do it this way? And you almost need people who are like, adjacent to the dominant profile so they, they, they seem enough like the typical person that they aren't immediately punished for raising their hand and asking that question. So you need this whole range of diversity, right? And then you need people who are like part of the dominant profile, but who are super friends with the other people and they can like, be the advocate and say, hey, you know, this isn't fair, right? But you don't get that if you're never exposed to it.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: It's interesting that you talk about the, the gap between the back door and how it works. It makes me think of, you know, we're doing a task. So you have a task that you're doing in the office and your leader asks you to do a particular task, and they have, the leader has a specific way that they would like it to be done. But they don't communicate that to the employee at first. So the employee does it the way that they think that should be done or the way that they've always done it, probably. And it comes back like, oh, well, I prefer that you would have done it this way. So there's a gap between the communication of you not saying, this is what I prefer. But also there's a gap between the employee checking at first to say, well, how would you prefer? Because there's this diversity of thought is kind of what I'm thinking of. When you talked about that. There's always a different way of doing things, but you definitely have to communicate what you're looking for or how you would like it to be done. And there's. There's a reason for that, that they have to probably take that information and bring it to somebody else. So it's got to be in a particular form.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Well, yeah, and there's this. You see this a lot in hr, specifically because our field is such a conglomeration of other fields. And so you'll have a very specific way that lnod thinks about a problem versus a way talent acquisition thinks about a problem versus the way employee relationship, employee relations thinks about a problem. And so you can say, you can give an instruction and get three wildly different interpretations just because of the field of origin of the person. They could be. They could be identical backgrounds otherwise, but coming from a slightly different area that they've spent their career working in, they would have different interpretations. And we don't. We don't talk out loud enough about these interpretations at work in general. And I think that's a huge source of distrust, trust. It's a huge source of friction. And, you know, people. This is a. This is a problem with experts in every field. Experts forget what it's like to not know. And so they package their information in these super dense packages. So if you flew into Denver, which is where I live, and you asked me how to get to Breckenridge, I would just say, oh, head high. Head. Head west on i70. You'll run into it.
That's not actually true. Like, you. You do have to take another road. And like, you know, and also, how do you know how to get to I70?
[00:20:53] Speaker A: Do you.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Do you, like, are you an American? And you know that I in autom indicates an interstate. I mean, there's like a lot of information packaged into that, right? And we don't recognize how many of those scaffolds, how many of the things that we use to package come from the specific field that we're in. And so diversity of thought, diversity of experience, diversity of background, all of those contribute to different ways of thinking. And they help us see where we're making assumptions about the way things work that may in fact not be true.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: So, Nicole, before we wrap up today, what is one takeaway that you'd like our listeners to remember from this episode?
[00:21:29] Speaker B: So I need leaders to remember that they, their behavior is not the only thing that contributes to trust. Employees aren't just reading that top layer of behavior. They are reading all of the systems they work in every single day. And those systems actually get higher priority in their brain. Who gets promoted? Which initiatives survive contact with the budget? Whose judgment actually changes a decision? Every single one of those signals carries is a belief about what the organization treats as real and worth rewarding. The trust gap closes when the beliefs encoded in your systems line up with the beliefs that the leader is trying to operate from. It's not just a more authentic leader, it's a more coherent organization.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: I love that. And you're absolutely right. There's that belief of what the leader is telling them or why they're telling them that, and the reasons for it is definitely something that has to be looked at and go, okay, I understand that and I'll continue doing this the way that you would like it to be. So I love that. I love that.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: You're very, very welcome. My call to action is to like, share and follow this episode. Nicole, I want to take time to thank you for coming on today as a guest. I admire your professionalism, how thorough you are, and you're just your outgoing personality. You're so personable and I just enjoy that. So, so thank you so much for taking the time for us today.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: Thank you. And I really appreciate that you're building out this podcast with all of these different perspectives. It's really valuable.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Appreciate that. On behalf of myself and my guest Nicole, I'd like to thank you all for listening today. And until next time, be safe. And remember, everyone, that if we all work together, we can accomplish anything you have been listening to.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: Let's be diverse with Andrew Stout to stay up to date with future content, hit subscribe.
