Your host, Sri Chellappa, talks with the CEO of Griffin Resources, Michelle Griffin. Michelle underscores the strong correlation between employee happiness and their performance at work. She asserts that when employees are fulfilled and engaged in their roles, they tend to perform better, work more efficiently, and go above and beyond their job descriptions. This fulfillment often stems from working for organizations aligning with their values and career aspirations. Michelle references the adage, "If you do something you enjoy, you never work a day in your life," to illustrate the importance of passion in the workplace.
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[00:00:02] People First Organizations will win in the future of work. The only real asset is your people. We all want our persons to work where age or lead organization is. I'm sorry, but leaders don't need it and they can be chopped away. Welcome to the People Strategy Leaders Show.
[00:00:19] I'm your host Srikalappa founder and president of Engageedly, and a serial entrepreneur in technology, films and music. This is where we talk to people leaders, business strategists, and organizational subanets about leading in the time of change. What is working, what is not working, and more importantly,
[00:00:37] what we should be thinking about. Stick around to the end of the show. We'll reveal how you can be our next guest. And now let's engage. Hello and welcome to People Strategy Leaders Podcast. I am Srikalappa, your host. I'm today with Michelle Griffin.
[00:00:57] Dr. Michelle Griffin is an entrepreneur and industrial organizational psychologist. Our primary role is a CEO and founder of Griffin Resources, which he founded in 2019 to provide innovative, fractional HR, payroll, and recruitment services to small and mid-sized companies globally.
[00:01:15] In the past, Michelle served as the head of HR at Connectwise, a billion dollar IT software company, and as a director of HR at homes by West Bay. The largest privately owned residential construction company in Tampa Bay.
[00:01:29] More recently, Michelle also co-founded and serves in operation for four other organizations for IT hardware supply to MSPs, investment funding, software creation, and licensing, and commercial charter flights. Michelle's leadership journey seamlessly weaves together business expertise
[00:01:46] and a global perspective, making her a standout figure in the ever evolving landscape of executive leadership. Well, thanks Michelle for joining the show today. Pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.
[00:02:00] Yeah, we were just chatting a little bit earlier about your background in finding the light people for the right role and one of the things that really resonated for me was happiness at workplace.
[00:02:12] And you said that there is a strong correlation between people who are happy at work to do better. Can you talk about a little bit more about exactly what your finding has been and your own observations have in this topic?
[00:02:31] Yeah, so the main point of obviously people who want to work enjoy their work and they want to make money, obviously. But it's more fulfilling for them when they're working for a company that aligns with their cause and they become fulfilled at work.
[00:02:51] They're happy to be working kind of goes back to the old adage that if you do something you enjoy, you never work a day in your life which in many situations in some capacity is true.
[00:03:03] And so if companies focus on hiring the right people for the right role, meaning they find people that are wanting to do the work that they're being hired for, they've stayed fulfilled in that and it aligns with their career aspirations, their education aspirations.
[00:03:23] And they take their personal goals and align it with the company's goals ultimately the company will win out on that. And then when the company makes sure that the people remain happy and fulfilled ultimately their work is being performed better, being performed faster, more efficiently.
[00:03:42] And that's also when people will start to go above and beyond the exact opposite of the quiet quitting we're hearing a lot about now because people are saying they don't feel like the company's care about them. They think that they're just a cog in the wheel.
[00:03:55] They're just there to make money for somebody else but it's the opposite if you can treat them in a way that that's not true, that they're valued and respected at the organization and then turn they're going to make money for the organization, they're going to provide
[00:04:07] better customer care for the clients or be the actual end user of whatever that company does. And so it's a huge trickle effect when everyone is treated in a way that provides happiness and fulfillment.
[00:04:25] So happiness and fulfillment is actually a very important topic because I talk about that a lot on my top topics of discussion in my podcast as well as my own thought leadership pieces that I write.
[00:04:37] The one thing that I sometimes struggle with is that aligning what the manager or the organization thinks will make an employee happy and what the employee thinks that will make them happy because sometimes it both could be wrong, right?
[00:04:52] Because the organization is trying to assess, okay, this role might make this person happy based on what they've said or heard. The employee might have said or heard something that may be misinterpreted or the employee
[00:05:05] may have expressed something that might be, they think will make them happy but it's not necessarily the case, right? You all try to do things. I'll think you'd make us happy in the interview as, oh, you know what this is really
[00:05:14] not big, I can be happy, I don't want to do this job, what I don't want to this career, I don't want to be in this city or whatever choices we make in life, right? How do you make sure that you get that alignment right?
[00:05:28] There's a few ways to do that from a scientific perspective, there's a lot of assessments out there that can help people to get past what they think they want and get down to measuring what's called your natural disposition.
[00:05:43] So it's kind of more of as the core of your behavior and the core of your personality, what attributes actually shine through for your work performance. And there's several of them out there, one that I use in my organization just because
[00:05:58] the ease of use and the accuracy and validity of it is predictive index. But there's many of them out there but that one is really easy to read the results and it's very simple to take. So it's not very invasive to get accurate results.
[00:06:13] But basically what it's measuring is too full and it's really interesting to look at the results, it will measure your natural disposition to say this is how you show up in life. And then it also measures how you change your behavior based on what you think
[00:06:31] others want from you and then you can see how misaligned that really is. And that's important to look at because you can see if someone is an exact opposite or really changing themselves to show up at work every day,
[00:06:45] it's going to be exhausting, it's going to create burnout. And that's when you really want to be able to say, you know, maybe you should be looking at jobs that more naturally align with yourself
[00:06:57] and you know some people are like, well I'll just do it for the money because they want to make more money. And eventually that's going to lead them to not be happy and fulfilled because they went so far outside their comfort zone.
[00:07:10] Yeah, yeah, we were used predictive index quite extensively in our organization as well and we are partners with them as well. So that's I was surprised how easy it is to take that. And then what surprised me really about that was how close it was to
[00:07:27] at least that you understand about yourself. And that's one way definitely to align, I guess on the behaviors in the values, the row could still be a challenge. I mean, you could say, you know, the values align your strategic thinker, we want a strategic thinker in this role.
[00:07:47] But the role might be something that requires different skillset or the skill set that really changes them. That's not really prepared to do, right? So that's a particular thing that helps with the job match.
[00:07:59] So if you are accurate and creating your job match and then you overlap the personality across the job match, you should be a little bit closer aligned. And what's nice about predictive index is you can look at
[00:08:12] the alignment of someone's natural disposition against the job match to see if it's going to cause them really far outside their comfort zone and versus how they, if you also look at other
[00:08:23] parts of the charts to say, well, this is it's closely aligned with how they already show up at work, but that's going to eventually cause problems for them. And it comes also down to the fact that
[00:08:35] people can change their mind, their lives are going to change, especially with family situations, new children, growing children, getting married, moving, you know, economic changes, anything like that that's going to cause changes in their lifestyle is also something to help
[00:08:52] accommodate for. That happened with me and obviously several of my team members I try to do a lot to accommodate work life balance for my team members. And one that a story that comes to mind is
[00:09:04] someone that had a small child and we had her on the phone's a lot. And she was doing recruiting, she was doing interviews and she just, you know, needed to be more at home with the child,
[00:09:16] she was working from home, the child care situation changed and, you know, she needed to also be there with the child, but unfortunately that's small child who's making noise and crying and, you know,
[00:09:27] she needed to be there step away from work or cancel some things and she tried, she essentially quit and we ended up discussing why she needed to quit. She didn't have another job lined up.
[00:09:37] She just couldn't handle the workload and I was like, well, let's just change your workload. What what passions do you have? And she said she'd like analytics and numbers and was thinking,
[00:09:46] maybe she'd go back to school for that. And I was like, well, let's give you a, you know, a job duty that takes you off the phones and incorporates numbers and analytics and we kind of moved her
[00:09:56] into payroll and started teaching her payroll processes. She absolutely loved it and started getting a certification in payroll and she was still able to be, you know, kind of stay at home, mom
[00:10:08] and, you know, get more hours which also helps with income and child care. So, you know, with just switching things if we had just let her go because she quit versus really just discussing
[00:10:19] what makes her happy, what's going to re-align with the changes in her life and, you know, she went on a, you know, onto a different career path she's been with me for years now.
[00:10:27] That's awesome. That's a great story and I think what I noticed it, it, it really works well for, you know, organizations that have leaders like you who really care about the team and
[00:10:40] people like that. But also I noticed it works in a lot of buckets in larger organizations. So, how do you help organizations that much bigger? Let's say 500 people, a thousand people to really make
[00:10:52] that as part of the organizational DNA that they can look at that as part of their organizational culture. That's what it really is, once you get bigger like that, you have to really, it's essentially a bunch of small businesses if you will into smaller pockets like departments.
[00:11:07] And that's when people say, you know, they don't leave their job, they leave their manager and it really comes down to companies listening to what the people have to say about their managers and if the managers are not aligned with the culture or they're treating people differently,
[00:11:21] they, there was, when I was at a much larger company, the, with connect-wise that was, you know, billion dollar company. And there was, you know, a manager that was really pushing the people to
[00:11:35] work really hard. And he demanded others of what he demanded of himself and I was like, that's, you can't really do that. You're a manager that's different or you're a business owner that's different than the people that are performing underneath you and you have to respect
[00:11:48] that their lives and their missions in for themselves are very different than trying to grow the business or be there for the business. And, you know, his wife had a baby and he literally was working
[00:11:59] in the hospital room with the baby in the room with her. And he's just, he's like, I did that. Why can't other people do that? And when you should never expect that of other people,
[00:12:08] you should respect their boundaries, you should expect their work life. And understand that they're going to want time off. They're going to want to take, you know, leave of absences to be with their family and different situations. And you should want to have to work that hard.
[00:12:23] So there are certain things where it's, you, a lot of people would be, you know, we're unhappy under his management because of those things. And it's, you know, I think COVID changed a lot of
[00:12:33] people's mentality and started speaking up about their boundaries versus just accepting it for the paycheck or for their career or not wanting to job hot because they didn't want to see a lot of
[00:12:45] roles and jobs on their resumes and whatever their motives were. And so now it's people are, you know, their mental health is much more of a, you know, concern and bigger deal, working remotely,
[00:12:57] only communicating with people via computer, things like that. We get asked a lot about how to make sure you take care of people. But in larger companies, it's the same thing just take it down
[00:13:08] and just kind of look at the micro pieces of it, departmentally, and then making sure that the managers are aligned. And when you hear that the managers are not aligned, a lot of times businesses
[00:13:17] will be like, well, the managers are great manager or they think they only see them from the top down perspective and then they just start getting rid of the lower level people that don't
[00:13:27] like that manager, ultimately it's a bigger symptom of that. So a lot of, a lot of companies can do three, sixty reviews, they can do bottom up reviews as well as top down reviews and really start to get
[00:13:42] confidential information from companies that can help them assess what is happening, but they may not notice and should have known if they really took the time to find information and listen. Yeah, I think that's a good one because I talk about how
[00:14:00] middle management is one of the toughest jobs because you're managing to age as stakeholders. On the top, you have top management, really pushing you to the two results and then you have people who have their own boundaries of your well and challenges and personalities
[00:14:17] that you don't work with. And so you have to balance the two and preparing managers to be successful in being able to manage those two stakeholders. Effectively is what will make them successful as a
[00:14:30] manager and it's really a sprung off for first time managers when they first get more of it, you know because they feel this obligation sometimes they feel this obligation to please their manager or their leadership that hey I need to know through myself because I've been a manager
[00:14:47] now I need to show results or it can go the other way where they have these people there were peers a few months ago and now they're leading them so now they are how to make them accountable
[00:14:58] for their role. So how do how do organizations best prepare these managers to make sure that they're not you know they were to balance these two stakeholders and ultimately provide this good balance of people being happy and fulfilled at work but also achieving the business results.
[00:15:17] That happens quite often where people will get promoted because they did their job well and not because they actually had leadership skills and so to be able to make sure that middle management is successful it takes a lot of training and a lot of coaching and that actually
[00:15:31] happened to me and I was I went from being people's peers to being the head of HR and running the department I had to hire my own replacement and then manage the team. Some people were happy about
[00:15:45] that some people were not happy about that and what I did for myself was I took a six-month coaching to learn active listening and I had to you know I was answering to the CEO and CEO of the company
[00:16:01] so I initially when I was first meeting with leadership they would start to ask me questions and I would anticipate the question and start to answer them and at one point they stopped me
[00:16:13] and said you know let me just finish the question you are right that is the answer to the question I was asking but I want to be able to hear myself like ask the question and it's important to
[00:16:23] to be heard and then once I got done with the coaching course and learned more active listening skills by the end of that the the other business owner actually noticed and said you know I feel like
[00:16:38] you're listening to me thank you so much which I was like wow that's a complete change of behavior in so now we actually offer you know individualized coaching for that specific reason so one of
[00:16:50] our coaches is for that I found you know valuable and then I started reading books like leaders eat last there's a lot of books out there that can help people understand how to be a good
[00:17:00] leader and it's important to obviously know how to speak to leaders in a way that they're looking for information which is very different than you know the way mental management I think tends to think so
[00:17:14] they you know leaders sometimes you want concise information they don't want excuses they want results those kinds of things so being able to take information that is important to the middle
[00:17:26] management person and then changing it in a way that is going to be important so the leaders is necessary I don't want long responses they don't want long emails you know so you have to learn how to change and understand different personalities and different communication styles this
[00:17:42] gives a really good one to start having everyone take so that they you start to learning each others communication styles and things like that so there's different ways to have you know I would say
[00:17:54] understanding how to communicate up and down the other thing I usually try to encourage middle leaders to understand is it's and it's a really hard mindset to get is that if the team does
[00:18:06] really well then the team is the one that gets the result you know gets the rewards for that and the acknowledgements for that but if the team screws up that is also the manager's responsibility to
[00:18:19] take the the blame for that and it's like if the if the team didn't have the right resources or they didn't have the right boundaries or known limitations of that then that's also the manager's fault
[00:18:32] that the team didn't succeed and so the middle management can also be a very thankless job because you're trying to promote other people's you know their skills and help them grow their careers
[00:18:45] and ultimately that's what makes a good leader if someone that can lead other people and promote them and so that is also to me what makes a great leader is someone that can can be that humble it's saying
[00:18:57] they did a great job this is their reward and when they screw up it's you know the manager realizes they failed their team in some way yeah yeah I think managers job is pretty hard I think you're
[00:19:10] right about coaching you know we talk a lot about you know discussions on how a new manager gets promoted because they were really good at their job but they were not necessarily the best people leader
[00:19:20] but but that's not something that's a dead end you can become a better people leader it just have to have a little bit more awareness self-awareness as well as awareness of your environment
[00:19:31] and the people you're working with the one last question I wanted to ask at a broad level have you seen changing perspectives and organizations where they are focusing more around you know going beyond
[00:19:44] just employee happiness but employee fulfillment better alignment to their purpose if you will and values it depends I mean yes and no it really depends on the leader and the economic status so when
[00:19:59] the economy is really struggling and the businesses are struggling then that becomes an issue because they are focused on keeping the business afloat and we're kind of starting to see a change in the you
[00:20:11] know in the economy that causes some concerns for business owners and when they're focused on money and making sure people have jobs that's you know a difference I would say if you were to
[00:20:23] think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs but in a business sense you know they're in a lower level mindset of just making sure they can keep the lights on and keeping people employed and might not
[00:20:34] necessarily be focused on you know they're happiness and mental health and things like that and if the company is really economically strong then they want to put resources into continuing education and so I haven't seen a lot of companies when they're ready and willing to spend money
[00:20:52] on investing in their people then their you know they'll start looking and saying you know continuing education is necessary it's part of the budget and they will make sure that there's resources available for the company you know for the employees whether it be medically related employee relations issues
[00:21:10] anything like that versus just saying hey here you know make sure you're getting your continuing education will pay for that will pay for conferences will make sure that your career advancement is happening for you too so it right think it definitely comes down to the the economic status
[00:21:25] in mindset of the organization and that will eventually depending on what stage the company is at yeah but I do I do think the COVID relief was a big wake-up call a lot of organizations and
[00:21:36] and leadership to say okay you know what we really need to focus more on people rather than just focusing purely on profits because I think I really related right the more happy and fulfilled employees you have the more profitability you'll have in the longer and as our organization
[00:21:52] yeah I completely agree and it definitely and that in that can be a double-edged sword is if you're focusing on people's happiness the money will follow if you're focusing on your client happiness and making sure you're providing the great the great product the money will follow
[00:22:06] and stay with you versus if you're cutting corners and cheating people it's gonna catch up with you yeah yeah well thanks Lord Michelle it's been really helpful how can people reach out learn
[00:22:17] what about your services and the type of work you do? Easy as thing is the website Griffin-Resources.com my contact information is there my direct way to reach me my email my phone number is all right there same thing with finding me on LinkedIn and Michelle Griffin so
[00:22:37] pretty easy to find me and Google me and I'm usually right there to all my all my information is out there on the internet to find so then I'll hide. Thanks Michelle it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
[00:22:50] Sri Chalapah here thank you so much for listening to the people strategy leaders podcast if you are a successful leader or a people strategist who would like to be on this program please visit engage at lead.com slash people strategy leaders podcast if you got something out of
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[00:23:38] we will see you next time and thank you to Patrick Ramsey sound engineer at Kalinga production studios for recording and mixing this show.