Cultivating Resilience With Janine Hamner Holman

 

Janine Hamner Holman is an internationally recognized speaker, bestselling author, and expert in organizational culture and leadership. In this episode, she joins Adam Markel to talk about the importance of cultivating resilience in the workplace to foster empowerment and positivity within the team. She shares how to create a healthy culture where psychological safety, open communication, and mutual trust thrive. Janine also looks back on her own career journey to break down how embracing a resilient mindset can lead to innovation, transformation, and purpose-driven work.

Show Notes:

• 00:36 – Ocean As A Symbol Of The Flow Of Life
• 04:35 – Shared Passion For Working With People
• 11:00 – Impact Of A Bad Boss
• 26:47 – Creating Trust And Psychological Safety
• 39:36 – Need For Change And Adaptation
• 48:07 – Resilience And Change

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Cultivating Resilience With Janine Hamner Holman

Welcome back to another episode of the show. I’m so thrilled to have my guest, a dear friend, a colleague, somebody that I truly love and admire, and I know you’re going to love her as well. Her name is Janine Hamner-Holman. She is an internationally recognized speaker, bestselling author, and expert in organizational culture change, conscious leadership, inclusion, and emotional intelligence with experience spanning nonprofit leadership, Fortune 200 companies, and the public sector. Janine brings unique insights into diagnosing and solving organizational challenges.

Her firm uses the DADI model that she developed, Diagnose, Assess, Design, and Implement to help organizations thrive by identifying challenges, designing solutions, and implementing changes that foster growth and resilience unlike many consulting approaches, Janine’s method ensures lasting impact and support throughout the change process. She was recently named by USA Today as a keynote speaker to watch in 2024. She’s also been recognized by LA Weekly as a trailblazing entrepreneur and won the CXO 2.0 Leadership Award. I know her as just the most incredible human and somebody that you are all going to vibe with and learn from. Sit back and enjoy my conversation with Janine Hamner-Holman.

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Ocean As A Symbol Of The Flow Of Life

Janine, first of all, I’m so thrilled that I got to introduce you and I got to share about you and I just have nothing but mad love. Honestly, I don’t mind declaring the world either. You’re a very special person in the universe. I’m really thrilled that I get to interview you. Have you shared with our readers a bit about the work you do in the world and what excites you and everything? The first question I want to ask right out of the gate, which I love asking this question actually, is what is one thing that is not a part of that bio that your CV and all the rest? What is one thing that you would love for people to know about you at the beginning of our conversation?

It’s such a great question. As you noticed by the deep breath that’s a question that creates space. You may notice over my shoulder right there, if you’re watching us, is a painting of the ocean at sunset or maybe sunrise, but I almost never see the sunrise. For me, it’s sunset. The ocean is my happy place. The ocean is my source. The ocean is my release. It is where I go to when I need space when I need a rejuvenation. It’s my connection with the divine and the eternal and the ebb and flow. When I get into that, “The sky is falling.”

A place where many of us get and some of us are at the moment. It is that reminder of the fact that for better or for worse, nothing is permanent and everything changes. The work that you and I both get to do and sometimes get to do in partnership with each other is all about helping organizations develop an individual, develop that resilience, develop that ability to keep it on in the face of whatever it is that’s happening and to learn to do it well. When you had me create that space, the first thing I thought of was the ocean. Thank you.

Thank you. You brought me right into that space. You brought me there. I love the ocean. My wife and I, we both settled in our lives on being near the ocean. That’s how we have arranged our world at this point to be near the ocean as often, as frequently as we possibly can, because it’s immense. It’s awesome. It’s everywhere. It’s so much a part of what helps us to live a healthy life.

 I think many people probably know that most of our oxygen, our clean air, comes from the ocean. It’s vitally important and there’s so much life in it. It’s also a dark, scary place. I mean, I have experience having been a lifeguard at the ocean. Many people know that my history includes early on, those types of experiences but so much of the ocean is unseen. The depth of the ocean there are dark and unknown places. I think for a lot of us, even to this day, even as adults, the dark, the unknown, the uncertain, scares us. Scares us a little bit.

That’s right because we’re just big kids

Shared Passion For Working With People

That’s maybe it’s a good lead-in, we’ll see. This thing that you and I both have a love for, we love to work with people. I’m speaking about us like I’m speaking for you, but correct me.

No, you’re right, you know.

I do. I think I know. You love to work with people and I do as well genuinely so. Now it’s business. There’s an element of working as in you work for a particular purpose and we all get what that purpose is or at least part of the purpose but I wouldn’t do that work. I would do solitary work. I would do some other work that did involve me interacting with people regularly if I didn’t enjoy it. That much I know about myself. I just wouldn’t have tolerated it all these years if it was something that didn’t fulfill me and fill me up.

I know you’re the same way. I want to lead in with that. I want to ask you, what is it about working with people and in particular, just to create context here, working inside of an organization? You and I are both asked to and given the honor, the privilege to work with teams, with leaders within organizations that are wanting to create some change or improvement. What is it about that really fulfills you or fills you up in the broadest and even the most narrow sense?

A little of my backstory, of course, and to share with your listeners. My first plan, even though I didn’t know you, was to follow in your footsteps and be an attorney. I’d had a crazy experience in high school working for a brilliant attorney at Harvard Law School. He then hired me back for the following three summers. I thought, “This is what I want to do.” Like I’m smart but I’m not that smart. This gentleman was the youngest tenured professor ever in the history of Harvard Law School and because he was a tenured professor, he was taking all of these very interesting cases, sometimes pro bono.

It was heady and fun and fascinating. Thankfully, before I went to law school, I worked as a paralegal for two really big law firms in New York City, Skatt & Arpels, and Shearman & Sterling, and realized, “No.” I didn’t have to have a fart attack like you did. I had my own fart attack about other things later in life, but I realized this is not what I want to do. I did a tiny little pivot and went to work for nonprofits for the next seventeen years and was in leadership and working, doing a lot in terms of helping the organizations that I was with move through change, even though it wasn’t part of my job description in nonprofits You do everything that’s needed to be done.

Often like in for-profit organizations. In 2008, when the economy got bad again, I decided to take a step back and I got recruited by Waste Management, the world’s largest trash and recycling company. The very first thing I said to them was, “You all are really not a nonprofit. What in the world would I do for you?” They said, “We need people who manage people well, who understand budgets, who understand how to run a team. A lot of the work that you’ve done has been with people and building relationships. We need people who can do all those things.”

I was there for almost a decade. When I decided to go out on my own in 2017, I hired a coach to figure out what the heck is the through line between this nonprofit work and now this Fortune 200 company. Like what holds these things together? What we figured out is that I have been on a mission to have the world of work. Be one in which everyone can thrive. That’s really what drives me. It’s part of why, as you said, the work that I do and the work that you do is working inside of organizations. People who aren’t familiar with the work that we do often will say to me, “You’re an executive coach.”

I say, “No, because if I had to coach each one of the humans, I would need to live to be five billion years old and I’m already tired. That plan’s not going to work.” I work inside of organizations and that’s where you get to experience the things that are really working inside of organizations and where things may be a little bit challenging or a little bit broken. They might need a new system put into place in order to have one of my best friends call we need to make things routine. Often, many of us are good at making routine things complicated. I get to figure out how to help bring the people together so that then the processes can run right. Sometimes there are technology needs that happen. I bring in somebody else to do that because that’s not my job.

I love how you created that trajectory for us. I want to because I do know your backstory and our readers don’t. I want to ask you, not to get into the details of the particular thing that I want to get into, but I want to use it as a jumping-off point or as a pivot point. If I self-servingly use that term yet again. I wish I would love it if I had just even a penny, even the lowly penny every time somebody has used the term pivot since I wrote that in 2016. In one of those employment contexts, I don’t even need to say which one.

Impact Of A Bad Boss

You had a bad boss. You had a manager who is not a woman fuzzy. You might say more about that if you want but I want to ask you about your take. What’s your take on the world of work today? I want to in particular focus on the area of safety and trust within organizations. I want to talk about a lot of things with you. I think just because you brought up your work history. That was a pivotal moment for you, working for somebody who was, and you could fill in the blank for me there, a Scrooge or whatever you want to call it but worse.

All of us humans are complicated. This was a woman, so I don’t want to say that she was a fill-in-the-blank. She’s a very complicated person and her management style was born out of dysfunction in her family and bad bosses that she had. It’s like parenting. When we have bad parents, we often don’t parent well. Sometimes we do the flip side. Sometimes we say, “I’m not going to do that to my kid if we are self-aware.” She unfortunately is not particularly self-aware. Her style was that she would raise people up and probably for a complicated set of reasons that I’ve decided to let go of trying to figure out. I was her favorite person to both raise up and it would sound like, “You guys,” because that’s how she talks.

“You guys, Janine is so brilliant. Janine, anything that you need help with, especially if it has to do with like writing or anything that has to do with putting stuff together, Janine’s the one that you want to talk to. God, she’s just so smart.” Of course, that was fun. It was fun being praised like that. The problem was that you always knew that the fall was coming. In my case, it wasn’t just that I would fall out of grace. It was that I would fall underneath the outhouse, like with the poop. She would publicly shame me and she would say, “Janine is an absolute effing idiot, and hear all the mistakes that she just made.” Just like her voice would get so excited, her voice would get hard. She would do it in front of people who are accountable to me. She would do it in front of my peers.

She would do it in front of people that I needed to work within other parts of the organization. She would do it in front of my customers. One way or another, she was my boss for the whole time that I was with this organization, which was about eight and a half years. What I didn’t realize, it was that frog in the pot of boiling water. What I didn’t realize was really the impact that was having on me and on my sense of self and my sense of efficacy and on my sense of worthiness as a human. Eventually, I realized I was in trouble. I went to the aforementioned best friend and I said, “I think I need some help. You have a psychiatrist. I think I need to go on antidepressants.”

She referred me to Dr. Rosenberg. I went into Dr. Rosenberg’s office and I was there for ten minutes. He said, “Here’s the thing. You are in massive crisis and you’re pulling so hard from your adrenal gland.” Women don’t have testosterone. To like, to get it up, to be in that environment every day, I was on the verge of adrenal burnout. I was massively depressed and I really didn’t even know it. I ended up being out on six-month medical leave. Obviously, this is a horrible story. Unfortunately, it is way more common than we think. I just recently recorded, which will probably be aired by the time this airs, it’s going to air on November 26th, which is actually my birthday, the Anti-Bullying Summit which is a dozens of high-powered people who were victims of bullying.

Obviously, this is a form of bullying. Obviously not then, but what it created in me long-term is a deep need to help organizations be better and to have this not happen in organizations. One of the things that gives me an enormous amount of hope for the future is that the younger generations in the workforce. The millennials and the Gen Zs, because of their upbringing, and of course, when you’re talking about two generations of humans, there are many exceptions to what I’m going to say, but as a group, they have a zero-tolerance policy for this behavior. In part, it comes from the fact that these are the people that you and I raised. Maybe not so much you and I, but this is the generation that got trophies for just showing up. We poured into them and we told them that they were brilliant and magnificent and could do anything that they wanted.

Shockingly, they believed us.

They believed it.

I didn’t mean to interrupt you, yes they believed us.

They have this sense of self that I had lost that they are not willing to lose. They are not willing to put up with this behavior in the workplace. Layer on top of that, they have a somewhat say slower maturation. Some would say a stronger relationship with their parents. Moving back home is not a big thing for them. Moving back in with Mom and Dad, great. I’m going to side-hustle things together. I’m going to couch surf. Like they have a much more fluid feeling about how life should go. I remember I had my first age-related crisis. I was 25 and I was living with two other people in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City and we had like cinder block shelves. I turned 25 and I was like, “This is not in my 25-year-old version of adulting.“

It’s like, “This is not how an adult should live. 25, that’s an adult age.” Looking back, I’m like, “You sweet little thing.” These young folk, they don’t have that. They don’t have that. Like, this is not how it’s supposed to go. It gives them so much more creativity and the ability to stand up for themselves. The reality is that the average tenure and many folks our age, we may still have it in our head that millennials, like these, are kids. The oldest of them are now 43. These are not kids anymore. The oldest Gen Zers or Zoomers, as they’re often called, they’re 27. Older than I was when I had my temper tantrum about being 25. I lost my train of thought. Give me a second, I will get it back. The Poditize team will brilliantly edit this part out.

If you do not have the mindset of 'this is not how it's supposed to go,' you can get so much creativity and hone your ability to stand up for yourself. Share on X

We don’t edit. Where I heard you tracking to, and this might drive the memory here, is that the idea that we don’t tolerate bullying today, or let’s say the people who are the leaders of today and tomorrow because there are many folks who are already that are millennial age that are leading. Let’s just say Gen Xers and baby boomers are, they are still in the bulk of the highest levels of leadership, and by 2030, I understand, Gen Zs and millennials will be the largest segment of the workforce by far. That’s ahead of us.

Millennials are already today, as we said here, they are the largest group in the workforce. They have overtaken the Gen Xs. As you said, many of them are now in positions of leadership and they are changing the face of work. I have gotten into many challenging conversations with older, often white men who have no shade thrown at you because you’re a very different white man, but older white men who are entrenched. This is how we’ve always done things here. I had to fight and I was bullied and I paid my dues.

These young folks, they got to pay their dues. This is just a phase that we’re in, but it’s not. It’s not a phase that we’re in. One of the things that I say, I’m working actually with a law firm right now on exactly this issue, the older partners are annoyed that they have to teach the young associates the things that they need to teach young associates anyway. The perpetual feedback and the other things that these two generations coming up need in the workplace.

Like regular feedback like opportunities for growth. Like a safe a safe environment in which to show up and be who you are whatever and ask questions.

Even challenge things in a respectful but we’re talking about doing this thing and it doesn’t make sense to me. Those things, having open and clear communication, having often high what’s called emotional intelligence, which is really just about how we understand ourselves and relate with other people. Having organization that really values mutual trust, not that trust that we have in a parent, which is often how hierarchical organizations are set up, do it because I tell you to do it, as we said to kids when they were two. No, these are grown up humans who in this case are lawyers and they’re baby lawyers. They’re just learning. We get to invest in them.

The thing is, whether we’re talking about a law firm or any other organization, when we fail to do that, we are putting ourselves in jeopardy because as you just recently said, the Xers and the Boomers, we’re leaving the workforce. The Millennials are now the biggest group in the workforce. The average tenure of the Millennials and the Gen Zs is still 18 months to 3 years. It is that because we are not letting their voices be heard. We are not enabling them to have the experience of belonging. We’re not giving them feedback in a way that works for them as opposed to just once a year and so they leave. The problem is we Xers and Boomers, we are the wisdom keepers in organizations. We are the institutional knowledge holders.

Once we leave that information is going to be gone if there’s nobody to impart it to. A lot of organizations, we’re still talking about the gray tsunami and I’m working with an organization right now, 50% of their workforce and they have 1800 employees, 50%, half of their workforce is eligible for retirement. If these folks decide to just get up and leave, in all likelihood, this organization, it’s not going to happen immediately.

 

This organization is going to fail because all of the information about relationships that have happened with customers over time is going to be gone. We’ve got to crack this code. Organizations have got to understand that this is not a phase, that this is because of how these generations were raised, often by the folks who are being pissy about doing what these younger folk need in the workforce. We failed to pay attention at our own peril. I said to a client the other day, “Here’s the thing, we can either change the five of you or we can change two entire generations which sounds easier.”

Creating Trust And Psychological Safety

I want to understand better, what does it look like? The term psychological safety is being used a lot. It’s been used for a while now. In order to create greater trust, in a situation where the trust is lacking, I mean, the fact that the attrition rates are as high as they are, as you say that tenure is reduced to 18 months to 3 years for a large segment of the working population. There’s something that’s not working. You’ve already given us a lot in that area but on the recommendation side of things. We understand this is an issue. This is a problem. What do we actually do or what can we do? What’s possible? What has worked that you’ve seen that you could share?

There are two fundamental things that underpin psychological safety, which is a term that was coined by Dr. Amy Edmondson out of the Harvard Business School. It really is about what we were talking about before. It is about my experience of being able to ask questions and wonder about stuff, even make mistakes without fear of negative reprisals. With the boss that I was talking about earlier, if I made a mistake, there was a huge negative reprisal. That organization or that team, because it was a fairly large organization, and so there were many teams within the organization. I’m certainly not painting the organization with one brush, but inside that team, there was a significant lack of psychological safety.

The problem is when you lack psychological safety, you also lack innovation. You lack creativity. You lack new ways of thinking outside the box. You lack honest information because if people are afraid to make a mistake if people are afraid to say something that, “Here’s what we’re hearing from customers. I know, Mr. or Ms. Boss, you may not really like it, but here’s the reality. We need to understand that reality so that we can make the changes inside of our organization to respond to our customers’ needs.” As a frontline employee, cannot share that with my boss.

When you lack psychological safety, you also lack innovation, creativity, new ways of thinking outside the box, and honest information. Share on X

Reconnaissance.

My boss is then making bad decisions, and it just goes up and down the hierarchical ladder in an organization. The cost of not having psychological safety is enormous. In the face of that cost, the two key things that run through creating psychological safety are open communication and trust. That’s not a revolutionary idea given that we are all in relationships with many different kinds of people. You have your wife, I have my husband. You have your children, I have my stepchildren. You have all your friends and family, I have mine. You have the organizations you help, I have the organizations I help. We are in a community with all kinds of people and all kinds of community and relationships.

We know that trust is an incredibly important component and clear, honest, open communication is an incredibly important component. Newsflash, this is an incredibly important component in the world of work. When I was coming up in the world of work, we had it that you had one set of rules at home and one set of Janine behaviors at home and another set of rules and another set of behaviors in the workplace. That paradigm is now broken. Just like these young folks want to have work-life harmony, and because of cell phones, because of modern technology, the lines between work and not work are much more blurred. Clear, open, honest communication and trust are critical. You think about, “How do you build trust?”

Part of how you build trust is being consistent, doing what you say, being predictable. The same boss, she used to say a version of, “Go get me a rock.” You’d go out and you’d create a document or you’d do whatever and you’d bring it to her and she’d say, “No, that’s not right.” You’d go and try and do it again, but you weren’t getting any feedback. Like, “I get it that it wasn’t what you wanted, but do you want it in a different font? Does it need to be laid out differently? Did the content stink? What’s the problem.” When we are clear and when we are consistent, then people know that they can trust us. The other thing that’s tricky about trust is we often have it that trust is a particular thing. It’s finite. Adam, you and I, after having known each other now for more than five years, we have trust.

 

This other person and I, we don’t have trust. Except that’s not actually how trust works. You and I have breakdowns and then we repair it. I say I’m going to do something, I make a commitment, and then I get to de-commit to that thing because I didn’t do it and then I get to make a new commitment. My not doing it, is it’s a break of trust. When I tell my husband, I’ll be home from work at 6:30 and I roll in at 7:30, I have not done what I have said. I have broken his trust. I just get to own it. “I know I said I was going to be home at 6:30, but here I am rolling in at 7:30, I’m really sorry.” I recommit to continuing to try to get better or not try but continuing working on really getting clear about how long things are going to take me and what time you can expect me to be home because mostly he works.

I think there are so many interesting things that you’ve said already that I could go down any number of paths, but I’ll just say that the thing that’s coming up too, in addition to doing what you say, that in building trust and establishing trust, that being somebody that you can count on, that others can count on, that’s an element of it. That being predictable and using that example of your former boss as a clear indication of what it looks like when somebody is unpredictable and therefore you never know where you stand.

Ultimately you either walk on eggshells or you’re always like in a nervous, shaky state frankly, because you don’t know what’s going to happen, who you’re going to meet today. The other thing too is, and you’ve alluded to it, but I want to specifically say it too is effective feedback. The reason why I think that trust is lacking, in addition to things you just said, is really a reflection of the fact that many people are very unskilled and lacking in skills and lacking in any training, frankly.

That’s right. It’s not a surprise that they’re lacking in skills because they’ve never been trained how to do it.

How to give or to receive feedback. That’s a really big deal because when you’re not good at something, as adults we’ve learned from the time we were children, or even learned from other instances where we’ve had people react in aggressive ways or harsh ways to us, we learned that when we’re not good at something, we tend to not get involved in those things. If you don’t feel terribly good at giving feedback, you don’t give a lot of feedback. Again, this is to the detriment of an organization, to the detriment of teams, to the detriment of relationships, when you simply cannot speak truthfully with compassion.

Somewhat long ago I was involved in a training where the way that was described is when you speak your truth without compassion, it’s barbarism. You’re a barbarian and that’s how some people handle it. When you add compassion, when you speak truthfully with compassion, then you’re really providing something very valuable to another person, to another individual. That is very different than the passive-aggressive form of communication that I think pervades in so many different arenas today. In the world of work, I see this in and among teams and their leaders. All manner of cohort that you could think of where the communication is just off in many ways. This is the root cause for a lack of trust.

The other thing too, so you mentioned open communication and trust. Also, what do you think of permission? How important is permission in this context? I want to be more specific. I am often, like you are often, in a role where we’re providing some level of advisory information. Being given that, again, is a great honor to be an advisor to leaders, teams, and the like. In that role someone will say to me, do I have to do it the way like the way you’re saying is possible? Do I have to do it that way if I’ve succeeded by doing it a different way? I’ll give you a good example. There are a lot of people who just they like to be the first in the office or the first to log in in the morning and the last to log out and the last to leave.

That’s their form of leadership is that they put their work first. They’re telling everybody, and I don’t know that that’s their motive, but it’s part of their identity. They wear it in a particular way. If this is how I show my loyalty to the organization, this is how I show my work ethic, this is how I’m demonstrating and modeling what it takes to succeed here, as well as what it would take to succeed anywhere. They come from that place and that’s fine. I never tell a person that you need to start sleeping another hour. Leave the office at 4:30 instead of at 7:30. Especially you mentioned lawyers and I was a lawyer for almost twenty years. I never go that route because I don’t believe it. If that’s made you successful if you feel that’s what fulfills you, it’s what you want, do it.

Need For Change And Adaptation

The other side of that is those same people are by their own modeling and their own example without knowing it, they are denying permission to others to do it differently. When they say to me, and I want to get your take on this, when they say, “Are you saying that I need to change?” When you talk about how people are experiencing burnout and anxiety levels are epidemic levels, loneliness. I mean, by a recent study, one in every four people at work are lonely, whether they’re remote or they’re hybrid or they’re full-time in the office. Loneliness is its own issue today. “You’re telling me I have to change it.” I say “No, what you do have to do is enable permission. You have to give people permission to do it in a way that’s not like the way you do it.” You’re saying absolute, say more about any of that.

I cannot say more other than you’re brilliant or I have to say more other than you’re brilliant. In my experience and in my research, you are directly hitting the nail on the head. If you, Mr. or Ms. Workaholic or super hard worker, super work ethic-y person, if that’s what works for you and you want to keep doing that, great. What you also get to do is shine a light on it. You get to have a conversation with your people, especially if you are managing other people, or if you are looked to as a leader because those two things are not necessarily synonymous. We can be a leader and not manage anybody.

We can be the janitor and be a leader in an organization because of how we show up. If you are looked to as a leader and or if you manage other people, you, I believe, must say, “This is what works for me. I love it and it’s part of my identity. I sweat if I even think about trying to change it. I am not asking you to do the same thing. If what works for you is to be in at 9:00. Honestly, I don’t care when you’re in and when you’re out. What I care about is that you get your work done.”

We have had this paradigm and it’s part of now what’s happening with organizations saying we want everybody back in the office and they are using organizational culture as a hammer. “We have to maintain our organizational culture and the only way that we can do that is with everybody in the office.” I call BS on that. You can create an organizational culture in an entirely remote organization. You just get to do it consciously and you get to be clear about it and communicate about it.

It looks different and it feels different. When I mean, certainly you and I are not here to say that different is good or bad. It’s not a one-size-fits-all for any.

Its author, it’s not, “Here’s what your organizational culture should look like.” The question that I always ask first about your organizational culture is what does it feel like right now? What would you like it to feel like? What are your organizational values and what are you up to? Do you have a mission that’s bigger than we sue insurance companies or we make shoes or we pick up the trash or we make widgets or whatever it is that we do here? What are you up to that’s bigger than that? That’s another key thing that these younger generations need. They need a sense of purpose and they need to know how their job directly connects to that bigger purpose.

 

I don’t give a flying hoot if you’re in the office at 8:00 AM, you leave at 10:00 PM, if that’s what it takes to get your job done, we need to have a conversation about the amount of things on their plate or maybe the efficiency with which you get things done because that’s too many hours for a harmonious life. If that’s what works for you, if you love it, if the first thing you want to do every day is come to the office and the last thing that you want to do every day is leave the office and go home and go to bed. If that really works for you, okay but for most everybody else, like just get your work done.

If you can get your work done between 8 and 4 or 9 and 3 or 2 and 5. If you can get your work done between 2 and 5, you don’t have enough work. Let’s adjust that. If you can get your work done in a normal amount of time, I mean, and we all know, where we were at work all the time, we spent time on our computers, on Facebook, and shopping, and doing whatever other nonsense we were doing. We were not nose to the grindstone. It’s reasonable to assume somebody is working with focus maybe 6 to 7 hours a day.

I think it’s productivity is the word where obviously we’re circling around. It’s a word that’s on the minds of economists, of the Fed in the US for folks that are following economic policy here, and Fed Chairman Jay Powell. Productivity is a very big component in the mix in terms of what monetary policy is likely to be or when it changes. AI and many other advances, but AI in particular, I think is the big question mark at the moment.

I think has already been tremendous productivity gains, productivity has been high, at least it’s been attributed to be high. We’re going to see more. There are a lot of predictions being made, economic predictions, and investment predictions on the value to productivity that some of these tools will provide. I agree with you. I think we have to get out of that rigid mindset. There’s alike, as we are going to land the plane in a few minutes here on our conversations, I think a lot of this that we’re talking about has to do with just how we see, how we see things.

The future of work.

It’s a mindset that we get to, as you say, be more conscious of, be more aware of, and then ultimately determine whether or not we’re either rigid, too rigid perhaps to change or to pivot or to lean into more of an agile philosophy or we’re not. I don’t think anybody ever thinks of themselves as being or wants to think of themselves as being so rigid that they cannot change. I’ve got the name of this podcast is change proof. I’m wearing a proof t-shirt because in many respects, I think ultimately changes is why you and I are in the roles that we’re in because things change is the great constant in the universe, which is a funny paradox in and of itself.

Resilience And Change

People are really shitty with change. Even really successful leaders and others who are not necessarily in those types of roles resist change. My last question is really, because you’ve been someone that’s made changes and you’ve made them I think in a really elegant way from my vantage point. I know they’ve not been easy. I don’t think many of the changes that involve career decisions and other things are easy but you’ve been resilient the whole for at least. I want to get your take on resiliency as it relates to change. That’ll be our last inquiry for the moment.

Wonderful. One of my areas of work is change management, which is another one of these weird constructs because, of course, we don’t manage change. We manage change processes and we manage ourselves in the face of change. The reality is that literally the pace of change is speeding up. It’s part of why we as a global society are more depressed, more anxious because us humans and this machine in our head called our brain, it does not like change. We’ve had goodness. The last five years we’re coming up on the anniversary of the beginning of COVID, I just realized the other day in March, that’s going to be five years when things shut down, and which doesn’t quite seem possible.

We don't manage change. We manage change processes and ourselves in the face of change. Share on X

When we think about all of the changes that we have gone through when all of the uncertainty, and obviously here in the U.S., there’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment. It has become the water that we’re swimming in. How we manage that is really through resilience. You’re the one who has taught me a lot about resilience. I think when I look back on my life, we know that the big changes, they are hard and they are painful. It is when we grow. I think part of the trick for me in managing my own resilience has both been to pay attention to when I need recharging of my battery. For me, we’re going to end where we started. For me, that is spending time at the ocean, by the ocean, and unplugged and also being really clear.

Just like we’ve become more clear about the process of grief, becoming more clear about the process of change. Often when a change is first introduced, we get mad and we rail against the machine. This is bullshit and this is not the way it’s supposed to go and then we get sad. We’re in an uncomfortable period where we’re letting go of how it was and we haven’t yet gotten really clear about how it is yet to be. That is the uncertainty period. Man, we hate it but being clear like, “I’m in the uncomfortable middle. Got it. Boy, I don’t like it. Here we are. What can I do to get into action” The thing that moves us out of the uncomfortable middle is getting into action toward the thing that is becoming and finding ways to be enthusiastic about that.

It can be hard, especially if what we’re letting go of is something that we really liked or something that was connected to our identity and with the way that work permeates our lives. It used to largely be men who self-identified with work. When they had to retire or were forced into retirement or whatever that end of the work time was like, it was a really big transition. It was really hard because their identity was so connected. It’s now most of us. Getting that this transition is difficult and I don’t really like being in this uncomfortable place. What can I be excited about that is in the process of formation? How can I get into action around that? That’s what moves us out of the uncomfortableness of the middle and then into the new thing.

I love the way you led us through that continuum, the thing that to me also follows or is in the sequence becomes full commitment. Life is messy for those of us out there who are either perfectionists or recovering perfectionists. I’m sorry to say there are no straight lines in the universe. Just hold your arm up and you can see it’s not straight and all the rest, ha ha, giggle, but ultimately this is not about trying to seek something perfect. Again, in that grieving that people experience when change happens, it’s letting go of what their vision of what should be.

That idea of what it should be is that, for many of us, that perfectionist’s view of the world. As you say, it takes some letting go. We’re not after perfectionism anyway. I think we’re after impeccability and I’m not just splitting hairs. I think that it’s more than semantics. It’s the meaning here is that to be impeccable is something we can strive for perfectionism, not so much, at least without a lot of pain and agony, frustration and agony are optional, I think. Impeccability we can strive for. To me, impeccability is the ability to be fully committed to something. When you’re impeccable it doesn’t mean you’re always going to win.

I mean, you always do it right.

Exactly, but that’s different. Being in that state, moving through that continuum to end up in a place where you can be fully committed is really, to me, the end goal to coming out of change or working on change. Utilizing it, leveraging it for everything it’s worth. That takes energy. That energy, I think people, they’re willing to sacrifice their energy so readily when they’re caught up in the rip current, the riptide of change. I couldn’t say it any better and I wouldn’t want to say it any differently. Just like you said at the beginning, they resist. When you resist change, when you resist anything, you ultimately exhaust yourself in the process. That will not enable you more readily, quickly, and agilely to get to that place where you could be fully committed to leveraging change.

It’s just self-defeating, ultimately. Janine, thank you so much for everything that you shared, for your insights, and for leading us through that beautiful sequence around change and resiliency. Just as we began the show by me saying just how I feel about you. Again, I want to reiterate it. You are amazing as a person. As someone who’s helping other people, I feel blessings for them that they get to utilize that brain of yours and those insights in your experience, which come from things that have been difficult as well as things that have been really have worked great. Thank you for sharing all of it or pieces of it.

It is truly been my honor and it has been my honor to be on this journey with you. I’m excited to see where it continues to take us.

Wonderful. Everybody, you’ll obviously just stay tuned for a moment. I’m going to share some post notes a little bit afterward on our conversation, as well as where you can find out more information about Janine Hamner-Holman. Of course, the show notes will have links to her website and more about her role with Work Well will be in there as well. We’d love to get your comments, and your feedback because it’s vital to us.

You can go to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast, leave a comment or a question for Janine or myself, and I promise you it will not be a bot, it will be actually us that responds to that. Lastly, of course, the feedback that you provide in the form of a rating on the platform that you’re consuming this show. We’d love a five-star rating, but whatever it is that makes sense for you is just really valuable to us. We appreciate so much you’re taking the time to share that feedback as well.

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I totally love that conversation with Janine. I get to speak to her frequently. She’s a friend, she’s a colleague. Every single time I speak to her, I learn something. Every time I speak to her, I find myself inspired and more and more enthusiastic about the work that I do. Her energy is contagious. Her sense of humor and her way of looking at the world, I think is really amazing and unique in many respects. I so enjoyed our take. Our conversation and looking at both her work history and she shared vulnerably a story from her past, having been bullied at work, I’ll use that term.

Somebody that I think has really come through some very difficult work experiences with profound insights, with uncommon insights into how it is that we create greater psychological safety in the workplace. She gave us a history of many of those concepts and really shared with us some very sage ideas, sage wisdom, I would say, around how it is that we develop greater trust and open communications in the workplace and ultimately how it is that we’re able to be better at leading others as well as leading ourselves and even in our roles as individual contributors.

All of these skills, all these tools that we were discussing are applicable in every area of relationship, be it personal, be it professional. Frankly, I think our discussion around how it is that we develop greater trust by doing the things that we say we’re going to do, by being predictable, by providing feedback and being open to receiving feedback. Even as I was wanting to plus and add and contribute something to that conversation by giving other people permission as well to do it differently, to succeed in a way that’s different than the way that we’ve learned to succeed.

That’s difficult. Often that’s that even that piece of it, allowing and letting other people succeed in a way that’s different than the way that we are accustomed to or the way that has worked for us is difficult. The conversation is vital as Janine said, we have to be able to speak about these things. We have to feel open, that it’s safe to be open and be in open dialogue and communication and in community with one another in regard to these difficult situations to navigate because we’re just people and we’re imperfect. Ultimately, we want to be able to navigate the one great constant that we all experience and that is what the universe is comprised of, which is change.

Things must constantly be evolving because if they’re not evolving and they’re not in a state of evolution, then they’re in a state of decay. They’re in a state of entropy. Change is the one thing that we as individuals, as leaders, as people that are involved and in relationship to others organizationally and in greater communities of our society, we have to know that change is always going to be the one constant. When we realize that we’re not great at change and where we resist it and we see it as a threat, that it interferes with our need for control even, that when we have that level of self-awareness. We understand that we must become better at change at working through the cycle, the sequence as Janine shared with us toward the end of our conversation.

That idea that we have to see. Acknowledge that we’re going to be mad sometimes, that our first reaction to change things, changing the status quo or something else in our world-changing, that we may be mad at first, that there’s anger associated with it. We may become sad and that’s also likely to occur that it would be ordinary for us to move from mad to sad, and then ultimately in that space of uncertainty that we feel unmoored, that we feel confused, and lacking in clarity. On the other side of that when we are able to emerge from that state looking at that change as something that is required because it wouldn’t have happened. Otherwise, I truly believe that whatever’s happening is happening for a reason.

It’s certainly not random and it’s certainly not by accident that in that sense it’s required that when we emerge from that process, understanding that this is something that will ultimately serve us or serve others, even if we don’t know how it will do so. That we can then get to the place where we can fully commit to it. Not to try to create a new form of perfection or to become inoculated from change in the future. That will never happen, but we can be impeccable. By impeccable, I mean that we can be fully committed, that we can move forward with full commitment.

That will ultimately leverage that change and create an exponential benefit from that event, whatever that change was, whether it was something involved directly in a professional or in a business context, or it’s something in our personal lives. All of that was just precipitated by how Janine led us through her personal story, through her own roller coaster, through her what was a rock bottom moment in her career to the point where now she is inspiring and  educating, leading insightful leaders to do better, to be able to lead more effectively through the constant period of change that we’re all experiencing living in.

As Janine said, that’s only accelerating in all likelihood, the pace of change, the velocity, if you will, is only increasing over time. We really desperately, in many cases, need to learn how to be better with change. Wearing a t-shirt that says change proof, having a show with that name, and writing a book with that title, change is really very much on my mind. I know it’s on the minds of all of us. What a perfect guest to help us to wade into that dark water and not feel somehow that we are not grounded. Janine is a very grounding person and I’m sure you got that reading to her.

Again, if you’d like to find out more about the work that she does and the work she actually does in collaboration with our organization Work Well as a facilitator, leading training and even keynotes on the topics of psychological safety, on inclusion, on emotional intelligence, on conscious leadership and other topics as well. Please feel free to engage with us on that. There’s more about Janine and her work in the world in our show notes.

For now, anyway, I just want to say thank you again for being a part of our community. Stay change-proof, I suppose. More than that, I wish you a really beautiful, peaceful day. A day when you can be in your heart, you can feel clear that in this moment, you’re not just safe, but you are doing something to advance, to grow, to evolve. What’s out in front of that evolution for all of us is something more beautiful than we can even imagine. I wish you the best and thank you again for being a part of this community.

 

Important Links

• Janine Hamner Holman’s LinkedIn
• Janine Hamner Holman’s Website
• Janine Hamner Holman’s Instagram
• Janine Hamner Holman’s Youtube Channel
• Adam Markel’s Podcast

 

About Janine Hammer Holman

Janine Hamner Holman is an internationally recognized speaker, bestselling author, and expert in organizational culture change, conscious leadership, inclusion, and emotional intelligence. With experience spanning nonprofit leadership, Fortune 200 companies, and the public sector, Janine brings unique insights into diagnosing and solving organizational challenges. Her firm uses the DADI model that she developed: Diagnose, Assess, Design, and Implement, to help organizations thrive by identifying challenges, designing solutions, and implementing changes that foster growth and resilience. Unlike many consulting approaches, Janine’s method ensures lasting impact and support throughout the change process.