Left to Our Own Devices with Erica Keswin

Mental Health in the workplace is top of mind, especially these days. With all that’s going on in the world, Covid continuing to upend plans, and burnout running rampant through organizations, leaders need practical, tactical solutions to helping their people (and themselves!) deal with mental health challenges. So on this final day of Mental Health Awareness month, Erica moderates a mental health roundtable discussion featuring leading experts in the diversity, inclusion, and belonging space. On this episode we have Daisy Auger-Dominguez, chief people officer at VICE media, Leonora Zilkha Williamson, human capital strategy and executive coach, and Nicholas Griggs-Drane, director of diversity and inclusion at Endeavor. In this episode, the panelists discuss how to recognize mental health matters in the workplace, how leaders and employees alike need to feel psychologically safe in order to be honest and vulnerable (and how to model that from the top), how different generations and geographical regions process mental health matters differently, why having mental health benefits are table stakes now in the recruiting process, and why it’s so important to give people time to unplug and rest in order to combat burnout.

Thanks to Terawatt for presenting this panel—“Because everyone deserves a good coach.”

What does it take to scale a business from an idea to unicorn status? Suneera Madhani would say to look to family values—specifically the ones her Pakistani parents instilled in her. With her brother, Suneera co-founded Stax Payments, a fintech platform now processing $23 billion in payments, so it’s clear that these immigrant family values are working. Suneera speaks with Erica about her three-bucket principle to prioritizing what matters most, Stax’s rituals around shared meals, why they’ve chosen a hybrid model for the office, and how onboarding should be intentionally thought through from the moment a prospective hire receives an offer letter. Suneera also runs the CEO School, a platform dedicated to educating women entrepreneurs on how to scale their businesses and go from founder to CEO. Suneera launched this platform after learning that less than 2% of female founders ever break $1 million in revenue, so now she aims to increase that number. CEO School includes a podcast as well as a membership with monthly classes, community events, fireside chats, and a quarterly curated product box. Additionally, Suneera’s new CEO School Course—an 8-week experience, with workshops on power, pitch, process, product, people, and profit—is open for enrollment May 19th-May 25th, and you can sign up below!

Contrary to popular belief, the highest performing teams are not necessarily conflict free. In fact, healthy disagreement—or creative friction—leads to more innovation, more trust, better ideas, and higher performance. Amy Gallo, author, podcast host, and contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, sits down with Erica on this week’s episode to discuss how to disagree in a human way. This conversation equips leaders and employees alike to build trust and psychological safety in relationships and teams (the foundation of healthy conflict), navigate difficult conversations, and establish norms around disagreement. They also touch on how and why there are gender differences in disagreement and advocacy, why a hybrid work environment makes conflict more difficult, and how to approach—top down OR bottom up—disagreement on whether employees should return to the office fully or be able to keep a flexible schedule. Anyone who’s ever struggled with conflict in the workplace will find this conversation enlightening and helpful. 

Amy’s latest book, Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone, Even Difficult People, is out September 13th and available for pre-order now.

When Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy pitched their second book, Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, to their publisher in January 2020, the authors were met with questions about its relevance. Fast forward six months (and three months into a new and terrifying global pandemic), and the publisher recognized this was, in fact, a very relevant book to publish. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. In these turbulent times, with millions participating in The Great Resignation, new Covid variants emerging every few months, derailing our collective plans to move on, and many dealing with the grief they’ve experienced from the loss of loved ones to the virus, Big Feelings couldn’t have come at a better time. Liz Fosslien, the co-author and illustrator stopped by Left to Our Own Devices to dig deep into big feelings. On this episode, Liz and Erica discuss the new book, how to express selective vulnerability (aka, bringing your most appropriate self to work), the importance of being intentional and taking time to connect and check in with colleagues, and how to introduce more stability into our teams during ever-changing times. Liz also offers two salient examples from Humu and IDEO on how to onboard in ways that will give new hires a sense of psychological safety as well as permission to bring their human to work.

Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy is out today! Pick up your copy wherever books are sold.

Gary Ware was working as a VP at a digital ad agency when he realized that being completely depleted, feeling broken, and having no drive to do anything was perhaps *not* normal. Gary was experiencing what many of us have faced, especially during the pandemic—burnout. So Gary took an improv class and realized play is what was missing in his life. On the podcast this week, Gary chats with Erica about his journey from burnout to breakthrough by incorporating play and games into the work day. He illustrates how applied improvisation and games help teams and colleagues unlock creativity, confidence, and better communication. Gary shares the challenges of reimagining in-person games to an online environment once the pandemic hit, signs an employee may be on the verge of burnout, why playing a silly game as a team before a client call can make everything go more smoothly, and why sense of intimacy must be created if we want to form genuine connection.

Few activities prepare a young person for the world of work better than participation in team sports. With skills like leadership, performance under pressure, work ethic, teamwork, problem solving, and the ability to strategize, athletes are naturally set up to be successful. And that’s just what this week’s guest, former Team USA Women’s Hockey team captain and three-time Olympic medalist, Meghan Duggan, has found. Meghan joined Erica on the podcast to discuss her transition from leading the Olympic team to gold to manager of player development for the New Jersey Devils NHL hockey team. Meghan’s main focus these days is planning and strategizing with recent draft picks and young pros at the beginning of their career life cycle so they can become full-time, multi-million dollar NHL players. Meghan talks about the moment she decided she would be an Olympian (at just 10 years old!), why family and professional rituals matter, and her work as president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, where they work to build greater equity, inclusion, and participation for girls and women in sports. Anyone going through a professional transition will find Meghan’s journey and this episode helpful.

From a one-man business consultant working out of a spare bedroom in 2007 to a team of 100 employees, 1 billion dollars secured in business financing, and a leading fintech marketplace for small businesses, Joe Camberato—or, Grow By Joe, as he’s known on the internet—knows a thing or two about growth. Which makes sense, because Joe’s mission is to help drive growth, both for clients and employees. So how does he do it? This week on the podcast, Joe Camberato, founder and CEO of National Business Capital, speaks with Erica about how to build a business from scratch. And the secret for Joe is to harness the power of culture. And culture doesn’t have to be overcomplicated, but it does have to be experienced. Joe discusses NBC’s team rituals, like the 9:01 AM daily stretch that gets everyone centered for the day, how they build fun into the day-to-day work, how their culture team intentionally crafts events and resources for the company, and why leaders should let people have the flexibility they need to deal with stuff going on in their lives—we’re all human after all. Listen in for a straightforward approach to bringing fun back to work.

How do we shift society as a whole towards more diversity and inclusion? It starts with the people and brands defining culture itself—“the icons, visionaries, renowned experts, award-winners, champions, leading brands and institutions.” And nowhere do they influence culture more than at Endeavor, a company that represents this top tier talent in sports, entertainment, fashion, live events, and media. On this episode, Erica spoke with Alicin Williamson, Chief Inclusion Officer, and Nicholas Griggs-Drane, Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Endeavor. Alicin and Nicholas help build D&I into the fabric of Endeavor, and thus the culture at large. In this episode Alicin and Nicholas discuss how to make sure everyone can show up as their full selves, using science and stories about underrepresented groups to shift the conversation, how to onboard with D&I baked in, and why putting diversity and inclusion first is a competitive advantage. This episode is an absolute must-listen for anyone in HR and people functions.