Best Seller Live | Author Interviews with Cynthia Johnson and Rhett Power
Rhett Power and Cynthia Johnson, both accomplished authors, entrepreneurs, and speakers, co-host Best Seller TV, interviewing fellow authors about their nonfiction books. With their expertise and engaging style, they create insightful and captivating conversations. Rhett's dynamic charisma and Cynthia's thoughtful approach make for a winning combination beyond mere promotion, offering viewers a deep dive into authors' minds.
Best Seller Live | Author Interviews with Cynthia Johnson and Rhett Power
Navigating Leadership and Well-Being with "Tomorrowmind" Author Gabriella Rosen Kellerman
What essential skills do you need to thrive in today's dynamic work environment? Join us as we sit down with Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, a Harvard-trained physician turned tech entrepreneur, and author of "Tomorrow Mind." Alongside co-author Professor Martin Seligman, Gabriella unpacks the concept of prospection and introduces us to the PRISM acronym, outlining five vital skills for success. This episode offers a thought-provoking journey from her initial career in clinical psychiatry to her current role as Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUp, where she focuses on enhancing population-level well-being through technology.
We also explore the nuanced demands of modern leadership, emphasizing the emotional labor involved and the importance of mentorship, coaching, and therapy. Gabriella shares her insights on how to foster a supportive environment for leaders to thrive, even amid today's volatile landscape. As organizations grapple with balancing individual empowerment and systemic change, we discuss the critical need for sustained well-being initiatives and greater literacy in behavioral science. Tune in for invaluable insights on navigating the evolving world of work and leadership, especially in the wake of a global pandemic.
Rhett Power and Cynthia Johnson, both accomplished authors, entrepreneurs, and speakers, co-host Best Seller TV, interviewing fellow authors about their nonfiction books. With their expertise and engaging style, they create insightful and captivating conversations. Rhett's dynamic charisma and Cynthia's thoughtful approach make for a winning combination beyond mere promotion, offering viewers a deep dive into authors' minds.
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Hello and welcome back to Best Seller TV. I am your co-host, cynthia Johnson, and I'm here with the lovely Rhett Power. Hi, rhett, how are you?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, those were very kind words. It's good to be with you again.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, those were very kind words, it's good to be with you, yes, and it's great to be here with our author of the week, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman. She's an author, entrepreneur, startup executive and Harvard-trained physician. Her expertise is in behavioral and organizational change, digital health, well-being and AI. Her first book, Tomorrow Mind, co-authored with Professor Martin Seligman. She has served as the Chief Product Officer at BetterUp and is currently the Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUp and Head of BetterUp Labs. Welcome, Gabriella, it's so great to have you.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much. It's great to be with you both.
Speaker 2:Very good to have you. I can't wait to talk about this topic because it is so timely and so relevant to what our leaders and our founders and our organizations are dealing with even the big organizations, right? Because I think in the last few years, leadership has drastically evolved and changed. And and so tell us a bit about your background and then what? Because you're, you're, you're coming at this from a medical perspective, as an MD and psychiatry. But what inspired in that background for you to start writing and to to really write this book?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for the question. So I did start my career in medicine and I've always wanted to work on this challenge of helping populations thrive. It bothered me at a young age, and it still bothers me, that we accept a certain amount of emotional suffering in our life as a status quo and as normal, and that we've made lifespan longer, we've raised the standard of living, that we haven't changed the experience of life in terms of the level of suffering it entails, and so that's a huge problem and there's no one place to work on it. And as a teenager I figured I you know I'm scientifically minded I figured I'll get all the scientific tools to think about the brain and to think about why we suffer and understand that. And at some point I started getting interested in the public health perspective. So I worked at the World Health Organization.
Speaker 3:It turns out that clinical psychiatry is not a great place today to work on population level well-being. It's much more about helping individuals who are struggling with pretty, in some cases pretty severe psychopathology, and that's where a lot of our funding goes in terms of drug discovery. Extremely important population, still in many ways a highly underserved population, but at the same time, if my sort of calling and passion area was thriving for everyone, that wasn't going to be the right place to focus. So it was 15 years ago that I left medicine for tech. Why tech? Because it was a place where a lot of innovation was happening around tools related to well-being and, in so doing, found partnerships throughout with large enterprises who were investing in this new technology to help people grow and thrive, and so that's really been my home, and understanding the world and the challenges of professionals who are trying to live their best life, both personally and professionally, and how to build tools and support to help them do that has been the project of those 15 years.
Speaker 3:As you guys know, this is not the world of work we evolved in the world of hunter-gatherers right, it couldn't be more different. It's this sort of technological hurricane and we wake up every day and there's something brand new, and it's hard and it's startling, and it may be internal to our organization or our team, or it may be external, but it has these ripple effects, and so understanding that environment has become a really important part of my work, of my life's work, of my current work as chief innovation officer at BetterUp, and doing wanted to capture the big picture of that research, even as we publish pieces of it in academic journals and in popular magazines and outlets. The bigger picture of what is this that's happening around us, why is it hitting us in a certain way and what are the gaps between kind of our native capabilities and the skills that we need to do well, calling all that out and hopefully teaching people how to build those.
Speaker 1:So with all of the years of I'm sorry to jump in, but I'm so curious with you say you're saying 15 years ago you entered the space. And then there's all this research. At what point did you know it was time to write the book?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for that question. It's interesting because there was one particular area of the research on prospection which is how we think about the future. That is one of the areas we've spent a lot of time and a lot of money through better up labs studying and we originally said we're going to write a book about that because we felt like we have a big picture perspective on that. Um and uh and and the idea was like it was a the quantity of research, it was some nuanced findings. So also this idea that prospection is it's not a familiar concept.
Speaker 3:Even the word probably isn't ringing a bell with many people watching this now. It's really about future-mindedness and foresight, but it happens to be essential for our world of work today. So we thought a book would be the right way to help people with that. And then, as we step back to try to explain why is this important, we realized we couldn't just talk about prospection alone. There were these four other skills we needed to talk about as well. And so it went from one skill prospection, the five skills, the PRISM acronym and became this bigger book. But it started from a desire to tell the story of prospection in particular.
Speaker 2:No, that's fascinating. What does tomorrow mind mean?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's a way of thinking about the skills we need to thrive at work today, and that title was originally inspired by prospection, which again is about future mindedness, and so there's a little bit of a play on words here, because, on the one hand, it's about how do we think about the future in a healthy and effective way. It's also, though, positioning this work within the conversation of the future of work which, you know, is inherently about tomorrow, and so there's both of those dimensions implied by that word.
Speaker 1:What are the skills that we need today to be successful?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's five. They're summarized by the acronym PRISM. The book goes through each of them. I'll tell you what PRISM stands for. But I'll just first say that the book doesn't go in order of the acronym because the way the skills build doesn't actually align to that order. So the acronym's out of order, but it's a great word, so that's what we're sticking with. So the P is prospection, which again is our ability to imagine and plan for the future. And in an era where change is coming at us fast and furious all the time, every bit of edge we can get on not necessarily predicting, but being prepared for a really wide range of changes positions us to be successful and to make the most of those changes really as opportunities. So that's prospection.
Speaker 3:R is resilience. That's the first skill we cover in the book because it's so foundational. Resilience is our ability to get back up after a challenge. At its most extreme it's anti-fragility, which is our ability to grow stronger because of challenge. And so, if you imagine, we wake up in this technological hurricane, every storm that comes our way, we're growing stronger because of it. That's a very different point of departure than being someone who's just like barely able to get out of bed storm after storm. So correcting that, getting people into a more centered, ready place is the goal of the resilience work the eyes for innovation, innovation and creativity is an essential work skill today. We see this more and more in all the future of work reports, but also in our data around what people are asking for help with. They're being asked to innovate more frequently on a larger number and a wider array of problems, because all of this novelty means we're, you know, at all levels of the organization, trying to solve for things we've never seen before, with increasing frequency. So the science of what that means and how to do it and how to build teams that can do it, is what that's about.
Speaker 3:The S is for social support and, in particular, social connection is really the skill to establish social support. In particular, we develop this concept of rapid rapport, which is how do we quickly build trust across difference? We know that we need trust to get to great outcomes for our own well-being, to get to great outcomes for our organization in terms of collaboration, innovation and also for our customers. We can't delight our customers, we can't do well by our customers, if we don't have a connection, a true connection with them. And as we automate more and more of customer service, the expectations of what human connection with a company is delivering are higher, and we need to get better at connecting with people quickly.
Speaker 3:And then the last one is mattering M for mattering, which is this very basic level of a feeling that our efforts, there's some point to our efforts.
Speaker 3:Now you can go all the way to meaning and purpose, which is really where we came at mattering from. We started with meaning and purpose and there's a lot of reasons we could talk about why we landed on mattering, but mattering is sort of the lowest, the minimum bar for helping people feel that their efforts matter. And if we don't feel it matters, we're not going to go back to work period, right, we're not going to just run in a hamster wheel for no reason. So a big part of the motivation to show up to work, the motivation to work on all of this on the one hand, and then also for leaders, the skills required is helping people feel that that work matters. Even, by the way, when you're asking them to stop doing something that they've been working on for a year and do something completely different, you need to be able to narrate for them. Why did that year matter, even though we're walking away from it, and why should you believe me that this next year is going to matter too?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really powerful, right? The idea that I mean mattering is the lowest form of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I saw.
Speaker 3:I was walking by a house I live in Berkeley, as I mentioned you guys. I was walking by a house that had a Black Lives Matter sign up and then next to it was a sign that said mattering is the minimum, and I thought that was really important. All of these movements to emphasize mattering, like let's not forget that that's really the bare minimum. It's something we can all agree on, so that's why I think we're hanging our hats on it, but it's not the be all and the end all. It's where we need to start.
Speaker 2:Do we? It seems to me I mean this book, and correct me if I'm wrong. This is a really essential book for leadership today and I think I want to know are these skills? Are they all intuitive? Can they be taught? Can we, as leaders, learn to be more resilient? Can we learn, you know, I just these are some of these are hard really. Yeah, I think these aren't natural to most.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for asking this. So a few points. First is everything we talk about in the book can be learned. So we're not in the business of diagnose adios, right, we want to help people. That's the first thing. All of them, and we have tons of data to show it. And we're trying to help people build them.
Speaker 3:The second thing is it is true that some people, by virtue of nature or nurture or some combination, have an easier time with some of these and a harder time with others, and to us, that just means we need to take a personalized approach. It's not a one size fits all. So, as one example of resilience, there's five drivers of resilience and each of us is going to be better at some and worse than others, and we focus on the ones where we have more room to grow and we also lean into our strengths, and you know, in times of challenge. So having that self-awareness of our own natural or nurtural predispositions is useful, but we want to help people grow regardless. And then I think the last point I just want to emphasize from your question is like leadership, it's not today what it used to be, and leadership changes depending on the nature of work and part of what I see all the time in working with large organizations and individual leaders is lots of people who are put in leadership roles thinking it's one thing when actually it's another, and in many cases it's not anyone's fault that that happened.
Speaker 3:But we do need to take a step back and be really clear headed about what leadership in this, what we call the whitewater world of work means and looks like. Call the whitewater world of work means and looks like People leadership, specifically managing people, is very different today and it requires you know it gives you energy in different ways and it drains your energy in different ways, and the more we can be clear and transparent about that, the more we can set people up for success. Part of that also means people for whom that's not a fit need a different way to progress their career. Otherwise it's going to be a, you know, a round peg square hole problem where we're trying to people are trying to fit themselves into something that's not good and the people who report to them are going to suffer Because that's the only way they think they can progress and you know it's not how it has to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting because you do you think, oh, I'll be a leader and that'll be easy, or that's the tone that some people you know, and it's actually maybe the hardest thing ever for someone who isn't, who likes to get in the work, right, um, and then recognizing that as a personality trait and they're both correction wrong when you're describing like future leadership, almost anyone could be a leader without a title, is that, is it? That's the kind of the tomorrow mind right?
Speaker 3:I think that's really true. Yeah, you can be a leader without a title and also you can have the title and not be doing justice to those, those skills, right? I mean, I think what you're what you're saying, part of what you're saying that, cynthia is there's this level. Part of what you're saying that, cynthia, is there's this level modern leadership. There's a level of emotional labor that's required. Um, because this is hard. It's it's hard for humans to do what we're doing, and when people are stuck and they're having a tough time, it is natural and also probably correct to look for some amount of support and guidance and coaching, ultimately from your manager. So that person has to be someone who's going to be inspired by that and energized by that, and if they're not, it's really going to be a drag.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:This is not a fair question, probably, and I apologize in advance, but you know just from your and you know I'm an executive coach and I work with entrepreneurs and founders and you know this is just not a fair question. I apologize just from your experience that it's healthy for leaders in this new world and everything that we're having to learn how to do and cope with and the stress of that, to sort of proactively talk to somebody. I mean, because to me it's a. You know, I'll use this example.
Speaker 2:So my 17-year-old came home they finished school a couple weeks ago and he said you know, we've been talking about cancel, getting canceled and the things that will get us canceled. And he's like this is what we're talking about with our friends and a 17-year-old is worried about getting canceled about with our friends and a 17 year old is worried about getting canceled. And so if a 17 year old is worried about how society is going to treat him like, for CEOs it is. It is very top of mind that if they say something wrong, do something wrong, take a wrong, you know.
Speaker 3:So what do you?
Speaker 2:like it, just I and I, you know I just because there's a lot of stress in that.
Speaker 3:Totally yeah, and I think there's two levels of your question that I'm playing around with in my head as I'm thinking about how to answer it. One is like it's just a very volatile world and we need support, and talking to people in one form or another, whether it's a mentor or a coach or a therapist can be so helpful to us. And then the other is specifically around cancel culture, where sometimes you need a safe place to try out words and try out language, to make sure that you're not going to get canceled more broadly for saying something. So yeah, I'd say both of those. For both of those things, I think it's extremely important and part of why I'm so passionate about the rise of coaching. And you know what, what you do, rad and Cynthia, I know you do some of it too, and you know I, of course, do.
Speaker 3:It is for so long therapy was the only way to talk to someone, and, first of all, we have a shortage of therapists.
Speaker 3:Second of all, they're really trained and you know I myself, originally, was trained to help people who are struggling with a clinical condition and, third of all, like that, a lot of what we need to talk about it doesn't fall in the DSM.
Speaker 3:So this idea of coaching and people are specialized in helping people talk through their challenges is so powerful and all of these skills, these prism skills we have so much data on how coaching in particular is an incredibly powerful way to grow those skills. Now, not everyone today yet can afford a coach. I do see that changing in the next 10 years. In the next 10 years, I think that we will get there with humans, not just with AI, but AI maybe can offload parts of the human conversation that don't need to be done by the human and save the coach again for these really high impact moments of epiphany and nuanced conversation. Very long-winded answer to your question, but I think it's incredibly powerful. I think I'm continually fascinated by the mystery of why is it so powerful to just be able to talk to somebody? But so much goodness happens when we are able to ask powerful questions and listen in the right way and help people on their journey of self-discovery.
Speaker 2:Amen.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting how different we all are, and especially in a workplace environment, and I think I, as someone who started, I worked in an ideal environment for myself which gave me leadership space but not all of the responsibility. And then that company was acquired and I worked inside of a corporation and I remember being like let's just blow it up from the inside out, like this thing's a mess in here, right, and wasn't a fit. And then I started my own company and I quickly learned the lessons of what it's like to have all the responsibility and and grow and grow. Through that and just over these different parts of my experience.
Speaker 1:I people are so different. I can look at someone now and go, wow, you are not a fit for your job, but I know exactly where you'd be perfect now because I've seen it. I've seen you in these roles before, and now we're in this place where mostly virtual, and we're relying on coaches pretty heavily to help guide our teams and our employees to solutions on their own. Solutions on their own um, what role is the? I mean, and I'm gonna, I'm asking this because of better up too right.
Speaker 1:It's like what role does the your company have in in both facilitating coaching experience? And offering, but also giving space to, to hear the outcome and and actually implement whatever that is yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 3:So I think that there's a lot of ways to sort of scale this approach of course better. It's a great way to scale coaching to lots of levels. I do think that there is a lot of work to be done. Back to our original point about what does leadership today look like and mean around training leaders to be coaches. There are certain core coaching skills that can be taught to. Anyone who's going to qualify for modern leadership can be taught some of these core coaching skills and that can unlock a lot for the organization.
Speaker 3:The other part of your question, though, I think, is around what's the role of the individual versus kind of the system around them, and I think that's a very important question, and there's sort of two layers to my answer. So one is that we can. Ultimately, we can only control what we ourselves do as individuals. If we're leaders, we can help control the system. If we're not, we can only control what we ourselves do as individuals. If we're leaders, we can help control the system. If we're not, you know we can't. But a huge part of psychological well-being is the ability to take ownership of what we can control and be OK with the parts that we can't. So, working one on one with an individual, looking at how am I going to help someone successfully get through this chapter, that's a big part of the work. And, by contrast, when we don't have that concept in place particularly when we, you know, feel like the things around us, it's just too much and we're kind of a victim of the environment it leads to negative psychological outcomes for people. Right, it leads to depression, ptsd, anxiety, substance, all kinds of things that we want to help people avoid. So, from an individual empowerment, I think there's an important way of saying what can I as an individual do and focus on that.
Speaker 3:At the same time, it is absolutely true that there are systemic factors that make it really hard for people to thrive in certain environments, and organizations need a lot of help seeing that and understanding that and changing that, and you know, I think there's a lot of data to help them go on that journey. Now, I think that it's a little harder to do that when we're in an economic recession. And it's a little harder to do that when we're in an economic recession. It's a little easier to do that in a strong labor market.
Speaker 3:But, regardless, if you're looking to get the most out of your employees, which every company is then these are things that you need to understand, and what are the best practices to help people really fulfill their potential. What can you do at the systemic level? So I think it's a both and the watch out and this is a point that my co-author, marty Seligman, makes often is that if we teach people that we need to change the system and that's going to be the fix and sort of like, just wait for that, it leads to patterns of learned helplessness, which again is just really bad for our well-being, our performance, our life satisfaction.
Speaker 2:So it's important to be able to kind of hold both of those things companies a grade on how we do, on these really important ways that we take care of people and we take care of ourselves. How are we doing kind of across the board? I know it's a very general question, but what do you think?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And did the pandemic shift that at all? Did it make a difference at that?
Speaker 3:So the pandemic helped companies care more. It really did. It swung the pendulum in favor of a lot of conversations around well-being, conversations around work-life balance. I will say it's been troubling to see how quickly the pendulum has swung back in the opposite direction and one of my answers to how I would grade any individual company is like how measured are those pendulum swings in any moment? And I think the ones who are so in the recession it's become all about performance. You know it's the year of efficiency or whatever it was that Zuckerberg has said and others have said, and it's understandable.
Speaker 3:But the lesson I hope that the lesson of the pandemic would have partially been that well-being drives performance, and so if you turn well-being into something that's nice to have, then you know you do that to the detriment of your own share price, by the way, which Jean-Emmanuel Deneuve recently showed in a great paper looking at stock price based on employee well-being and you know you do it at the expense of the sustainability of your entire organization.
Speaker 3:So I think we are still very immature in our understanding of this. There's still a huge amount of legacy and shadow of the industrial revolution that led to the ways we think about people as machines and that's not how we work and it's not who we are. So I think I'm gonna refrain from giving a grade. I will say there are some A companies out there and that's great to see, and there are others at the opposite end and hopefully, as more and more leaders come up from a generation that's a little more attuned to these things, hopefully we will see more of that change. And as folks get more curious about the science that's out there, you know, I think reading papers, reading studies, like look at the data. It doesn't have to be a matter of I believe this or I don't, just look at the studies.
Speaker 2:It's safe to say we have a lot of work to do. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm not trying to put more work on you, but podcasts for you, but I don't know. Pull the study and talk about it for us that would be great, I would yeah, there are.
Speaker 3:honestly, there's so much great work out there and we need more avenues for dissemination and we need to help people also with just general literacy around behavioral science. It's one of the points to make at the end of the book that it's very hard to make a business case around some of this because of the length of time to see these changes play out, of the sophistication of some of the statistical methods that are used. It's not just like bring in this vendor and they'll replace our in-house person and you know we get the same outcome for less money. It's not an efficiency sale, it's an effectiveness sale and that's much more nuanced and it would help if we all had more education and you know, probably in secondary school around these concepts and these studies and this just mindset of how to think about outcomes that are more complex.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have gotten to the end of our time, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:So let's ask one final question is where can we get the book.
Speaker 3:You can get it on any major retailer, online, um, or in person, um. It's published by atrio, just simon and schuster, so there's a page for the book that has lots of links there, or my website has all the same links and that's just gabriella rosen, kellermancom, or gabriella kellermancom, um. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram, I would love that too. Not Gabriella Rosen Kellerman.
Speaker 2:Gabriella, let me ask you this real quick Do you go into companies and give a talk?
Speaker 3:And I love, I love to do it. So I love to talk about those broader concepts. I love to talk about resilience, creativity, the relationship of all these things to performance, the science of it. All of the above, yeah, thanks, rhett.
Speaker 2:They can find out how to do that too, if they want to get into this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks, rhett. Thank you guys so much for the conversation and thanks for hosting this great podcast.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely, and for everyone watching at home. We are Best Seller TV. We'll be back next week with another amazing author. Thank you, Gabriela, for being here.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much.
