ļ»æHi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with the Meridian Point. Today we're joined by Desiree Goldey, a disruptive force in talent and culture transformation, director of talent operations at ZRG Partners, and founder of Do Better Consulting. I love that name. It's like, do better. We can do better. We can help you do better. Desiree challenges traditional approaches to DEI and workplace culture. Her unique perspective combines data-driven insights with a focus on individual mindset change to create lasting organizational impacts.
Without further ado, here is Desiree joining me on stage. Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm excited to be here. This has been a long time coming and I'm so excited. I can't imagine a better time to spend with you.
Thank you so much. I love the energy and I love the name of your consulting company, Do Better Consulting. How did that come about?
I didn't really fall into that, which is funny because people think you actually fall into the work, but I actually think I created the work. How I crafted it was kind of like, I don't think people are doing really good. And that seems super unintelligent. But it also is like, how do we find our way to a better place? Even now as we move forward through so many things that we're doing, we should just be doing better. No one can see my necklace, but my necklace says "do better people." I mean that. Please take a time, take a breath, and do better, right? Because we can all do better in some things. I can do better at cooking. I can do better at cleaning. I can do better at whatever. But I can also do better in the workplace.
I really like that. It has universal appeal and applicability. Who doesn't want to do better, right?
I think a part of doing better is having awareness of what you're doing in the first place and looking for opportunities to improve, right? And that brings us to the work that you do. Tell us about that.
This is a huge thing for me is self-awareness. If you have to do better, you have to figure out where you're doing that. And that takes self-awareness. That takes all of us thinking about how we can do better in our jobs, how we can do better as people. Let's sit with that. Let's sit and think about how we move forward and also take a data-driven approach to this. Because data is our friend. It's a huge piece of doing better for me and for my consulting company and how we move forward. Leadership feels crazy in the moment, right? And being an IC feels crazy in the moment. But if we actually dial it back to the data of what we're looking at, we can actually say, these are our goals. These are our markers. And I don't think you do that enough.
I really like that. We hear a lot about a data-driven approach to improvement, self-improvement, company improvement, whatever it might be. But it can be a little scary, I think, for people. Do I really want to know what the data is saying? I'm just going to go with my gut. So how do you coach your clients, the people that you work with?
When clients come to me, I really say to them, we're going to leave everything out there. Please leave whatever you thought corporate means to you. Please leave it wherever you left it. Leave it with your house. Leave it with whatever. And we actually have two sessions of just leaving it. Because leaving it is a huge problem for most executives and leaders. They do not know how to leave it on the table. They can't even say to me, why don't I want to leave it there? So I asked that question. I'm like, Sue, you really are strong on the position of holding this value. What does value mean to you? If you can't answer that, then we have to leave it on the table. Then we get back to another position. What does that value mean to you? If you can't answer that, we kind of move that one forward. I think that we get in these organizations and we think we're so on board. We think we're so all in. But sometimes we're just toeing a line.
That's a good point. There's something that we do as part of our "disruptor method." This whole channel, this podcast is all about disruption and innovation and love talking to people that have disrupted themselves. We're going to get to that about you in a second. People that help others disrupt themselves, maybe disrupt how they work, it's all about change, right? And embracing change for the good, not just for the sake of change, but for the better so we can do better. I love the phrase you put, it's like, leave it, leave it on the table, right? We use something maybe not quite as accessible for people. We say, empty your glass.
I love that. I'm going to use it. There's actually an episode we did on the podcast about emptying your glass because people have a lot of biases, misconceptions in their heads, in their brains about how they're supposed to act, how they're supposed to behave in this corporate world.
Why do we have those? I want to take it back and say we have those biases because of society. Society has told us we need to do these things. One, two, three, four, five. My parents chose to bring me up as someone who went to college, did the thing, worked for a huge organization, and went through the motions. But I think that bias holds us up a little bit. And it fuels how we interview. It fuels how we do present work. It fuels our projects. It fuels everything that we're going to do.
Corporate culture is an interesting breeding ground because we do things in corporate cultures that we wouldn't normally do. Why would you do that? We treat people like we wouldn't treat them if they were just in real life. We wouldn't do that. But we do that in corporate culture because of hierarchy. It's in our DNA in a way, in a manner of speaking, right? It's our evolutionary heritage that we need to control things. And so we need to put things in a certain order. And so in corporates, we act a certain way that we wouldn't do outside of the office. But in the office, we are armored.
Let me back a little bit and say, this is about power too, right? There's a definite power underlying dynamic to all of this. I wouldn't act like that, I wouldn't do that. There's a power dynamic where I'm also saying I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to be the most responsible, I need to get my KPIs. And there's a power dynamic we're not even talking about most of the time.
In my experience, a lot of this comes up due to the reward models in corporate culture, right? How people are rewarded, promoted, given bonuses and all that stuff. And so it drives certain behaviors that are frankly, in many cases, dysfunctional. What has been your experience in changing that or helping people change that?
I always have this conversation when I'm doing sales recruiting. Because this is the perfect understanding of how it's a broken down system. And I love sales. I love talking to salespeople because they're like my energy. You see, my energy is really vibrant. I get crazy in the room. But then we start to break down their KPIs. And you're never talking to me about what actually is supporting them. They're sitting in the KPI. So how do we figure out how KPI meets culture? That is a really hard dynamic to figure out. What I want to say is that KPI meets culture if you have a leader that is somewhere being trained to build that culture. And what you're not having right now is that KPI versus culture. You're not having a leader connect or bridge that, because we're not training them to do it.
That's true. When you talk about culture and the KPIs, they are largely disconnected because culture is largely built on the values of the company, right? What you see on the walls, but the KPIs don't reflect those.
Absolutely not. They're more about the hard numbers and things like that. They don't really reflect those. So there is definitely a disconnect. And I'm curious, how do you connect leaders with the values?
When I work with individuals, I say, how do you figure out what your morals and values look like? What are they? I don't care what they are. Mine may be different than yours. I don't have to coach you on that. You tell me what you think your morals and values are. And then we break them down into how we do leadership, how we build inclusive teams, because that is the essential part. Every individual comes to this table with something. I'm trying to get at the root of something. So I get at the root of it. And so what is the root? Because that's the essential thing.
My friend always tells me I'm the professional corporate coach at a personal level, because I dig into the personal, because that's really important. We bring all the personal to this. We bring the essential things we should see in corporate, but we don't bring the personal. We only step back from the personal. And so when I work with individuals, I take them all the way back. How did you even get a job? How did that happen? What made you get in this career? What was super important to you? Why did you get into this job? Why are you at the organization that you're working for? And when they can answer those questionsā€”and some by the way cannot answer, they can't even answer the first oneā€”if we can dissect how we got there, you're bound to know what the end result is.
I see one of the questions is about this micro focus that you and I talked about before. And I think this is what you're getting at, right? So you're looking at changing hearts and minds, if you will, one person at a time, right?
One person at a time. Because I believe that we have this very global identification in the United States, in the UK, globally, that we should be solving the world's problems. What I want to solve is one person at a time, because I believe that if you would change one person, you could change the next person, you could change the next person. That we get to the end result.
In a way you're working the system one node at a time, right? So this person is part of a system. And so you're changing it. If you change one node, there's probably going to be a butterfly effect where they change people around them to a certain extent. And so if you change a few nodes, you're going to be able to engineer a more lasting change rather than trying to do this top down.
I'm with you. I'm a disciple of systemic coaching. I've done the top down. By the way, the top is already done. They're cooked. But one of my favorite movies was Pay It Forward. There's a moment that somebody does something really present for someone else. I believe it to my heart. I believe you do something, you move something and you move the needle. I believe that.
I'm totally with you. That's been my experience as well. Even though I do a lot of corporate coaching as you do, my focus is also on the individuals that I work with and the teams that I work with. But I spend more time on the individual. And I'm sure this will resonate with you. It's the heart first, then the head and the briefcase. It's how do you connect with that individual and their wants, their needs, their values, how they show up for work. Then you can start working on the mindset, the head. When they start to get more awareness about where they are and where they want to go, then that translates to the briefcase, the KPIs, the numbers, the metrics, the data-driven approach that they might take to improve the performance at their job or the performance of their team.
First of all, I want to go back three hundred steps because I can talk about all those. We probably have a different show, but self-awareness is so key. I have met with so many individuals that don't even have self-awareness. So coaching and executive coaching and leading forward all starts with this one point: you need to be self-aware. And then it leads into all the other dissections that you just did so brilliantly, right? Because we can't get there if you're not going to say you're kind of biased. You can't say you're doing the wrong thing. You can't say that every time I get an African-American woman in the room, I'm immediately saying no to her. It really is about dissection of your self-awareness, how you show up in the world. And that's why I really dissect on those things.
I think we connect on those so strongly. The approach that you take is certainly one that I take. So let's talk about you. What led you to what you do today? I mean, if I recall, you were in the hospitality industry. How did you get from there to here?
I kind of didn't fall into this work. I kind of fought for it, if that makes sense. I didn't think leadership, innovation, anything that's going to be my span, but I do think my background was curated to do it. I've been across multiple industries, CPG, hospitality, sales, and now talent. I think there's an upbringing of how you get into what you fall into. I just feel that way. And I was actually really awesome at hiring people. So in my last career, it didn't seem like that's where I should be, but I could find the right people to do the right jobs, to be present in the seat. And so that was really important to me. And I always wanted them to feel supported. So that is that bridge for me. I wanted to put you in the seat because I thought you were awesome. And then also I wanted to support you in the culture that was happening. So I had to figure out in my career how that meshed together. It's a really hard job.
Really interesting path you took. And I imagine that working in the hospitality industry prepared you in some way for this, for what you do now. Certainly for me, I used to run restaurants in my youth and it prepared me, gave me a better education than any college would have, in terms of how to deal with people, how to lead people, how to be a follower, how to be a leader, and how to help people and yourself gain more self-awareness.
Self-awareness and hospitality is like a whole other thing. It really is. I can't tell people enough. I think that we always think that hospitality feels like a downgrade. I want to say it's not. Because it's literally living at how you get to the next step. Because it gave me everything. Customer service, sales, hospitality. It gave me everything. And actually, self-awareness.
I totally agree. Because you have to be a servant leader in the hospitality industry. You have to serve. And so you have to understand how to serve, which means you have to have empathy for the customers you serve, which means you have to check your own emotions and be aware of them so that they don't come out.
I used to open a restaurant for a big food chain and I used to give this big speech about empathy for your staff. And I'm still talking about it today. Because in the corporate world, the corporates aren't that close to their customers, like in a hotel or in a restaurant, your customers, you see them every day. The products you build, they're consuming them every day, every minute of every day, especially in a restaurant. In a big corporate, they may be building products that are far removed. I mean, they're building them, but they don't see their customers. They don't see how they use them. They don't see how they complain about them. There's very little empathy there.
The empathy thing for me, I love that you pointed that out because that's a big thing for me. If we can have empathy, authenticity in everything that we did, because I feel like the hospitality industry taught me that you could be successful if you did these two things, empathy and authenticity. And then I moved to corporate. And you are not doing that. You're not doing that on a regular basis. You're not fueling people to get to the next step. You're not having leaders that sit in the seat. You're not developing people that should do the right thing. Like there's so many missteps on empathy and authenticity and also customer service. We talk internally about who's the customer. The customer is your people.
I'm with you there. There's definitely lots of opportunity for us to ply our trade because there are a lot of dysfunctions out there, right? And so it's really trying to get people closer to...
I just want to say that everybody talks about how the system is broken. I want to say that it may be. How are you going to fix it? And I try to, but there are systems and processes and biases and things that are happening every day in this moment that we are having when we're talking about merit, when we're talking about all these things. Let's get to how you fix the system. Because it's broken.
So speaking of broken systems, I don't know if this is broken or not, but certainly in the environment that we're in right now, so the anti-woke movement is attempting to disrupt all the progress that has been made with DEI and initiatives like that to offer more equal opportunities to people. How can leaders sort of alter their approach to maintain whatever momentum was gained while this is a challenging situation, right? So especially for public organizations.
I would love to give the best advice and say, go do this. I don't think we're at a go do this moment because no one's allowing us to. But I will say that from 2020 to 2025, I actually think that DEI could be reformed. Go back into DEI right now. Your organization allows it. Please be less performative and more about the action of people. I want you to really think about how your people are in your organization, how they're experiencing your work environment. Because if you take that moment, if you take that pause, you will actually figure out how people are experiencing your moment.
I am really a sufferer of the DEI moment. I don't know if that makes sense, but I'm a true believer, but I don't think it was done correctly. I do think what's happening now is that we need a revamp. I don't care what you call it. Don't call it DEI. Call it something else. I don't care. But figure out how you make sure that a person in a wheelchair, a person who can't see a screen, a person who is a Black American, a person who is queer, I don't care how you get that person in the seat, let's do that.
It does make sense. I'm also thinking about what you said, I'm trying to process it, that from if you had to do it over, what would you do differently?
That's a great question. 2020 was a very reactionary moment for everyone because it was horrible. And we had a lot of bad moments in 2020, 2021, 2022. I mean, just and still today. But it raised the awareness in 2020. I would say go back. And don't put butts in the seats. I think it's always crazy. They're like, what do you mean? I'm like, stop putting black people in the seats just because. Yes, qualified. Yes, they want to sit there. Yes, all of those things, because I do believe DEI actually means merit. If you're putting people in the seat and you're not making them belong to the seat, you've got nothing. And it led to the backlash that we're seeing now. Because everybody wants to talk about merit. We're talking about merit all day. But merit didn't mean unqualified. Merit still means a qualified person. Merit was part of DEI. It just meant we leveled the playing field. And now we're moving that leveling of the playing field. So I'm going to say to people out there, if you have the power to do what you're going to do, to sit in the seat, please let that person sit in the seat, but also encourage them to belong to the seat.
That's a really good point. I had another guest on the show a couple of weeks ago, and he said that a lot of companies spend a lot of time and money on understanding and empathizing with the customer experience, whatever they do, right? They build products, and they hire a lot of UX and CX people to understand what the customer wants and needs, and then to build their products and services to suit those needs. There are very few companies that focus on the employee experience. How could they do their work better, more collaboratively? How could they work with people in other parts of the organizations to combine their know-how, their experience or skill to innovate and create even better products. And the companies that do focus on understanding their employees and to your point, make them feel that they belong in the seat are going to be more successful than those that don't.
I can't tell you enough about the data because McKinsey has talked about it all the time. I'm a McKinsey lover. I literally sit in this data all the time. You can't tell me enough that you have a product that goes out and there's a salesperson selling it. And then they don't feel like they belong to your organization who is not as innovative to how they sell their product. It's a really very clear transition of how we move money. The goal in America, which we all know capitalism is, is to move money. You're not moving it effectively because you're not innovating it effectively. I love that you talked about that because that is the truth of where we get to. We get to products and customers.
There are sort of employee-centric companies out there. And they are successful. They're sort of under the radar because they've stayed private or whatever, right? In many cases, employee-owned. They use techniques like open book management to get their employees really involved in running the company, because there's an open book. They understand where the numbers are, what the numbers are and how to improve them.
The company that I work for now is very traditional. And now we're coming to the future. And I'm going to tell you, I feel so supported where I'm sitting in the seat, which is very different than anybody could feel. Like I feel as supported as they can. They try to bring me in. I know the financials. I know what's happening. I feel like I'm good in this seat. And so that's important. You got to let people know what they're working towards. And that's so important.
I was talking to a friend of mine that actually owns some big boutiques in Target. She owns like the stations in Target. And she said, I just don't know what's happening right now. I've been outed. That's a thing. To feel outed from a major organization.
It feels ugly. It's not a good thing. It feels wrong. Let's bring the focus back to this. We've covered a lot of topics, right? We've covered culture. We've covered leadership. We've covered self-awareness, empathy. Help me tie these all together. Help for the audience. How would you tie these together? Because I think all of them are tied together, right?
If you have great leadership, you have great empathy, you have great talent. If you have great talent, I could literally run the line of how this works together. But I do think it starts with how you train and coach your leaders, how you bring self-awareness to those leaders. And how you encourage empathy. I know it's a weird thing for people. It's a weird thing to understand how you coach somebody to do empathy. But it's actually the same. So how would you do that?
I would sit with someone and really dissect how they visualize themselves. How they visualize the world. How they visualize their organization. And figure out what they're sitting in the seat and doing. Because task and skills, I know we don't hold a lot of weight to that in the United States, but task and skills are huge. What do you have to do every day to get your job done? And then we break that down.
That seems like a really solid approach and it certainly resonates with me. There are people, and I would say that you'd have to build some kind of relationship before they open up and answer those questions. It takes time.
It takes time. But once you've broken through and you've made a connection with the heart, they're going to open up and tell you what their motivations are. And I'm going to tell you, I don't think it's as big as you think it is. I usually get to the second or third session and we're good.
That's probably just a testament to you and your wonderful smile and your demeanor.
Maybe. But I think that is also because they're ready. When they come to me, they're ready. They're ready to do the right thing or ready to do the next thing. They're ready to move on.
I love that. So, yeah, I think that for whoever is listening, if this type of coaching seems like it's something you want or need or you want to explore, then get in touch with Desiree. We'll include the information in the show notes here so that you can bring her into the company and start to work one heart at a time. And then one head at a time.
That's what I'm here for. One head.
I've got some fun questions to round out this interview. So you're an Austin native, right?
I am not. I'm a Philadelphia native. But I am Austin seven years.
So what's your favorite thing about Austin culture? And then we'll shift to Philly.
It's a little bit weird. It's a little bit crazy and it's hot. So everybody should know I've traveled the world. I've lived in probably four countries and I've lived all over the United States. But Northeast is kind of my favorite kind of attitude. But I moved to Austin just to be with the warm weather.
So you like it there. You don't want to be tired of the chilly winters.
I can't stand the snow. The weird things that happen with snow and the slush. No, thank you.
So you were in restaurants, right? What was the most innovative solution you implemented to fix a broken restaurant?
I was a bar manager. For many years, I opened and closed many restaurants. But the one thing that we had, I don't know if anybody knows it, but you can see the tops on the top of a liquor bottle that keeps the flies out. That keeps the flies out of anything. By the way, any gnat or any fly that is looking is going to find that liquor bottle. But we instituted that and it was part of the actual hospitality rules on the FDA.
What disruption in your life has led to your greatest personal growth?
I'm going to say that for me I have two. One was in college where I got out of college. I had a major in international business and marketing and a minor in Japanese. I went to Japan, came back, thought I was doing the greatest thing, worked for a company that I thought was doing the most amazing things and quit that job. I actually walked out of that job. That was really good for me.
And then the second I would say is that I figured out that hospitality couldn't be my answer.
Couldn't be your answer. Tell me more.
I couldn't figure out the answer to how to retire in hospitality. Like, I'm old. I don't want to be on my feet all day. It was getting to the point where I was like, I can't do this anymore. And so that was a huge disruption for me. All the time, underneath that was all the work I've always been doing. But it felt different at that point, when I was about thirty-eight. And I was like, this feels different.
It's interesting. I got out of restaurants when I was twenty-nine.
Thirty-eight. Come on. So that's quite a bit longer for me. I've been in restaurants my whole adult life, you know, put myself through school. I ran as one of the youngest general managers. And I was pretty successful, but I gave it away because like you, I couldn't see myself retiring, running a restaurant. And I'm a foodie. Like I still to this day, if I was a billionaire, I would open seven hundred restaurants. But I'm not the person.
What have I not asked you that you'd like to share?
Well, you have not asked me what I don't like.
What I don't like. Which I think it's going to be shocking for your audience. Ready? I don't like chocolate.
You don't like chocolate. I don't think I've ever met anyone that does not like chocolate.
I hate it. I really don't like it. It's so extra. I don't need chocolate to bring it in. I also don't like ice cream. It's a very bizarre thing in my house because my partner loves chocolate and ice cream. I actually don't like sweets in general. I'm a salty. Give me a big bag of Lays. I'm that person.
But I also think the thing that you didn't ask me, which is impressive for me is how leadership is evolving in the world of AI. I think that what we're about to see is a huge really big moment about how you have to think about leadership. You can't judge them so much anymore in the written word. You can't think about their skills in an interview because we're about to have AI interviews. So how are you judging them and how are they becoming leaders?
I would say if you're open to it, I'd love to have you back on. We can have a conversation about that.
I think it's a big topic. I'm diving into it right now. I'm about to do a big conference with someone in Chicago. Because this is the thing. How do we create leaders in AI? Because that's the thing. Because it's coming. By the way, it's already here. It's not coming. It's already here.
Because to me, leadership is a human quality and a human characteristic.
I would love to talk about it and talk about how we dive into the future of what leadership looks like.
Let's do that. With that, thank you for watching. Thank you so much for being here, Desiree. It's been a really enjoyable conversation for me to sort of banter about these things that I'm so passionate about. And I found someone else that's equally passionate as me. So it's been great.
It's been so exciting for me because I don't always get to talk to someone who knows almost in my head so I love it so much.
It's been a real pleasure. Hope you all enjoyed it and come back again next week for another episode. And if you want to get a hold of Desiree, all her information is going to be in the show notes. Thanks!
