Rebroadcast: Culture School with Amira El Gawly
About This Episode
Amira El-Gawly believes love is making a comeback at work.
That’s a pretty heady statement, and one you might be tempted to dismiss. What’s love got to do with work? you might say. We’re about engagement and KPIs and customer data you might say. Here’s the thing: Amira El-Gawly co-founded her first company at 27 and across the arc of her myriad careers — journalist, marketer, designer, speechwriter, operations executive — she has focused a keen eye on her people, their relationships, and what leads to better results.
As it turns out, work has changed. Our people have different expectations of one another and their leaders today than they did five years ago, and the last twelve months has only accelerated the trend. Her firm, Manifesta, specializes in helping organizations unleash potential through the relationships and experiences of their people. Collaboration across the workforce thus becomes an exercise in “alignment, joy, and humanity.” Today, as Amira says, “investing in people is investing in performance.”
This week on the show, we’re talking about the nature of work, how work has changed in the last twelve months, and how those expectations of stronger, richer relationships can bring more love back to the workplace. People who love their work, and love the people they work with, love succeeding together.
Thanks to Amira El-Gawly for her participation on the show this week. She’s an aspirational figure and a dear friend of Mission Forward.
Links & Notes
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Carrie:
If there is something we can all use a little more of it's love, really. Have you ever found yourself saying, "You know, what I could use more of right now is a little less love in my life." I'm going to put money on that as a no, because being loved and loving others is the very best part of living. Well this week's guest brings love into the workplace. Amira El-Gawly is the founder of Manifesta and then genius behind wonderfully popular Culture School newsletter. As Amira has said, love is the universal human language, love is our greatest human desire, and love is our most powerful tool as leaders. But in spite of these three fundamental truths, the word love has historically been banished from the workplace. And yet, as Amira says, it is making a comeback.
Yes, it took a global pandemic and a global movement on racial justice to shake us free from the status quo, but people are finally starting to be honest with themselves and their colleagues about who they are and what they need when they're at work. In this week's episode, we talk about what it means for leaders to invest in their teams and how investing in people is investing in performance. Yes, caring for people is the very best strategy for improving your team. So stay tuned. This is a fascinating conversation with a ton of new insights from Amira's recent research, and I know you are going to love it.
Amira, I'm so glad I got a little bit of time with you today and this season to be able to talk with you about your work in Manifesta and some amazing research that you've recently done. But before we get into all of that, I would love to do just a simple check-in first, which is tell us where we find you today, where are you sitting, and what's one thing in your view that makes you happy?
Amira El-Gawly:
Carrie, I'm so happy to be with you always, but especially today. You find me in my office, Manifesta headquarters, which is right in the center of Washington, DC in the Heurich House mansion. The sun is streaming in, it is a warm, breezy day in DC, and the thing in my view that is making me happy right now is the reflections of sunlight on the ceiling, these slivers of light, and I love light and I love the sun. So that's making me happy.
Carrie:
And as I look at you, you look very angelic with the sun coming in, which is actually perfectly fitting because it's the way that I think about you on most days, as an angel. So it's nice to have you and see you with light. I'll tell you, I was reading your newsletter this morning and I've got it in front of me, and there's a couple of themes in it that I think are so perfect for today's conversation. But one of them really around we are coming into spring, we're coming into a new season, and that wonderful sense of renewal that spring brings with it.
And it's interesting because Amira, it feels in recent weeks, I have noticed across the board, both on my team and with many organizations I work with, this sense of just burnout. This exhaustion of how long we have been at this and that there's so much more ahead of us. And I suspect you hear that a lot too, from your perspective. So I want to just put that out there that I would love to get some time to talk about that today on how do we stay focused on the renewal and the future potential of what's in front of us, knowing that a lot of folks are just purely feeling burnt out. So hold that thought for a minute, because before we get to that, I want you to give us a little context for who you are and the amazing business that you run.
Amira El-Gawly:
Well, I'm excited to talk about that. I have really strong feelings about that. I'm an Egyptian who was born and raised in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and I have lived now in DC for 10 years. I founded my business Manifesta almost two years ago, which is crazy to think that it's been almost two years, with the mission of making work better for everyone through the lens of culture, leadership, and people strategy. And the way I think about my business is through a spiritual lens of sorts. And I imagine you and I will talk about this a bit more. But I think in terms of how do we bring more love into the world? As a human being I think about that. How do we bring more love into the world, into each other's lives?
And throughout my career, I spent the majority of my 20s and early 30s at work. The vast majority, even probably more than my peers and friends of mine. And I realized, if we want to bring more love into the world, we need to bring love into the workplace. But where is there a space for that? So that's the high calling of Manifesta, is to bring love into our work through heart-centered leadership, through workplaces that are more human, and we help leaders do that every day.
Carrie:
I can't think of anything more important in our world and in the workplace. You are so true to yourself and to your work. I remember Amira, the very first time I met you in a coffee shop, and we were getting to know one another, and it was so clear that you bring and carry this sense of love and humanity in everything you do. So it's so perfect that you run the company that you do because of the way that you live your life and connect with people. And how timely. We met before, well before the pandemic, and yet I can only imagine and would love for you to talk a little bit about how your work has changed in this last 12 month period.
Amira El-Gawly:
So what's really interesting, Carrie, and thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You don't even have to include all my thank yous. But thank you, thank you, thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me coming from you. My work has not changed a ton since the pandemic started, but I think that we started the business at the right time. And my work hasn't changed because my work, our work, Manifesta's existence, I think it's slightly ahead of its time. Even though every magazine from Harvard Business Review to Entrepreneur to even newspapers like the New York Times are talking about workplace culture and leadership and the importance of these topics, and you'll hear these words on the lips of just about every CEO or executive you meet, in reality, in the actual workplace, very little is being done.
And I think that it often takes months and years for our habits and our practices and our dollars to match our intent and our desires. And we see that in the workplace. So what happened was an acceleration of leaders' decisions around making changes in the workplace, because where they found themselves last year is completely overwhelmed. Completely overwhelmed by the pivots that needed to be made strategically of their businesses, overwhelmed by this quick shift to go remote, and all of a sudden have to build policies and connection and new meeting structures and potentially put in place wellbeing resources, and completely reconfigure their benefits packages. There were so many operational shifts for leaders last year that for us, for the clients we were working with already, we were able to work with them really strategically to advise them on those shifts.
Where we found ourselves leaning more with new clients was on team building, on building connection, comradery. People that are in meetings all day every day. I mean you know this. We've rescheduled this three times because of meetings and all the things that are happening in life. Where teams are finding themselves is new employees are joining companies and are feeling completely lost. They don't really have a sense of who are these people. They don't have a sense of who the new employees are, so people are getting glossed in the shuffle. Leaders and managers are finding it really hard to connect with people sufficiently. So we found ourselves doing a ton more team building and team connection experiences than I anticipated we would be doing. So that was one, I think, surprising place we found ourselves at the end of the year, was spending a lot of time with larger teams, building those connections and helping them get to know each other and helping them actually unwind from their day-to-day responsibilities and the operations of their work to the relationships of their work.
Carrie:
And I guess we should also acknowledge that the organizations who are working with you are the ones who were able to get through this time. I think about all of the companies who probably wish they could have been having conversations about policies and procedures, and they were just trying to keep the doors open as long as they could. So we've got such a splintered recovery happening, in terms of what business and our economy looks like.
Amira El-Gawly:
Yeah, 100%. You're so spot on. My business was fairly new when the pandemic hit, you'll remember. Maybe we were six months into it, or seven months into it. And people were like, "Oh, you must be on fire right now in April. People must be calling you right and left." My response was, "No they might be reaching out right and left to say, 'Wow, your work is so important and needed right now,' but where their attention was, was saving their businesses, saving their employees' jobs." It was not, "How do I make my team more cohesive?" It was not, "How do I build trust right now?" It was literally, "How do we make sure the house doesn't fall down?" And I respect that and I think that's so important, so I think that 2021 is actually going to be the year where things have calmed down slightly and/or at least a stronger foundation has been established and leaders and executives are thinking, "Okay, now how do we rebuild? How do we reset?"
Carrie:
And it really smart. And you say it in your recent newsletter, if I get this right, hopefully I get it right, correct me if I don't. But you talk about how people investments are performance investments. If you want to have a better performing company, you have to invest in your people and in your culture.
Amira El-Gawly:
Yeah, that's exactly. I say investing in people is investing in performance. And that was a response, a personal response to the research that I led at the end of the year last year with CEOs and other members of the C-suite, where I found that the reaction to the word culture was that it's this ethereal thing. This ethereal thing that's really hard to invest in. This bubble, almost, or this nice to have thing that, "Hey, once we're a high performing team, once we hit our numbers, maybe then we can start to think about culture and all these fun things that we can be doing with our teams."
It's one of the shifts that I'm making in my work, as we talk about the workplace, and as we talk about culture is actually talk about performance. People want to come to work and perform at their best. They want to do that. That's what makes people feel like they are fulfilled, like they bring value. And that's what every business wants. That's what every leader wants too. But we somehow think we need to invest in their work, and then once we reap the value from the work investment, then we can invest in people. So that's a message I will be reinforcing over over the next few months is, "Hey, how can we actually invest in people so that it drives performance, so that it drives sales, so that it drives greater profits, so that it drives greater customer and client loyalty," versus thinking about it the other way around.
Carrie:
All right, so one closing question on that, and then we're going to move forward. But when we think about, or when you think about the impetus for why people were reaching out to you over the course of the last year, it sounds like a lot of that was COVID driven. In a new virtual environment, how do we keep our team connected? But tell me some of the other reasons why folks are really turning to... I'm not going to call it co culture work, but when you think about why folks are feeling the need to engage and invest in their teams now?
Amira El-Gawly:
Well, I think that, like in all facets of life, 2020 revealed so much of what we were able to gloss over because of this speed at which we were running and working and going from place to place. So moving to the remote environment for teams just exacerbated issues that they might've been having before. So what we saw was trust issues were revealed. This is a word that we don't use a lot at work, but drama. All this team drama, random drama was emerging in a remote environment, in a much louder way than it would have in the office environment. Things that were happening before, but they just were exacerbated and caused a lot more pain in a remote environment. So a lot of the outreach that we were receiving over last summer and into the fall was around actually longterm issues that just rose to the top. That's all. Not new issues, just existing issues that Rose to the top, or came to the fore because of the remote environment.
Carrie:
As COVID did on so many levels. The magnifying of existing issues.
Amira El-Gawly:
Exactly. It magnified the existing issues. And I think that in addition to magnifying the issues, everyone had way less bandwidth and capacity, both practical capacity and emotional capacity to handle those issues. So there was this moment of hands up in the air, this has to stop. This is the moment where we have to figure it out. If we're not going to figure it out now, then forgive my language, we're screwed.
Carrie:
Do you think then, that question I posed at the top and had us pause on for a minute, do you think that we're at a breaking point? Are we there? Are we coming to it? This exhaustion that people seem to be feeling?
Amira El-Gawly:
I think we've been at the breaking point. I think we've been at the breaking point for some time. And every day people are just doing their best to keep going, because what else will we do? I think that the one year anniversary is cementing that breaking point. It's making it clear for most of us who are just going, going, going, because again, what else can we do? I think the one year anniversary psychologically is making it feel like something's got to give. Something's got to give, something's got to shift, something's got to change.
Which is why I think using the seasons as our guide is such a wise way of almost stepping outside of the cacophony of work and email and meetings and Zooms and craziness that everyone is living in to say, "What can I learn as I come out of winter and move into this new season of spring?" Not only is there hope because of the vaccine, there's hope because the sun is around more hours of the day. There's hope because we see flowers blooming. There's so many signals that are saying it's time to reset. It's time to clear the air. And I just think it's a great opportunity for us to take those signals and respond to them.
Carrie:
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Both of us being business owners and leaders, we know firsthand how overwhelming it is to be a leader at this time. And I also know from many conversations I've had that folks don't often know where to start to be that leader that their organization needs. To show up and step up where they need to to be that leader. And I'm going to go back to this newsletter because I've just found it so useful. You laid out some themes that leaders need to understand, to be able to drive performance and help with that sense of renewal and reset, and would love if you could talk through a few of those.
Amira El-Gawly:
So for leaders who don't know where to start, I always feel like the best place to start is through introspection. And for anyone who's listening, we have a self-assessment that can help you be more introspective about your leadership in this season and help you actually figure out where to start. The themes that were in the newsletter, Carrie, emerged out of our research and our interviews, direct interviews with the C-suite. And the first theme was around connection versus cohesion. So something I heard a lot, and I imagine a lot of everyone has heard a lot was, "Wow, we are talking more than ever before." All day long people are on Zoom. All day long people are on Teams, or on G Chat or whatever. They are so connected to the people they work with. They probably have gotten to know their spouses, their kids, their pets, their homes. People feel really connected.
What we're not hearing is that teams are working better, that they're more cohesive, that they're more aligned. We're not hearing those things. So what I found really interesting from these conversations with leaders was, "Yeah, we're talking all the time." "Well, is your team more aligned then?" "No." "Why not?" "Well, we're too busy. We're on zoom all day." So I found that really ironic, that, wow, as much as we communicate, alignment isn't there, cohesion isn't there. And in fact, we don't have enough time to communicate well. I think that's really interesting and really important for leaders to remember is just because we're connecting all the time, just because we're talking all the time, doesn't mean that the most important things are being communicated, A, being communicated enough or consistently enough, B, and C, that everyone is aligned. So what can we do to more intentionally create that cohesion and alignment?
Carrie:
I mean, that resonates with me a lot. At Mission Partners we talk about the difference between activity and action. And we don't measure ourselves by the amount of activity we do. We measure ourselves by the collective action and impact we have. But you're exactly right. In an intraday space that can be really hard. You can lose the bigger picture in the day to day tasks that you have to complete and the day to day Zoom calls that are filling up your calendar.
Amira El-Gawly:
So another theme that came out of the research, Carrie, was around this tension that we talked about around caring for people versus driving performance. And I heard this tension in every CEO I interviewed, was, "Amira, I really, for the first time in my life, am spending time getting to know people's issues, being vulnerable, caring them. But I need to drive the business forward, and I don't know how to balance the two." And my encouragement to every CEO who shared this with me was, "Well, in fact, the more time you spend listening to your employees, the more likely they are to perform better. So you are actually driving performance by being a more caring, compassionate CEO." So I think that the encouragement there is it's not a trade-off, it's not a zero sum game. By investing in your people, by caring for your people, by showing compassion to your people, you are actually helping to build a stronger foundation for your employees to perform.
One more theme I will share with you that I found was a hypothesis of mine that the research proved, and is actually going to lead to Manifesta investing in some new products and services in 2021, was around an issue around managers, people managers specifically. And we've known for a few years of people who work in the world of work, or workplace that we have an issue, a manager issue in the workplace. Managers drive 70% of an employee's engagement with a company. That's a very high number. And yet most people who are promoted into manager positions don't have manager talent.
There are latent talents, unique super powers that exist within the world's best managers. And 90%, Gallup research shows that 90% of people in manager roles don't have that talent. And on top of it, most organizations are not... When they promote somebody into a manager position are not giving them training and development and coaching to become great managers. So what happens is that, well no wonder so many people are disengaged at work. 66% of the American workforce is disengaged at work. If 70% of their engagement is driven by their managers and their managers don't really know how to manage well, then we have a major problem.
Carrie:
And that is an enormous number, by the way. I just want to reinforce that. 66% of people are not engaged at work.
Amira El-Gawly:
It's insane if you think about it. So how is that not a priority to drive employee engagement? And the insight for me was the primary way we need to be driving employee engagement is through investing in better managers. We need to invest in strengthening our managers. And by the way, in a lot of businesses, the manager is the CEO. The CEO plays many roles. One of them is to be a people manager. And if the CEO doesn't know how to give great feedback, if the CEO doesn't know how to help their employees develop and grow, then every business is at a loss and is going to reach an impasse in terms of growth.
So what we heard from these CXOs, Carrie, was that when I asked, "Hey, do you feel like you can rely on your managers to translate the vision, the strategy of your organization," many said no. The majority said no. And when I asked, "Hey, what would you invest your dollars in," And then I gave them a list of things to choose from, the vast majority of them picked manager effectiveness, because most of their managers they felt were not effective enough. So those are some of the themes that came out of the research that I found really fascinating.
Carrie:
I want to create some space before we wrap up. I've got two last questions for you. But the first one is around going back to that notion of culture. And I know you said it's not necessarily the word that resonates a lot with folks, but when I think about what you were just sharing, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of managers, what we bring to the workplace in terms of our biases and our experiences, our life experiences, that what we know is that the majority of work places are steeped inside a white dominant culture, and even further a white supremacist culture. So we are in a moment, and let's hope that it's not more than a moment, when some organizations are starting to challenge that model and that culture. To say, "How do we create truly a more inclusive business model and a more inclusive culture that is not top down led by the managers of that company, or even more so led by the societal norms that we've all signed on to for many hundreds of years here."
I'd love you to talk to me a little bit about that. What are you seeing? Are you seeing companies challenging and pushing on those white dominant norms, or again, is that still, in your mind, something that needs to come, but folks aren't ready for it yet?
Amira El-Gawly:
As always, I will be completely honest with you. I'm not seeing a ton of it. I'm just not. I'm seeing there are some organizations that are taking this so seriously, so beautifully seriously. Some of my clients. I mean, I feel like every conversation we're having, this is a theme, a thread, it's now an underpinning to everything they are doing. I work with other organizations and I speak with many, many executives on a weekly basis who, for them, this is not part of the agenda. It's just not part of the agenda. It's not part of the narrative. They don't have time for it. They did a book club in August. And I think that, like you said earlier, most don't know where to start. Most don't know where to start and don't know who to ask, and there isn't a playbook, and everybody wants a playbook.
When you're busy and you're overwhelmed, and your day is full of Zoom meetings, and something feels unclear to you or ambiguous, you want someone to tell you what to do. Even if you're a CEO, you want someone to tell you what to do. And what's happened is it's just become noisy. It's become noisy. And I think there's a lot of unfamiliar language and terminology, and I am hoping... This is not the center of my work. It's one of my learning goals this year as a leader to continue to invest in my own anti-racist learning journey and how to embed that into how we advise clients. But I'm really eager and hopeful that some of the DEI practitioners and experts who are leading this work will help to clarify and communicate with a little more simplicity how companies can get started. I know that those people are overwhelmed and overworked and their books are full, but I'm hopeful, but I think it will take a lot more time, Carrie, a lot. A lot more time.
Carrie:
Yeah, I agree. I agree with you. And yet I also remain hopeful that it will not... It will go beyond the, to your point of, we've checked the box of taking a training, to we understand at a deeper level that we are all human here, and let's think about how we are treating one another as humans, as colleagues, as coworkers, as people. We spend more time at work than we do any place else. But this inability to be able to celebrate one another's differences rather than continuing to see them as differences. We're more alike than we are different.
Amira El-Gawly:
We're more alike than we are different. And if you don't mind, I'd love to share one more thing that I heard a friend share this morning, that maybe the opposite of love is fear, and if our aim is to bring love to the workplace and love to our leadership and to our teams, then we need to really work to eradicate the fear of the unknown, the fear of the other, the fear of the ambiguous, the fear of shame, and maybe when we do all of that, then we can start to build more inclusive, more human, more compassionate workplaces.
Carrie:
That's a great place to end today, Amira. Somehow our time is already up. That went very fast, and I didn't get to half of the questions I have for you. So we we'll find another time to continue this conversation, but for now, I am so grateful for you, for your friendship, for all of the counsel that you've given me over the years, and for what you're doing. You're spot on. You are ahead of the curve, but you are what is needed in this moment. So my hope is that businesses catch up to where you are, because that's what we need most.
Amira El-Gawly:
Thank you so much, Carrie. It is always such a pleasure and honor and I'm always inspired when I talk to you. So thank you.
Carrie:
Thanks, friend. Thanks again for listening to today's episode of Mission Forward. What I loved about this conversation is that Amira's insights are both wonderfully practical little nuggets that can be implemented with teams starting right now, but they're also like the very beginning of a beautiful hike. You know there's so much more good stuff ahead. So if you liked this episode, please let us know. Rate or review this podcast and definitely share it with a friend. We are nearing the end of the season and would love to know that this content is resonating with you. Until then, stay well, be good, and share love.
