The Conscious Workplace

By Shaara Roman

Don't let profits be your kryptonite!

 

Discover your business's superpowers: your purpose, your people, and your values.

 

Prevailing wisdom tells business leaders to focus primarily on profit, which works in the short term…until your company inevitably encounters a crisis. Then the one thing that can save your company is the very thing walking out the door.

 

For twenty-five years, Shaara Roman, CEO and founder of The Silverene Group, has worked directly with executives to build company cultures that not only keep their businesses afloat in times of need but also lead them to greater profits and sustainability. Now for the first time ever, she shares the same wisdom in The Conscious Workplace, giving leaders of every industry the chance to build intentional cultures of their own.

 

Combining Roman's diverse and unique experiences as an entrepreneur, HR executive, and Fortune 500 leader, straight-from-the-headlines research, and practical, actionable advice, The Conscious Workplace provides rich business insights to help leaders transform their companies by building purpose-led, people-centric, and values-driven cultures. Explore high-profile examples from companies like yogurt maker Chobani, mattress company Leesa, and King Arthur Baking Company, which have all harnessed a strong company culture to create a truly resilient business. No matter the size of your organization, The Conscious Workplace can show you how to get the most out of your greatest resources—people, purpose, and values—by investing in them. And when you focus on what really matters, as these case studies show, you make good on your commitment to ESG and increase profits.

A thought-provoking and thorough examination of the current state of workplace culture and the opportunities the future holds, The Conscious Workplace shows leaders at all levels how to strengthen their business to thrive in any crisis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bedgebury Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986128726

Book preview

The Conscious Workplace

THE CONSCIOUS WORKPLACE

FORTIFY YOUR CULTURE TO THRIVE IN ANY CRISIS

SHAARA ROMAN

Bedgebury PressBedgebury Press logo

Published by Bedgebury Press

Arlington, VA

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Copyright © 2022 by Shaara Roman

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. To request permission, visit shaararoman.com.

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First Edition

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Paperback: 979-8-9861287-0-2

Ebook: 979-8-9861287-2-6

KDP: 979-8-9861287-1-9

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Edited by Intrepid Literary

Cover design by The Book Designers

To Dinah, my second mom. You left us all way too soon. I miss our chats, your tight hugs, and your quiet advice.

FOREWORD

When Shaara Roman asked me to write the foreword for her new book, I was so excited to read it. The Conscious Workplace is truly special. Not only is Shaara’s background diverse and unique, but also the book’s wonderful combination of research, stories, and practical advice adds to the rich business insights she shares for leaders at all levels of life and career.

As a psychologist and businessman, over my forty-year career, I have studied and advised CEOs and executives as they navigate change and attempt to build healthy, high-performance enterprises. I’ve had the opportunity to sit face-to-face with over five hundred CEOs in countries around the world. A single observation stands out in all these conversations.

All good leaders must master four strategic agendas—the finance agenda, which is all about growth and performance; the marketplace agenda, which focuses on customers and service; the operations agenda, which helps us design and create our products and solutions; and the human agenda, which highlights people, leadership, purpose, and culture.

What is special among the best companies? Their leaders put their human agenda first, and the finance agenda is the scorecard for success. What this means is that their purpose, people, and culture are the leading indicators of their businesses. These leaders champion them, make significant investments in these areas, and understand deeply how these factors contribute to their long-term success. Purpose is the North Star. People bring it to light, and culture gives it the energy to light up the sky.

Many leaders know how important these factors are in leading teams and organizations, yet many don’t know how to implement them. In this book, Shaara teaches us how to build purpose-led, people-centric, and values-driven cultures. Intuitively, she knows that cultures are built one person at a time. By helping people align their personal purpose with the company’s purpose, we build connections and community that prepare us for the future.

Our world is changing faster than our ability to adapt. We should not be searching for a return to normal, nor should we be searching for a new normal. Both concepts are based on the same shared illusion that success stems from stability. Rather, we should embrace constant change—with all the complexity and uncertainty that goes with it—the no normal. Like roots growing from a tree, purpose, people, and culture ground us through these winds of change.

Shaara is an authority on this topic. With twenty-five years of experience working with leaders, her advice is quite valuable: Be conscious of your culture, create community, and nurture your talent. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to create a more welcoming, innovative, and equitable workplace.

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Bob Rosen, PhD

Founder and CEO, The Healthy Leader

CONTENTS

Building a Business on Belonging

Section 1

Culture Is the Cornerstone of Your Business

Chapter 1

We Can Do Better

Chapter 2

Does Culture Really Matter?

Chapter 3

Intentional Culture Is the Key to Success

Chapter 4

Why Inclusion Matters

Chapter 5

Changing Our Mindset

Section 2

Cultivate Your Culture to Strengthen Your Business

Chapter 6

Embodying Conscious Culture

Chapter 7

Creating Community

Chapter 8

Nurturing Talent

Chapter 9

Fostering an Ownership Mentality

Section 3

Success in the New World

Chapter 10

A Fresh Approach to the Future of Business

Conclusion

Bibliography by Chapter

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

BUILDING A BUSINESS ON BELONGING

Belonging and purpose aren’t just ideas to me—they’re the entire basis of my company, my life, and my personal philosophy. I founded The Silverene Group in 2016 because I knew businesses that put people and purpose first weren’t just better places to work; they were also more productive and profitable. I also knew that my global upbringing—being a true citizen of the world—brought unique experiences, gifts, and insights that others lacked, resources I could draw upon to make one part of the world a little better.

Drawing from my experiences as an employee, leader, consultant, and world citizen, I have crafted an uncommon approach to workplace culture. In The Conscious Workplace, I share my approach, teaching you how to draw on your own unique experiences and gifts to build workplaces where people thrive alongside the organization.

Even after building a successful career and landing coveted executive roles in HR to lead transformation and change efforts in organizations, I still felt something was missing in my professional life. I was not as enthusiastic about my work as I knew I could be and wanted to be. I had the entrepreneurial bug inherent in my family. I realized I needed to go out on my own, combining my passion and purpose as a consultant and executive adviser to help companies of every size and industry create effective workplaces. That’s when I founded my company.

I was also inspired by my great-great-grandfather Dinshawji Pandole, who left the teaching profession to build a carbonated beverage business, which he called Duke’s after the manufacturer of his lucky cricket balls. In 1889, with a little money he inherited and a big dream to bring the popular bottled soft drinks he had experienced while traveling to England to Bombay, India, he started the business. He built a thriving business that endured for over one hundred years and eventually sold to Pepsi. The success allowed his son, my great-grandfather, to build a family home called Silverene. It’s where my mother was born, and it holds many special memories for us. Through family stories, I learned that if you follow an idea with your whole heart, you can be successful and take care of those around you. One hundred years ago, long before models and theories for understanding the role of belonging at work were even being developed, my great-great-grandfather knew building a business was more than bricks and mortar, the product, or the people. Building a business is about bringing all those pieces together into something more, into something greater. My team and I continue his legacy of purpose, passion, impact, and fostering belonging every day at The Silverene Group.

But long before I knew I wanted to start my own consulting firm, I knew that culture and belonging mattered.

In some ways, I have the quintessential American immigrant story wrapped up in a love story. I was born in Bombay, India, and my parents moved me to Lagos, Nigeria, when I was a toddler. They ended up living there for twenty-five years, and my elementary school education took place in Nigeria. Even before I was able to fully express myself, I had grown up in multiple cultures. Additionally, my family’s unique culture was unusual for Indian cultural norms. My grandparents were divorced. Single parents weren’t shamed. Single people weren’t pressured to marry. My family was all about girl power and bucking tradition. My parents told me I could do anything I wanted with my life. And I knew they meant it. I knew they would accept whatever path I chose because they believed that I would know what was right for me. Their faith in me helped me establish a sense of who I was in the world.

When I reached middle school, I went back to Bombay to live with my grandparents and go to classes. I felt like a fish out of water, and my grandmother, with whom I was very close, could see that I was struggling. She felt strongly that it was time for me to spread my wings.

She somehow convinced my parents that I would be better off in the UK, and I happily matriculated at an all-girls school in the Kent countryside. Surrounded by new people who loved school and wanted to learn, I thrived. After finishing high school, I planned to take a gap year to travel, learn new languages, and live with my parents back in Lagos.

Then—and this is where it gets romantic—I met my husband, a Puerto Rican US Marine from the Bronx who just so happened to be stationed in Lagos. We fell in love and moved to Greece, where we married and lived for two years. Unlike everywhere else I had lived, English was not the business language in Greece, but I learned to navigate their world by being curious and learning a few important Greek phrases.

After that, we moved to the US, where my husband was stationed in Virginia (I talk about my first experience looking for work at the transition assistance office in chapter 4). I learned about the way people in the US view immigrants and people of color firsthand, and those early instances of exclusion and discrimination showed me how valuable my multicultural upbringing and personal life was.

Though I made the US my home, I often say that I’ve always been a guest in someone else’s country, and being a guest in someone else’s country instilled in me a sense of curiosity and empathy. It also gave me exceptional listening skills and a deep appreciation for the diversity and differences between the different cultures and countries I lived in. From an early age, I wanted to understand why people hold different perspectives and to bring them together to share what they have in common.

From learning why my new friends in Lagos liked certain music or food over others to indulging in the interests of my boarding school classmates in Kent, I learned how to be curious in an active way. I also learned how to be independent and culturally open—you’ll recall that in both India and the UK, I didn’t live with my parents. I had to be resilient and learn on the fly rather than having information sequenced and organized for me.

It might sound like it was daunting or challenging, and to be fair, at times it was, but what I remember most is my desire to understand the rituals and customs of the people around me. And I found that the more questions I asked my friends and their families, the more curious they became about me. I found that genuine curiosity is the root of relationships and connection.

So when it came time to found a business, it was completely natural to make curiosity and human connection the heart of what we do. I’m passionate about bringing people together, and I feel grateful to have this full-circle experience where what I was learning as a young child in Lagos is still part of what I do with people today. The congruency in my life brings me joy and a strong sense of purpose.

The truth is that I don’t approach workplace culture like many people might. I don’t have a flowchart of if this happens, then do this or a rule that says any company experiencing one thing will definitely experience another. What I have is a deep connection to people, a long-held commitment to community, and a desire to help people connect to a feeling of belonging so that we can all do our work better.

Business is a field dominated by cisgender, straight white men. I know we’re not used to being quite so upfront in business conversations, but it’s OK. Here in this book, we’re going to be direct and talk about the realities we live with—and how we can do better. Now, I’m not saying that cisgender, straight white men can’t be transformational leaders of companies that foster a sense of belonging. Throughout this book, you will see testaments to the opposite. However, because I have lived my entire life without the privilege of being deferred to and automatically respected, I have learned how to build relationships, establish credibility, and move organizations from transactional to transformative cultures.

In some ways, the idea for The Silverene Group came from my experiences being an immigrant Indian woman in the US’s white, male-dominated business sector. I was frequently surrounded and supervised by men who had a singular focus on making money and consolidating power for themselves. Scarcity wasn’t just a mindset; it was a management tool. We were taught to think that if Judy gets a promotion, that means I can’t, so I better jockey with Judy for favor so I get the one promotion available. But I kept wondering why we both couldn’t be recognized for our efforts and promoted. There seemed to be a lot of mediocre white men at the leadership level, but what about the rest of us?

Perfectionism was also a problem. Instead of looking at mistakes as something we could all learn and grow from, making a mistake was equated to you personally failing the company and becoming untrustworthy for future responsibilities. Instead of seeing that there was more than one right way to do things, we were expected to conform to the way our supervisors or the CEO would do things. Even if we were able to envision another answer, we had to guess which solution our supervisors thought was right. It felt like being constantly tested and mistrusted.

It wasn’t just the mentality that this was the way we did things and the way we expected things to be done, but the sense that because I was more junior, my time and life were worth less. I had a boss, Beth, who repeatedly loved to drop off a supposedly urgent task on my desk five or ten minutes before I would be leaving work. I came to find out it was never actually urgent, and she often left me at the office to finish the work while she headed to happy hour with colleagues. Looking back, it was a power play, and she knew I needed the job to fund my college bills. Instead of building an ally and trusted colleague, she fostered mistrust and stress with her tactics.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this is when I started to piece together what would be the foundation for The Silverene Group. In the face of so many arbitrary rules and ways of being, I found my curiosity returning. Where did these rules come from? Why were they the rules? Why do things one way and not another?

More than that, I knew from my lived experience that there’s always more than one right way to do things and that the process of creating rules is just as important as the rules themselves. If my supervisors had asked me why I did something a different way while still producing a positive result, they would have learned that I could think outside the box and might have even held the answers to the problems they faced. If those companies had cultivated cultures of belonging, I wouldn’t have wondered if I was safe to be myself at work. But it extends beyond the experience of the individual employee. If their business strategy had focused on purpose and people first, they would have been more successful.

Because that’s what it boils down to at the end of the day, and that’s what this book is about. Businesses need to put purpose, people, and their values—what we might collectively call culture—over profit. It can be an intimidating call to action for an industry that has long had a narrow focus on profits, but, as I’ll explain throughout the book, it’s not only the right thing to do but also the best route to profitability.

In fact, the triple bottom line of profit, people, and the planet is not a new concept. We’ve been thinking about the idea of a multiple bottom line since the 1990s, and as we encounter the challenging dynamics of our new world, this concept has become even more relevant. Furthermore, it’s on the minds of boards of directors as environmental, social, and governance reporting and oversight, collectively referred to as ESG, have become more important.

Too often I see businesses waiting until a crisis hits them to think carefully about their culture. Most businesses think they are doing everything perfectly right up until the moment they see their problem clearly, whether because their talent say there’s a problem, they experience high turnover, or they receive public backlash. I firmly believe it’s possible to course correct in almost all of these instances, but my sincere hope is that this book will give you the tools and strategies to recognize and strengthen your culture before something negative happens.

Some of my clients fall into the category above. They run a company with a long history of success, but now they’ve run into an issue and they realize they need to be intentional with their culture. If you’re in that group, this book is for you.

Other clients are more proactive. Their team might have doubled in size over the last few years, perhaps they are no longer founder led, or they may have a new CEO who knows they can do their work better. If you’re in this group, this book is also for you.

If you fall somewhere in between or beyond those two groups, there’s still a good deal you can take from this book because we all face the same problem—and I believe we can all leverage different versions of the same solution to address it.

Current and future talent live in a world that is changing rapidly. They are no longer willing to tolerate outdated, unsupportive, or stale workplace cultures. They know there’s better out there, and they’re not afraid to go join a company with a strong culture or create their own business so they get to dictate the culture. Companies are losing prime candidates and the opportunities they bring with them to grow and sustain success.

To appeal to this talent, both employees and customers, we have to toss out the outdated top-down model of doing business. It’s time to be intentional about creating a people-first, purpose-driven culture that values the diverse experiences, skills, personalities, strengths, and weaknesses that each person brings to work. Furthermore, the talent your organization needs in order to thrive isn’t going to wait on you to figure this out. They’re already driving a focus on social and environmental change, and savvy boards are starting to take notice, especially through their oversight of ESG. These employers know that harnessing the power of your talent is also about honoring your multiple bottom line. Not only will this approach strengthen your customers’ experience, but it will bring you financial success.

To help companies build transformational cultures that bring out the best in people, we will explore the following concepts and more in this book:

• The crucial impact culture has on an organization’s success, financially and beyond

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• The stakes and potentially devastating consequences of not having a people-centric, purpose-driven culture

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• What diversity, equity, and inclusion mean and why they aren’t enough until they’re paired with belonging and empowerment

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• How different generations view the workplace and what that means for the future of work and leadership

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• The importance of creating community in the workplace and beyond

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• How you can nurture talent from different backgrounds in an inclusive way

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• What options you have for instilling a sense of ownership in your people

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• Leaders’ role in creating culture and finding purpose for themselves, the company, and employees

Though we talk about leaders and leadership a lot, this isn’t just a book about leadership, training, or how to increase profits at the cost of everything else. I’m not going to give you an extensive checklist so that if you complete every item, your culture is The Silverene Group approved. Not only is culture constantly evolving, but the lessons contained in this book are as much about shifting your mindset as they are about taking action. That said, most chapters end with a list of actions you can take to implement the lessons in each chapter as well as advice for how leaders and employees can shift culture in minor and major ways.

This book offers you a road map to success through your intentional, purpose-driven culture. I share thought-provoking examples from my own work and life experiences as well as examine high-profile instances of cultures falling short and cultures that are huge successes. From Wells Fargo mishandling their business strategy at the expense of their culture to Patagonia retaining working mothers with an inclusive culture, we’ll explore why culture is the heart of business—and what you can do to make yours stronger than ever.

I share stories of triumph and struggle in these pages not to scare you but to help illustrate how pervasive and important culture truly is. I use pseudonyms and at times composite characters in order to protect the identities of people I’ve worked with as a colleague, supervisor, or consultant, but worry not—every story in this book is real. I’ve either lived it, observed it, consulted someone through it, or read about it in the news.

I also share a good deal of statistics and studies because I am an avid reader and I want to show that even the anecdotal truths I share can be applied universally. If you want to read these studies and books, I have an extensive bibliography and list of recommended further reading at the end of the book. Check them out!

Through all of this, my goal is to give you tools and strategies you can use today to strengthen your culture, support your people, connect with a sense of purpose, and make the world a little bit better every day.

The daunting task of creating cultures of belonging lies before us. Before we get into how to take it on, let’s discuss why.

SECTION 1

CULTURE IS THE CORNERSTONE OF YOUR BUSINESS

1

WE CAN DO BETTER

When Hamdi Ulukaya moved to New York from Turkey, he noticed that yogurt wasn’t as integral to American cuisine as it was in many other parts of the world, including his home country. In 2005, he decided to do something about it, believing that there would be a market for the thick, creamy, tangy yogurt he remembered from his childhood. Armed with a loan from the Small Business Administration, Ulukaya bought an old yogurt plant, hired a small team, and named his company Chobani, which means shepherd in Turkish. Not only was Ulukaya shepherding his vision into becoming, but he wanted to honor the hardworking and compassionate spirit of the mountain farmer.

Ulukaya spent two years testing and developing his yogurt-making craft while adding new members to his team. He sought people