On this episode of People Fundamentals, I’m joined by Dan Riley, co-founder of RADICL. RADICL is a leader in people science, focused on transforming how organizations approach employee engagement, performance management, and leadership development.
We dive deep into the critical role of connection at work—why it’s not just a “nice to have,” but a must-have for organizations looking to drive productivity, innovation, and trust. We explore how meaningful workplace relationships fuel effectiveness, break down silos, and create cultures where employees thrive.
In this conversation, recorded live at UNLEASH World 2024 in Paris, Dan shares his take on why connection is the foundation of business success and how you can make it a reality in your organization.
Listen in as we explore tangible ways to build trust, drive engagement, and create momentum for lasting change.
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Turn connection into a competitive advantage
There’s far more to connection than just fostering relationships. “It’s being connected to the right person at the right time, at the right place,” Dan says, “when you need them, where you need them, why you need them.” And there’s real business value in strong workplace relationships, Dan continues, explaining that better connection directly fuels productivity and innovation.
“Better connection drives innovation, right? It drives effectiveness, it drives productivity,” he says. “We have numbers in our data research that shows there’s 200% productivity increases when there’s better connection, trusted connections in the workplace.”
This isn’t just an abstract idea. Organizations that prioritize connection see measurable improvements in performance. Yet many leaders still see connection-building as a secondary concern, rather than a critical factor in achieving business goals. Dan emphasizes that the real challenge is getting executive buy-in, and that means presenting the numbers.
“We should just want to do this for our people,” he says. “But everybody wants data to back organizational decisions. So the data’s there, it’s loud and clear: Having a more connected workforce absolutely drives productivity. It unlocks innovation and drives team effectiveness to numbers in the triple digits.”
Connection isn’t just a cultural benefit: It’s a driver of business success. Leaders who fail to recognize this are leaving massive potential on the table.
Dismantle silos before they disconnect your people
Silos and disconnection create frustration and prevent teams from performing at their best. Dan makes it clear that trust and open communication are the keys to fixing these challenges. “The best way to fix silos and disconnection is recognizing that they exist,” he says.
Many organizations only address organizational culture when issues arise. But Dan challenges leaders to take a different approach—one that mirrors how we maintain strong relationships in our personal lives. Instead of waiting until there’s a breakdown, leaders should actively create opportunities for open dialogue, alignment, and relationship-building. “That helps to break down barriers, build trust—and organizations need to think about it like that,” he says. “They really need to think about it like a personal relationship.”
He also emphasizes that trust isn’t just about making employees feel good. At their core, trust, and connection promote business success. Many executives focus on revenue growth as their top priority, but Dan argues that this mindset is backward.
“Revenue production, margins, business performance—these are outcomes of taking care of your people,” he says. “These might be critical focus areas, but how are you going to do that? You have to empower and take care of your people. You have to build trusted connections in the workplace.”
Fuel lasting change through continuous momentum
Cultural change doesn’t happen overnight. Dan encourages leaders to stop thinking about change as a one-time initiative and start thinking of it as an ongoing momentum-building process.
“Think about change as momentum,” he says. “Build a culture that focuses on that speed and momentum and not just arrival and hitting the numbers, because then I think it’s too short-sighted.”
This means focusing on incremental wins rather than waiting for a major transformation to happen all at once. It’s about setting small, clear priorities and communicating them transparently across the organization. Dan suggests being clear about what the company is focusing on, but also acknowledging what you aren’t addressing right now. Employees appreciate transparency, and setting realistic expectations fosters trust.
Dan also emphasizes the importance of seeing employees as whole people, not just workers. Some employees want to separate their personal and professional lives, while others want to bring more of their identity into the workplace. The key is giving them the freedom to choose.
“So sometimes when we talk about whole-person, too often some organizations or employees think, ‘Well, no, I want separation,’ and great. If you want separation, you should have separation,” he says. “But if there are things that are important in your life that you want to bring into the workplace…you should be able to do that as well.”
Dan’s message is simple but powerful. We all want the same things: opportunity, development, growth, and impact. The key is staying focused on that shared vision and creating the trust and connection needed to get there.
People in This Episode
Dan Riley: LinkedIn
Transcript
Dan Riley:
It is easy to say, “Well, it’s the right thing to do,” right? Having people more connected, trusting each other, is good. But if a CFO or anybody needs data, there is incredible data behind… Better connection drives innovation, right? It drives effectiveness, it drives productivity. We have numbers in our data research that shows there’s 200% productivity increases when there’s better connection, trusted connections in the workplace. So to try to get the C-suite behind this and putting resources behind this, again, we should just want to do this for our people.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Hi everyone, and welcome to Betterworks’ podcast, People Fundamentals. I’m your host, Ashley Litzenberger, Senior Director of Product Marketing. Betterworks’ core belief in people fundamentals revolves around helping HR lead through constant change by focusing on core values like fairness, support, balance, and enabling growth opportunities for employees. These tenets empower everyone in the workforce to strive for excellence, to foster creativity, and to acknowledge each other’s contributions. Betterworks believes that strategic HR leaders can translate these principles into action, shaping their workforce for the better and helping to drive meaningful business outcomes. And in this show, we’re diving even deeper into these principles by listening to experts share how you can make them come alive at your organization.
In this episode, recorded live at UNLEASH World 2024 in Paris, I’m excited to welcome back to the show Dan Riley, co-founder of RADICL. RADICL calls itself an authority in people science and the whole person experience, and its goal is to transform how organizations approach employee engagement, performance management, and leadership development.
Dan shares his perspective on why trust and connection are more important than ever in today’s workplace, especially as we navigate hybrid and remote work environments. We touch on everything from how generational shifts are influencing workplace values to the growing urgency for organizations to embrace empathy and purpose. Dan also provides actionable advice and compelling stories that will inspire you to think differently about how you lead and support your people. This is an episode full of practical takeaways and fresh perspectives to help you rethink how to build a stronger, more human-centered organization. Let’s get started.
Dan, it’s so wonderful to have you on the podcast today.
Dan Riley:
I am very happy to be here. This is one of my favorite events. I’m not picking favorites, but I do love this event. And we’re in Paris.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Who doesn’t love being in Paris?
Dan Riley:
Yes, yes.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Now, Dan, you’ve had the wonderful fortune of getting to emcee one of the stages over the last few days.
Dan Riley:
Yes.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Tell me, what are some of the themes that are showing up on stage as people are talking and in the questions that the audience is asking?
Dan Riley:
Yeah, so the stage that I’m running is entitled HR Evolution. And when I kicked off the day yesterday, the first session was packed and I asked a very simple question. I said, “Is HR evolving quickly enough?” And not a single hand went up. I expected that to be the case.
So I think that was a great starting point for a lot of great speakers that have been talking about new approaches to AI and employee experience, newer approaches to listening, newer approaches to building culture, connection, putting people first. There’s been great stories. Every speaker has brought, I’d say, a different angle to what ultimately is about: How do we continue to challenge HR to put their people first and organizations to make sure they put their people first? Because the long play with that will always be successful, and I will go to my grave preaching that.
Ashley Litzenberger:
There seems to be a really heightened focus on building trust in the workplace or going back to employee connections, or sometimes it’s in HR, we need to put the human back in our work or center the human back at the focus of our work. And I know that this as a theme, has ebbed and flowed in the zeitgeist of what’s hot in the HR world, in newsletters and topics. It’s coming back around again, but what is different about it this time? And what is creating an urgency or why is it surfacing back to the top of people’s radars?
Dan Riley:
So I would say a couple of things. Number one, it came back loud and clear and very loud during the pandemic, for obvious reasons, right? Taking care of each other… And what I always joke and say that question, “How are you doing?” became really important. And if I asked you that, I truly was asking you because I cared, “How are you doing?” And your response to me was very honest and genuine.
So I think there was a moment in time where the best of humanity—I’m going to make this kind of big for a moment—came out because there was something bigger than just going to work. And we, luckily and thankfully, it was a hard time, but we all made it past that. Then I think we started to get back to the anxiety of business as usual.
But now I think what we’re seeing, there’s one or two things. Number one, there’s societal divide. There’s a lot of angry people, especially in the U.S., but I would even say globally from a political landscape. And I think that causes people wanting to feel appreciated and connecting around something bigger than just political beliefs or ideology. So I feel like we’re at this moment where that recognition of “We can do better, we must do better, employers need to put their people first” is stronger than it’s ever been because we have to.
I say that so passionately, we have to. We’re to a point where it isn’t just an HR fluffy statement like, well, let’s just connect, put our people first. Let’s trust each other more. We have to make work better to make society better, to make happiness, humanity better.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. I think that’s really interesting because there’s a few other things that come to mind as you were talking. Gen Z is starting to be very much more values driven in what they’re looking for in an employer and in a workplace experience. So they’re driving conversations around these and around connecting and belonging and being supported in the workplace, and they’re choosing employers based on the moral and ethical decisions that they’re making around, “Are they a green company? Are they actively working to divest from different things?” And I think that’s really interesting.
But then we also are coming out of a pandemic where we all became a little bit more insular, a little bit more isolated because we had to. And now we’re coming back into the world, but we had a moment for a few years where if we didn’t agree with someone, we didn’t have to interact with them. So in some cases there’s a regrowth or a retraining of a muscle of learning how to be around other people civilly with different opinions and with different points of view. And I think that’s something that maybe is coming to a head now as we’re moving back into hybrid or full-time work environments, or we’re in prolonged contact with other people who maybe we don’t agree with and we don’t have that option of just taking a step back, which we did before.
Dan Riley:
Yeah, absolutely. So number one, hybrid work environments, remote work, that’s a huge factor in sort of the obsession of building stronger connections in the workplace. Number two, Gen Z, for sure. They want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They choose companies really based on what they stand for. It needs to be a values connection.
Other things need to be in place; I call them “sharp edges.” Pay’s got to be right, pay equity, things like that we have to fix, we have to take care of. But assuming we get those things somewhat, the edges smoothed out, younger workers are choosing organizations really based on more of a value-driven decision and a purpose-led decision, like being involved with something bigger than themselves. So we’re definitely seeing that.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yep. I wonder, do you think it really is just something that younger generations are doing? Or do you think other generations are actually starting to act on it as well? But we see it more often in the younger generation, or maybe they’re more vocal about it.
Dan Riley:
So from a generational standpoint, those of us who are a little bit older, we’ve been working for a while, so we are not quite as passionate about it. Although I think nobody would argue that having trust in the workplace, having connections in the workplace, caring about the company that you work for, feeling like they care for you, working for a company that has purpose, that’s adding value… I think that’s across any generation. However, I do think there’s more of, from a selection standpoint and a decision-making, I want to work for that company, I want to work for that company. Absolutely, younger kids, as I call them, they want to be a part of something bigger like that.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. So when we think about being a part of something bigger, that goes back to employee connection. What do we mean when we talk about employee connections? Especially when you’re thinking about how that’s shifting between a fully in-person environment because some organizations are still electing to do that or brought that back, versus a hybrid experience versus a remote experience. Is there a difference in what you mean by employee connection or is it something that’s broader that goes across regardless of work environment?
Dan Riley:
Yeah, so when we think about connection, number one, we think about having clear direction and trust amongst your team. So it isn’t just hierarchy relationships anymore, it’s being connected to the right person at the right time, at the right place, when you need them, where you need them, why you need them, right? That’s a big part about connection.
Clarity is a big part of connection. So having that trust to really drive organizational clarity around what my role is today, what should I be focused on? What can I count on my team to deliver? That’s a huge part of connection.
And also, the third part of connection is just, that, getting to know, this is me, see me, hear me. This is what I stand for. This is important to me. So those are the areas of connection that we focus on, and I think everybody wants that, whether it’s in a personal relationship or in a work environment.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Now, as HR practitioners, this is such a natural desire because there is this desire to create a strong community, to cultivate a workforce that is happy to be coming into the office or coming into the virtual office on a regular basis. But how do you translate that into a strategic priority that the rest of the C-suite is going to value and prioritize? How do you translate this desire of wanting to create community into something that is worth putting resources behind and is justifiable in any change management that you want to do or any new implementation of software or processes or programs?
Dan Riley:
So there’s two sides to this. Number one, it’s easy to say, “Well, it’s the right thing to do,” right? Having people more connected, trusting each other, is good. But if a CFO or anybody needs data, there is incredible data behind… Better connection drives innovation, right? It drives effectiveness, it drives productivity. We have numbers in our data research that shows there’s 200% productivity increases when there’s better connection, trusted connections in the workplace. So to try to get the C-suite behind this and putting resources behind this, again, we should just want to do this for our people.
But everybody wants data decisions to back organizational decisions. So the data’s there, it’s loud and clear. Having a more connected workforce absolutely drives productivity. It unlocks innovation and drives team effectiveness to numbers in the triple digits.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah. When I was in college, I studied philosophy and I got to think about what is just the best outcome? And I studied moral philosophy, and then I was like, “How should people act in an ideal world?” And the hardest thing for me was leaving college and spending two to three years in the real world and recognizing that the utopia that we think about what perfect could look like or what ideal would look like is so far away from reality, and that you need more than just this idea that this is what utopia could look like to actually make it come to reality.
So a lot of my 20s and 30s became, how do you take these ideals that you have and how do you motivate people to turn them into practicality? So I think your point about finding the data and finding the numbers is really important to justify the change in a world where we’ve incentivized capitalism and revenue and productivity as the primary decision makers for whether or not we do something.
Dan Riley:
Yeah, those are all, I feel like I’m a broken record saying this often, but those are outcomes, right? Revenue production, margins, business performance, these are outcomes of taking care of your people. If I talk to a CEO and I say, “What’s your number one priority?” It’s like, “Well, revenue growth.” Okay, that cannot be, that can’t be. That might be an outcome and there might be a critical focus area, but how are you going to do that? You have to empower and take care of your people. You have to build trusted connections in the workplace.
So I’m pretty passionate about that. Again, that’s why I said earlier, this isn’t a sort of nice to have. This is a must have as we head into a 2025 world.
Ashley Litzenberger:
And I’m going to use a very common, and maybe an old anecdote at this point, but if you look at the trajectory of Boeing over the last 30 years, it used to be such a dominant—and it is still one of the key players in the aviation industry, absolutely—but the reputation that it had in the 1980s and the 1990s compared to the reputation that it has today based on board and executive decisions that prioritized revenue over a culture of safety, over a culture of reporting, over a culture of focusing on and supporting employees has led to a very different safety outcome. And other aviation companies are really able to take advantage of that now.
Dan Riley:
That’s a great example and a powerful one. There is direct-line data to show that if employees are taken care of, especially those who are involved with maintenance at Boeing, that’s going to drive safety outcomes. You don’t start saying, “We need to be safer.” You empower your people so they can be empowered to want to make things safer. So this, it’s not rocket science, no pun intended with Boeing.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Sure. Sure.
Dan Riley:
And the final thing I’ll say, too, around this is I talk about change a lot and going through change and focused on building connection and trust in the workplace. And I always say that change is momentum, right? Change isn’t arrival. So if we’re obsessed or too focused on KPIs, if we’re too focused on arrival or high-fiving, saying we’ve succeeded, I think that’s the wrong area of focus. If you’re focused on momentum and wind behind your back or behind your sails, that allows you to keep going and keep moving. So, I always urge leadership, organizations, think about change as momentum. Build a culture that focuses on that speed and momentum and not just arrival and hitting the numbers, because then I think it’s too short-sighted.
Ashley Litzenberger:
So let’s say that the listener today is someone who works in an HR team at an organization and there’s not a strong feeling of employee connection or there’s a stronger feeling of distrust or competition within teams or across teams. How do you start to create that momentum, that cultural change that will be… What are the first steps? Because the hardest thing to do is move from… going from no movement into momentum for the first time.
Dan Riley:
Yeah. Well, number one, I’m a big believer in storytelling and it’s important for organizations to really be able to define, “What does success look like? What does a culture of connection and trust look like?” And turning trust around to say, “If we trusted each other more,” and this is even at the team level, “or if we were better connected or knew each other or understood each other more, what would it feel like? And how would we be able to work a little differently?”
So I think you need to first just say, throw up words like connection and trust as high-level macro values. I don’t think that’s very helpful. You really have to break it down to the teams and individuals. So I think open, honest, candid, authentic conversations around where do we rock? Let’s keep doing that. Where are the areas where we’re just, for whatever reason, we’re not communicating well, there’s silos, there’s overlap? We need to dive into those areas and start focusing on those areas.
And it can be a long process and it’s commitment, it’s being committed to that change. So I think that’s where you start, and listening and asking your employees how they feel. And I don’t mean just an employee engagement survey, but I mean more in focus groups, design thinking sessions. Bring people in. The best ideas come from the quietest voices so often. So bring people together, spend time with your people, hear what matters to them, then prioritize. You can’t do everything and don’t commit to doing everything, but pick a few things you’re going to focus on and then communicate back as change continues and begins to occur.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I think one of the things that I most appreciated from a former CEO once was we were going into the new fiscal year, they’d set our goals, and there were two slides that he went through and one was, “Here are our priorities for the year.” And it was like three or four of them. And then the second slide was, “Here’s what we’re not focusing on this year.” Even though we know it’s important, we don’t have capacity to do it.
And it was a list of really important things, and we had a really great 20-minute conversation, 30-minute conversation at a company all-hands where people could ask, “Why did you choose this? And why didn’t you choose that? If you’re not doing that this year, what’s the future for it? We just stood up an enterprise sales team, and you say that enterprise functionality is not a priority for the roadmap.”
But that created a level of trust and a level of alignment. And I wonder if there’s something that an HR leader or practitioner could also take. “Here’s what we heard from you and here’s what we’re prioritizing, and here is what’s-“
Dan Riley:
And here’s what we’re not doing.
Ashley Litzenberger:
“Here’s what we’re not going to be focusing on now, so we can do these other things well.” And just be very clear about what we’re committed to working on and what the trade-off is in doing those things.
Dan Riley:
Yeah, employees like that. Think about a personal relationship or a friendship, like being honest about, “Here’s things we need to work on. Here’s things maybe we can’t work on.” And we agree that we can’t make progress right now, but communication in anything you do is so key, and that absolutely helps prioritize. I’m always asked if someone brings something up and you can’t really focus on it right away, or a team brings something up, it’s the, “I hear you,” response. And with the genuine approach, “I hear you. This is important. Here’s what we’re prioritizing right now, but we hear you and we understand this is important, but we can’t do everything.”
Any employee is going to say, “Okay, you’re gaining my trust because you hear me, and you’re focused.” And knowing that, hopefully, you’ll get to things that make a difference and an impact for me so I can be happier.
Ashley Litzenberger:
One of the things you’ve also mentioned is storytelling and the power of storytelling. And I think it’s been mentioned on this show before, or I’ve heard it from someone else, that a huge part of HR’s job is actually marketing. It’s selling, it’s promoting, it’s getting buy-in, it’s getting excitement around the initiatives that you’re putting forward. I’m curious, what is your recipe for storytelling? Because you are such a good storyteller and you do create something that’s really inspiring and persuasive. How can someone get better at that?
Dan Riley:
The best way to story-tell is to really, is you have to believe what you’re talking about. Any story, if it’s not authentic and if it’s not believable, it doesn’t land.
Ashley Litzenberger:
And if the presenter doesn’t believe it, it really doesn’t land. Yeah.
Dan Riley:
No, that’s what I mean, more than anything. So you have to be able to weave in a story that’s going to impact and inspire people around you. You have to truly believe in it, and you need to understand what the story is and how it’s actually relatable back to the change you’re trying to make.
So I think the best storytellers make it personal, bring their heart into it, bring a lot of honesty into it. And I encourage any leader, encourage anybody for that matter, but certainly leaders and those who have opportunity to inspire those around them in their organization, to use stories, make it personal, as much as they’re comfortable with. But also make it honest, and like you said, make it priority-focused. And I love what you said. Also say, “Here’s what we’re not doing,” and explain why, right? Explain why, not just, “We’re not doing it, but here’s why we’re focusing on these three or four top ideas or change ideas.”
Ashley Litzenberger:
I think that’s really powerful. As HR teams or as a leader of HR who’s responsible for talent acquisition, talent management, benefits, well-being, all of the different things that go within an HR function, how do you think about how all those pieces fit together to create a community of trust or to create employee trust within the workspace?
Dan Riley:
Yeah, silos across functions still haunts us in business. And there’s no easy answer for that other than you have to bring in key leaders and representatives for different business functions and create alignment. And again, you do that through conversation. I don’t encourage overdoing it. It’s amazing, simplicity, focus, having the right people in the right meetings, and then they can communicate back to their parts of the business, their functions.
But the worst thing you can do is ignore that and just let silos kind of be created and tribalism at its worst start to rise in organizations. So I really think it is about cross-communication, and that takes incredible leadership. And that takes, again, I think a leadership that’s committed to purpose. I’m a huge purpose-first leader. That doesn’t mean, or you don’t get into the details. Sometimes some think, “Well, if it’s all about purpose, it’s too high level.” You can’t get to the details if you don’t have the purpose and the why. You simply can’t. You have to have that first and then you need to be able to break it down, get into the details, get the right people and the right conversations at the right time, do that consistently and create that momentum, like we talked about.
And it can be done. I’ve seen organizations do this. We spend a lot of time working with organizations to do this, so I know it’s possible. This is not just a utopia.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I think it’s totally possible as well. It’s interesting because my background… My focus in my work is really around marketing and sales and customer success. And one of the themes that I think about often is creating a consistent positive experience for someone from the moment that they talk to a sales rep, all the way through to the moment that they decide that they want to move to a different company, all through their onboarding, their adoption, everything from beginning to end. And I ended up being pitched a software for my own job, and the salesperson used a deck, and then the implementation team used the same first five slides of that deck. And then the customer success team used the same first five slides, and it was always going back to, Here’s what our priorities are at this organization, here’s what we’re committed to delivering to you, and here’s how we help you solve your problems.”
And I’ve seen different organizational leaders use that format in a road show where they created a road show slide deck for their team saying, “Here’s our priorities for the year, here’s how we’re all fitting together.” And then each team starts with the same three slides and then builds out their own deck for, “Here’s how this is going to relate to talent acquisition.” But when you’re able to always go back to the same documents and those are the starting points for each team, that’s one way that I’ve seen breaking down silos to be really effective.
Dan Riley:
Yeah, I know. I completely agree with that. And breaking down silos, again, can be challenging. I think that’s through consistency, through communication, that’s a great way to consider it and do it.
Ashley Litzenberger:
And I think that’s something that’s really interesting because HR is all about building those connections across teams and helping create the systems for an entire company to help prevent silos at the broader scale. But it is also something that you experience within your own team and your own organization. So you almost are your own alpha tester for figuring out how do I create alignment? What are the processes that are leading my own HR department to feeling disconnected or more siloed than it should be? And what are we doing to try and fix those issues?
And once we find those solutions, can we bring those into other organizations? Or can I learn from other departments how they’re breaking down the silos and ensuring a fluid movement of communication? And can we bring those up and scale them out across the company?
Dan Riley:
Yeah, that’s the best way to fix silos and fix disconnection is recognizing that they exist. Again, I use relationship analogies a lot when I speak. And if you’re with your partner and once a year or once every six months or when things just start to feel bad, then you have the conversation versus proactive conversations around, “Hey, what can we do a little bit differently?” Or, “What do you mean by that?” Or the, “How are you doing?” question. That helps to break down barriers, build trust, and organizations need to think about it like that. They really need to think about it like a personal relationship. I think that’s so important.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I really like that as the… That’s such a great takeaway, the idea of switching. Oftentimes, HR feels like they’re always reacting to things, and oftentimes they are. Something happens and you are responding to someone’s situation or you are responding to a changing business need. But when it comes to listening to your employees, if you can flip and become more proactive and solicit feedback before someone has gotten to a point where something is so dire that it needs to be communicated out. And if you can catch things early or prevent them from really spiraling, that’s probably the most powerful work that gets… That’s hard to measure, but it is probably the most impactful work that does happen.
Dan Riley:
It is. And in your example of from whether it’s from onboarding or even pre-boarding, as someone joins the organization, first impressions are really important. Again, back to a relationship analogy, when you’re starting to get to know someone, things that you learn have a lot more impact because you don’t know… there’s not enough detail yet. So you’re making decisions based on small little factual points, and then you’re applying those small factual points to the larger context of the person or the organization. And it’s not really fair, but it’s reality.
So, immediately, we’re triggered by small things that happen, and that happens in the onboarding process, that happens when employees take on new roles in organizations, join different teams. So I just think there’s that proactive approach. And if you don’t understand something, say, “Well, what did you mean by that? I don’t get it, I don’t understand it.” We also have to build a culture of safety and trust where we feel empowered to say, “I don’t understand this. I don’t get it,” and not feel like it’s going to affect your career, or someone’s going to look at you in an odd way. We have to be able to communicate like that in our personal lives and in our work lives.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Yeah, I think one of the most important things is going to be to let the previous idea that you have a professional persona and an at-home persona, and you keep those things very divided and different. I don’t think that is the world of work anymore. And I think our strongest leaders are the ones who lead from a very personal and very human approach where they are looking at the individual, not an employee, not a colleague, not a teammate. And they’re just trying to connect with each other on a human level, on a personal level. And that connection, that building of trust is what leads to great leadership, and it’s what leads to people taking risks or people feeling safe or people feeling inspired or supported by their organization and by their teams.
Dan Riley:
I completely agree. And one thing I’ll add on top of that though is that work-life balance, it’s kind of an old-fashioned word. But as far as personal life and work-life, the whole point when we talk about whole-person experience or authentic work experience, it doesn’t mean you have to bring all of your personal stuff to work. It means you should be able to bring whatever you need to bring, and you should be able to separate whatever you need to separate, and that’s up to the individual. And again, that’s safety at its best.
So sometimes when we talk about whole-person, too often some organizations or employees think, “Well, no, I want separation,” and great. If you want separation, you should have separation. But if there are things that are important in your life that you want to bring into the workplace, and this is me again, see me, hear me, this is what I’m all about, you should be able to do that as well. So I’m a big believer in that’s what we mean when we talk about that whole-person experience and authenticity of who you are. You define what’s important to you to bring in to the workplace.
And that’s where empathy at its best and kind of earlier… To bring it full circle here, asking why is connection and trust so important now? And I started also by saying there’s a lot of societal anger and divide. But empathy gets us a long way. And I’ll just use this final example.
I do believe, even from a political landscape, we all, for the most part, want the same thing, right? So there might be an island, and this is an example I’ve used before where if we make it to the island, for the most part, we all want the same thing. Doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. Where we argue is how do we get there? And the problem is we forget where we’re going and we get caught up on the how do we get there approach, and we get stuck.
So it’s really important to sit back and remember, for the most part, again, we all want the same thing. And that holds true for the workplace too, we all want opportunity. We all want development. We all want to be able to grow. We all want to be able to feel empowered. We all want to feel like we’re making a difference and an impact. All those things hold true, but many of us have different ideas of how we might achieve that.
So again, that’s another challenge I have for organizations. Remember what you’re trying to accomplish. That’s that long play, that’s that North Star approach. And I also challenge and ask everybody, especially in this political climate that we’re going through, at least in the United States, to think like that too, that we all do want the same thing, let’s not… Whatever happens, let’s try to stay tight and remember we’re all in this together.
Ashley Litzenberger:
To go back to your analogies of relationships all the time, the things that show up are the idea that if you and your partner or you and a teammate are having a disagreement, it’s not that you two are antagonists against each other. Reframing it to being on the same team, and you two are tackling the same problem is a fundamental shift. And that’s what it means to create connectedness at work. It’s to look at your teammates and to see them not as adversaries that are preventing you from completing your work or creating roadblocks for you, but the two of you are working together to try and fix a shared issue or a shared problem. And you both might have differing opinions on how to do that, but you’re both trying to deliver the same thing at the end of the day.
Dan Riley:
I completely agree, 100%.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Well, thank you so much, Dan, for joining us today. This has been phenomenal.
Dan Riley:
Yes, thank you so much. It was really nice. Thank you for having me.
Ashley Litzenberger:
As we wrap up today’s conversation with Dan, let’s think about how we can apply some of these powerful ideas to our own organizations. First, prioritize trust and connection. Dan highlighted how essential these are in today’s workplace, especially with hybrid and remote work environments. Take steps to create clear communication channels and foster stronger relationships within your teams. When people feel seen, heard, and supported, they’re more likely to trust and engage with their work.
Second, embrace purpose-driven leadership. Employees, especially younger generations, are increasingly drawn to organizations with clear values and a sense of mission. Define your organization’s purpose and align your practices around it. This not only builds loyalty, but also motivates your people to contribute to something bigger than themselves.
Finally, be proactive in creating momentum. Dan reminded us that change isn’t about a final destination. It’s about building the energy and the commitment to keep moving forward. Start by identifying areas where your team feels disconnected, listen to their needs, and take small, focused steps towards improvement. Even modest progress can inspire lasting cultural shifts.
These strategies are more than just tactics. They’re about reshaping how we think about leadership and workplace culture to create organizations where people and performance thrive. Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode of the People Fundamentals podcast. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. And if you like what you hear, share us with your friends and colleagues. We’ll see you again soon.
