Work Positive

EP 208 | You Invest. Your People Invest Back. | Katherine Kobs About a decade ago, a company told a young team member, "We wanna send you to college and we'll pay for it." Kate Kobs said yes. Nearly a decade later, she invests in people the way that company invested in her. In this week's episode, Kate talks with Dr. Joey about attracting top talent with total rewards and retaining them as you follow through. Who on your team waits for you to invest first? ABOUT THE GUEST Katherine (Kate) Kobs is a human resources leader who creates people-first HR functions. She created them across manufacturing, municipal government, energy, and retail companies. She loves translating compliance into practical guidance managers use to positively influence their culture. Today she leads HR for an organization with entities spread across Wisconsin. She also serves as a human resources sergeant in the Wisconsin Army National Guard. Kate lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She shares inspiring stories about work culture on LinkedIn. She welcomes your questions there. Key Insights Attract top talent with total rewards. Base pay is one part of the package. Boomers through Gen Z each weigh it against their own values, from paid parental leave to time to care for an aging parent. Let candidates hear your values lived out. A car dealership supervisor once walked Kate from site to site and told his team, "Tell her your story." Follow through on every interview promise. Kate says, "If you invest in people, they're gonna invest back in you." Listen, then tell your people what you heard. Stay interviews, exit interviews, and pulse checks work when you say, "We heard this. In response, we're doing this." Little things retain people. One team asked Kate to bring back Doughnut Fridays. She brought them back. Hire for culture fit. One rotten fruit in the bowl spoils the fresh fruit faster. Dr. Joey calls those team members, Eeyore Vampires. Give continuous feedback. Kate asks, "Why wait until your annual review?" Check in before anyone needs you. Kate calls her store managers so a call from HR becomes a touch point. Your Do One Thing Challenge Kate's Do One Thing (DOT) for you this week: Invest in your people. "They're gonna invest right back in you," she says. Discover which benefits your culture offers that align with your team members' values. Then use your total rewards to attract people who fit your culture. Connect with Kate Kobs LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-kobs/ Kate welcomes your LinkedIn message with a question about how she leads HR. Connect with Dr. Joey Podcasts: https://workpositive.today/podcasts Newsletter: https://workpositive.today/newsletter YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@workpositive7529 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjoeyfaucette/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorkPositiveToday/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/workpositive.today/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.joeyfaucette Enjoying the show? Leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so more people leaders discover the Work Positive Podcast. It takes a minute and helps the whole community. Know a leader who would be a great guest? Send your recommendation to [email protected].

EP 207 | Slow Down to Grow Trust | Sara Valentine Halloween comes every Monday at Give Kids The World Village. Christmas comes every Thursday. Sara Valentine says your culture happens on the days in between, on ordinary Tuesdays. In this week's episode, Sara talks with Dr. Joey about the HEART framework she discovered as she watched her team serve Wish families, and how a culture climbs back from rock bottom one conversation at a time. What does your team hear from you on an ordinary Tuesday? ABOUT THE GUEST Our guest on this episode is a human resources executive, leadership speaker, and creator of the Heart Leadership framework. It's a simple approach that helps leaders like you and me build trust through intentional conversations and everyday actions. She's led people and culture for nearly 20 years, and is passionate about helping organizations like yours create work cultures where employees feel heard, valued, and empowered. She currently serves as vice president of talent and culture at Give Kids The World Village, and hosts the Heart Leadership podcast. She believes that leadership is less about having all the answers and more about how we show up for our people. Sara welcomes messages from the Work Positive community on LinkedIn. KEY INSIGHTS Sara's first job at 14 had her scaling fish at a bait and tackle store for $5 an hour. A difficult boss there showed her the effect a people leader has on everyone around them. She's been a guardian of people ever since. Give Kids The World Village earns a 99.1% guest satisfaction score from families of critically ill children who get one wish. The team gets one opportunity to do it right. Sara asks people leaders, "What do you do for the Wish families?" Then she tells them, "You need to do that for the employee." Dr. Joey calls it taking the external and bringing it internal. HEART gives a busy people leader one word to remember in a difficult conversation: Hear, Empathize, Acknowledge, Respond, and Thank. A culture transformation often gets worse before it gets better. The Village culture climbs back from rock bottom with a CEO who is all in, day by day and moment by moment. Sara attracts top talent with one question: "Why should someone wanna work here?" People join people leaders. Attraction starts long before anyone submits an application. Retention starts on day one. Sara says, "People don't leave because of one bad day. It's hundreds of moments of not feeling heard, appreciated or supported." Sara says culture is "literally built on ordinary Tuesdays," created one conversation, one decision, and one response at a time. Every people leader shapes culture. Sara coaches people leaders to "be consistently human." People forgive a people leader who makes a mistake and owns it. Sara remembers standing at the gas tank deciding between gas and groceries. That memory centers her. Everybody brings their life with them to work. YOUR DO ONE THING (DOT) CHALLENGE Slow down and listen to your people. Sara says, "They already have the answer. They're waiting to tell you, because people want to be heard." Listen to understand rather than to respond. Then act on what you hear. As trust grows, your culture transforms. CONNECT WITH SARA VALENTINE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-valentine-09892221/ SimplyHR, LLC: https://simplyhrllc.com/ The Heart Leadership Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheHeartLeaderPodcast Give Kids The World Village https://www.gktw.org/ CONNECT WITH DR. JOEY Free Work Positive Culture Assessment: https://workpositive.today Work Positive Newsletter: https://workpositive.today/newsletter Work Positive Podcast archive: https://workpositive.today/podcasts B.R.A.V.E. @ Work: https://amzn.to/3SWiOot YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@workpositive7529 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjoeyfaucette/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorkPositiveToday/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/workpositive.today/  Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.joeyfaucette   Enjoying the show? Leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so more people leaders discover the Work Positive Podcast. It takes a minute and helps the whole community. Know a leader who would be a great guest? Send your recommendation to [email protected].

EP 206 |  You Go First. Then Your Team Follows. | Dr. Joey Faucette Every February at Dr. Joey's farm, the first crocus pushes through frozen ground before the daylilies stir. The crocus goes first. Then spring follows. In this week's episode, Dr. Joey coaches all five B.R.A.V.E. @ Work practices from the Work Positive Community Live Experience. Who on your team waits for you to go first? ABOUT DR. JOEY Dr. Joey Faucette is the creator of the Work Positive Culture framework and founder of Work Positive Today. He serves as a Positive Culture Architect, Executive Coach, and host of the Work Positive Podcast. He helps people leaders transform their work cultures so they attract top talent, reduce turnover, and grow productivity and profits. The bestselling author of 19 books, Dr. Joey brings more than four decades of culture coaching to every conversation. Each month he hosts the Work Positive Culture Live Experience, where he coaches the Work Positive Community through one framework at a time. He works from Pleasant Gap Farm in Dry Fork, Virginia. KEY INSIGHTS Believe First. Albert Bandura's research at Stanford shows self-efficacy predicts performance more reliably than skill alone. Believe First. Teams with high collective efficacy, the shared belief in their joint capacity to achieve, outperform teams with high individual talent. Believe First. In Martin Seligman's MetLife study, optimistic applicants who failed the standard hiring test outsold the pessimists by 37% in year two. Release Your Ego. Tasha Eurich finds 95% of people believe they possess self-awareness. About 15% score high on both internal and external measures. Your ego lives in that gap. Release Your Ego. Brené Brown's interviews with 150 senior leaders name vulnerability as the foundational skill of daring leadership. Ego is the most common armor people leaders wear that prevent vulnerability. Activate What's Possible. Teresa Amabile's research names progress on meaningful work as the strongest predictor of positive workday emotion and engagement. Activate What's Possible. Recognition is the activation energy. Shawn Achor's research links naming a team member's progress out loud with positive biochemistry. Venture Forward. The step comes first. The bridge follows. Angela Duckworth's research on grit finds talent predicts achievement less reliably than the willingness to take the next step. Embrace the Suck. In a 30,000-person study Kelly McGonigal documents, people under high stress who believed stress was harmful carried a 43% increased risk of dying. Those who held the opposite belief carried the lowest risk in the study. Embrace the Suck. Robert Emmons's research suggests gratitude carries its highest leverage as the sour accompanies the sweet in your culture’s sauce. YOUR DO ONE THING CHALLENGE This week, identify one place where your team stopped believing because you stopped first. Write three sentences about it in pencil. Pencil is honest. Then send the three sentences to one person on your team who notices what you do. CONNECT WITH DR. JOEY Free Work Positive Culture Assessment: https://workpositive.today Work Positive Newsletter: https://workpositive.today/newsletter Work Positive Podcast archive: https://workpositive.today/podcasts B.R.A.V.E. @ Work: https://amzn.to/3SWiOot YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@workpositive7529 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjoeyfaucette/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorkPositiveToday/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/workpositive.today/  Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.joeyfaucette   Enjoying the show? Leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so more people leaders discover the Work Positive Podcast. It takes a minute and helps the whole community. Know a leader who would be a great guest? Send your recommendation to [email protected].

EP 205 | Millions Hiding in Your Organization | Porschia Parker-Griffin Two sisters bought a pearl necklace at a Goodwill for sixty-nine cents. The appraisal came back at $50,000. Do you undervalue your team in a similar way? One designer at an architecture firm shared her underappraisal with Glassdoor because her owner had yet to ask. Porschia Parker-Griffin helps organizations unlock the millions of dollars of potential hiding inside their own teams. What would an appraisal of your team discover that you priced too low? ABOUT THE GUEST Porschia Parker-Griffin is the founder and CEO of Fly High Coaching. She helps organizations attract, engage, and retain high-caliber professionals through tailored consulting, training, and coaching programs that achieve their business goals and enhance their culture. She holds the ICF Professional Certified Coach credential along with numerous other important certifications, including master practitioner status in the MBTI and certification in the Hogan assessments. She holds two psychology degrees, including a master's in industrial and organizational psychology, and she hosts the Career 101 Podcast, which she describes as everything you were never taught about career growth, development, and change. Her company tagline is soaring to your full potential. She especially enjoys helping companies unlock the millions of dollars of potential hiding in their organization, and she offers the Work Positive community her case studies, her podcast, and an open LinkedIn inbox. KEY INSIGHTS Three core essentials attract top talent: real values rather than aspirational ones, a clear mission, and the points of distinction that separate you from every similar organization. Millennials and Gen Z team members tie themselves to mission and values. That alignment travels further than a salary bump or a full-time remote privilege. Pensions retired with the generation that earned them, which leaves values, mission, and alignment as the answer to "what are you working for?" What the executive team names as the problem is often a symptom or a byproduct of the real one. Listening at every level of the organization surfaces the friction points. Support usually looks like resources. One millennial designer posted on Glassdoor what she withheld from her owner and her manager. That post cost the firm its next round of top talent. Employers who skip engagement surveys in an employer's market still pay for high turnover, which signals the culture challenge underneath. Teresa Amabile's research across nearly 12,000 diary entries names progress on meaningful work as the strongest predictor of workday engagement. An assessment gives you the deep read on your team's personality, and both Dr. Joey and Porschia hold decades of MBTI practitioner experience. YOUR DO ONE THING CHALLENGE Porschia's one thing: understand deeply the personality of your team. This week, take these three steps: Choose one assessment and run it with your whole team. Sit down with each team member and ask what the results name that you had priced too low. Focus on one strength of each person and strengthen it with a to-do this quarter. CONNECT WITH PORSCHIA PARKER-GRIFFIN LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/porschiaparker/ Website: https://www.fly-highcoaching.com/ Career 101 Podcast: wherever you listen to podcasts   Connect with Dr. Joey & Work Positive Work Positive Podcast: workpositive.today/podcasts Free Work Positive Newsletter: workpositive.today/newsletter YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@workpositive7529 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjoeyfaucette/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorkPositiveToday/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/workpositive.today/  Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.joeyfaucette Enjoying the show? Leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so more people leaders discover the Work Positive Podcast. It takes a minute and helps the whole community. Know a leader who would be a great guest? Send your recommendation to [email protected].

EP 204 | You Started Out an Octopus. | Michael Hunter You started out an octopus. Curious, full of wonder, eight arms reaching in eight directions at once. Then the system folded you down to a grain of sand, coated the irritation layer by layer, and called the result beautiful. Michael Hunter spent 40 years debugging software before he discovered the bug was always in the people. Your team engages with whoever is inside that pearl. How do you crack the pearl open?   ABOUT MICHAEL HUNTER Michael Hunter debugged software for 40 years at Microsoft, Tableau, and Salesforce. Somewhere in those 40 years he discovered that every technical problem he solved was actually a squishy people problem. So he switched to debugging people. That worked out about as well as you would expect. Now he helps people leaders debug themselves. Michael founded Uncommon Teams and wrote The Resilient Tech Leader, which is for a lot more than tech leaders. He works with people leaders on the gap between who the system trains them to be and who they really are. He calls the return from that gap resilience. He treats resilience as a journey rather than a destination. Michael gives the Work Positive community a free copy of The Resilient Tech Leader at theresilienttechleader.com, along with a complimentary 30-minute first conversation about where you are, where you want to be, and why that gap matters.   Key Insights Michael spent 40 years debugging code before he discovered every technical problem was actually a people problem Everybody qualifies as a people leader. Every person leads themselves at minimum The world compacts a curious octopus into a grain of sand, then encases the irritation in a pearl the world calls beautiful Tasha Eurich's research finds 95% of people believe they possess self-awareness. Roughly 15% score well on both the inward and the outward measure A people leader who releases one layer shifts the room that same week, even before anyone names the shift out loud The most common stall is inviting feedback out loud and then ignoring what comes back An uncommon team holds the grain of sand, the glass, the sandpaper, the fuzzy bunny, the goofy seahorse, and the Martian rather than papering everyone into one snare drum Flexing out of your preference costs energy, so Michael flexes toward structured colleagues on purpose and names the trade out loud Setting the container is the people leader's job, which includes telling a poor fit honestly that a better team exists for them Resilience means returning to yourself again and again, a journey rather than a destination Your Do One Thing Challenge Michael Hunter gives the Work Positive community three moves for today: practice noticing where you are be curious about why that matters do one tiny thing to learn more about what you noticed Michael names the trap himself. "It seems like it's way too simple to actually work. Yet when we put it into practice, I often find it is way more complex and challenging than these simple words might lead us to believe." Connect with Michael Hunter Website: https://uncommonteams.com/ Free copy of The Resilient Tech Leader: https://theresilienttechleader.com/ Book page: https://uncommonteams.com/the-resilient-tech-leader/ The Resilient Tech Leader on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4yjxLjy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/humbugreality/   Michael offers the Work Positive community a free PDF of The Resilient Tech Leader and a complimentary 30-minute first conversation about where you are, where you want to be, and why that gap matters. Connect with Dr. Joey & Work Positive Work Positive Podcast: workpositive.today/podcasts Free Work Positive Newsletter: workpositive.today/newsletter YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@workpositive7529 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjoeyfaucette/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorkPositiveToday/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/workpositive.today/  Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.joeyfaucette Free Work Positive Culture Assessment: https://workpositive.today   B.R.A.V.E. @ Work: Five Practices That Transform How Your Team Engages releases September 15. A.L.I.G.N. @ Work: Five Practices That Transform How Your Team Collaborates: https://amzn.to/3SWRhTO   Enjoying the show? Leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so more people leaders discover the Work Positive Podcast. It takes a minute and helps the whole community. Know a leader who would be a great guest? Send your recommendation to [email protected].