As human beings, we all encounter problems in our lives. Some may be traumatic, and it’s just a fact of life. These experiences can make it hard to focus on our daily tasks, especially at work. How can we create a workplace culture that supports employees during these times?
In this episode, I sit down with Tamara Fox, a coach and head of consulting at LOEB Leadership. We discussed the impact of trauma on both personal and professional life, and the need for workplaces to address employees’ trauma, and the future of their work. Tamara shared about the approaches to leadership development and the benefits of prioritizing employee’s mental health. Tune in to learn how we can build a more supportive workplace
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Prioritizing Employees’ Well-Being in the Workplace with Tamara Fox
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. On this particular podcast, I’ve talked quite a bit about our work culture and about how many things about our culture that we all encounter at work need some adjustment in our thinking. And one of the topics that I was recently introduced to at the Boulder Startup Week last month is the topic of what happens when one of your coworkers, one of your employees has a traumatic experience. Now, we’re all going to have traumatic experiences in life, it’s just a fact of life that something major is going to happen to you and something major is going to happen to you that’s going to cause you to maybe even focus on that particular aspect of your life a little bit more, even a little bit more than your work, and we need to find a way to, on a broader scale, allow people to be coworkers but also human beings. Today, my guest, Tamara Fox, is a coach and a consultant, and she was the speaker at this particular event on workforce trauma.
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Tamara, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thank you so much. So, I want to first start off talking about your particular story, your particular journey, when you talk about what made workplace culture something that really interested you and then what made specifically how people endure these traumas at workplaces something that you want to kind of lean into with your career.
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m definitely one of those people that I took my own personal experiences and made it into something I’m actually passionate about and doing in the workforce today. And I always start my story back in 2011, when I was 19, I always age myself now when I do podcasts, I think that was 13 years ago, it was wild. But in 2011, I was 19 years old and I woke up and I was living in an apartment in Denver, Colorado, and I woke up to a masked man standing over my bed with a gun who raped me and actually physically assaulted me as well, like dislocated my arm, did a whole bunch of stuff to me that, you know, won’t go into details. I truly saw my life flash before my eyes, thought I was going to die, never see my family again. So that was 19 years old.
Wow.
Pretty life changing experience, that was the catapult into my experiences with personal trauma myself, like going through something traumatic. Pretty shortly after that, my dad had been battling with an opioid addiction, most of my childhood, it just didn’t really come to the surface or I wasn’t really aware of it at like more conscious level until after my trauma and I think my trauma actually catapulted him a little bit, made him a little bit worse, because when your family experience something like that, of course it has an impact on the family around them so his opioid addiction got to the point that he was verbally abusive, he was blacking out and not remembering things, and he was abusing opioids illegally. So then that happened and he became suicidal and his mental health was just awful. So that had an impact for me on a trauma perspective. Then, from 2016 to 2024, I had nine deaths, so nine deaths in nine years, so approximately a death a year. One of those was my father who died right at the start of COVID. He died April 4th, 2020. Another was, I always talk about this one because I don’t think it’s spoken about enough is my dog who I got for that trauma in 2011. I got a German shepherd for protection who enabled me to sleep at night, helped him with PTSD, helped me with anxiety. She passed away March 21st, 2021. And then one of my brothers was hit and killed in a car accident, March 18th, 2022. So, again, nine deaths in nine years. One of my best friends was killed in 2022 as well. So four of those deaths were definitely very traumatic, very unexpected, especially for somebody in their 30s to go through. So that is a little bit of my personal history. And when I was 19, after that first traumatic event, I knew I wanted to help people because being at that age, I was about to go back into college at the time, I had taken a little time off, and I knew that I was going to enter the workforce and need help. I had severe PTSD, severe anxiety, I knew I was going to need support, so at that time, I was like, okay, I’m gonna go into human resources. That’s how I can help people in the workplace. Well, the longer I was in HR, the more I learned this isn’t really 100 percent what I want to do, I don’t love the compliance side, the legal side, the hiring and firing and benefits. While those all have a purpose, it didn’t actually feel like I was doing what I was called and like meant to do, like what fueled my fire. So, with time in the human resources space, I shifted over into what I always call the fun side of HR, which is leadership development, culture, engagement, basically anything around developing people and creating workplace cultures where we can thrive, where people can be their authentic selves. So that is the work I do today. I am a national board-certified health and wellness coach and then a leadership development consultant and culture consultant, the world’s longest title, I should probably find a way to shorten that. I work one on one with individuals in a coaching setting, whether leadership or health and wellness, and then I also work on that macro scale with organizations, training and teaching about what to do with trauma in the workplace, when somebody experiences trauma or grief, because as I talked about in my talk, there’s only two things in life that are inevitable, life and death.
So you had this awful traumatic event at the age of 19 and then you decided, first, I’m going to pursue a career in HR, the first few years when you found yourself in some of these like non-fun aspects of it, and I think everyone’s kind of familiar with that, like, oh, the person that has to sign off on performance improvement plans, the person who has to look up all the legal things if there’s a conflict and someone does something, all that, the compliance part of it. What were those first few years like? And then what kind of things did you experience and potentially even struggle with that as you were kind of coming to the realization that what you were doing was not exactly what that experience kind of called you to do when you pick that path?
Yeah. I started in HR when I was 20 so while I was still in school, so I’ve been in this career 12, 13-ish years. I was in very entry level roles and, of course, anytime you’re in more entry-level roles, you do more administrative, behind-the-scenes work, so it wasn’t until I was in HR for a couple years that I started doing more of things like recruiting and performance improvement, employee relations, performance improvement plans, or benefits, those pieces, so I did a lot of employee relations, like having difficult conversations, writing people up, firing people, hiring people. It all felt very transactional to me. Like, well, I know that that is required in order for a business to be successful, you have to hire people, you have to promote people, you have to document performance, it just felt like I was going through the motions instead of getting fulfillment and enjoyment out of what I was doing. I knew there was more in HR, which is why I kept pursuing it and learning more and pushing myself to venture into the space that I wanted to, but it just felt like I was out of alignment or inauthentic for me. Towards the end of the time, I was doing things like employer relations, it would actually cause stress internally for me, like I don’t like firing someone, I don’t like having to be involved in layoffs, it just made me feel very uncomfortable. And I understand the business perspective. I know that it’s required at times. I know it’s necessary, I see the employer’s perspective and the why. I felt so out of place doing that. And I would see colleagues around me just naturally, almost like do it with ease, and it wasn’t something for them that caused any emotional reaction or response. So once I learned more about the leadership development side, culture side of things, that’s where I continued to pursue and I just felt more ease and alignment. I know they always say in any type of personal development space, when you feel resistance and something you’re doing, it typically as assignment, it’s not meant for you.
You’re kind of going against yourself and how that can kind of eat at you in certain ways, right? Because if what you’re doing, and I’ve experienced this in my past as well, where every single day, you wake up, you’re going to work but you’re doing something that’s either completely out of alignment or even something that you don’t even necessarily agree with, you talk about these major, like one instance traumas, but that seems like kind of like this kind of longer term, low-key situation that can continue to eat at you if people stay in situations like that for years and years on end where every day you’re not being true to who you are.
Yeah. I mean, I know early on in my career, I stayed with companies approximately a year, sometimes less and then would change when I knew it no longer served me, no longer for me, no longer was in alignment with what I truly wanted to do at the core. I think that’s oftentimes how people get this bad reputation in their career for being job hoppers. Yes, I understand, again, from a business perspective, why you want to keep people, why you want to retain people like you should, there is a way to do that and Gallup talks a lot about utilizing people’s strengths, focusing on people’s strengths, it’s a lot of the work we do within cultures, but I think very early on in people’s careers, especially post college, post high school, depending on when you enter the workforce, it is necessary to expose yourself to a lot of different things and see what is meant for you. Yes, you have an inner fire and an inner calling of what feels right. You have to experiment and dabble with what that actually means on the surface.
And so, job hopping, alongside the idea of a, quote-unquote, “gap” in the resume is something that I have encountered, people having certain attitudes about. Do you think that the attitudes around either of these two concepts are currently changing? Because it feels like, if you go back to 2011, there would probably be a lot of people that’d say, “Oh, no, you can’t change jobs now, you’re gonna look like a flake,” or whatever, or, “You can’t have a gap in your resume because then –” I have no idea where that one came from, to be honest, but I do recall – but, as you’re saying, if there are other more human considerations, such as it probably is a good idea when you’re first starting your career to try a few different things and see if you like it so that you can find something that you’re going to be happy with longer term.
Yeah. I think the mindsets are changing slightly. It’s in a lot of the ways, like similar to what we talked about with the culture work we do, but so many people are sometimes forgetting the human aspect of the people that work with or for them. So, mind you, when I was entering the workforce, again, I had severe PTSD and anxiety, I was not thinking the same clear level that I am today because I was operating in a different space. That aside, I was still learning who I was as an individual, as an adult, so I don’t think we’ve shifted enough yet on the mindset of job hopping and career gaps. I think people are slowly getting there, especially so many parents have to leave the workforce to take care of their children and return so we’re getting a little bit more open minded around the career gap piece in ways. We’re also – I am seeing some shifts in the job hopping piece, especially for those more junior in their career or those younger professionals, because people reflect back to themselves of, “Oh, wait, I did that too.” It’s okay to not be at a place that is no longer serving me. And also what I challenge leaders with when they say, “Oh, I have an employee who– or I don’t want to hire this job hopper or I have an employee leaving and I want them to stay,” it’s focusing on is that what’s serving you or what’s serving them? Is that in your best interest or their best interests?
It’s going to cause more turmoil, more destruction, and keep somebody there who’s not happy and engaged and productive than it is to support somebody for a short tenure, give them the tools they need to be more successful, because that’s contributing to society overall, like regardless of where they’re working, whether it’s for you, a competitor, or a completely different industry, you’re giving them knowledge and training them to be the best professional that they can be while they’re at your organization, that’s contributing to the greater good, which I think we’re not there yet it within the organizational lens because we’re all about ROI and that piece, but it is slowly shifting there. Yes, people also still have to do what’s best for them.
It’s interesting that you talk about the difference between only thinking about what’s good for the organization versus thinking about what’s good for the organization as well as what’s good for that employee. You kind of briefly touched base on this idea that, long term, which is something that’s been on my mind for my entire career, to be honest, of like you can get that employee to do what you want that employee to do how you want them to do it, etcetera, around your interest, around your organization interests, but how long are they going to be happy and how long are they going to continue to be productive? If we’re looking at Q2, Q3, Q4, yeah, okay, you’ll probably get what you want, but if you’re looking at 2027, 2028, well, how long can that go? So, what is your general tactic when talking with leaders, I know some people don’t really always respond to this idea of the greater good so is there other tactics that you tend to use on people to kind of explain to them that, okay, maybe what you’re doing now, the manner in which you’re trying to get what you want is not really going to give you a great result long term?
So it depends on the specific situation, if it’s really drilled down to like the example of we have an employee who wants to leave because they want to pursue something else within their career and they no longer want to do what they’re doing here, the first question I often ask to leaders is did you have conversations with them ongoing about what they wanted to do? Were you even aware that what they were doing was not creating fulfillment for them? Because depending on the organization, there’s oftentimes that you can slowly pivot their role to get them doing more and more of the work they’re wanting to do, assuming they don’t want to jump from doing something like engineer over to therapist, like that’s such a gap. But, oftentimes, like my shift, when I use myself as an example, is not so drastic that there were ways that I could slowly pivot with time without having to change roles, but I, at the time and my level of awareness, I didn’t know to ask for those things, like how can I continue to pivot. I also didn’t really know what I wanted fully, like I had to learn that myself. So when leaders come to me and share that, I say, well, what have you learned about the employee? What do they even want? Nine times out of ten, the leader will be like, “I don’t know, I don’t know what their long-term aspirations are,” because, often, employees are afraid to share what they want, fearing that if it’s not in complete alignment with what the organization wants, they’re going to get fired. So many employees are still operating from the space of fear instead of this space of trust, of the organization trusts me to say what I truly want to do and I’ll sit here and give my best effort and be as productive as I can until my time runs up, whether that time is a year, 10 years, 20 years, whatever that may be, like leaders just have to realize if you are transparent and communicate with your team, they’ll tell you what’s going on and then you’ll be prepared for when they do want to leave. So, in the event they do want to leave, you can have a runway to support them and a runway to support yourself. It can be a mutual party instead of this like hostile thing where somebody gives two weeks and the workplace comes back and they’re like, “Hey, tomorrow’s your last day.” I hear that time and time again of like people reacting or responding negatively to people leaving the organization instead of being proactive on supporting people appropriately throughout their life cycle within an organization so that when they do leave, it’s this wonderful mutual parting.
So what needs to shift, both from the perspective of the employee that maybe wants to make a shift and, say, you’re an employee that wants to make a shift but it’s much like yours, like maybe a younger version of you where it’s like, okay, it’s something that can be handled within the organization as opposed to the, “I’m an engineer, now I wanna be a therapist,” which that’ll oftentimes not really work. From that perspective, what needs to shift? Or is it more important right now for the general culture of the organization to shift to make people more comfortable, less fear based and less thinking, “If I say what I really want, I’m gonna get fired or have some other weird punishment where they’d give me terrible assignments,” or something like that?
Yeah, it needs to shift at the organizational level in order to create the space at the employee level. So I’m sure you’ve heard the term psychological safety tossed around. It’s been tossed around the past couple of years. It’s truly kind of the foundation when we talk about things like trust and culture, or even inclusion, psychological safety is at the core of that.
So people will not trust their leaders, will not trust their managers, will not trust their organization if they don’t feel psychologically safe to do so. Share on XSo it really does need to shift at that organizational level to create the space for the employees to say what they need and have that transparency, that level of communication. And that really starts with, one, being clear on the culture you want to create within an organization and then aligning behaviors and your processes, structure, policies, everything you do within your organization to that culture you want to create and then training your managers and leaders to be in support of that and holding people accountable to that. Often, what I see with most organizations, they’re like, “Oh, we have a vision statement, we have values,” it’s like, great, so how many people in your organization can name the values? Are they actually real values or ones that you made up 10 years ago and they’re just living on a shelf somewhere? And how many of your managers and leaders are actually trained to be leaders, not just to manage the work but to lead employees? Do they know what the difference is? So I encounter organizations time and time again that don’t really fully dive deep into that space because they don’t know what it is and they feel it’s more of a check-the-box mentality than, oh, this is a true strategic initiative that we need to put time, energy, and effort on and it’s not just something HR does, it has to be something that the organization does.
And are you seeing any progress made on, I guess what we can kind of summarize the term being psychological safety that we’re seeing right now in organizational cultures? Do you see organizations making improvements in that area or do you feel like we’ve kind of gone stagnant over the past few years?
That’s a tough one to say, because I feel so often that, especially after 2020, for a variety of different reasons, so many organizations really plummeted into the DE&I space, which is often where psychological safety gets plugged in and there’s a variety of reasons some organizations that stopped, but when it comes to true psychological safety, I’m seeing some organizations still push forward. They recognize and realize that the future generations are the generations that are about to be majority of the workforce. I was told last week by someone that millennials are actually going to be the largest generation in the workforce, I believe, 2025, which is next year, that millennials and Gen Z in particular are looking for that. They’re looking for psychological safety, they’re looking for trust, they’re looking for transparency in the culture they work in. So, for the organizations that already have a pretty dominant millennial or Gen Z workforce or want to support those in that space within their workforce, I see them keep moving that forward. Others, I see some resistance for them. Like we did the work, we had a speaker come in, we did one training, they’re still in that check-the-box mentality of “We did something once, we don’t need to do something forever,” where I push back on those organizations and leaders and say, “Well, if you would have only learned addition, how would you also be able to do multiplication?”
You have to continue to learn, it’s not just a one and done thing. Share on XYeah, that makes sense. And the discussion about psychological safety or even how comfortable someone feels speaking about things is definitely tied in to the primary discussion that you had at Startup Week about traumatic experiences and trauma because having encountered a bunch of that myself, I know that every single person responds differently and you mentioned this a bit in your talk, how there’s a lot of organizations with that standard, will give you five days bereavement, and some people don’t want any, some people want to go right back into their work because that’s how they’re coping and others need to step away for a while. How do you see that kind of playing out in the organizations that you work with? Are you helping them not only with employees that can speak up and say, “Hey, this is great opportunity but I kinda wanna start moving into this direction. Is there anything you can do to help me?” as well as the employee that needs to say, “Hey, I just lost my uncle in a tragic car wreck and I need X, Y, and Z,” whatever that is.
Yeah, so I do both. I mean, the reason I did the talk at Startup Week is my first passion is, unfortunately, the trauma space. Or fortunately, I guess, because, as I shared, there’s only two things in life inevitable – life and death. And I have just found, especially I have like nine deaths in nine years, I mean, I’m 32 so before the age of 33, is a lot. And so because I was catapulted into that and had such a compressed experience with death and saw the way that society and workplaces and clients and just a variety of things responded around me, I just was having so many conversations with people about, “Oh, I also lost this person and nobody knew what to do,” and it prioritized kind of the importance for me on why focus there typically, but not all organizations are ready for that conversation yet. So I do the other work too with organizations and leaders on just talking about, again, that culture side. How can we support people regardless of what that is? Oftentimes, that trauma naturally comes up because I’ll have a leader say to me, “I have a person on my team who shared that they’re dealing with this personal item, what should I do?” or, “I had an employee leave because of these personal matters. I wish I could have supported them better.” So, sometimes, it often comes up, even if that’s not what they’ve reached out for, like the overarching goal, and sometimes that’s where organizations feel safe to start. Again, trauma and grief is scary for people to talk about. We’re not yet as a society at a place where, which is why I do what I do, where we can talk about it openly, vulnerably, and in a transparent way, because most people don’t even know how. They see the words and they get nervous or freeze up or don’t know what to do. But because it’s all so connected, like we’re human beings, unless you are overseeing a team of AI bots or some type of machine, you have to recognize that your team that reports to you is human or that the people operating those machines are human and they’re going to have individualistic names, they’re going to have different pasts, they’re going to have different stories, and we’re all not the same. And so much I think this is, again, where I felt misalignment in the HR space on that compliance side is so much of what we do in the day-to-day work is here’s what we have, like bereavement, we have three days of bereavement leave or five days of bereavement leave. It’s the standard generic offering to somebody to support them when we’re not actually looking at the person in front of us and asking them what they need from us as their leader or manager, especially around things like trauma and grief. It’s very individualized and even personal and professional development is super individualized to each person.
Oh, yeah, for sure. One thing I oftentimes refer to the old or incumbent work culture as being very one size fits all, whether it’s vacation policy, whether it’s policy around even like time of work and stuff like that, because people have different circadian rhythms. I remember reading about that and how we kind of encompass all of that. As you were kind of feeling a little bit distressed about the compliance side, what allowed you to kind of move into the stuff that you really wanted to do? Were you able to speak up in your organization? Were you able to find a way to kind of work with the people there, to say, “Okay, I really want to move in this direction”? Is this something that you’ve been able to live yourself or did you have to kind of chart your own path that you’re now bringing to these other organizations?
It was a combination of both. I think, again, at first, I was young and didn’t know and I was just exploring, you know, this doesn’t feel right for me. At the time, I wouldn’t have been able to put the words to it if it doesn’t feel right for me, it was just more of like, “I feel like I’m at my capacity here. I feel like I’ve reached the limit here, like the ceiling.” It wasn’t more of that, “This feels out of alignment,” so especially when I was younger, that was it. So I’ve been a consultant for most of my career and this company I’m at, my last company I was a consultant, the last company I was at I was definitely able to pivot more into what I want to do. This company, that’s all we do, the company I work with so it’s also the ability to find the right place for me to do that work. But, again, it took me, what? Thirteen years to fully understand what I wanted to do. And even though I knew in my guts 13 years ago that I wanted to do something that helped people, I wasn’t really crystal clear on what that could be and I’m fully aware that that could continue to evolve. One day, I could exclusively help people in a different way and I think I just remain open to that. I think so often we get, especially like the way we’re taught – education in school is we’re perceived that you follow a certain path, you stay in that path, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You got a finance degree, you go into finance. We feel that that’s what’s right based off of what society’s telling us, instead of saying, “Okay, I have these strengths, how can I apply these strengths for what feels aligned for me?” and following that. It’s hard because we all have to pay our bills, I get that, you have to have a job. The biggest thing is just time, understanding, being curious, exploring. I was always pretty fortunate I’ve had really good leaders that I reported to regardless of the companies I worked for, I always was lucky in that sense. I think that is one of the biggest things that enabled me to probably have the confidence to leave companies and apply for a new job or ask for things like, “Hey, I’d like to do more of this. I’d like to explore this.” It created that space for me. I’m also naturally a person that is pretty good at vocalizing my own needs but I do attribute quite a bit of it to the leaders I had so that’s why I focus so much of the work I do with organizations on the leader side because if you have good leaders, good managers, again, people leave, managers typically in organizations it’s the number one reason, then people will feel more safe and secure to do what they need to do, ask for what they need to ask for. And, again, at the end of the day, if somebody, it’s not the right fit for them after six months, yes, I get that it has an ROI impact for the business but that was six months that they contributed to your team and they’re going to be better off for it and, like I said, society will be better off for it because of it.
So if somebody doesn’t have that leader in their lives, what do you think someone in that situation can do? Is there a way that someone can cultivate a mindset, whether it be stopping and slowing down, paying more attention to things, anything else, where someone can actually be able to start discovering who they are, what they want, why they’re feeling this misalignment? Why someone’s feeling dissatisfied?
It’s interesting, I had a conversation similar with a friend and I won’t obviously disclose much, it was a pretty recent conversation, where this particular friend was sharing with me that their childhood upbringing forced them to be focused on their education their entire life. They never had the ability to explore what they enjoyed, what they loved. So as an adult now, they’re really exploring that and they feel that they put so much of their pressure on who they are into their career. And they’re like, “I don’t even know if this is what I wanna do. Is this what I –” and this person’s in their 30s, again, “Is this the – do I really even like this work? It’s what I’ve gotten a PhD in, but is it even the work I wanna be doing?” is the conversation I had with a friend. And this person does not have a leader within the organization that they could ask these questions to, which is probably why they had this conversation with me instead. So for those folks that are in this position of like, “I don’t have anybody who I can view as a leader that I respect, that I trust, that I can have conversations with that could either help guide me or give me feedback and help and support,” for any things you can do, one, I think podcasts are a beautiful thing because they’re free most of the time and they are abundant. There are so many podcasts out there about what you record, what others record talking about how people got to where they are. There’s so much good free advice on the internet now that it’s hard to ignore that and I think so often I meet with people, I’ll say, “Well, what books have you read? What podcasts have you listened to? Who’s your favorite speaker?” and most the time, people are like, “I don’t know.” I’m like, “Well, go find someone,” Find someone you admire. For me, Brene Brown is one of the most amazing people, I know a lot of people have her on their top five list. If I could be Brene. Brown, that’s a goal in life. So I tell those folks, I’m like find someone you aspire where you can get advice from. If you don’t have a leader and you truly need support, there are a lot of great coaches out there. Hire a coach work with a coach. Again, the coaching profession is not super regulated, which is why I got a board-certified credential so just make sure your coach is certified. Find somebody you can work with who can help you unpack that and figure that out. Of course, that costs money, but at least that gives you someone who can help you navigate what should you be doing or where should you be going or how can you navigate your current situation to the best of your ability without risking telling your manager or leader how you feel if you’re worried they’re going to turn around and fire you. So that’s the second piece would be if you have the ability to a coach. Otherwise, that friend I mentioned before, the advice I gave to this person was write out a list of things you like about your job and you don’t like about your job. It can be as simple as I like the people I work with or I like sending emails, I like working with clients, like I told this person write it out, every couple months, revisit that list and see how it evolves, see how that grows. And then, over time, you can see what do you like doing and what do you not like doing. And then, hopefully, you can figure out where can you go from there. How can you slowly inch your way into roles that focus more on what you like or your strengths versus what you don’t like? And that’s also free.
And that’s like one of the beautiful things about the modern world. Now, obviously, we have tons of distractions as well but the resources is wonderful. And one thing that I kind of wished for a while is the way we kind of orient our spending habits, because there are people who will just, drop thousands, tens of thousands of dollars on stuff without scrutinizing it nearly as much as people scrutinize working with like a coach in some sort of way. I feel like that there’s just like, for some reason, unnecessarily replacing your furniture or something like that and people will be like, “Oh, yeah, $8,000, sure, go ahead,” but then when it’s like $3,000 to work with a coach for three months or something, it becomes a little bit more – I don’t know, people just tend to hesitate a little bit more. Do you think that’s partially related to that whole story of the person who’s so laser focused on their education that didn’t take the time to think about like who am I, what do I value, where do I want to prioritize my own efforts and resources?
I feel like there’s probably a million reasons why people do that. I mean, when I always tell people you spend money where it’s important to you. I have my own coach that I pay for out of my own pocket that I’ve been working with for over three years because my development, personally and professionally, is important to me. It is intrinsic to who I am. One thing that I’ve talked about, I do this training and exercise, there’s something called life domains or like the wheel of life, some people know it as where you can fill in the eight to ten things that are most important to you and then how much energy and effort you spend into those. And we can only derive so much satisfaction out of one life domain. So when I talk to somebody who’s like, “I’m not willing to invest in a coach,” but personal and professional development is on their wheel of things that are eight to ten of the most important things to them, I’m like, “Okay, well, how is your level of satisfaction gonna increase if that’s not something you’re willing to invest in?” Because if everything else is great, like your family, your relationships, whatever, you can only get so much satisfaction out of that. So, oftentimes, those folks who were like, “Oh, I’ll go spend money on furniture but not a coach,” their personal and professional development satisfaction is decreased. Their career satisfaction is decreased. Oftentimes, their financial satisfaction is decreased because they feel that they’re not making enough and they should be making more. So there’s so many things that go into it. So when I encounter those folks, I mean, I ask a variety of questions but, at the end of the day, it’s like you have to choose how you want to invest.
I think sometimes coaches have this bad stigma of like, it is expensive, it’s not free, it’s not cheap, nor are therapists which are necessary too, but there are so many coaches I know that will let people work hourly and they’ll let them do one session a month so that people can afford it and make it manageable. You have to be willing to explore, and I think, especially in our society today with things like TikTok, people will just take the first thing they get and they see and when it’s an answer they don’t like, they’re like, “Okay, well, I guess I can’t work with a coach,” instead of when I meet clients that are like, “Hey, maybe it’s not the right fit or it’s not the right price,” I’m like, “Great. I know 50 plus other coaches I can refer you to. Would you like some other information and you can see if it’s a better fit for you?” Like just ask and be willing to explore instead of take the first answer you get at face value.
Oh, that makes perfect sense because there is that decision fatigue, right? Even someone that wants to work with a coach, you start exploring online or you go to any networking event in your home city, depending on what city you’re in, you’re going to encounter a lot of different resources so it’s wonderful that, you know, have that network of people that you can refer people to. Now, when you work with organizations, is it kind of a similar vibe here, whereas like, personally, we’re all reflecting our values by where we’re choosing to spend our time and money, “I’m gonna choose to spend time and money working with a coach,” versus, “I’m gonna choose to spend time and money trying to afford a fancier car,” or whatever your standard thing is, is it a similar decision that these organizations are making where you’re looking at these organizations that you’re working with and figuring out which ones are really going to put the time and money and effort into cultivating their leadership through services like your own?
Absolutely. So, oftentimes, we’ll get met with leaders saying, “Oh, well, it’s too expensive, or that’s not in our budget right now,” and we’ll ask questions like, “Well, how much is it costing you to not invest in this?” and one statistic that’s out there and it’s pretty well known is that the cost to replace somebody is two to four times their salary. I just use the figure 100 grand because math is not my best forte off the top of my head, so if you lose somebody that their salary is 100,000 a year, it’s $200,000 to $400,000 to replace that person. When an organization says to me, “Sorry, we don’t have that money,” one, either they truly don’t want to do it because back to the phrase, people find money for what’s important to them, organizations will find money for what’s important to them. They either won’t buy as many, you know, maybe not snacks but they won’t have as many people take clients out to eat for that month or they’ll find ways to reorganize expenses in order to pay for it. So, when organizations do ask those questions, either, one, again, it’s not important and they truly don’t value it, which to me means they don’t have the commitment or dedication that would be necessary to even create success, or, two, they’re not there yet. I think, again, these words of “culture,” “psychological safety,” “trust” are still so faux pas for many executive-level leaders and it’s so much of, “We don’t need to do that. We don’t need to invest in it,” for a lot and that’s okay. But I think in the next 10, especially 15, 20 years, when we have different leaders in the executive seat in different generations, we’re going to see more of a change in this. It is necessary to even be a business that survives to do this stuff.
I fully believe it, that the organizations that thrive and survive are going to be the ones that invest in leadership development, invest in culture work. Share on XWe see it all the time. We see those workforces more productive. We see those companies making more money. We see them retaining people more. We see the data play out when we work with those organizations and support them. People just aren’t there yet. Like it’s the change curve. We’re always going to have the late adopters and folks that are not there yet. And, as a consultant, I think I have just learned to, it’s maybe I’ve been a little diluted because I’ve been a consultant for so long, I’ve seen so many different stages of organizations, but it’s up to the individuals to decide and, typically, at the organizational level, those individuals that get to decide are at the top.
Yeah, so it’s going to take a little while before a lot of these people kind of get on board with the type of leadership development work that you’re doing. Now, tell me a little bit about what this leadership development work looks like and what does it look like to be like a true leader that considers these things, like psychological safety and how to make a workforce where people can kind of truly be who they are?
So it’s different for every organization and every person. I’ve probably said that a lot. You’re like, “Okay, we get it.” But that’s I think so much of coaching and consulting, back to your phrase before, one size can’t fit all anymore and we can’t have that approach when working with organizations. Even if I work with an organization that is the exact same size and exact same industry and exact same city, it’s still oftentimes a very different approach, because the problems that they have going on within their organizations are going to be different. There may be some crossover but it’s not time and time again the same. There’s typical themes that we see but it’s not always consistent. The biggest thing that I try to get all organizations to say yes to, which I don’t feel is a huge investment, especially for organizations that aren’t ready to spend a huge organizational investment on the consulting side, is at least start with one training. Train your leaders on what it even means to be a leader. Because 90 probably some percent of the managers and leaders I meet when I ask them what type of training have you received about being a leader, every time they tell me no, like none, “I figured out on my own.” So when I ask them, okay, well, what does it mean to lead with emotional intelligence? What does it mean to be empathetic? What does it mean to be vulnerable to your team? What does it mean to have transparency with the team you lead? They have no idea. They say, “Well, I’ve just figured it out.” They’re piecing things together on their own instead of the organization setting a tone for here’s how we want our leaders to be emotionally intelligent, creating consistency so when an employee is on one team and transfers to another team, there’s so much inconsistency because they’re not providing any platform for people to learn. So, for organizations, one of the places I always say to start is just start with some type of training, like just start training your managers and leaders. Yes, it’s only going to move the dial like a slight bit but at least you’re starting to move the dial. For the organizations that are ready to kind of fully jump in and make that splash on how they should, we’ll take a more holistic approach. We’ll do assessments, we’ll do diagnostics, we’ll interview people, we’ll do different surveys, we’ll read through their different policies and programs and procedures, we’ll understand the structure of the organization, how they manage, how they hold people accountable, how they lead, and then understand what they want their desired state to be and then help them create a transformation to get from that current state to desired state. So the organizations that are all in, that’s what we see them do. The organizations that are a little bit more teetering on the edge of, “Do I wanna do this? Are we ready to invest?” they’ll start with a training and I truly think it’s a great place to start, like starting somewhere is better than doing nothing at all.
Oh, yeah. And people always say doing nothing is also staying where you are, right? That’s also a choice.
Yeah, it’s a decision.
And I love the way that you’re kind of like realistically but also optimistic in the sense of like, okay, we have this churn, we have new generations, we all want something different for our lives, and I think it really comes down to what we want for our lives and the idea that going from, say, age 22, normal time when people, say, graduate college to the age 72, because let’s just be realistic about retirement age here, doing something that’s not really fulfilling and putting this much energy into it at least 40 hours a week, probably more, is just not something that’s acceptable to so many people now. And so, as we go through these transformations, what do you see as like, even the secondary and tertiary effects of if, say, the majority of organizations were to get to the point where we can finally start moving the needle on employee satisfaction and stuff like that and more people are just open and honest about what they want and living lives where their work is not draining them as much anymore?
So I guess we’ll have to relisten to this podcast in like 10 or 15 years to see if I’m accurate but I would say I think there’s so many things that will come out of it. One, I think we’ll have a happier society. Mental health is a huge issue, which is part of the reason, one of the main reasons I do the work I do in the trauma and grief space. I’m not a mental health professional. I’m a board-certified coach but I’m not a mental health professional. And we spend most of our time at work.
So if the workplace can have a positive impact on how we feel, imagine the impact that would have on mental health in our society. Share on XBecause if we like what we did, if we showed up in places we felt respected, if we trusted our leaders, if we felt good about what we did, I mean, I know people that work way more than 40 hours a week but at least 40 hours a week, what would that do for mental health in the society? So I think that’s the first is it would rapidly transform the way mental health is within our country, especially in the United States. When I speak to a lot of what I speak to, mainly referring to the United States. So mental health would be first. I think the second is we would live in a world that cared about not just ourselves, like is a less selfish place. So, so much of what we do is intrinsically motivated for ourselves instead of extrinsically motivated because so many of us, especially early in your careers, are operating from a state of survival. We’re operating paycheck to paycheck. We don’t know what our manager or leader thinks about us. We’re learning so much. So if we could operate more from like less of a selfish place of like, “I have to survive,” and more from a, “I can help everybody and everything,” like supporting the greater good, it would create a ripple effect for all. Happiness would increase. Again, back to the mental health piece but separate from that even, like people would just feel better. We would have a place where we can – like I know so many organizations where people can manage, like work-life balance wouldn’t even be a thing that people talk about when they go into job interviews. When I talk to people who are interviewing for jobs, why does that even need to be a thing? We work, we live, let’s just – like work-life balance is possible, is feasible, it will no longer be a like buzz word, hot topic, it will just be the way that people are. We will just be able to balance our lives and balance work. And then I think the fourth thing of it all is I think, overall, organizations would see less turnover. We would see people staying – millennials, and I am a millennial, we get this bad reputation of we job hop. We stay at careers less time. You mentioned earlier something about like the older generations, when I get that comment from older generations, I’m like, “Well, you realize you raised us, right?” So when the boomers say, “Well, you millennials want this, you ask for that,” I’m like, “But you raised my generation. I don’t know how you can blame me.” My mom so funnily pointed, she was like, “Yeah, we gave you all trophies for participating.” I’m like, exactly so now when you get mad at us for asking for what we want, who can you blame besides yourself? So, same way as a millennial, I cannot blame the generation that I will be raising.
Organizations will see less turnover because people will be able to stay where they want to be. Organizations will be able to find homes for people that is fulfilling Share on XMaybe that is only them working part time because they also want to do a different job part time and it’s more of their passion project. It’s better to retain somebody part time than not at all. Whereas organizations have been very rigid in the way they manage and I think we’ll see a lot more flexibility in the way we manage and meeting the person where they’re at instead of meeting the organization for what they need.
Amazing. I really hope that that future comes to pass obviously, when back and listen to this in 10 years because it does make sense. That’s another thing even about like the work setup of 40 hours per week is a very one-size-fits-all set up as well and maybe someone’s had trauma and they need to do different arrangements for a little while or someone had a baby and they want to be part of their lives as opposed to just dumping them off at daycare or something. Before we finish up, I just want to see if you have any resources, anyone that wants to connect with you based on this podcast, maybe you’re thinking about your own organization, what would be the best way for someone to get a hold of you, contact you?
Absolutely. So, I’m the most active on LinkedIn so if you can drop my LinkedIn link for anyone to follow, and then I have my own website, it’s awakenedempowerment.com, if you can drop that as well for folks. I have a blog on there, I have all my podcast episodes. You can also contact me that way if you don’t use LinkedIn, happy to chat. And, again, either provide you with what I do or connect you with others. I’m very fortunate that I know a lot of great people doing work in this space so if I’m not exactly who you’re looking for, I can provide some recommendations on who could help and whether, again, that’s one-on-one personal, professional level or more at the organizational level, happy to help however I can.
Well, Tamara, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us a bit about your personal story. I know it takes a good amount of, to quote Brene Brown, vulnerability just to share that in front of an audience of listeners who you don’t know, and sharing some resources. I’d like to thank also everyone out there for listening. If you’re interested, Tamara, the links that she’s referring to will be available in the show notes at actions-antidotes.com where you can find all my episodes. And I hope you found some great inspiration and great ways for you to think about bringing yourself in alignment with who you are, which is what we really are kind of wanting for the thing that we spend our most waking time doing.
Thank you for having me.
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About Tamara Fox
Tamara Fox is an Organizational Consultant and Board-Certified Health and Wellness Coach who specializes in Leadership Development and Culture. She partners with organizations to take a holistic look at their wellness/wellbeing programs and helps organizations put the right strategy, tools, trainings, and resources in place to optimize employee wellness/wellbeing and organizational culture. Tamara trains, speaks, and consults to organizations on the topics of grief/trauma and has helped countless organizations, leaders and individuals learn effective ways to better support employees through life’s most difficult times.