Why Do You Work?

Do you find yourself frustrated because your team isn't working the way you expected? Are you struggling to understand why your employees don’t seem to share the same drive and commitment that you bring to your business? In this episode of *Leadership is Feminine*, host Kris Plachy explores the diverse reasons people work and how understanding these differences can transform your approach to leadership.

Kris explains that it is easy to assume that everyone’s motivations for working are the same, but the reality is often very different. The assumptions leaders make about others' motivations for working can create conflict. She explains that leaders often expect their team members to share the same level of dedication, only to face disappointment when reality doesn't align. Kris introduces the concept of the "leadership lens," highlighting that each person views work through their own set of experiences, values, and beliefs, which can greatly differ from those of their leaders or colleagues.

As Kris states, “The reason we work is ours and ultimately, the only person who is accountable for whatever that reason is – is you.” She encourages listeners to take responsibility for their own motivations while also fostering a culture of accountability within their teams.

Kris provides a practical solution by emphasizing the importance of setting a strong foundation: ensure the vision is clear, values are well-defined, and team members understand their roles and agreements. She stresses that leaders must hold employees accountable to these expectations while consistently providing feedback to foster growth and alignment within the team.

This episode offers practical guidance for leaders who want to move past frustration and build a workplace where different motivations are understood and valued, leading to more effective collaboration and results.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. Understanding Your Reason for Why You Work

2. Differences in Perspectives, Employees vs. Leaders: Recognizing that everyone’s reasons aren’t necessarily the same.

3. The Leadership Lens: How perspectives and assumptions affect work environments.

4. Conflict in Workplaces Based on Assumptions We Make: Importance of mutual understanding and avoiding assumptions in interactions.

5. The Need for Accountability: How accountability issues, on either end, can affect the overall work environment.

6. Advice for Employees and Employers: Encouragement for employees not satisfied with their jobs to seek better opportunities and advice for leaders to be clear about company vision, values, and goals.

7. Ownership & Responsibility: The role of honesty and emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility in job performance.

Contact Information and Recommended Resources

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Transcript

Kris Plachy:
Well, hello, how are you? Welcome, welcome. I'm thrilled to have you here. I'm Kris Plachy and I am your host to this podcast that has been around for a while now, Leadership is Feminine. Thank you for tuning in today. I've had a topic that I wanted to talk about with you here and then I'm actually going to be doing some other things with it with my clients. But the name of this podcast is really simply, "Why do you work?" And it's got a two fold process. It's certainly for you as a woman who's leading her own business and you know who you are, because you have been tuning in for years, and I know that some of you are not leading your own business, but you still tune in. But today I want to talk about why people work.

Kris Plachy:
I want you to think about this as it applies to you. And I also think that if you know other people who need to kind of go through this process of considering, you know, "Why do you work?" maybe this would be good for you to share this episode because why not? Like, I think all of us could benefit from having a good think about it. You know, I think there's certainly an assumption that we all work for the same reasons, and the truth is that is not the truth. Have you met anybody? Because everybody's reasons are different and yet we make a lot of assumptions about why people work. Now, are there some general rules around why people work? Maybe. But I think even when we get into well, of course people work to make money. Not always.

Kris Plachy:
And so I really want to take a different point of view here. I don't want to make any assumptions about anything. What I think matters is your reason. And if you lead people, it is valuable to help the people that work for you to know their reason because they're not going to have the same reason that you have. That, I can assure you. When I used to do in person workshops - right - or even speaking events, I would ask frequently this question, why do you work? Right. It's so interesting, the collage of answers.

Kris Plachy:
Some people say to make money. Some people say to pay for retirement. Some people say to pay for my kids food. Some people say to get out of the house. Some people say to build generational wealth. Some people say because I'm bored if I don't. Then you can ask a separate question. Why do you have a job? Right? What do you think is the jobs responsibility? And most employees will say they have a job to pay the bills, pay for food, pay for this.

Kris Plachy:
But most leaders will say to achieve this vision. And it doesn't mean that people who are in leadership or founder roles don't still need to make money and pay for things, but their point of view is different depending on so many circumstances, right? One of the key lessons I've been teaching for years, I call the leadership lens, is really that we all have a point of view that we bring to everything that we do. Everything that we do. Driving your car, going into the grocery store, right? Have you ever gone shopping with somebody else and they, like, put things in your car in their cart, and you're like, you eat that. Like, I didn't even know those things existed. Like, I was raised on frozen vegetables, and then I have a girlfriend who only ever eats canned vegetables, and I'm like, what? And then there could be somebody else who's like, I only eat fresh vegetables. Like, how do you do? So it's such a silly example, but point of view varies everywhere, and we make a lot of assumptions, right? The leadership lens teaches that we collect our, basically our value system and our point of view and all the pieces and parts of who we are.

Kris Plachy:
We collect those over the course of our especially young life, right? Till we're in our adolescence or so, we start to be sort of formulated, right? And it's based on our religion and our culture and where we live in the world and what our family dynamics are and what our education is and who our friends are. And all these things, all these experiences convene and congeal together, and they make this little cocktail that becomes you and becomes who you think you are in the world and also becomes your belief system about people and the world, right? And the truth is that most of us, all of us, go through that.So all of us have a point of view. All of us have assumptions. All of us have a lens that we use that to use to see the world. All of us. The challenge is that the majority of us never stretch ourselves to actually see the way that we see the world, the beliefs we have about the world, the values that we have are our beliefs.

Kris Plachy:
They are not the truth. Even though you think what you believe is the truth is the truth for you, but it's not necessarily the truth for other people. And so where the conflict, this, where this conflict really shows up when we're at work is in the behaviors that people demonstrate at work. One person's apathy is another person's taking it easy. One person thinking, "This person doesn't care about the job," is another person's thinking, "You don't care about me". What is critically obvious, if you go into the world, is most people do not examine their own thinking before they make assumptions about other people's thinking. They the only thing we have to assess with each other is our behavior.

Kris Plachy:
I don't know what's going on in your mind when I see what you're doing, I only know what you're doing. And I make assessments of what you're doing based on my experience, not based on yours. So most people walk around the world and watch what people do and then assign meaning to what they see based on their experience. And then we're going to put all these people together in work. Whatever work it is you do, whether you work at a fast food restaurant or you're the CEO of a kajillion dollar company, all y'all go to work, we're going to put you all together and there's going to be employees and there's going to be leaders and there's going to be managers and there's going to be CEOs and CTOs and CMOs. There's going to be all these people in there just trying to get work done with a kajillion different points of view, lots of different lenses by which we see the world. And where the biggest issues arise at work is when the assumption becomes the basis for how we interact with one another. So if I see how you're doing your job or not, and I make assumptions about that and I don't ever talk to you about it, now, I will engage with you based on my assumption, not based on you.

Kris Plachy:
You follow? And the same is true if I'm an employee and I have a boss and I make assumptions about how that boss is interacting with me. Now, I will interact with the boss based on my assumption, not based on what they're thinking, but based on what I'm thinking. And of course, again, we think our thinking is the truth. "Oh, they just don't like me. They're just really disrespectful. They're just mean to everyone. They're just out to get people. They don't care.

Kris Plachy:
"They're just capitalists. They're just wanting to make money off me. They don't care. Bosses, they're just lazy. They're just entitled. They don't care. They nobody has a good work worth work ethic anymore. People just want to show up and get a paycheck.

Kris Plachy:
"They want a raise right away. They want to raise for not doing anything. Everybody just wants more money."Like this is what's happening. Tell me I'm wrong. I'm hearing it all the time, which tells me- it's so interesting, you know, when I first started this work, this was years ago, and I, I started it within the company that I worked in. I started teaching these workshops and just working with people individually.

Kris Plachy:
And then I left that. We did a huge layoff, I left, requested to leave. And then we went out into the world. I went out into the world, I started leading workshops and I started to see such a systemic issue, especially in companies or organizations that were big. And so they bring someone like me in to lead a workshop for the managers or the staff, but never the senior leaders. The senior leaders, there's always this assumption that somehow the senior leaders know what they're doing, don't need development, they don't have time, they can't get out of those meetings. Good lord, the meetings y'all go to, right? Like, there's just this assumption that the senior leaders, they don't really need. Big, big poor assumption.

Kris Plachy:
And so for years, honestly, at least the first five years of my business, I did a lot of these workshops and I finally came home to my husband one day and I, first of all, I was exhausted. They're exhausting. I love to do speaking engagements, but I don't love to stand in front of a room of people knowing that even if in the moments that they spend with me during the workshop, they see the bright light of potential of what could happen if people actually started to understand themselves and gain some self awareness and were able to communicate better. It didn't matter because they were just going right back to work with the boss over here who didn't have to go to the training. And, or even if they went to the training, there was no accountability to actually change because the CEO wasn't in the training. And so I said to him, "I'm not- I can't do this anymore.

Kris Plachy:
"This is literally breaking my heart. I have to work with people who I know can implement change." Which is why I switched to working exclusively with entrepreneurs, with very limited exception, because it's too hard to coach people through the process of working with other people who are not interested in making changes.So why do we work? Back to the title of the podcast. I think whoever's listening to this podcast, you need to ask yourself that question. Why do you work? What is the reason that you show up every day? It will change over your lifetime, right? My son, who's 24, is just getting started, figuring it out. He wants to make money, right? And that's normal. I know if I know if I talk to him in 30 years, his reason for working will be different.

Kris Plachy:
I know my reasons are different. Sure, I love to make money. I love to do fun things. But the reasons why I want the money are different because I think there gets to be a day where you ask that question, "Why do I work?" And you may not know, or you might say, "I don't want to". I believe there's a lot of people who don't believe this, but I believe that because we spend so much time in what we do professionally, I believe it should serve us developmentally and personally. I know not everybody believes that, and I'm not here to convince you that that's true. But I think from that point of view, that's why I've always chosen to do what I do. And I think those people listening would understand, like, yeah, if I'm going to go eight to 10 hours a day, I want to feel something in return.

Kris Plachy:
I want to grow, I want to learn. I want to feel like I'm contributing the special gifts that I have. Right. I think as we're older, that becomes more true as we get older. But one of the things that I think is essential, if we're being honest with ourselves about why we work, is that we work for our own reasons, which is what I've mentioned, which means that there is only one person who ultimately is accountable for delivering the results I want, and that's me. Accountability, as I have said on a lot of my podcasts, and I teach in my Lead for Women program, is a problem. We have a systemic, broken - I don't even know what to call it - paradigm around accountability in our society, where I think people love to hold other people accountable and point the finger at other people, but when it comes to them, they think there should be a slippery slope.

Kris Plachy:
And unfortunately, we have a system that makes that true. And so it's very frustrating for those of us who believe that accountability is actually an asset. Being held accountable to perform and being accountable to your agreements and your performance is an asset. Because I want to work with people who invite me to be better, and I only want to work with people who want to be invited to be better, who want to grow, who want to meet their commitments, who want to show up for themselves and other people. That's who I want to surround myself with. Does that involve difficult conversations on both sides of that? Always. Are we strong enough to handle it? 100%. But there's too many environments right now where that is not true.

Kris Plachy:
There are people who are in management positions, leadership positions, business owners, founders, CEOs, presidents, who are not practicing consistent accountability processes and conversation, period. And a lack of consistency from leadership means that the team will be messy. Now, it's frustrating when you're a leader and all you want is for people to just do their dang job. Like, it's not that hard. Why can't people just do their job instead of doing their job? They're spending all their time not doing their job and then complaining about how they're not making more money. Right. So it is frustrating as a leader to have people who work for you who don't have an internal drive to meet their own personal expectations and the agreements they make to themselves, or to you.

Kris Plachy:
I agree with you. I know how frustrating it is. My thought for the first, probably 12 years that I was in a leadership position was, seriously, you're an adult. I have to actually talk to you about why you're not hitting your goals. I don't even understand how is that. How is that a thing? Because if I'm not meeting my goals and I work for someone, I'm the first one to come to you and say, "I'm not hitting my goals. I need help. Can you give me new direction? Can we talk through it? What can I do differently? Here's what I'm going to try.

Kris Plachy:
"What do you think? Because I committed to hit the goal and I'm not going to hit it, I need help. I need to figure this out. I want to hit the goal."So I know it's frustrating to hire people into your organization that you're super hopeful for, and then they don't deliver. But we have to look at both sides of an equation, you guys, because if you're listening to this and you're the team member, you're not the leader. Maybe you're furious with your boss. You think your boss is a creep, a jerk, a bi- You know, they don't care about you.

Kris Plachy:
All they do is talk about, you know, hitting your goals. Yeah. So can we just talk about something to you really fast? When you said yes to the job, you said yes to the goal. You, when you said, "yes, I'll take a paycheck today, I'll walk through my door and I'll get paid for today". Do you know what you said yes to? Delivering the result of whatever that position that you're in. You didn't say yes to be on your phone intermittently. I used to do workshops for managers who would talk about that.

Kris Plachy:
There were people who were literally watching, like, Netflix movies on their phone while they were working. Like, what? Who are we? So you didn't say yes, like, "Oh, this job is so inconvenient for my living, my life". No, you said yes to work. You said yes to yes, I will, I will accept that salary, that hourly wage to meet these goals.And I'll tell you what, if you said yes to a job and your boss hasn't told you what your goals are, then you need to ask him or her, "Hey, I'm here to do this thing here, but I don't really know what your expectations are. Let's talk about it instead of sitting there not doing anything all day because they didn't tell you what to do."

Kris Plachy:
It is a form of stealing to sit in a chair and get paid and not do anything. Tell me it's not. But see, we justify all this. We go back to the beginning of my podcast with those assumptions. So bosses are over here assuming that employees just don't care, and employees are over here assuming the bosses, you know, are just capitalist money hungry. I don't know. What do you-

Kris Plachy:
It's so unhealthy what's happening at work right now. And so guess who gets to fix it? Y'all, if you're an employee and you don't like your job, you'll get another one. And please don't tell me it's hard to get a job. It's not. There's a lot of jobs for the committed, for the serious, for the eager. There are lots of ways for you to start generating more money for yourself. But we get resigned. We don't want to go through the discomfort.

Kris Plachy:
I have to go on the interviews. I don't know when I'll schedule those. I didn't redo my resume. I don't want my LinkedIn- whatever your things are, there's just all these reasons that it just can't happen. So we'll just stay here and be miserable. Please don't do that. You have one life to live.

Kris Plachy:
Can you please take care of yourself and find something that pays you well and makes you feel good? Maybe you had the best job and then the company changed and it's not the best job. That's what happened to me. I had a great job. Still to this day, I worked with some of the best people I'll ever know in my whole life, and I stayed in touch with so many of them. I'm so grateful for that experience. That company got taken over by new leaders, and they destroyed it. It is but a shell of what it used to be. It was hard.

Kris Plachy:
I was mad. It took me three years to get over what I knew ultimately in my heart, which is, this is not where I belong anymore. But it took me three years to figure out how to separate enough to take care of myself. So I appreciate how challenging it is. But why was I working? I was working to make a difference. I was working to use these skills that I have. And when I was working for a company that finally looked at me and said, that's not what we want anymore, I was like, free. And if you're an employer and you have people on your team who aren't performing, you make sure your vision's right.

Kris Plachy:
You make sure your values are clear. You make sure that people know what their agreements are. You make sure that people know what their roles and goals are, and you make sure you're giving them feedback. And if you're doing those things and then you're not holding them accountable, start. Because if you're keeping people in your business that you're paying money to and they're not performing, you're paying them to literally hurt your business. So you're paying them. So you're sort of stealing from your own company. Here's $2,000 to not achieve what we talked about.

Kris Plachy:
Stop it. What are you afraid of, not gonna be able to find someone? Well, you certainly won't find someone if you're not looking. And if you're an employer, you should be looking all the time. When I used to manage managers, they had to do interviews every month. They had to have a certain number of interviews, even if they didn't have any openings. Because you never know when you're gonna need to replace someone. You never know when someone's just gonna stop performing. You never know when someone's gonna quit.

Kris Plachy:
You just never know. So why do we work? At the end of the day, the reason that we work is ours. And the only person who's accountable to whatever that reason is is you. It's not your boss's job. It's not the company's job. And if you're, if we invert this, it's not the employee's job, it's not the recruiter that you hired's job to find you. Your reason for what you're trying to achieve through your expression of work, through the salary that you make, through the earnings that you have, that is your responsibility.

Kris Plachy:
It is yours to take ownership of. As soon as you abdicate that, you become helpless, disenchanted. And that's when all that blame and all that ickiness kicks in. But if we just accept responsibility for ourselves and we get honest with ourselves, it's a game changer. If you're in a job right now and you're in a staff position and you're not performing, just be honest about it. Don't blame your employer for it. If you think your employer has something they could give to you, ask them for help.

Kris Plachy:
"Hey, I'm not meeting my goals. I'd love to help. I'd love your help. I'd love to see if I can get better." If you don't want to get better, could you go find another job? And if you run a company and you have people who aren't performing, can you make sure you go through that list I just gave you? Vision, values, agreements, roles, goals, feedback. Go through that. Make sure you're crystal clear. If you don't know how to do that, you should join Lead for Women.

Kris Plachy:
We'll solve that for you. It's not hard. Go through that. And if they can't deliver, it's okay. It's not personal, but they got to go. When I hire someone and someone says yes, we make an agreement. "Hey, you. Come on in here. I'm going to pay you this much to deliver this much."

Kris Plachy:
And you know what the employee says, "Okay, I will take that payment and I will deliver it". And if that's not happening and one or both sides are not meeting the commitment of that arrangement for work, we have to make a new decision. But sitting in a desk chair, whether you're the boss or the staff, being furious at someone else for the lack of results that you have, is not getting it done. And we have to stop it. We have to nip this. We're waiting for someone. We're waiting for some magical thing to change in the universe. The only thing that's going to change is the heart and mind in your body.

Kris Plachy:
And if you want a successful company, then start acting like a woman who wants to run it. And if you want a successful career, then start acting like an employee who wants to have it. Is that enough said? Woo. All right, if you're coming back next week, I'll talk to you then.