569: Advisor to Microsoft, Google, and Hilton Executives Reveals How Leaders Create High-Performance Cultures Without Sacrificing Employee Joy

569: Advisor to Microsoft, Google, and Hilton Executives Reveals How Leaders Create High-Performance Cultures Without Sacrificing Employee Joy

In this conversation with Bree Groff, author of "Today Was Fun" and who has advised executives at Microsoft, Google, Target, and Hilton through periods of organizational change, shares specific observations about leadership blind spots in large corporations and offers practical frameworks for creating workplace cultures that drive both performance and employee satisfaction.

Key Insights:

The Professional Conformity Trap: Large organizations often mistake formality for competence, creating environments where rigid presentation styles and corporate jargon become proxies for professionalism. This stifles the creativity and authenticity that both employees and customers actually seek. Organizations that are "unapologetically themselves" create magnetic appeal, as demonstrated by early Google's distinctive culture.

The Psychological Safety Framework: Effective leaders implement simple tools to humanize workplace interactions. The "check-in" method—where meeting participants rate their current state on a scale of one to five and briefly explain why—transforms team dynamics by creating context for behavior and establishing emotional safety that enables better performance.

The Micro-Change Strategy: Rather than pursuing wholesale transformation, leaders create meaningful cultural shifts through "micro acts of mischief" and connection. These range from rearranging office furniture to facilitate collaboration, to sending brief acknowledgment messages to colleagues. Such small actions compound to create environments where creativity and engagement flourish.

The Joy-Performance Connection: Organizations that measure employee satisfaction with the same rigor they apply to productivity metrics discover that optimizing for workplace enjoyment simultaneously addresses communication gaps, decision-making delays, and other operational inefficiencies. As Groff explains, "to optimize for joy and fun means you're automatically optimizing for all of the other things that make a business successful."

Leadership Characteristics That Drive Culture Change: The most effective leaders demonstrate two key traits: they avoid taking themselves too seriously while thinking expansively about possibilities. Groff cites Melissa Goldie, former Chief Marketing Officer of Calvin Klein, who maintained perspective with phrases like "there's no such thing as a fashion emergency" while pursuing ambitious creative projects.

This discussion provides concrete tools for leaders seeking to create environments where high performance and genuine workplace satisfaction reinforce each other, drawn from real-world applications across major corporate environments.

Get Bree’s book here: https://shorturl.at/NMyys

Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously)

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132: Apple car & Amazon's core strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #15)

132: Apple car & Amazon's core strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #15)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m. (#15), a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news.    To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. To get a written copy with links to mentioned articles sign up here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

15 Helmi 202135min

131: Defense is not a strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #14)

131: Defense is not a strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #14)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m. (#14), a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news.    To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. To get a written copy with links to mentioned articles sign up here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

8 Helmi 202132min

130: How to create a career strategy for an executive (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #13)

130: How to create a career strategy for an executive (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #13)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m. (#13), a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news.    To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. To get a written copy with links to mentioned articles sign up here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

1 Helmi 202137min

129: The nuances of a private equity strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #12)

129: The nuances of a private equity strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #12)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m., a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news.    To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. To get a written copy with links to mentioned articles sign up here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

25 Tammi 202130min

128: How to eliminate bureaucratic red tape and bad excuses, with Martin Lindstrom

128: How to eliminate bureaucratic red tape and bad excuses, with Martin Lindstrom

Martin's book THE MINISTRY OF COMMON SENSE: https://amzn.to/3962pE9 Meet New York Times bestselling author Martin Lindstrom (one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People). We interviewed Martin about his new book THE MINISTRY OF COMMON SENSE: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS. Doesn’t your workplace drive you crazy when you get cc’ed on irrelevant email chains, invited to unnecessary meetings, or forbidden by company policy to do the exact thing your boss commands you to do?  These and many other frustrations stem from the same underlying cause: a lack of common sense! In an interview Martin discusses the most typical roadblocks to common sense: (Bad) customer experience Politics Technology Meetings and Power Points Rules, Regulations, and Policies Compliance and Legal And has remedies for all.  Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, a global branding & culture transformation firm, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People,” and for three years running, Thinkers50, has selected Lindstrom to be among the world’s top 50 business thinkers. Among the companies he advises are Burger King, Lowes, Boar’s Head, Beverly Hills Hotels, Pepsi, Nestle and Google. Lindstrom is the author of seven books including several New York Times bestsellers that have been translated into 60 languages. The Wall-Street Journal praised his book Brand Sense as “one of the five best marketing books ever published,” and his book Small Data as “revolutionary,” and TIME called his book Buyology “a breakthrough in branding.”

21 Tammi 20211h 17min

127: Fear is not a strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #11)

127: Fear is not a strategy (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #11)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m., a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news.    To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. To get a written copy with links to mentioned articles sign up here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

18 Tammi 202130min

126: One of the biggest strategy shifts ever in the next 10 to 20 years (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #10)

126: One of the biggest strategy shifts ever in the next 10 to 20 years (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #10)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m., a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news.    To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. To get a written copy with links to mentioned articles sign up here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

11 Tammi 202128min

125: Netflix vs. Disney+ vs. AppleTV vs. HBO Max (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #9)

125: Netflix vs. Disney+ vs. AppleTV vs. HBO Max (Monday Morning 8 a.m. #9)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m., a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news.    To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. To get a written copy with links to mentioned articles sign up here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

21 Joulu 202030min

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