Expert Interview: Matthew Cahill - Belonging in the Workplace
Video interview with Matthew Cahill
In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by Matthew Cahill, President of The Percipio Company to discuss belonging in the workplace.
Mari Ryan: Welcome to the workplace will being essential series I’m Mari Ryan. I’m the CEO and founder of Advancing Wellness. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this expert interview. Where we explore topics that impact employee will be my guest today is Matthew Cahill. Matthew is the President and principal consultant of the Pacific to company, where he is on a mission to demystify and D stigmatize cognitive biases, disrupt social biases of all types, and to dismantle bias that's been institutionalized in our respective businesses and public agencies. His work is predicated on the belief that if you have a brain, you have bias. Matthew partners with executives to reduce mental mistakes strengthen workplace relationships and disrupt existing bias within HR processes meeting protocols and corporate policies. Matthew has demonstrated success with large clients like LinkedIn, Salesforce, and dozens of small to medium sized companies looking to create more inclusive workplaces, work smarter, generate more revenue, and move from bias to belonging. Matthew, I'm so excited to have you here for this conversation today.
Matthew Cahill: Thank you, thank you, thank you it's a pleasure. Truly a pleasure.
Mari Ryan: I’m so excited about our conversation today about belonging. As human beings, we all have a need to belong, and that belonging is really a basic need along with safety, shelter, food and all the basics. Let's start our conversation today if we could, by defining what does belonging really mean.
Matthew Cahill: I think you're defining it as in part of your description. It is a fundamental human need. Many would argue now after doing some research that shines a different light on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to say belonging it can even override our sense of survival. Think about research that you may have heard about infants that haven't been touched. We as human creatures, human beings are creatures that need that type of socialization. We need to have that sense of belonging for a general state of well-being. And if it's missing, there is a direct correlation to problems occurring, whether that be in or out of the workplace so belonging to me, is something that I do take, I go to not extreme measures, but very diligent measures to make sure that the definition is understood by everybody engaging in the conversation. Too often, when it's put into the context of a DEI work (Diversity, Equity, Enclusion and Belonging) you'll often hear belonging be added on. And if it's not really thought through, and this is true for the D, the E and the I if you're not really thinking them through and making sure everybody's coming into the conversation with a common understanding. This is the number one indicator that problems are going to arise. That it's going to be others in some way, shape or form by the people, engaging in the conversation and therefore other ring leads to exclusion and people aren't having that sense of belonging so it's an elusive concept that I appreciate an organization being willing to tackle, because it is a relatively new phenomenon that we're trying to meet that need within the workplace. I think work in and of itself has morphed over the last two years and people are looking to their employers, looking to the workplace to satisfy something that they, at one point in our societal in our history, we're getting through other community-based forums, either through family or church or through some other institution. They have that need met and now it's very audacious it's very bold for a company to try to provide that for its employees.
Mari Ryan: Well, I'm so glad you define that for us, so that we've set the stage of what the conversation is today, but I also find it very interesting that the whole diversity, equity, and inclusion has now involved to include belonging so that's an important step to be able to recognize how important this is.
Matthew Cahill: Absolutely, and I often will go through my own anecdotal history, which is I'm old enough to remember when diversity was introduced to corporate America. And it was couched in language, such as we need to tolerate diversity and that and I think this is where language really matters. And you tolerate something like a rash that you want to go away right you don't tolerate something that you want to have become a core part of your business strategy and, and so it was quickly realized, I think that diversity alone is insufficient. And thus, you had D and I, diversity and we need to be inclusive, with people who may not look alike, with one another, I may not think the same way, or may not value the same way, we need to get, we need to be both inclusive and diverse. And of course, out of that conversation equity was born and I think D, I had a very good run up until I'm going to draw random line in the sand, I would say about five years ago, is when I first started hearing belonging being introduced into this context. And what I really like most about the current state of work that I’m doing with my clients is the very intentional definition of belonging as four cornerstones of belonging and framing conversations around each one of those to really shape the culture of a workplace, so that is leading to more productivity more revenues greater employee retention.
Mari Ryan: There is lots of great impacts to all this work that you're doing. You mentioned this in the work you do as a consultant advising organizations on creating these diverse and inclusive cultures, you've developed a framework that you just started to mention there and I’m wondering if you can take us through that framework, and those four elements.
Matthew Cahill: Absolutely. The first cornerstone of belonging is what I call identity and identity is not only an individual's race, gender culture age, orientation, neuro ability, communication style personality type. It's all of those things right. It's how we show up in the workplace and so identity is the first step towards understanding, who you are essentially and then it's morphed into who you are in your respective workplace, and this is where I start to segue towards agency.
Agency is the second cornerstone for a culture of belonging and agency is defined as an individual's ability to demonstrate confidence in the role that they're playing within that organization. I think an easy example would be a look at you know, a CFO is a white male they're stepping into a role that's traditionally defined by other white men. If you're a black female CFO in an organization your experience is going to be very different. So that role becomes a defining characteristic right, it becomes the lens that you look through to analyze problems within the workplace. And having both an identity that matches that role, you know make some things a lot easier, but also having. Your identity align with the passions the skills, the experience that you have within an organizational context, so you can grow and take on more responsibility and be more productive. All of that is wrapped up in that person's sense of agency within the organization. And when you go, you know make that shift from going from your self-reflective identity so to how you represent and show up in the workplace, your agency
Now we're in a really good position to tackle power. Power is the third cornerstone of belonging and power is so often ignored. It's ran away from and other times it's unconsciously driving us towards certain people, places, and things because we want, we like to be in close proximity with power. There's a sense of security with that, but what I found by explicitly calling it out and power is who has decision making ability within an organization. Sometimes it's you know the owner, the founder. Sometimes it's the CEO other times power has morphed, and it's become concentrated in different areas or different departments, or you know it's really an elusive dynamic, but unless you're really calling out where the power dynamics are and then allowing people to adjust accordingly. Power is always going to influence what how things get done and if it's not really it can be when it's not acknowledged when it's not put out into the open. It can start to create weird power dynamics, where people you know, are at risk of getting into deeper and deeper trouble if they're not acknowledging power in that context, and so I think that that's really where the you know the heavy lifting of this work comes into play when you're doing organizational work and it needs to look at all levels of the organization from the structure of it. The Board, the executive team what's the makeup of that team. How did decisions get made? What is the level of transparency? These are all things that you can start to unpack when you start to look through that lens. So that ultimately, we're going to calibrate things so that as many people as possible for as much of the time that they're engaged in their work are hitting states of flow.
That's the fourth cornerstone for a culture of belonging, you have groups of people who have a high degree of flow in their daily routines. And flow is pulled directly from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on transformative states, when in the workplace. So those are the four cornerstones: identity, agency, power, and flow and I've developed an assessment that kind of opens up the conversations to get people you know leaning into discovering where they're at with these different four cornerstones of belonging and as corporations like to do it nonprofits like businesses like to do we measure them, and so it gives you a measurable quantifiable number, so that you get a sense of where you're at and what areas, you need to potentially work on.
Mari Ryan: I love it and I’m curious about a few things in talking about this. We'll talk about the assessment in a minute, but I do want to learn more about that. When you talk about power, power is usually something that is tied to a role and yet increasingly we see people within organizations who have informal, what I think is defined as informal authority. So they have influence. But not as a result of the role or job title that they might have more as a result of their ability to influence thinking of other people, be able to rally people around concepts. I'm just wondering if you could talk about when it what happens in that power dynamic when you have someone who is not in a formal role, but has more informal authority or influence.
Matthew Cahill: Your question is what happens when that dynamic is present?
Mari Ryan: How does it influence the power dynamics.
Matthew Cahill: I think it's inevitable it's going to happen in in every workplace. The example that popped to mind was if you have an executive team, even if it's a small business and there's an executive assistant that may be dedicated for one person, it may be dedicated for one or more people, depending on the size of the organization. That person can often have the greatest amount of power. As that person is determining like the they're writing the agenda, they're determining what memos get put up on the top, they're determining what calls get forwarded their. You know they are such a source of unacknowledged power in many cases. I think the personality types that come into play if it's an organization that values, more of a consensus building or, at least, including people in on decisions and establishing a process that's going to go through stages and obviously take more time, that's really I think how the power dynamics are ultimately defined. You can at the onset say, you know that the CEO is going to make you know, is going to have the final say on whatever, but how that person handles that power, what do they do with it that those are the governing questions when you start to look through that lens. Right, who has the power and what are they doing with it, and those are great Those are two great starting questions to start to really see where it is in an organization.
Mari Ryan: Such interesting topics I live on the topic of flow, this is something you know, having studied a lot in this area of behavior I’m certainly familiar with, but I’m not sure that the average person in the workplace necessarily is familiar with this concept of flow and I’m curious about how you introduce this topic and help people recognize when they're having flow experiences.
Matthew Cahill: I think it's often sports is the easy analogy. As people are at least somewhat familiar usually, especially if you've grown up in an American culture you're familiar with various sports. And you hear that expression “in the zone” or “the hot hand fallacy”. It's really a fallacy, but that it's become so indoctrinated into our culture that it's easy to point to those as examples of somebody being you know, in the zone or having that state of flow and then couple that with a definition as a transcendent state of being where you lose track of time and now you can start to relate it down to what somebody is doing. Whether they're writing contracts, whether they're writing a book, whether they're doing preparing for a presentation, whether they're doing research. Whatever it might be. Maybe they're gardening. It could be any type of activity, but it's that the you identify those moments when you have been engaged in that activity and just lost track of time. And I think that's a great starting point to give people a very tangible way to understand and relate it to their own experience.
Mari Ryan: That's great. I love it and let's hope people do get into more flow experiences because it's certainly a great way to be able to work and be productive. I'd love to learn more about the assessment that you mentioned. Can you tell us what this is about and how you use it with your clients and in your work.
Matthew Cahill: Sure, the belonging assessment is taking those four cornerstones of belongings, and I carefully crafted five questions for each one of the four cornerstones so it's a total of 20 questions. It takes about four to six minutes to go through it, but it's really important to take a few moments to get in the right mindset before you go into this 20 question assessment. I say that because our workplace is so biased towards efficiency. We want to optimize everything we want to be, you know hit deadlines we want to just be press, press, press. We want to use stress in a positive way right. Like it's underneath just about everything that's done in the modern workplace. Which is also why people are so stressed out because it's whether or not, it's intentionally or consciously called that. When you introduce this type of these mechanisms to sort of drive or govern behavior. That's what's happening under the surface, right is you're starting to in many cases overvalue that aspect of our work. And what the belonging assessment asks you right out of the gate is to pause. Take a few deep breaths and really be put on a reflective mindset and then proceed with answering the questions. There's no trick questions in there. There's no questions that are designed to kind of you know weighted differently if you answer one. It's one to ten scale. Ten is high one is low and you go in and respond to the questions where you, you know where you see yourself, most of the time in in the in the workplace that's a key addition to put into your framework because a lot of times, people will ask me, are you referring to my personal life or my professional life or and my response to them is yes. I believe that in the modern workplace a couple things have to fundamentally change. And this line of demarcation that we that was once part of an agrarian age or an industrial age where you were doing a physical act, and that was your work and then you would you know be separate from that when you're resting or eating or sleeping or whatever. In the modern workplace, much of our work is happening up here (points to head) and it's happening all the time, so the think you can use an eight-hour day as an effective way to capture work is silly to think that you can be something else when it's just you whether you be at work or at home. You know, and then COVID just eradicated the line altogether where we're all still in our homes and pretending we're at work it's really a peculiar phenomenon but I think getting into that mindset being very self-reflective and then going through the questions and the most you know honest way possible, will give you an indicator of where you're at. And then the way I work with my clients is to use that individual score and then show them what they've scored collectively. One of the key ways our brains make sense out of the world is by comparison. So we see where we're at in relation to the rest of our organization right and that's often helpful to see where you're going to focus your time, effort, energy and attention.
Mari Ryan: And do you use this to measure over time? Do you do this as a time one time to time three kind of thing to measure change in that sense of belonging?
Matthew Cahill: Absolutely. My bias when it comes to any type of assessment, whether it be a Strength Finder, enneagram, DISC, Myers Briggs, any of these types of assessments, whether they personality inventories or whether the communication diagnostics they're measuring essentially a snapshot in time, some of them are more consistent than others. But in other cases, it's really you can score very differently depending on what you had for breakfast that day. You could score very differently than if you had a bad argument before you actually going in and taking it, so I think assessments are best thought of as snapshots and their data points and the belonging assessment is just that it's a snapshot it's a data point we're going to do some. You know programming some content we're going to have conversations we're going to change some behaviors we're going to hold each other accountable over a period of time. And then we'll go back in and take it again and see literally is the needle moving because you know we love to measure things and, and so this gives us a way to measure this elusive sense of belonging.
Mari Ryan: Well it's important to measure I think that's a really important element, and I really applaud you in developing this type of an instrument that you can use because how else will we know if there's change, and I really think it's important to be able to measure this and be able to show that behavior has changed, attitudes have changed, bias has diminished, and really be able to make sure that we're showing impact.
Matthew Cahill: Absolutely and then you know the ultimate arbiter is, are we growing as a company? Are we increasing productivity? Are we decreasing attrition? Are we retaining employees? Are we like these are more concrete business results that are intimately tied to the work that I’m doing.
Mari Ryan: Such important work. I'm so grateful that you are doing this kind of work. I have another question for you, I was recently listening to Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart and in her book she differentiates between belonging and fitting in. I'm wondering if you can talk about the difference between those.
Matthew Cahill: Absolutely. I refer to Brené Brown as Saint Brené, by the way. And, and when Saint Brené talks, I tend to listen. So very big Brené Brown fan, and I love when she brings this differentiation up. Because my understanding of it, and my interpretation of what she's describing is the difference between a culture that's looking to assimilate its employees and a culture that's looking to bring out the value add of employees and comes into the language. I consult and work with hiring managers and with HR teams to get them thinking of employees, new people coming in, as being a culture add to the organization, not a culture fit. When you're looking for fit your there's implicit in that an assimilation component, where you want somebody to fit into something that you've defined predefined. And more often than not, that predefinition was based on somebody else somebody else that had that role right or somebody else that vacated that role, and to think that somebody new could actually be a watered down version of somebody else's silly so really disrupting that. At the source, which is how we're going to frame it and what we're looking for and then how we're going to see. If this person's uniqueness, that if their identity and agency are really going to allow them to flow in this role right, the way that we've designed it, the way that we have it within our cultural context. And so, I think when you do the latter, when you're looking to have employees, be a culture add. Now you're creating the conditions to have a culture of belonging, which isn't a form fitted watered down version of somebody that no longer exists in the organization right.
Mari Ryan: Such an interesting distinction. I'm so glad that we took time to talk about that, because I think too often people know the old hire to fit kind of stuff. We have to stop thinking that way and start thinking more along these lines of what does it really mean to belong.
Matthew Cahill: I couldn't agree with you more and embrace St Brené also agrees.
Mari Ryan: Apparently so. Matthew, if our audience wants to learn more about you and the work that you're doing where can they find you.
Matthew Cahill: The easiest spot my favorite go to spot is the Percipio company website, so it is all one-word Percipio.Com. And there you'll see right away there's a couple assessments. You can take if you're intrigued to learn a little bit more about the bias assessment. I hadn't I didn't talk about that all that much but that's often a great starting point to understand your identity and who you are in the workplace, because you know bias doesn't discriminate bias is universal, if you have a brain, you have bias and so it's much more effective and much more constructive to really look inside, to see what your biases are how have they been influencing your decision making and your relationships and how are they often times influencing the trajectory of your career and it's nearly always a good exploration to take.
Mari Ryan: Excellent. Well, I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing, the impact that it's having, all these great tools and resources that you've created. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you and to learn from you.
Matthew Cahill: Yhank you. You're the best. Thank you for having me.
