Create A Culture Of Honesty With Justin Jones-Fosu

 

Justin Jones-Fosu, founder and CEO of Work. Meaningful., is here to discuss why organizational culture requires not just raw strength but also unflinching honesty in order to thrive. Together with Adam Markel, they unpack how truth is the bedrock of resilience that allows organizational cultures to unlock long-term strategic growth over short-term gains. Justin also talks about the role of honesty in turning even the biggest challenges into learning opportunities that drive lasting and impactful change.

 

Show Notes: 

• 01:27 – Learning And Growth Beyond Your Comfort Zone
• 04:02 – The Power Of Travel In Broadening Perspectives
• 08:34 – Adventurous Travels And Summiting Big Mountains
• 16:36 – Bridging Personal Experiences With Work Lessons
• 23:54 – Recognizing Cultural Struggles In Organizations
• 35:09 – Resilience As A Key To Organizational Success
• 49:31 – Building Resilience Through Pain, Failure, And Growth
• 52:53 – Resilience And Character Development In Business
• 56:15 – The Future Of Workplace Culture Post-Pandemic

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Create A Culture Of Honesty With Justin Jones-Fosu

I absolutely love the guest that I’ve got in store for you. You’re going to love this guy. He’s just full of insight, full of energy, just a heck of a great guy. I know this conversation is going to resonate with so many of you. Let me share a little bit more about him and then we’ll bring him out. Justin Jones-Fosu is the embodiment of energy, both at home and as a dedicated father of four spirited children and atop the world’s highest peaks, having conquered one of the famed seven summits.

Justin’s passion for elevation doesn’t end with trekking. It’s mirrored in his professional ascent as a captivating Business Speaker, Innovative Social Entrepreneur and Insightful Workplace Researcher. At the helm of Work Meaningful, Justin is the driving force and CEO behind a movement that empowers organizations across the globe delivering over 50 keynote addresses each year on the pivotal topics of meaningful work and inclusion.

His mission is to ignite a transformation in corporate culture, guiding organizations and individuals to ascend to their peak potential through mastery of mindset, purpose, and performance. Find a comfortable spot to sit down and read or do something active because this conversation is going to go places. You’re going to enjoy very much listening to the insights of Justin Jones-Fosu.

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Learning And Growth Beyond Your Comfort Zone

Justin, you’re a Keynote Speaker, you’re out there in the business world regularly being introduced and all that. It’s fun to hear your bio. It’s weird, I think, too, but people frame you or you have provided that frame for other people to edify you in the presence of other folks. My question at the beginning is really about something that’s not in your bio. What’s one thing that is not a part of your introduction or your bio that in this moment right now you would love for people to know about you? One thing.

I think one thing that is actually pretty central to the work we’re doing with I Respectfully Disagree is every 6 to 12 months I take what I call the Circles of Grace challenge. It’s a challenge that I created for myself because I realized I was not living up to the seeds my mom planted in me years ago, challenging me to leave my circles of comfort to get to experience the beauty of people and cultures around me.

Since I wasn’t doing that, I’m a strategy guy, so I was like, “Let me create a strategy behind this.” Every 6 to 12 months, and I’ll go to events, experiences where I engage with people in either which I don’t know a lot about or I disagree with to ask two questions. One, what did I learn about these events, experiences and/or people and what did I learn about myself as I experienced them? That is something that is not in my bio, but it is a central part of who I am.

Why is that a central part of who you are? Tell me a little bit that.

Yeah, that’s my mom. I remember growing up, my mom and I would go to events. I was like, “Why are we here?” We would go to October Fest and Polish festivals and people powwows and Hispanic Heritage month events and we wouldn’t even go to events that we disagreed with. I’d be sitting there like, “Mom, we don’t even agree with this. Why are we here?”

What I realized is my mom was planting these seeds and I didn’t realize until later that even in the midst of disagreement that there was humanity before us. As I interviewed my mom for my last two books, I was like, like, “Mom, where did this come from for you?” My mom shared a story. I leaned into my mom’s story that she was one of the first Black female air traffic controllers in the Air Force.

She shared a very interesting story that there sometimes, she’d be stationed in Japan for 2 years and there were some soldiers in that same 2-year timeframe that never left base. I remember her sharing with my brother and I, she was like, “I never want you all to be like this, to not leave your home base metaphorically and not get to experience the beauty of people and cultures around you.” I really do believe that it was the seeds that my mom planted years ago that have been the basis of who I am, of being curious about people and cultures. I haven’t always been that way and I had to put some strategy behind it and make sure I was intentional.

The Power Of Travel In Broadening Perspectives

I forget the old quote. I think it might be a Mark Twain quote about travel being the enemy of bigotry, the enemy of closed-mindedness and the like. Travel for travel’s sake and for the enjoyment and stepping outside of your comfort zone, there’s so many benefits associated with that. There’s also just this idea that when you travel you really get to see, I mean for me anyway, I’m just speaking my own personal experience.

There’s very little difference between us, but we have different food tastes, different worldviews. We wear different clothes depending on the climates that we live in. There are all those differences that are clearly differentiators and they’re the most obvious. Yet, wherever I’ve traveled, whether it’s been to Abu Dhabi, the most far away place I traveled earlier in 2024.

Wherever I’ve been, that that’s been the one thing that continually comes back to me that like it’s a reminder. I don’t even know why. I don’t know, Justin, how you feel about this, but I want to know, like I need the reminder seemingly that we have so much in common. Every time I travel someplace, whether it’s the middle of Missouri in a place that I’ve never been to or some place on the other side of the globe, I just come back to the same thing that we’re just baked the same way.

The things we love are the really rooted in the same seeds, and yet I need reminders that that’s the case because my mind perpetually goes to those places where I see the differences or the differences of what’s most obvious. Unpack it for me a little bit. What are you most curious about and do you feel the same way that you need those reminders or not so much?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we need those reminders. To your point, Adam, I think how you travel matters. I’ve noticed some people who go to different countries, they’ll go to the all-inclusive resorts, which is not bad because I’ve been to those and I love them, but they never get to actually experience the real country. They get to experience what the country or that specific resort has manufactured for them to experience.

We all operate at different paces. It does not mean that one person's wrong all the time. It means we just take different approaches. Share on X

For me, I try my best to go and experience the beauty. Great example, international backpacking trip once a year. Part of that is I want to spend at least 3 or 4 days just in the country experiencing what the people experience, going to the restaurants, challenging myself to learn a lot more about it. This upcoming one is Columbia and so going to Cartagena and just engaging and we’re doing an Airbnb in Santa Marta and then doing the four-day backpacking trip to the Lost City.

A similar thing happened in Patagonia when I was in Chile and just being able to experience the beauty of Chile and see unique things. I think how you travel does matter. Just traveling by itself won’t allow you to experience it unless you’re intentional of going off the manufactured or manicured plan.

The second piece of that I think is I actually like both, I love the reminders of our commonalities, but I also love the reminders of our differences. For me, I like digging into understanding. One of the things in the States is that you’ll sometimes go to restaurants and there’ll be bottle service or bottle people or in some places, specifically bottle girls for certain places and establishments. When I was in Chile, it was interesting because I saw the same thing for coffee and I’d never seen this before.

It was like the morning coffee. You saw these bottled women who were coffee women who would come out and bring the coffee and talk to the guys. It was very interesting to see. I was like, “That’s different. I haven’t experienced that. Now I’m curious. Why does that happen?” That’s why for me, I think the most important thing is not only I get to experience and see like, “There’s some great commonalities.” It’s like some things I didn’t think of.

I was like, “Santiago is like New York just with mountains,” and that’s why they call it Sanhattan. That commonality. However, seeing some of the differences, I was like, “This is actually pretty cool.” I love learning. One of those unique superpowers of just choosing to learn and being intentional is helpful. I love the both the commonalities reminders, as well as the difference reminders. I get to understand better why certain things happen differently in some parts of the world and/or some parts of our country.

Adventurous Travels And Summiting Big Mountains

There’s a front and back to things two sides of a same coin. I’m so glad that you brought that up and you’ve done quite a bit of extensive traveling. Share, if you could, a little bit about the more adventurous traveling you’ve done. I heard you summited a pretty big mountain. Is it one of the seven biggest or whatever? Tell us about that

For those that don’t know, there’s this whole concept called seven summits. I didn’t know about it until probably before 2015. I was on a plane watching the movie Everest. For some strange reason, watching the movie Everest where seventeen people died on Mount Everest, inspired me to want to start hiking mountains. I went home and started doing this research.

In the movie, they talked about one of the people doing the seven summits, and this was the last summit. I was like, “What are the seven summits?” I looked, and this is the tallest mountain on every continent. There’s seven. I was like, “How many of these are actually non-technical climbs?” I’m not like an ice picker or belay.

I found out Mount Kilimanjaro in the continent of Africa, which is very significant to me, being a dual citizen of both Ghana and the United States. It was like, “This will be great for my first really big international trek.” Was I in for it. I had no idea what I was leaning into. That was one of the most adventurous things for me in several different ways.

One, there’s several times I wanted to give up. It taught me about the power of resilience and power of community. Two, there were moments where I leaned heavily into ego and realized that I needed to operate in some more humility because of how much I was operating in ego. There were some great lessons that I learned and actually took with me to future hikes and tricks.

Three, I just loved experiencing the different parts of Tanzania. I was able to get to experience of Indian Ocean in Zanzibar and the turtle orphanage and this one cool restaurant where you could sometimes walk up to it, but sometimes you have to take a boat because the tide would come in and out. Also, to go and experience Tanzania and because our guide was from Tanzania and to experience the real Tanzania and go out dancing where every day, to be out there with Tanzanians and engage and just be in the presence of that. There was just this beautiful exchange of both challenging for myself, but then also just the learning about the culture that I didn’t know a lot about.

I want to know more about the actual hike too. It’s not really a hike. What do they call that?

They call it a trek. There are different names for it. The way I talk about is there’s three different versions. There’s hiking, there’s trekking, and there’s mountain climbing. Hiking could just be the woods. You’re just going for a walk, essentially. For me, trekking is where you’re hiking to a specific place or for a specific purpose in that way.

Mountain climbing is what you’ll see in terms of where the people are like in the Netflix specials, where they’re climbing the mountains with their hands, whether they’re using gear or not gear. I don’t do mountain climbing, I love indoor mountain climbing, the fake mountains, but trekking is my thing. When I did Machu Picchu, we backpacked and hiked to get to Machu Picchu. Patagonia, we did the W trek. We were going to the glacier to get there, but there was a very specific focus.

I’m going to be specific now. On this trek that you were on, you mentioned humility. Can you share with us? I feel like humility is such an unsung hero in so many important things in life in terms of our journey in life. I really want to understand when you say humility, what’s that based on? Was it an experience in particular? Was it more revelatory of just the whole thing. What did humility look like? When did it pop up for you, I guess?

Yeah, so as a person, I’ve been hiking before. I did four days in the Grand Canyon. There are some people, this is their first hike, like their first major hike. I went into it from, “This is my hike and I’m going to hike my own pace, my own way that I go.” Going to follow the guides. It’s going to be my personal hike.

There are some times where I thought that was still a good idea because there are times where I felt like they tried to keep the group together, but we were all at different levels. We were at different fitness levels, we were at different things. There’s sometimes I’m going slower than I should and my body temperature is decreasing. I need to be able to continue to keep my body temperature going forward. That’s super important to me.

Another piece of this is where I was like, “I needed to actually be with the group more.” It’s just this interesting balance of being able to also be with the group and realizing that it’s not just me. That it’s not just can I do it, but how am I encouraging others? Where that came up, because there was some times I was just off by myself where I was just off ahead. I didn’t care where the group was. I realized why the whole group didn’t need to stay together. I could’ve been more humble and like, “Let me go with the 1 or 2 people who are still relatively faster and do the hike.

 

Why is that important? On the next hike I did in Machu Picchu, I started day one that way. I remember journaling when I was on Kilimanjaro of like, Justin, you need to check your ego a little bit. It’s not just about you and your pace and your hike. It’s about how do you encourage and inspire other people.” I invited one of my buddies to go on Machu Picchu and I realized, “This is his first hike and I left him.”

I was just like, “Justin, remember what you learned on Mount Kili?” I chose, instead of saying, “How fast can I go, how much can I push myself,” my mission was to be there, lock and step with him. No matter what pace he went, I chose to walk his pace. It was actually a much more enjoyable hike because I had somebody to talk to constantly. That I was able to be there to support and encourage him process. That was one thing that I learned.

You mentioned the power of community as well. What were the ways in which that you saw the power of community?

The encouragement, the noticing what everybody else had done. I had a one, the last day where it was like these ridges that never ended. I felt like DJ Khaled was like the top of each ridge, like, “And another one.” I was just sitting there and wanting to give up. When I turned around, everybody had already given up their backpacks. I was like, “Why haven’t I given up my backpack yet?” I was on the verge of giving up.

One, acknowledging and being exposed to the community and the choices other people have made that may impact my choices. Number two, I also missed out on encouragement. Not only being encouraged by other people, but also encouraging others. That was a unique aspect that I learned through Machu Picchu of that enjoyment I got from just telling my buddy like, “You got this. You’re here.”

I was challenged by external perceptions. There was one woman on our hike, Alicia, who she had lost like close to 100 pounds. She was a school teacher. She was about ten years older than me. When I was at last day, when I was just like, “I’m just going to go and I’m going to challenge myself and go,” guess who was right behind me? Alicia.

Also, just even challenging my own perceptions because I would’ve never have imagined that she would’ve been there. It was Alicia and I and our 2 guides and there was 9 of the people who were behind us. She and I went and we were able to talk. When I got sick from altitude sickness, she had some altitude sickness pills that were helpful for me that had I not gotten, I’m not sure I would’ve made it, Adam. You just talk about just the power of community of who’s around us, that we can actually go further, we can actually do more and we can actually have a much more enjoyable experience when we have true powerful community with us.

Bridging Personal Experiences With Work Lessons

I would love for you to build a bridge between, if you can, and I know you can, I’m confident you can, let’s talk through this. Is there a bridge between that experience or parts of that experience and what you see in and among community in a different context? In the work world, the world of work, I know it’s meaningful to you as it is for me. We both have companies in that space. You do keynote work as well.

How do you bring those lessons? Do you bring those lessons back into that space? What’s the connection between these two things, the world of work and what you have learned and what you learn in these experiences where you’re trekking, both in a solo fashion as well as being really more interwoven into a community of people that are doing are all about that one goal, if you will, getting to a summit or another point on a map.

I’m glad you asked that question. It’s actually a brilliant question because actually this last trip in Patagonia started capturing, what have I learned about company’s business culture from my trekking experiences. Instead of boring you with all the things I learned, I’ll share with you the three things that I think are the bridge to that.

Number one is that we all operate at different paces. One of the things I’ve loved about mountain climbing, trekking, hiking is that nobody takes the exact same path. Even when we’re following someone else, there’s a slightly different version of the way that we go, our stride, our step, our thing. Even in snowshoeing, which I did in Colorado, climbing a mountain, doing that, like trying your best to operate in that person’s step. We all have different steps. Just first acknowledging that all of our ways up the corporate organizational culture mountain are vastly different.

It doesn’t mean that one person’s wrong all the time. It means that we just take different approaches. That’s been helpful, just as an acknowledgement piece that everybody has a different journey. Not every journey’s the same. Number two is that we can actually go further with each other. There is this old African proverb that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

In Kili, I may not have been able to go far without Alicia. That’s the same thing in our corporate world. The culture is that there’s an opportunity when we have meaningful relationships, when we build this aspect of collaboration. One of the things that a lot of organizations are struggling with now is siloed approaches. Marketing is vastly different than finance. Finance is vastly different than HR and sometimes a competition rather than a collaboration about how do we have the biggest impact towards the organizational why and getting to this point. That being a bridge, I think, is helpful in seeing that.

The last thing I would say is this pole pole. At Kili, they talk about pole pole, which means slow, slow. I want to change that narrative and not slow, slow, but sometimes slow is good, but strategic, strategic. As a strategy person, I feel like we often approach society and our organizations with what I call the hare approach.

One of my favorite fables growing up is The Tortoise and The Hare. I loved it because in the story, the tortoise was slow and steady, but I’ve been like, “We’ve been calling a tortoise wrong all these years. The tortoise wasn’t slow. The tortoise was strategic.” We only called the tortoise slow because we compared it to the hare. We find out in our society there’s a lot of hares. There’s a lot of people who they want to change culture and it looks good, really quick because they put up a new mission statement. They created a new person, they added a new body counselor, and all these things to the organization.

However, there wasn’t strategic long lasting foundational focus building that allowed for there to be sustainable change and growth. That’s meaningful for me because during my MBA, my focus was leadership and organizational change and that aspect of long-lasting sustainable change is important. Those are the three things that I really saw come to light in my treks.

This is literally why you and I are having this conversation, I’m sure, because our teams found that there was synergy in our philosophy, if you will, our way of looking at the world and at business in particular. I’m wearing a got your back t-shirt now for a reason. For those that are watching this on youtube and those that are reading, just imagine that bald, too. By the way, for those who are just consuming by the way of reading only, we are two bald brothers. We are relatively shiny bald brothers. You’re a little more mocha than me, but I’m a little mocha myself. I’m not pasty.

You’re cream vanilla. You’re not just vanilla.

If you are never afraid, you are not pushing hard enough. You have to intentionally do things that scare you. That is part of your growth. Share on X

I’m definitely not pure White, let’s put it that way.

You’re not Snow White.

I’m not Snow White in so many ways. That is so true. It’s funny you mentioned The Tortoise and the Hare. My wife has used that analogy for so long in certain respects, because I’m an entrepreneur, and like a lot of people that are entrepreneurs, we want to go fast. Right now, we’re writing a book, doing research and interviews and some things regarding culture. In that process, I’m not only exploring what I’ve learned and what I see and observe in other organizations and other leaders and their approach to culture, etc., I also just see what’s been my path looking backwards. It’s always easy to see that path like walking through the snow and you can look back and you can see exactly what led you here.

At times, I have been more the hare. That’s why my wife has been that one to say sometimes, “Think about slow and steady,” because the moral of that story, which is why it is a moral and why we read that story and tell that story to kids, is that the tortoise wins that race. We get it that faster is, again, a part of the DNA, it’s genetic material for entrepreneurs, to go fast. Why wait to build the plane to fly it kind of thing. There’s an element of that being required. I’m not discounting that because the truth is I know it’s not just gotten me to certain places. I’ve seen it get a lot of other business leaders to places where you might not have gotten there if you weren’t ready to giddy up.

Recognizing Cultural Struggles In Organizations

That’s not the whole story. If that is the whole story, there’s likely to be an accident, a fall, more drama, more struggle, frankly, than is absolutely necessary. Struggle is optional on some level when you gain some humility, to go back to what you said earlier. When it’s about ego, then it’s just about plowing ahead, torpedoes, whatever. You just go full steam ahead. You work in that space of culture regularly. I would love to understand from your perspective. I don’t really want to call them mistakes, but when you see that a strategic culture approach to culture is off the mark, what does that look like in your experience?

Is it that going too fast? Is it ego? Is it trying to paint a pretty picture that doesn’t really exist and get everybody to buy into to something that you’re wishing to be the case but really, seeds of it aren’t in the ground? Everything that grows above the ground is the result of what was in the ground. That’s how nature works. I’m just curious. I guess I’m asking is where do you see them struggling in terms of culture where you would say, “This is unnecessary struggle.” Do you see that?

Yeah, I do see it. I think there is not one standard thing because what I found is every organization have been very different. The number one thing that I constantly see that’s the miss is organizations who aren’t willing to be honest with where they really are. That is the number one place because we can’t map out a chart or map out a map of where we’re going if we haven’t fully assessed where we are. That’s the number one thing that I feel I faced resistance from organizations of not wanting to really identify where they are. I used to work for a top financial for firm and global HR and our work around adult learning was a level what we call the four-stage analysis model. I work with organizations and boards to implement this of where we simply go and ask four questions.

Sometimes, this has taken two days. First question is where are we now? That’s a very interesting thing because people often disagree, but finding consensus on where we are now. Second is where do we want to be? Third is what are the barriers preventing us from getting there? Then fourth is how do we remove the barriers?

Now that’s the very strategic focus because you’re looking at different steps about fully addressing where we are first right now. That’s the number one thing I feel like that’s been missing. I’ve gone into some organizations where I’ve sensed an aspect of what I call toxic positivity. Nobody wants to say anything bad about the company, the organization, the leader is one that’s very positive. Nobody likes to challenge. What’s interesting because even in the book I Respectfully Disagree, we identified a whole another part of research that we weren’t even looking for.

Initially, we were just trying to solve for helping people to go from disrespectful disagreement to respectful disagreement. Adam, there’s a whole other category called disrespectful agreement. Disrespectful agreement occurs when in a couple ways where I may say, “Adam, that’s a great idea in the team meeting,” but then behind closed doors, I’m like, “that was stupid. I don’t even know why we’re doing that.”

We may have created a culture where everybody has to go along and agree and there has to be this cohesion and collaboration and so you don’t feel like you can disagree. On the other side, there’s some people who have been taught that as children or even in cultures, that children should be seen and not heard. We bring that into the workplace with us. We go in and we agree or sometimes are silent in places where we could disagree and we end up disrespecting ourself in the process. To answer that question succinctly, I say the number one thing is organizations and teams not being honest and doing an honest assessment of where they really are.

I so appreciate that answer. I love that answer. It also really rings true in my, my experience. One of the things we do at the very outset of any of our engagements is create a specific not a canned assessment, but something that’s really unique to that organization. On this side of culture, we have a particular tool that we use there.

What we find often. I guess our research, if we were doing a Venn diagram right now, we would be seeing that our research, our findings are very similar, yours and ours, in that what is sometimes referred to as psychological safety today is lacking. People don’t either feel empowered to actually speak their minds or they just don’t speak their mind for some other reason or, “That’s not how we do it around here. We speak in a certain way. We have a certain language.”

You putting a name to that or the phrase that using that phrase toxic positivity, sometimes we call it magic thinking. This magical thinking that’s happening, which again, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I get that that’s a Steve Jobs like, what did he call it? The distortion field? What was the name that was given to that?

I know what you’re talking about. Yes.

It’s his reality that everybody just had to get on board with. Yeah, there are very few leaders that have that level of gravitas that in hindsight, you could say, “He was right,” or that he was on point. Often, it’s just this is the view, like this is a senior leader’s view of the state of affairs, like the state of the union. Nobody can really question. We’re bringing in all these tales of yesterday. It reminds me of The Emperor’s New Clothes, that story. Do you remember that one? It’s like everybody’s telling the emperor, “You look great,” but he’s naked.

He’s riding around and he’s nude and nobody has guts to say, “You’re nude,” because then they’ll kill that guy. I do think that’s part of the rhythm of our minds that we fear. So much of how we show up seems to be based in fear. I think that’s what gets in the way of that honesty. When you pointed out that one thing that seems to be a through line, which I so appreciated you bringing that up, that if organizations were just simply more honest about where they are, even if we were saying, “By the way, we don’t know we are.”

I’m going to make a funny joke about this, but the last thing is it’s an old stereotype about guys and men and women and they’re in a car and the maybe the guy’s in the driver’s seat and they go, “Honey, are you lost?” It’s like, “No. I know exactly where I am.” It’s like, “Yeah, can you stop and get directions?” It was back when we didn’t have a GPS and it’s like you had a map.

 

When I started to learn to drive, if you were lost, you had to go pull into a gas station, ask somebody where the you were. That took humility to do that. We’re back again, these threads here. To be honest, you have to be humble. To be honest, you also have to not be operating from a place of fear.

Also, lean into the fear. It’s not operating, I think, with the absence of fear, because that’s almost impossible. I tell people, “If you’re never afraid, you’re not pushing hard enough.” It’s like you have to do things intentionally that scare you. That’s a part of our growth. That’s one of the things that I lean into. That’s one of the things that I think a lot of the corporations and organizations have done.

Now, I want to give some nuance to people like Steve Jobs because I do believe there was this reality distortion field with products and services where I don’t think that works as well as with people. That’s where the difference of we can think through and be creative and innovative and think about products and services and what things could be, that takes the level of reality distortion. However, I think there were people who challenged Steve Jobs on the products, challenged him on services, challenged and disagreed and said, it’s not, “what if we did this?” It wasn’t just Steve Jobs that came up with the iphone idea.

we shouldn’t be looking for end to end control of everything. There were people who challenged him.

Yes. Now you had to prove yourself to have been able to challenge him. You had to be in a person that he trusted, valued, and thought was smarter than him. There are several people who did those things and helped Apple become who the company that it became. Where it’s slightly different is as it relates to people. Do people feel like they can challenge? One of the things that we’ve been challenging and encouraging leaders to do three rethinks. If you’re a leader or you have direct reports, you’re influencing other people, there are three ways that you can lean into helping to create this culture in your team and your organization.

Number one, to tell people you want disagreement. You would think it that simple, but no, because you have no idea the journey people have been on. We’re right now doing a tour with some Toyota manufacturing plants. One of the things, this one lady, and she’s like, “I don’t speak for all my culture,” but from her experience as a Latina, she was like, “I grew up and was taught that children should be seen and not heard, and that a woman’s place was here in a specific thing, in a home, a different thing.”

She was like, “I carried that with me to work and realized as a leader, I struggled at times because I was trying to keep the peace, not rock the boat too much, and realizing that that wasn’t helping with the creativity, innovation and overall productivity of our team.” One, one has to be honest with oneself of what their journey has been. I think with people, we have to be able to tell them, “Yes, you can disagree with me.”

Number two, we have to reward that disagreement, and I don’t mean monetarily, I mean in the meeting, if somebody disagrees with you after you’ve asked for it, reward it in the moment. “Adam, thank you so much for bringing up that point. It makes me think about X,” or, “Thank you for challenging me, because that’s a really important thing to consider.” I tell my team, “I want you to disagree with me. Prove how I’m wrong because if you can’t prove how I’m wrong, then I may have the wrong team around me.”

The second thing is to reward people verbally, because people are paying attention to what you are reinforcing. Number three is to follow up. If you came to a solution, had some innovative idea, were able to come back to this, come back two months later or a month later or three months later and say, “In that meeting, when you disagree, that was super valuable.” Say it in front of other people because not only are you now asking for disagreement, you’re rewarding it, but you’re following it up and showing that this is something that I actually value.

Those are the things that help the shape culture. It, it actually follows perfectly with my favorite change management model called ADKAR that shows that A, is Awareness. Why do we need to change in the first place? D, what is the desire? What’s in it for me? Why should this be important to me? K what Knowledge do I need to be able to have? A, do I have the Ability, the resources, funds, time, all these things? The last piece that they state most people miss is the R, the Reinforcement. What change are you now reinforcing? People will go back to what they’re used to without strong positive reinforcement.

Resilience As A Key To Organizational Success

Yes, indeed. I want to go to the reality. These are all the scenarios where improvement can occur and a shift can happen. Let’s just get into the place where honesty is lacking, where there’s a reason that the whole story isn’t being shared. We said earlier, fear, and I love again the distinction around we need fear. Fear is healthy at times and it’s not going anywhere anyway. It’s just a part of how we’re baked. Trying to remove it is foolish. There’s another way that you can look at the reality. I like to think of it as if we can’t necessarily change reality, we can’t distort reality for our own purposes, the way Steve Jobs was accused of doing. What can we do with it? To me the answer is resilience.

On our side of the field, when we’re working with organizations, we’re looking at operationalizing resilience organizationally. The reason for that is because in that case, we’re agnostic to the challenge. It’s not like we don’t care, but we know we take it for granted that we’re going to get disrupted, that it’s likely that the market’s going to change. There’ll be macro factors that are well beyond our control, as we see all the time. What’s the answer to that? Our answer to that is you develop resilience.

It was interesting, I don’t know if you saw this interview and if you didn’t, I’m going to totally send this to you. Short clip of a commencement address or part of a commencement interview really, it wasn’t even an address, but Jensen Wong, who’s the CEO of Nvidia was being interviewed by somebody at Stanford Business School. He’s speaking to a group of Stanford then soon-to-be graduate Stanford business folks, the brightest, the best, like the great minds and people that have tremendous potential careers ahead of them.

They have great expectations for what their business life is going to look like. He basically says to them, “You guys all have high expectations. You should. You’re graduating from this amazing school, one of the best. You also were able to pay tuition.” That got a little laugh from the audience. “You managed to do that and now you’re going to graduate.”

This is a guy who’s running that company now for 30 years. I don’t know that everybody knows that that’s how old or how long Nvidia has been around before it became a household name, a $4 trillion company or whatever. He says, “People with high expectations have low resilience.” That’s what he said. I have used that clip with when we are again embedded and it is like one of the great honors.

You tell me you feel the same. You’re nodding your head because it is a great honor when any leadership team, any organization, lets you get in there with their people because it’s like saying, “Take my kids. Put my kids in your bus.” That’s a big responsibility. Sometimes consultants get a bad rap and deservedly, I guess, but I know we take that super seriously.

I will challenge their way of thinking sometimes by bringing this video up and just asking for conversation around what’s he talking about here? Do you agree? Do you disagree with that principle and what does it mean to you? Ultimately, he comes out of that conversation saying, “You just can’t succeed without resilience.” It’s in that process of building resilience, you’re building character. You build a character of your team, your company’s, and that’s a requirement. That ingredient must be in the mix for you to be successful, like you say, not in the short-term necessarily, but for the long term. He’s a 30-year long company that’s only just now hitting its stride and its greatest potential is still ahead of it, which is remarkable.

Isn’t that fascinating? That’s where I think we missed the mark. What I can say from a larger aspect of what I see from our society is that we are short-term thinkers and short-term actors. What I mean by that is we care more about the short-term at times than the long-term. Organizations, it comes back to The Tortoise and The Hare for me. There are some organizations who make some very hare choices. We want to turn around a company in the next two years. We make some decisions, we cut costs, we cut team members, we change recipes of our food to do all these things. Not realizing the potential impact of five years from now, people will not like our food as much and not shop at our restaurant as much and all of these things.

The sacrifice of leadership for an organization to perform and lead well requires thinking in long-term. Share on X

However, in those first two years, our stock prices shot up. We’re able to manage and navigate stakeholder expectations and all these things. There isn’t a plan of how will this impact us now and how will this impact us 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now? We don’t want to know that. The first place I can take you to is the, our sports culture. Think about how many coaches. There’s been a very big narrative right now for those who love sports in the football, is how many rookie quarterbacks are actually playing now their first rookie season.

It’s because we want the turnaround immediately because coaches’ jobs are on the line. Their pressure to play these rookies that may not be ready yet because you think about some of the ones who had to sit back. Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rogers, all these people didn’t play their first year. They sat back and some of them didn’t play the first 2, 3 years because Brett Farve before Aaron Rogers. What ends up happening is because we’re so shortsighted, we make shortsighted decisions rather asking the question of what is the potential of this decision 10, 15, 20 years from now? That is one of the reasons I love the Steelers.

I come back to that Jensen piece of this. We have high expectations. Those high expectations demand certain immediacy. If you’re not achieving those high expectations, then something knee jerky or something radical or something immediate, whatever you want to call it, has to be done about it. We make a lot of those mistakes, including laying people off. It’s like the waves in the ocean, like we hire, we fire. They go through that, whether it’s every eighteen months or sooner. It repeats itself over and over again.

It’s so wasteful as well as it destroys trust. You talk about the value of things that are valuable in the creation of strong culture, trust being, again, fundamental. That trust is eroded every single time that cycle repeats itself. We’re going to wrap up here in a little bit, but I want to get your take on resilience because, again, to me when he says high expectations creates low resilience, it’s because when stuff happens, we need to be able to understand the process of moving through those challenges.

When stuff goes sideways, we need to understand that we will be better on the other end or better in the process of getting to the resolution of that thing. Know that upfront. Know that ahead of time. Otherwise, what we’re doing is responding or reacting to it from a place of emotion, place of fear, from, again, a place of we need to win or these are the results. We need to win or we lose our dollars here or there or elsewhere. We need to win. I need to win or somebody’s head’s going to come off.

We’re going to make a change at the top, or whatever it might be. I think you put your finger on it. It’s short-term thinking. It’s very tricky bit here, but when so many of these companies are so fundamentally focused on shareholder value, that’s short-term thinking. The way it used to be, if you’re a shareholder for a long period of time and the company’s in a bad place, no shareholder would say, “I think you should lay off 10% of your workforce so that my stock price is higher next year than it is this year.”

As opposed to if you don’t lay off 10% of your workforce and instead you weather whatever that downturn or that headwind is more effectively, so that three years from now, you’re better equipped to then not have to rehire or get up to speed, but you’ve been innovating and you’ve been strengthening and you are more ready to capture market share. Three years or five years later, you are ready for even more exponential growth because you didn’t waste.

You didn’t go through that period of waste and also displace trust in the process. That’s better for me as a shareholder five years from now than it is now but that’s not the way the compensation packages work for those at the very top. It’s not what we seem to be focused on in terms of how we approach stakeholders. I went off a little on a tangent there, but I’d love to. I love it. Your thoughts on any of that? I want to come back to how you think about resilience as well.

I love that. I worked for a top financial firm during the time of 2008, 2009, and there’s a lot of fear what was going on in society in terms of with the stock market and the “crash” and all those things that were happening. One thing I appreciated about that organization is there was not a single layoff based upon what was happening in an environment. If somebody got laid off, it was because of they were fired because of poor performance and they were intentional.

They talked to leadership, they talked to management and management and leadership, or look past some potential bonuses, look past some raises, even some reduced their salaries in order to keep everybody during that time. They had a very long-term thinking and mindset for their organization. They didn’t have to go through a hiring frenzy when the market rebounded, where a lot of other companies were either folding and or doing amazing layoffs.

I think that principle really stood out to me of the sacrifice of leadership in order for the overall organization to perform and lead well. That takes a different type of thinking, that takes a different type of leadership to think that long-term and not just about what I get out of this, but how do I serve all of our stakeholders, including our employees and their families as well. I think you’re spot on. I think it’s an interesting balance because that’s not what a lot of organizations are looking for right now. It’s about the immediacy of the moment. Back to your point about resilience, your approach to resilience is great.

I want to simplify it. I think organizations like yours come in and operationalize it. One of the things that I share in a story. I do this thing called a birthday challenge where I challenge myself to do one thing that I’ve never done before, but always thought about doing. One year I was learning how to mountain bike and so I went mountain biking here in Charlotte and had a great time and I captured video of it.

I sometimes showed in my presentations where like riding and it’s great and it look great. You’re not supposed to sit on the bike when you’re a mountain biking, you’re supposed to hover. It’s all these things. I show the very next thing and I see people like, “I could watch my position and then I fall off a bridge.”

Now it was my first time mountain biking and I fell off a bridge and I walked the rest of the way. I ran into this guy who was super fit like you and you could tell like a mountain biker extraordinaire I met earlier and he was like, “How was your first time mountain biking?” I looked at the bike that I was walking up the hill and I was like, “I fell off a bridge.”

Without skipping a beat, Adam, he was like, “That’s cool because if you’re not falling, you’re not really riding.” It hit me. It’s something that resonated with me because of statement I I’ve often challenged myself to live by is that if you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. One aspect I think that has been missing in some aspects of resilience is encouraging failure in our teams. Encouraging, challenging and trying new things, encouraging thinking outside of the box that might cause us to go off.

I remember the stories about, I’m forgetting her name, but the person who, did Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg, and she talked about how she was brought before her organization at that time, and I think it was a Google at that time, and rewarded for a multimillion dollar failure. It was just like she tried. We really appreciated that. That resonated with me for two reasons, personal and professional.

I now talk to my kids about, “Have you failed recently and what have you learned?” My daughter, they lost the basketball game and I was like, “That’s cool.” She was mad at me for saying that. I was just like, “No, we need to lose at times because sometimes in losing we learn how we actually can win better, how we perform.” That leads to the, as another aspect of professional and my leaders, if you’re, if you’re reading, hear Carol Dweck’s work.

Part of the way that we develop resilience is in praising on progress, not performance. How does that play out? Say you completed a project and I was like, “Adam, thank you so much. The multimillion dollars, we are able to come from your creativity. Innovation is awesome.” That’s what we need more of. Just praise your performance.

 

Now, what Carol Dweck work has shown is that people will try to get to that performance because that’s what’s reinforced, even if they have to steal, cheat or not utilize integrity in order to get there. We praise on progress. “Adam, talk to me about what it took to you to successfully get to this place where this multimillion-dollar deal came through.”

You say, “I had to do this and sometimes I was up late. Sometimes I had to take some self-care and go to the beach and just think and quiet my brain. I had to have difficult conversations with the team members. Somebody challenged me.” I was like, “That’s what we need to praise. Keep doing that, Adam, because that got you to this. I want to encourage you to keep having the conversations with other departments to keep challenging yourself, taking care of self-care to think through that.” That praising on progress she’s found in her research, not just theoretical, and her research has kept people continuing to lean into what they did to get there, rather than manufacturing the performance that you praised. That’s one way that we can build resilience.

Building Resilience Through Pain, Failure, And Growth

It’s, again, such a great alignment here. It’s really similar to this because when, when I have that conversation around what low expectations that and how low expectations, nobody wants to say, “I want my team to have low expectations. I want to, as a leader, have low expectations of others.” That’s what’s controversial about his statement, that high expectations create low resilience?

It’s not that you watered down your expectations, it’s understanding, as you said, that failure is a part of success. It’s not just the part of success we don’t ever want to talk about. It’s a part we need to talk about more and more. In fact, I think he says in that same interview, something to the effect that he says when there’s pain and suffering at Nvidia, he meets it with glee. That’s what he says to these Stanford business school grads. He says, “If I could wish you anything, what I wish you are ample doses of pain and suffering.”

I think the audience is laughing, but uncomfortably so because he understands that through pain and suffering, and that’s not the language I would’ve used to describe it because again, from a resilience standpoint, it’s when we know it doesn’t work. This is what our research tells us as well. When we know it doesn’t work, we know what does. It’s a really interesting thing. If you look at any area of your life and you just to test this out for, again, the people reading this and going, “Do I buy that? Do I not buy that?” It’s a simple litmus test. Just look at any area of your life and see something that didn’t work. When you can look at what didn’t work, you already know what does work. When you know what you don’t want, you know what you do want.

You could even do a T chart. Sometimes the simplest of exercises is so easy to see it. On the left-hand side, just again, anything you don’t want, anything that didn’t work, anything that was a failure or a mistake on the left-hand side of this T chart, on the right hand side, what’s the wisdom? What do you automatically have crystal clarity about because of that?

That’s where resilience is built. That’s where we don’t care on some level, what’s the disruption? We just had an election, we’re not going to talk politics here, but regardless of which side was going to win or did win, it’s like we’re going to be all right on either side of that. If you are thinking somehow like that there’s an existential threat to life itself to the world because one thing happens versus the other, that’s a BS story. It’s unnecessary drama.

Drama is depleting. When we think about the things mentally, emotionally, physically, even spiritually, that deplete us, deplete our resilience in the face of the world that is complex and ambiguous and filled with things that we should be afraid of. All of those things exist simultaneously. How are you resilient in the face of that, by getting drawn into the drama of what ifs? No, and that’s certainly not the way of business. From a system standpoint, that’s wasteful. It’s wasteful of energy, it’s wasteful of resources, it’s wasteful of opportunities. I so love how you and I are interweaving our own threads in this fabric. We’re a little over time. I want to ask you one other thing.

Resilience And Character Development In Business

If you allow me just briefly to give some context to that, there’s two really quick things. I want to encourage people, even as you mentioned the things about politics, I want to be very careful about ascertaining in terms of where people should be because I think we can get there, but not everybody gets there at the same time. Some people I’ve had encourage to take a break because there are some people I’ve had conversations with that do feel as if their identity may no longer be valued, cherished appreciated, and they have to work through that and then get through the other side.

We often, I think, incorrectly, appreciate resilience for immediate resilience rather than being able to walk through the process of getting there. One thing that’s been important for me, which gets to the personal aspect, is that I learned from my first marriage that we ended a divorce and we were married for fifteen years is that one thing that I felt would’ve been central. Two things. One was that we would never stop going to marriage counseling.

I learned what did work. I told my now wife Tanya, I was like, “If you can’t go to marriage counseling with me for the rest of your life, I’m not your person,” because I realized what didn’t work as well as the second thing of like, I now go to counseling every single month. I’ll never stop going to counseling. Not because there’s something wrong with me, even though my kids may say something different, but because I want to keep things going.

To your point is I want people to see this doesn’t, this stuff isn’t just about business and workplace. The former HR leader, we used to tell people leave work at work, get at home, at home, but that doesn’t work. The same aspect of resilience and the T chart of realizing like, “This didn’t work in my first marriage. We’re never stopping going to counseling in this current marriage.” The things that I think can lead into.

it’s a tool for clarity. That’s the reason I mention it because to me, you can apply it in any area, again, whether it’s a personal one, a professional one, whether it’s we’re talking about even just your belief system, your worldview or what’s happening in the world around you that you have no control over or limited control. To me, anything that provides clarity where you can get clear. Your clarity becomes, in many ways, not only a beacon for other people to gain clarity, but it helps you to show up in the way that you’re capable of showing up. I don’t know that there’s more that we’re charged with, even from like a spiritual perspective. I don’t know. There’s more that is our true responsibility.

So often, I think, it’s, again, clarifying to understand what’s my work to do, what’s mine to do, what’s not mine to do. If we set ourselves up for struggle and frustration and any of those things, I ultimately look at it like that depletes the energy that we would otherwise have to be problem solvers. To be working on the side of where my clarity leads me and where the world is different and the people around me are somehow are impacted positively because I’m coming from a place of clarity, not a place of anger or any of the other things that, that come, we’re drawn into that which is not truly either ours to do or when we’re in, again, that reactive state that is threatening to our very identity or very existence. That’s what you were saying.

The Future Of Workplace Culture Post-Pandemic

Clarity is so key. At the risk of this going just a little longer, I really do want to get this question in front of me, which is about culture because it’s such an amorphous topic. It’s defined in so many different ways and so I’m not looking to define it. I want to get a sense of do you feel like this concept of culture in business, which by the way, it’s funny, the word cult is embedded in that, the cult that is our team and our family, if you use it right at work, are we regressing?

Is culture regressing or is it evolving? Do you feel like the tide is going backward post-pandemic or do you feel like the things that change, the radical changes that occurred in the workplace as a result of the pandemic are propelling us in some bold evolved or more evolved direction? I know that’s not an easy question, by the way.

It’s a very great question that I’m going to give a very great response. The answer is yes to both of those things. I think there’s some cultures that are regressing and that didn’t necessarily take lessons that they learned from the pandemic and are trying to operate from a pre-pandemic playbook when people are now post-pandemic in many ways and have a different way of thinking, living and engaging in the world of work as well as their personal lives.

I have seen some organizations that are regressing and are not paying attention to what has shifted for their people because if we just identify like a high-level culture, it’s a way of life for a group of people. Shared beliefs, shared values, shared traditions and behaviors. One thing the pandemic did is it shifted a lot of what we thought were our staple belief standards, operating procedures.

The sacrifice of leadership for an organization to perform and lead well requires thinking in long-term. Share on X

There are companies that are regressing. I think there are companies that are evolving and cultures that are evolving because they’re taking into account how things have shifted. They’re paying attention to their people. They’re taking assessments like yours and identifying where we really are.

That’s the thing, because sometimes it’s not about even what we enact. It’s did we care enough to even ask the people? Did we say, “I’d love to hear from you about how this impacts you. Sometimes as organizations and leaders, we make decisions that will impact the culture without even hearing how our people will respond to this. How will it impact them, their family lives, the way they care for their children if they have children, their parents who are aging with them, all of these things.

That’s where the place of regression happens. When you’re paying attention from a cultural perspective, will you make decisions that will please everybody? Absolutely not. Will you at least hear your people? That’s the place that I think we can lean into as leaders. Whether that’s surveys, assessments, focus groups, whether that’s you actually listen to the data and not just earmark for it because you’re trying to get the best company to work for.

You’re actually looking and saying, “Our frontline associates are showing us that this new safety standard would actually hurt them more than help them. Let’s talk to them to figure out do they have another solution or ways that we can approach that we can get to see.” This is so powerful for me, if people want to dive into something deeper. One of the best books I ever read came from my MBA professor and he was the type of professor that was a little bit different.

He would have us sit in the middle of a room for 10 minutes, not say anything, not do anything, and then write a 10-page paper about it. He would like that Dead Poet’s Society, like carpe diem type professor. He had us read this book called Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together by William Isaacs that has had such a profound impact on how I approach society and the world now.

The essence of that book is, “I come to you, Adam, trying to prove to you A and you come to me trying to prove B.” His challenge is what if we ask what C? C doesn’t mean 50/50. C could be 95-5. C could be 40-60. C could be 20-80. It’s this concept of creating something together that is energizing, that is resilient, that is helping us collaboratively to grow together. That’s one of the reasons pillar four in our book of I Respectfully Disagree is Seek the Gray. It’s how we find this gray, this common ground, not middle ground, but common ground together that I think helps us in our society and our world now to be more resilient in the face of what’s going on in society. Those are ways that we lean in.

Justin, I literally could talk to you all day. This show is not the Joe Rogan model of three-hour longs and all that. We’re going to land the plane right here. I’m sure people are going, “Keep going.” Maybe somebody’s going, “You guys should shut up already.” I don’t know. Regardless, we are going to land the plane. I want to say to my bald brother, thank you so much for your time and for this whole great vibe, great conversation. There’ll be more to come.

For our folks, as check out the links because I want you to learn more about Justin and his work in the world and where you can find him and hire him and bring him on. Not only to speak, but also to facilitate and provide insight. If you’ve got a comment question for Justin or myself, you can go to AdamMarkel.com/podcast, leave a question or comment there and we would love it.

As always, this is an ask. I say this humbly that our community has grown and it’s grown because of you. It’s grown because you’ve shared these episodes with other people, friends, colleagues, whoever it is that might benefit. You’ve also taken it even the couple of minutes it does take to provide your rating, the ranking. On whatever platform you’re consuming this, if you if it’s a 5-star, it’s 4-star, it’s a 1-star, whatever it is, the feedback is just so welcome and helpful and that’s how we’ve grown. We appreciate you doing that. Whenever that’s time for you to do and you have make the time for it, we again, are so grateful. Justin, speaking of gratitude, buddy, thank you again for your time.

Thank you, Adam. I appreciate you, brother.

—

I don’t know, that was so much fun. I love the show. It is definitely into our 350th episode or something over the years. It can be like anything else. It can get old and become stale and even dull, I guess. Somehow or another, it just hasn’t for me. In part, I want to just shout out to our team because frankly it would have a long time ago lost my interest if it weren’t for the great guests that I am constantly being served up. I feel like I have the easiest job of all, which is to just ask some questions and maybe do some good listening and whatnot. Our team, they do the really hard work of finding these great, amazing people and leaders, these just really interesting souls that I get to speak to.

I do have the easiest job of all in that. I wanted to take this moment to simply acknowledge our team and all that they do to, to make this show ever interesting, enlivening and something that I look forward to doing. I don’t have any dread feelings about it and I can’t say that about everything that I’ve done for long periods of time. I’m the pivot guy. I wrote books called Pivot and Change Proof.

When stuff isn’t working, I tend not to continue to do it. It’s a testament to the fact that I’m still doing this podcast. That it is still to me a place of growth and aliveness and something valuable. I think it’s a valuable service to anybody that gets to read the insights of the people that we find somewhere that’s definitely above my pay grade and I’m just so grateful that they’re doing the work that they’re doing. Shout out to our team.

Our conversation, Justin and I, we really covered so many things. It would be difficult for me to summarize it and I won’t. I would just say read it again. Share it with a friend, a colleague, a family member, somebody that might also vibe with some of the stuff that was being shared. It was definitely a very interesting ride, a bit of a rollercoaster up and all over the place. We just kept finding new heights, new higher and higher heights. That’s what it felt like. The conversation was elevating in consciousness the whole way through. What a blast. If you did love it, please feel free to leave us a comment or rate the show. Give us that rating that makes it possible for other people to find this show or for the show to find them, I guess, is really the way to put it.

Lastly, if you are in a place where you’d like to check out how resilient you culture is, how resilient you as a leader are you as an individual contributor are, you can start with a very simple tool. It takes two and a half minutes and it’s absolutely free. Go to RankMyResilience.com. Two and a half minutes and sixteen questions later, you’re going to get your own personalized assessment score, confidential information and resources.

Of course, we can talk about how it is that you can leverage that information or use it. Also how to assess greater numbers of people, greater subsets, whether it’s by team, by function, by geography in your organization, and how to use those insights more importantly or as importantly, to make methodical, well thought out long change for the long term to really be adopting that long-term thinking approach that the tortoise approach to winning the race in life and winning the race in business. With that, I will just say once again, thank you so much for being a part of this community. Thank you for all that you contribute to us. For now, I will just say ciao. Thank you again.

 

Important Links

• Justin Jones-Fosu
• I Respectfully Disagree
• Lean In
• Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together
• Pivot
• Change Proof
• Justin Jones-Fosu on Instagram
• Justin Jones-Fosu on Facebook
• Justin Jones-Fosu on LinkedIn

 

About Justin Jones-Fosu

Justin Jones-Fosu is the embodiment of energy, both at home as a dedicated father to two spirited children and atop the world’s highest peaks, having recently conquered one of the famed 7 Summits. But Justin’s passion for elevation doesn’t end with trekking, it’s mirrored in his professional ascent as a captivating business speaker, innovative social entrepreneur, and insightful workplace researcher.

At the helm of Work. Meaningful., Justin is the driving force and CEO behind a movement that empowers organizations across the globe, delivering over 50 keynote addresses a year on the pivotal topics of meaningful work and inclusion. His mission is to ignite a transformation in corporate culture, guiding organizations and individuals to ascend to their peak potential through mastery of mindset, purpose, and performance.