Episode 43: Trust Overload: How Workplace Intimacy Masks Inequity with Sarah Mosseri
The hidden costs of workplace intimacy and how to navigate systemic betrayal.
Episode Summary
We are often told that trust is the foundation of a healthy workplace, but what happens when that trust is used to mask deep-seated inequity? In this episode, sociologist and author Sarah Mosseri joins host Ellen Whitlock Baker to discuss her book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us. Sarah shares the "weird puzzle" that sparked her research: while institutional trust in America is at an all-time low, over 80% of workers still claim to trust their managers and peers. Through over 1,200 hours of ethnographic observation across tech startups, restaurants, and the gig economy, Sarah reveals why we cling to these bonds even when the underlying systems are increasingly insecure.
The conversation dives deep into the phenomenon of "trust overload," where personal relationships are forced to do the work that fair rules and structural protections should be doing. Sarah explains how "Maverick Managers"—often white, cis-gender men who use plain talk or "endearing incompetence"—can build intense loyalty while women and people of color are often denied that same latitude (think Michael Scott from The Office). Ellen and Sarah explore how these dynamics shift risk onto the most vulnerable employees, making workplace betrayal not just personal, but systemic.
Finally, Sarah offers a way forward using her MAP framework: naming the Moment, Analyzing the pattern, and finding your People. Ellen and Sarah discuss the power of collective action, the lessons learned from ride-hail drivers who fought back against platform invisibility, and the importance of building community outside of our primary job. Whether you are a leader looking to build genuine accountability or a worker trying to "unlearn" toxic norms, this episode provides a necessary reality check on what it really means to trust at work.
Keywords
trust in workplace, organizational culture, workplace inequality, management practices, employee relationships, ethnography, workplace trust, systemic bias, leadership, workplace research
Key Topics
The paradox of trust in workplaces with low institutional trust
Ethnographic research across diverse workplaces
How managerial practices influence trust and betrayal
The role of systemic inequality in workplace trust
Strategies for building genuine trust and community
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Sarah Mosseri and the Book Trust Fall
01:46 The Puzzle: Trust in Society vs. Workplace Trust
04:02 Research Methodology: Ethnography and Interviews
06:53 Why Do People Say They Trust Their Coworkers?
09:54 The Impact of Workplace Insecurity and Inequality
14:43 Trust as a Structural and Relational Phenomenon
19:52 Maverick Managers and Trust Building Strategies
24:49 Examples of Betrayal and Trust Breakdown
29:41 The Role of Technology and Platform Work in Trust
34:36 Implications for Leadership and Organizational Change
39:51 Community, Collective Action, and Rebuilding Trust
44:35 Unlearning and Rethinking Workplace Norms
49:33 Practical Lessons and Future Directions
Resources
Trust Fall by Sarah Mosseri - https://www.smosseri.com/trust-fall
Sarah Mosseri's Website - https://www.sarahmosseri.com
Work Fails (Substack) - https://workfails.substack.com
Transcript
Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:01)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Hard at Work podcast. I'm your host Ellen Whitlock Baker and I'm joined today by Sarah Mosseri. Hi Sarah, it's great to see you.
Sarah Mosseri (00:11)
Hi, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:14)
I'm delighted to have you and I'm so excited to talk about your work and your book, Trust Fall, How Workplace Relationships Fail Us, which had me at the title. But if you could first maybe share with everyone, what was the setup for this book?
Sarah Mosseri (00:30)
The book started with this weird puzzle that I saw. I was looking at and just hearing on the news, and we still hear this, about how we're having this crisis of trust in America. I was looking at data because I like data. And I was really surprised that, OK, trust in all of our institutions was down, trust in each other, just kind of generally speaking, was at an all time low.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:52)
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (00:57)
But weirdly when you looked in the workplace, more than 80 % of people in the same surveys were saying they trusted their managers and they trusted their coworkers. And I just thought that was weird. Yeah, exactly. So that was kind of the impetus for the book.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:07)
That's weird.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (01:14)
And so I felt like, there's something in this quantitative data that isn't quite telling the full story. So I moved to New York and I started trying to get into different workplaces and I ended up going into four different workplaces, a marketing firm, a restaurant, tech startup, and then hanging around with New York City, ride hail workers, people who work for Uber or Lyft and drive for them.
And I just kind of went in, I did what sociologists call ethnography, which is essentially kind of hanging out, observing, participating where you can, getting to know people on that day-to-day basis. So I did like 1,200 hours of observation across those four workplaces over the course of like a year and a half. And I did 122 interviews with the workers and the managers, just trying to get a sense. And so that's what informed the book.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (01:59)
my gosh.
Wow. That's what makes it so compelling you get to know the people, the various employers, and you hear what they're actually saying. You quote them. So it just makes you just much more deeply understand where they're coming from. What made you choose those particular workplaces, like what was your thought process for what you wanted to study?
Sarah Mosseri (02:33)
There were kind of three things. One was there's this problem of access. It's actually really hard to get workplaces to say, hey, sure, come on in, study us from the inside. And so there was a little bit about what my own social networks. I had worked in restaurants. I had worked in advertising. So I had some networks there. So a little bit of it was just practical.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (02:40)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (02:53)
But a big part of it was also that there was a lot of research in really elite workplaces like investment banking that showed these systems of trust really help powerful people keep their power, kind of move up in the workplace or deal with insecurity. And then there was trust on people in poverty who like the fact that they had been let down so many times, they didn't trust or it was harder for them to gain trust, the trust of others. And as a result, they were really suffering. And so I was like, okay, it's...
Ellen Whitlock Baker (03:08)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (03:27)
interesting that we see this happening, but what's happening in the middle for everybody else, like the working and middle class kind of people. So that's why I focused on these. And then within them, I wanted to get some variation. So I wanted to get that typical like professional office
Ellen Whitlock Baker (03:31)
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (03:41)
idea that we all kind of have in our heads maybe when we think about work, but also that interactive service work. So that was the marketing firm and the tech startup or that kind of professional office. And then the interactive service work, know, people who are on the front lines, what we've called sometimes essential workers during the pandemic. That was the restaurant and the ride hail workers. So not only was there that kind of status distinction, but I also wanted
Ellen Whitlock Baker (03:43)
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (04:06)
some organizations that were more traditional. They had been around for a long time, like the industry had. There were clear hierarchies. They were incorporating technology, but they had pre-existed technology, like our current technologies. And then there were the more emergent workplaces. So like the tech startup and the ride hail. This is where technology was more central. There were flatter organizations. And so I wanted that kind of variation across those two dimensions.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (04:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
What was super interesting to me, and we'll get into it, is that it didn't seem to matter the lack of trust or the sort of like false narrative of trust seems to be true in all, at least the tech startup, the restaurant and the events company, no matter how big, small, flat, what did you find? Because everyone's saying they have trust in their workplaces. So why do we think we have trust in our workplaces?
Sarah Mosseri (05:02)
Yeah, the book kind of answers a simple question. It's like, why do so many workplaces feel really deeply personal, even though the underlying system is increasingly insecure and unequal? And what I've found is that trust at work isn't necessarily fake. In many cases, it's very real. But in insecure workplaces and unequal workplaces, it becomes overloaded.
So it's asked to do the work that structures should be doing. So things like fair rules or protections or accountability. So relationships end up carrying a lot of weight. They make work feel humane, which is awesome, but they also hide inequality. They shift risk down to the people who have the least responsibility. And they also make betrayal kind of harder to name.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (05:41)
Mm-hmm
Mmm.
Sarah Mosseri (05:53)
And so there's kind of like actually three steps, like why it works so well. One is that trust solves like a very real human problem. We all want to feel recognized. We want to feel seen and in trusted relationships, you often get that recognition. And so when it happens, it feels good. It feels like safety. feels like support.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:11)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (06:13)
But when it's used to fill these structural gaps, know, instead of pay raises or better structures or protections, we get like these really good vibes and these great humane cultures, which are nice, but they shouldn't be kind of discretionary perks. They should actually be like fundamental rights in the workplace.
And then that's when you get the problems of workers absorbing the risks, inequalities kind of lurking within intimacy, all those sorts of problems that I show in the book.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (06:37)
Mm-hmm.
I thought your example of the restaurant shift swapping was such a good example of that. the schedule would come out and then everybody's phones would blow up with a like, can you cover for me and can you cover for me and I can't do this day? Because it sounds like you basically could ask for days off, but you weren't necessarily gonna get them.
And so you were sort of at the whim of the schedule system and your peers. So that like network of connected trust with your peers. And what I thought was so interesting was that the managers, they didn't really care because the system was set up so that it worked for the company. the company was gonna be fine no matter what. it was all pushed onto the workers.
Sarah Mosseri (07:23)
Yeah, that's such a good example of the dynamic at play because with the on-call system and the flexible scheduling, the way that would work in the restaurant is you have kind of this constant need for schedule. You need people on all the time.
It was this really intense kind of never stopping schedule and the flexibility made it really easy to manage your schedule. It gave you a sense of autonomy. You're like, yeah, I'm working all the time or I got a really bad schedule this week, but I'm able to swap. I get to control my schedule. But what it does is it puts a lot of pressure on each other. And so if you call out,
Ellen Whitlock Baker (07:49)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (08:05)
somebody else is gonna get called in. So they have everybody for every shift, there's gonna be somebody on call, which is why the managers are like, sure, call out, doesn't matter to me, I'm gonna still have the shift covered. But instead, so instead of getting frustrated at management for your bad schedule, you end up getting mad at whoever calls out, whether it was a legitimate reason or not. You get mad at people who don't like step in for you when you need them to, when you're in a bind and you need somebody to pick up your shift. So it ends up being you kind of turn on each other.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (08:07)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (08:35)
while management stays above the fray.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (08:37)
Yeah, though it translated into the other workplaces as well, too.
Sarah Mosseri (08:41)
one of the ways that I saw that in the startup was around this idea of the partnership mindset. this idea that we're all a team and we're all partners here.
And we wouldn't make it through unless everybody was treating this organization like your own. you know, with a startup, it's always about trying to help the startup survive and everybody was all in. and so if you weren't all in, if you didn't show up, you know, for a late night meeting, or if you weren't willing to put in the extra work when it was really needed, you were kind of seen as, the, weakest link that was bringing every down.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (09:14)
there's this like there's so much harm that these structures that feel warm and fuzzy or are purported to be warm and fuzzy but are deeply fractured on the inside, there's so much harm that's caused. And I was really happy how you really point out and explain how, in particular, those of us who don't fit the model of what a boss is, which is still a cis white man in a lot of workplaces, are disproportionately affected by both being lured into the trust and also broken by it and experiencing that betrayal that you talked about Can you talk a little bit about that?
How do these typical bosses use that trust or build that trust?
Sarah Mosseri (10:11)
What it makes me think of is the narratives that are very important around authenticity and vulnerability at work. These have become, I dare say, overused to the point of being a little bit cliche. And what I found is...
Ellen Whitlock Baker (10:17)
Yes, yeah.
huh.
Sarah Mosseri (10:26)
they really end up being like a shorthand or a shortcut for leadership. They have taken the task, they're like, great, authenticity and vulnerability, that's what we need to be. in the book, I detail what I call maverick managers and they are the best at this, right? So they are able to convey that authenticity and vulnerability in a way that builds trust.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (10:42)
yeah.
Sarah Mosseri (10:50)
The thing is though, our template for leadership is this white male. have, know, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, like we have these kind of templates in our head. So when they act in ways that are authentic or vulnerable that go outside the lines, it's seen as individuality and realness. Whereas when people who don't match that template, so women or people of color,
Ellen Whitlock Baker (11:07)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (11:15)
we're already a little suspect in those roles. People are already like, do you fit? And so when we then, in addition, act authentic or vulnerable in ways that don't fit the typical mold, it's not read as authenticity or vulnerability. Instead, it's read as, hmm, maybe they're not right for the job.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (11:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sarah Mosseri (11:36)
And so what I noticed in my Maverick managers, particularly cis white men did it through plain talk. So they were able to be really straightforward. They spoke directly and I should say there was a gender dynamic too. They were like, I don't use any of that flowery subjective HR language. But yeah, and it was like very blunt and like straightforward. but that was, know.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (11:42)
Mm-hmm.
Yep. Uh-huh. Ugh.
Sarah Mosseri (11:57)
they were able to, that was often read as authentic and real and telling it like it is. Yeah. And another way was, you know, what I call endearing and competence.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (12:01)
Yeah, no, they built, they still built trust. Yeah.
God, yeah, that one like had me almost throwing the book across. I was like, I know some of these people. Tell us more.
Sarah Mosseri (12:16)
Yes, it's like, from the office, Michael, from the office, they're kind of like Michael Scott, like these bumbling, like fumbling kind of lovable figures, right? And so at the restaurant, this was absolutely this, the general manager, Paul, he kind of, you know, he very much embraces flaws. He was like, I don't have a great memory. I'm not very good with guests. And I mean, this is these are key, key components of the job.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (12:20)
Yeah, it's Michael Scott, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sarah Mosseri (12:44)
and you know, but, but he was so, human that people really were drawn to him. and so he kind of got away with it. Whereas, you know, the, the women managers, like if they were behind the bar, people were so critical, like of like, whether they knew their stuff, whether they knew every single drink or not, whether they knew when to cut people or not.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (12:48)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (13:07)
So their competence was always in question. they couldn't do this kind of endearing incompetence in the same way. And then a third way that Maverick managers were able to build trust was through discretionary rule breaking, which is kind of, we'll break the rules here and there, which can feel really humane and honest. Like you're like, yeah, like we've all been in those situations where the policy just doesn't fit the human circumstances and you need that flexibility.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (13:13)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Sarah Mosseri (13:36)
And they really took advantage of that. Whereas, they were given that leeway because they weren't already under suspicion. Maverick managers weren't bad managers, but that pathway for trust was a lot harder for other groups to access.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (13:52)
And it just reminds me that you can get sucked into that as a member of the workplace, no matter how you identify. Cause that was what was interesting too, is all of the people you interviewed, whether they were women or people of color or women of color or LGBTQ plus folks most of them were like, yeah, I totally love Bob, you know, or I really trust Steve I mean, he's not great at his job, but he'll be there for you if you need him. Or I think one of them was like, I would save him if the building was burning down. I don't know if that was the same guy, like, yeah. it was really stark to me to see it in action.
Sarah Mosseri (14:24)
Yes, that was Paul, yes.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (14:32)
The allure that that trust plus privilege plus power, the allure that it has for everyone in the workplace. And then at some point it turns on you. Will you talk about that a little bit?
Sarah Mosseri (14:45)
Truss is often kind of celebrated as this like, absolute good right and I think part of the question that my book Raises is can you have trust amid? Inequality what happens when the person who's asking for your trust also has power over you
Ellen Whitlock Baker (14:56)
Yeah.
Sarah Mosseri (15:01)
quite frankly, we don't have a lot of other options. Like we don't have a ton of like things that can support us if things go wrong. So it's not that we trust everybody in the workplace. We have our pockets of trust. We've made exceptions. We understand the workplace is like,
Ellen Whitlock Baker (15:16)
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (15:19)
volatile and will probably get laid off at some point or another but like probably not in this job with this manager, you know, because built this like really strong relationship with them and that can be really that kind of exceptionalism can be really seductive and kind of give you that hope that you want.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (15:32)
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (15:36)
The only exception I saw was the ride hail case. In the ride hail case, you didn't have these constant rituals, everybody jumping in the trenches together, your boss being able to talk to you, bring you into the fold like that. Everything was happening through an app. trust actually became very quantified.
Trust in numbers isn't quite as malleable as trust in day-to-day interactions. In day-to-day interactions, I could see people, when they would get disappointed, if they had a trust that was based on care.
or something like that, it's based in authenticity. Like this person didn't take care of me, but they're really honest. Or maybe this person didn't take care of me, but they're very competent. But you didn't have that same kind of malleability when there wasn't that day-to-day interactions.
The actual managers who are managing the platforms because of legal reasons They made themselves highly invisible because if they were too visible as managers, then they would have to call
the driver's employees and then they would have to provide them with all of these benefits. And so they pulled back and made themselves less visible.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (16:35)
interesting.
Sarah Mosseri (16:40)
But also because of needing to build trust with their writer base, they made drivers super visible through ratings, through all the statistics and all the surveillance that they gathered on them. And those kind of cross currents of visibility, like also created a problem where the drivers felt really watched but not seen, which was totally different than the other workplaces. And so I saw something different. They actually, they felt betrayed.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (16:46)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm.
Sarah Mosseri (17:07)
Because a lot of workers came into the right hill industry with a lot of hope a lot of them came in after the 2008 recession This was a real opportunity platform driving everywhere on in New York City There were these billboards about like be your own boss make your own hours but then as the model started to shift and fares started to go down, which cut into wages, the commission structures changed
Ellen Whitlock Baker (17:29)
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (17:31)
more drivers enter the field and there weren't those protections. And so they called out their betrayal. And they started to talk to each other.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (17:36)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (17:45)
a little bit more in a way that without the intervention of managers being there because managers were taking that step back. And you wouldn't think in a ride hail, like you would be like, how do workers get together? But actually, yeah, so there's this kind of.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (17:50)
Interesting.
That's what I was gonna ask, like how did they find each other?
Sarah Mosseri (18:03)
One of the things about platform work is it's not just in time work, you know, where you're called up on demand, but you also are called to a certain place. So it's like just in place. what that meant in the ride-home industry is those, a lot of people congregated around airports
There was like a digital queue that the platforms would set up and they would have like a geo fence, which if you stepped out, if you went outside that area, you lost your spot in the queue. so all the drivers were kind of contained in these lots as they waited for these rides. So they had time on their hands.
they weren't around managers and they felt betrayed. And so they were able to talk to each other and to vent and to kind of validate for each other. No, this isn't right. We should do something about it. The system is broken. And so they started to really act together in ways that, you know, I don't want to romanticize the case. They don't have, they still don't have the greatest of working conditions, but you know, they fought for in act tipping. They caught
Ellen Whitlock Baker (18:41)
Hmm? Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sarah Mosseri (19:06)
the platforms taking taxes out of their share of the fairs and were able to sue for like a $300 million lawsuit that they won, a settlement. And so they have had like real successes in that way. So it was very different than some of the other organizations that I looked at.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (19:11)
Hmm.
my gosh.
Mm-hmm.
What lessons does this give us for the workplace now?
Sarah Mosseri (19:27)
you think about it as kind of a map. By map, mean, so M for moment. So being able to name the moment. And I think my book gives us a language to do that, whether it's Maverick management or whether it's heavy ties, which is getting at that bartering issue. I give names to these things that we've all experienced and allow us to see it. Whether you're in a managerial role or you're in a worker role, right, you can see it. And then, the A in MAP is analyzing the pattern. So how does this work when there's inequality in the workplace? Who ends up taking on most of the risk? Who ends up not being trusted analyzing those unequal patterns. And then the P is for people, like finding your people, standing with your people. And I think the ride hail case really kind of shows you kind of one way you could do that. And so naming the moment, analyzing the pattern, and then finding and standing with your people. The book isn't saying we don't want trust in the workplace. Nobody wants to work in a workplace where there's no trust. But just trying to find that balance in our ethical frameworks,
Ellen Whitlock Baker (20:36)
yes, we want trust in the workplace, but like the way trust is happening does not seem like it's actual trust. It's this sort of manufactured malleable thing that the people with the power and the privilege can use to get things done the way they want or like remain in power.
Sarah Mosseri (20:50)
even the people in power, it's not intentional, right? Like our systems are just set up where so much is being placed on trust.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (20:55)
Right, right, right.
Sarah Mosseri (21:02)
I mean, you see it in the labor market when you, I mean, we all know you get jobs through who you know as much as what you know. You need people who trust you and who you trust to get information about jobs, to get references. And so there's just so much writing on this that even if you have the best of intentions, when there's that inequality in terms of, I mean, there are workplace hierarchies, whether we want to acknowledge them or not.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (21:08)
Yep.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sarah Mosseri (21:27)
And there are like broader societal hierarchies. so until those are addressed, ends up you kind of have people who have maybe really great intentions kind of perpetuating the same problems
Ellen Whitlock Baker (21:40)
I like MAP a lot because what I'm learning in all of these wonderful conversations is naming it is so important because it's once you see you can't unsee. naming and understanding it I find is a powerful tool for us.
All of this is so systemic. It's not going to be fixed overnight and especially not right now when a lot of other things are happening. there is power in being able to say, yeah, you know, that trust is, I'm going to come at that a different way because the way that it was described to me or how I was brought up in the workplace thinking that we're supposed to be a family, like, no, that's not actually a safe place to be.
I like what you were saying too, about the sort of collectivization or the gathering. I'm learning that for a lot of things. Community is the answer, the more you can talk to other people about how things are going at work outside of the lens of that, maverick leader How can you have a safe place, whether it's an ERG or something like that. some sort of safe place to have a collective conversation seems really essential right now in workplaces. But it's also hard to find those, I think, or even form them.
Sarah Mosseri (22:53)
about the naming and what you're saying. I mean, to go back to venting, one of the things that really kind of stuck with me is when people would find somebody to vent with. And then the thing they would say would be they would be like, my gosh, I'm not crazy.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (23:02)
Mm-hmm.
Yes,
Sarah Mosseri (23:09)
And if you can find somebody else, you know, that safe space, like you were saying, it allows you to like kind of push back on that, to create a different reality or to affirm a different reality.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (23:19)
Yes.
Sarah Mosseri (23:21)
And finding that community both with people you work with, but also I think work has come to take up so much space in our lives, which is also by design. mean, our healthcare is tied to work, our identity is tied to work. But the more you can build that kind of community even outside the workplace, it kind of shifts your perspective too and allows you to see alternatives.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (23:31)
It has, Yup. Yup. Yup.
I totally agree with you. It's this unlearning that's really hard. We're learning to unlearn. But I think it starts with the naming. It starts with books like yours, where it's like, here's the data. We're not just saying this. This is actually how things are happening in the workplace. And then it starts people thinking outside of these norms that we have all been brought up to think, this is the way it is so interesting. Yes.
Sarah Mosseri (24:16)
think we should be concerned that trust at work is really high when it's really bad everywhere else, because that means that the workplace has kind of a monopoly on our trust, and that's not good. Like, you don't want trust to be consolidated in one institution. You really want to, like, spread it out across society,
Ellen Whitlock Baker (24:23)
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
no.
the people filling out the survey believe they trust, but now as we've uncovered all of this, it's tenuous and not reciprocal. Yeah, we're forced to because that's, yeah, because that's how you get along
Sarah Mosseri (24:44)
Yeah, you're forced to trust. You're forced to trust.
I think we might be at another inflection point, especially coming so soon after what happened after the pandemic. where people are starting to want something better and talk about something better.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (25:02)
I have so many conversations with people who are like, you know, what if I just go in and I do my job and I go home? Like, what if I don't have that next executive level job? What if I don't want that anymore? Is that okay? I think we're having a lot of come to terms with it conversations with ourselves. And I hope that we can collectively find each other to keep having those conversations because that's what you say. And I think, you know, what we're learning, like that's what's gonna give it power is more voices.
Sarah Mosseri (25:27)
And that's what your podcast does.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (25:29)
Here's hoping all two listeners. No, I'm just kidding. I have more than two listeners, but yeah, that's why I'm loving having these conversations because it's just like hey There's other things to think about and there's other experts to listen to Then the same five people you see on the HBR bestseller list, you know who write from a very
Sarah Mosseri (25:46)
Yeah, because even like before the pandemic, we didn't we were told you couldn't you couldn't run a business when people are working from home. It wasn't even possible. It wasn't in our collective imagination. And so I think it's time to expand our imaginations.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (25:55)
No!
Mm-mm.
That's why I really want you to read this book and like make your brain think a little bit harder because it's so easy to be like, well, this is how work works. And we're seeing these massive, massive retention issues. And if we don't address it, we're gonna have problems.
I have a lot of sympathy or empathy or both for leaders because you have been doing this for 30 years thinking this is how you lead. And now it's like, God, that was all built on inequality and structural racism and privilege.
Sarah Mosseri (26:30)
Yes.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (26:39)
Also, the world's really changed. So it can feel really insecure to put all that away and say, okay, well, how do I start afresh? And I think people are afraid to do that.
Sarah Mosseri (26:51)
Yeah, it's almost a different sense of betrayal. It's like everything I learned up to this point. And now I like, so I think you're having people having to face betrayal, which is, as you said, so painful. Whether you're a leader who's been leading a certain way and now you're realizing, this doesn't work or it can't continue to work. Or whether you're a worker who's feeling disappointed because somebody didn't show up for you or your workplace didn't.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (26:54)
Yeah. yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mosseri (27:20)
support you the way you need it to be supported.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (27:23)
my gosh, we're at time. This has been really, really helpful, Sarah. Where can folks find you if they want to learn more? I'll put a link to the book for sure
Sarah Mosseri (27:32)
Great, yeah, so I have my website at www.sarahmosseri.com, but also I have a Substack called Work Fails. I pull out some things from my research, some of it's from the book, some of it's from other projects that I've done in different contexts, but that's where you can find me.
And definitely I am happy to work with organizations that are looking for people to come speak. I can do that as well.
Ellen Whitlock Baker (27:51)
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much for being with us, Sarah. I really appreciate it. And thank all of you for listening. And we'll see you on the next episode of Hard at Work.
