What happens when people-first policies run up against the demands of a profit-centered world?

Is it unrealistic to believe that companies can value culture as highly as they value sales? Or is it fantasy?

Today we sit down with Catrin Lewis, a renowned author and workforce expert who has embraced that very idea. We discuss her work, her views on workplace culture, and her acclaimed books about unicorns, vultures, and the very real power of employee engagement.

Learn more about Catrin here: https://tenzing.pe/about-us/meet-the-team/catrin-lewis/

Key Points

• The importance of employee engagement in a modern world of work and its changing role
• Employee Engagement Bridge
• The power of fairy tales and storytelling in business
• The real cost of a “culture vulture” in the team

*Some companies call them “Hero Awards.” Others call them “Hugs.” We call them Kudos. It is a written and public recognition of a colleague for something they have contributed to the team.

A Kudo is not just given from the top down, but peer-to-peer and bottom-up, across departments and organizations. Anyone can recognize someone else’s work. It’s a way to break down hierarchical limitations and to encourage everyone to offer instant positive feedback.

In the Management 3.0 Web Shop, you can find a box with 400 colorful appreciation cards in eight different designs and in multiple languages. Browse now at www.management30.com/shop

Transcript

*Please note that the transcript has been automatically generated and proofread for mistakes. But remains in spoken English, and some syntax and grammar mistakes might remain.

Elisa Tuijnder: [00:00:00] What happens when people first policies run up against the demands of a profit centered world? Is it unrealistic to believe that companies can value culture and wellbeing as highly as they value sales, or is it a fantasy? Today we sit down with a renowned author and workforce expert who has embraced that idea, writing acclaimed books about unicorns, vultures, and the very real power of employee engagement.

Before we dive in, you are listening to The Happiness At Work podcast by Management 3.0 where we are getting serious about happiness.[00:01:00] 

I’m your host, Elisa Tuijnder, Happiness Enthusiast and Management 3.0 team member. In this podcast, we share insights from industry experts, influencers, and thought leaders about what it takes to be happy, motivated, and productive at work, so that loving your job becomes the norm and not the exception. We will be publishing every fortnight on Friday, so be sure to tune in and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Our guest today is Catrin Lewis, a renowned author, thought leader, and a subject specialist for employee engagement with Tenzing. Her new book is titled The Culture Vulture, A Tale From the Disengagement Danger Zone, and Is Available Now. Hey, thank you so much for joining us, Cat. 

Catrin Lewis: Thank you for having me.

Elisa Tuijnder: Hey, I’m so excited to talk with you cuz you have this really unique approach to some of these things. And, talk about your book [00:02:00] and and the new book, the old book, which was also really cool. But here on the podcast, we always start with the same question, and that is, what does happiness mean to you?

Catrin Lewis: Great question. So happiness. Happiness to me, especially at work, means working in alignment with my strengths and passions in a really cohesive and collaborative team. I’ve experienced that and like you can just see now the smile on my face really as I talk about that. Yeah. And I think when you find this, you can really feel a state of flow in your work and as they say, like you found your calling, I suppose in work, and that to me is really happiness in your life.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. Yeah. It’s very powerful being able to work like that and ha being in the flow. 

Catrin Lewis: Yeah. Extremely. See, how long have you been writing 

Elisa Tuijnder: about. Working and about employee engagement mostly, cuz that’s where your area of expertise 

Catrin Lewis: lies. Yeah, sure. I’ve been working in employee engagement since 2012.[00:03:00] 

Which, when I think back to then, it wasn’t even cool then. Nobody even knew what 

Elisa Tuijnder: wasn’t 

Catrin Lewis: a buzzword. People thought that I was working in weddings or something cuz it just, the engagement bit and not realized, no, it’s employee engagement. Many of those conversations I had. Yeah, it wasn’t known well then at all, but in 11 years the industry has changed so much and I’ve been writing and speaking on the topic of employee experience, engagement and the enablement of employees for the last six years.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. Hey. And how did you get there? Because you just said it wasn’t that, that well known. How did you end up in employee engagement? Was it like Yeah, sure. A chosen path, or did you just accidentally found yourself and went, yeah, this is really cool. I love it. It’s been 

Catrin Lewis: a very different path to what you might expect.

Prior to working at Reward Gateway, I actually work for the police. Yeah. And employee engage with that. People work for the police cause like they [00:04:00] want to do good citizenship, great pension, but in terms of other benefits and things like this I just remember they had PDF download from their intranet and discounts at Nando’s and Dunkin Donut, let’s run it, but zero tech, like nothing there to enable really or anything around that.

So I want, I nacked there and I wanted to move to London and a very good friend of mine works leading the client’s success team. And so I was a referral. Yeah. Thank that friend for that referral. Yeah. So I applied and I got the job and I was actually working as implementation manager. So it was taking, this is a good lesson in transferable skills.

I’d been working in a control room, operational role in the police, applied those skills to then apply for a operational role in a tech company. Yeah. And that was my sideways move into a completely different in industry by transferring skills. So it was much [00:05:00] smaller then. And largely focused on discounts and childcare vouchers and cycle to work and things like this.

But over that time, the needs of HR and workforce has just changed radically. And it went from being like 50 employees to now 750 employees. And having led the implementation, I went on to build the knowledge base. Having built the knowledge base, I’d collaborated with the CEO engineering, help desk, client success, retail, like every area of the business.

And that’s the experience that really set me up for then being approached by the leadership team to say, Hey, you are great at collaborating with everyone. Know the product inside out. Can you take on the role of engagement and internal communications in the business? And that first assignment that they asked me to get stuck into was to communicate the change of a huge transformation of the business.

We were gonna, hey, having a change of investor and ownership. [00:06:00] So they asked me to focus on educating, engaging, and retaining all the employees through that period because they were our most valuable asset. Yeah. And that was an experience that kind of kickstarted my career in this area. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. I love how it’s also you got to grow with reward gateway and you got to be there from the start 

and 

Catrin Lewis: I really did the kind of the leaders that our workforce set an environment, which allowed complete freedom, I think, to go off that knowledge base project. I didn’t get asked to do that.

I actually just, I just created it cuz I was like, Hey, we’re working in these ways. It’s really repeatable. My job design would be better if customers can actually sell themselves. And then they saw what I’d done and they really championed it. And they just let you, have permission for you to make decisions.

And then you saw that things could be made better. It wouldn’t be way yeah. Told what to do. That high trust culture of. Employee to it. So let them grow and know. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. [00:07:00] Yeah. Absolutely. But what we all stand for at Management 3.0 as well yeah. Trust, authenticity. Hey, so why do you think it is that employee engagement kind of skyrocketed?

Why? Not just in Reward Gateway, right? But like why do you think, why are we focusing much more on this as leaders and in organizations than 

Catrin Lewis: before? Sure. I think it’s a difficult, it’s difficult time right now. It was important before, but the pandemic really accelerated focus on how you can maximize your business outcomes.

There were a lot of industries that were completely obliterated during that time, and if you want to maximize your business outcomes, then employee engagement and focusing on people experience is such a critical strategic component to actually achieving that financial success. It’s been drilled into me over the years, like engaged employees, more productive, more innovative, better enabled for the modern world of work.

Especially now we’ve switched to this [00:08:00] largely hybrid way of working for people. And you’ve got so much research into the field now, which really proves that case in point, like Josh Bernson, his definitive guide to employee engagement, she can completely geek out on, if you like, numbers, data and things like this.

Yeah. Like four times more likely to innovate effectively. 5.1 times more likely to create a senate sense of belonging and to retain employees. 2.2 more likely to exceed financial targets. Who doesn’t want that? And 5.2 more likely to be a great place of work, which is just everything that leadership teams and companies are striving to do.

And you can’t achieve it without focusing on, this is an element of your strategy. Can’t just be, oh, this is the people teams job or anything like that. It’s the whole company project. And I also think. We think about how much time we spend at work. I think you say on average it’s 90,000 hours a third of your life.

Yeah. It’s a lot a third of your life. [00:09:00] So if you create a better experience at work by focusing on how you engage employees and bring out that passion in them, essentially you are creating a better quality of life for people. And I don’t know what there is about that to really want to do or Yeah. If you are leading that as a project.

You can go home at night and be immensely proud of how you are really changing the world. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, and how does how does employee wellbeing differ from employee engagement? Or is it just like a part of 

Catrin Lewis: it? How did it coexist? Yeah, sure. I think it’s a key enabler for employee engagement.

10 years ago most employers would probably be offering just a gym discount and an employee assistance program. But things have changed so much. Technology’s changed, culture’s changed, and in really positive ways as well. So mental wellbeing, it’s no longer so misunderstood what the clear definition is between mental [00:10:00] illness and mental health.

I think conversations there have opened up and, absolutely. It’s a lot more it’s part of our culture now and the world that we live in. It’s no longer unusual to be talking about that. The cost of living is put financial education and benefits front of stage for people to be leading and wanting physical wellbeing.

It’s that culture’s changed completely. It’s so much more inclusive and accessible for all now, if I think back to days before, it would just be like really like strong men and aerobics for women and this kind of thing. It’s not like that now. Not like that at all. People like Gallup for instance, they’ve got decades of research on wellbeing and looking at the different elements of life which transcend culture and regions and those different elements.

They really define what could help somebody thrive at work and then ones that would people would struggle with if they weren’t there. And I think that’s really like the difference between engaged and motivated. Or somebody who’s [00:11:00] looking to leave the company and go somewhere else, right? And wellbeing as a part of engagement, it’s not just wellbeing now, as in physical wellbeing, it’s career wellbeing.

So what are you doing every day? It’s social wellbeing. Talking about the meaningful relationships you have in your work, and the mentors and the inspiring people and financial wellbeing. So how are you managing your salary and where’s that all going? Physical wellbeing, obviously still key. Community wellbeing.

So how is your role, how is your company contributing to the environment around it? That’s so key now too. Yeah. And when we think about all those different assets, they create a healthy mindset. And that’s why it’s gone from just being like wellbeing in its old state, in Nando voucher. It’s all encompassing.

Fitness. Yeah. All encompassing it. It’s everything. Yeah, absolutely. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Hey, so some people that are listening might mean maybe right now they’re like, Hey, we really need to [00:12:00] be more mindful of this within our company. And you just, loaded them up with all of the different things that they need to think about.

There’s so many different things, but, how do, how does an organization start with this? How can they more focus on employee engagement than employee happiness and employee wellbeing? Do they just have to chunk it all up and just get going? Or what’s 

the 

Catrin Lewis: start there? Yeah, I guess I can list, I list up all those things, and it might sound overwhelming, but it’s a really handy tool here.

So six years ago, the Employee Engagement Bridge was created and published by Glen Elliot and Debra Corey to help with exactly that. This is a bridge model. It’s got 10 parts to it, which highlight the areas which leaders need to examine in order to build highly engaged company culture. And it’s a real framework for success.

I’ve always had it by my side and everything I do, and if people ask me what’s your job? I can hold up that bridge model and say this is it. So [00:13:00] from, you’ve got recognition to benefits and values and everything that you need to foster innovative culture there. So rather than having to think, wow, I’ve got these 10 things all to tackle at once, you can start there from thinking, what’s the primary focus for me now?

Talking of wellbeing. So when you look at this image, comp, picture, a bridge, she and wellbeing, workspace and payer benefits, they sit at the bottom of this structure. It’s on either side of the bridge. You’ve got those as the founding principles. You need those before you can move on to layering anything else.

Just then create the bridge between the two. Wellbeing. As I say, that’s a key component there, base of the bridge. And then on top of that, you start to layer all these other things, which will create your full spectrum of what you need to achieve success at work. And I’ve used that to guide conversations with leadership and really break it down into a simple framework for people to follow in hundreds of co conversations over.

Yeah, no, I think if [00:14:00] you are, if you feel, wow, there’s so much to do here. How can I visualize this? Here’s 10 really easy steps to think. How do I build my bridge and what order would they go in? Yeah. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. We love Debra on the podcast on there, 

Catrin Lewis: To add as well. This is something and Debra did this six years ago. HR trends are always changing and yeah, the definition of wellbeing is evolved even since that bridge was created. But it’s wellbeing’s all encompassing, so we can do that. Something that isn’t on the bridge, and I’ve been ansked this a couple of times and I’m gonna say it cause it’s really important.

People have said, there’s been a huge shift in focus to equity, diversity, and inclusion. So why, how come that isn’t on the bridge shouldn’t have its own element there. And I say, no, it, I don’t think it should. Because in every part that’s on there, that’s the lens that you look through. It shouldn’t be, should permeate zone in its own box.

That’s, you need to be looking at everything through that lens when you work on them. So it’s there, [00:15:00] you just have to place it over the top of it all and it it’s the cement that bridges, builds the bridges back that brings it all together. Yeah. 

Elisa Tuijnder: I have thought about, I’ve have had, I’ve had that discussion with people as well before.

I’m like, yeah, but actually d and I should be everywhere and should be. Yeah. Yeah. Like it’s great to have people steering in and leading it and pushing it, we should have that. 

Catrin Lewis: Permeating to every bit. Yeah, exactly. Just I think taking that and using it as a guide to say, Hey, okay, today or this month I’m gonna have a project.

Really listening on how are we at recognition within our business. I’m gonna listen, I’m gonna survey, I’m gonna learn, I’m gonna benchmark us against how other companies in our industry are doing that. And then that will provide you with a really great set of Yeah. Analytical and anecdotal data, and you’ll have that then in your set to build your strategy across every element of the bridge in a really nice monthly project or however it suits your timescales in the company you work for.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. [00:16:00] Yeah, you’re making it sound 

Catrin Lewis: super easy, but I’m guessing No. Easy. Just like that. There’s so much to do 

Elisa Tuijnder: with that, but yeah, it just, let’s do it. Yeah. But yes, it’s true though. It is. It is true. And everybody who’s out there who hasn’t got one of these strategies yet, definitely start looking into it because it is so important.

It is. It is everything at the moment when that’s what we stand for, that’s what you stand for. People. 

People. 

Catrin Lewis: Yeah. I think, I need to say that there’s so many people that can help with it as well. Giving you an outside perspective of your company and looking in. Cause it could be really hard when you are in it to sometimes gauge, Hey how are we doing?

Can be, it’s really easy to be self-critical, all of those things. So then having an external eye on, I used it so many times in my role at RG to connect with external partners on different specialists in these areas. Because I I can do the connection, I can do the strategy, and that’s really my key strength.

I love that work. But hey, [00:17:00] when it came to building some of the talk about wellbeing, for instance, I really leaned into some experts that are out there, like Sanctus MAD for Health in Australia, Ben Davy doing the physical work with us. Ian Pedigree, who’s a fantastic mindset coach for leadership.

They, there’s so many people that can help you with this. So you’re not alone when you start to build on these things. No, 

Elisa Tuijnder: absolutely. We’ve had Sanctus on the podcast as well before, and they’re just fantastic in that respect. And yes, you, like you said, there’s so much information out there.

There’s so many good people out there, so yeah, use them.

Some companies call them hero awards. Others ripas or hugs, we call them kudos. It is a written and public recognition of a colleague for something they have contributed to the team. A kudo is not just given [00:18:00] from the top down. But peer to peer and bottom up across departments and organizations, anyone can recognize someone else’s work.

It’s a way to break down hierarchical limitations and to encourage everyone to offer instant positive feedback. In our web shop, you can find a box with 400 colorful appreciation cards in eight different designs and multiple languages. Why don’t you check it out at Management30.Com/shop.

Hey, let’s get back to your writing because I’m wanna talk about that a little bit. So you have two published books and the last one was called The Culture Vulture, A Tale From the Disengagement Danger Zone. And I should mention for our listeners that this is [00:19:00] not your run of the mill management book.

It’s not what you’re thinking at this point. How would you describe it? How, 

Catrin Lewis: what does it look like? So it looks very different to your normal business book. I, okay. So I love Dr. Seuss and his way of writing, and I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from that method of storytelling and just the way that they’re able to convey really meaningful messages in their short stories.

So translating that into my own style, I suppose this has created a business book for all. It’s relatable, it’s engagement focused, playful for sure. But applicable, so there’s clear learnings and it’s aim is to really leave a smile on the reader’s face and make it so, I’ve read these books to five-year olds all the way to grandparents. And it makes it understandable for all, whereas a [00:20:00] textbook can sometimes be just jarring and not the language that resonates with everyone. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. And they’re very visual, right? 

Catrin Lewis: They’re incredibly visual. Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. I’ve worked as some really great animators and artists to bring the stories to life officially. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. Yeah. You started with a similar book, which is called like The Little Unicorn, an Adventure Through the Disengagement Zone. So yes, they all I’ve seen the covers, I’ve seen the, I’ve seen the books in general and they look so beautiful. So I encourage, all of the listeners to just have a look at them because yeah, it’s like reading a fairy tale about work.

Catrin Lewis: And yeah, it’s really nice being able to, You only go to a conference and then you’re presented with multiple sessions, multiple slide decks. And so to be able to get on stage and present the same content, but through a fairytale with watercolor slides behind me was something that was just a real joy because it would be a nice [00:21:00] surprise for people, the unexpected.

And I really just love seeing the audience fo like re-energized basically by being Hey, I didn’t know we were gonna get an art show here. Yeah, exactly. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. That’s lovely. Yeah. With Management 3.0 we’re also so visual and all of our imagery is very playful and I think it helps with the learning.

It just helps with the learning instead of detracts from it. For 

Catrin Lewis: sure. For sure. Yeah. There’s something in that especially as well, there’s, it’s better for learning, but I’ve also used rhyming. And I added triplets and things like this to help lessons in people’s heads in ways you can use writing very powerfully if you know the tricks of the trait.

Yeah, 

Elisa Tuijnder: I bet. Do you wanna tell us a little bit more about the culture of vulture? What adventure does he get up to 

Catrin Lewis: In this last book? Oh yeah, sure. Okay. So Culture Vulture, I slipped that word, all that saying on its head. I would expect that. Most people listening to this have encountered at least one culture [00:22:00] vulture in their work life.

It’s talking about how much time we spend at work and it should be a place where you learn, grow, and build the career that you really wanted. But what happens when you find yourself in a position where there’s perhaps a toxic character in that workplace that stops, that somebody that’s a negative.

A negative addition to the workforce and, it could be that you’ve had a bad boss before, an NBS employee, a cowardly employee, somebody that is just bringing the team down through negativity and selfishness, like one that’s not in it for the team, they’re just in it for themselves, not bought into the cultural mission they’re just there for the wrong reasons. If you’ve ever followed Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary V as they’re known on LinkedIn. So an inspiration for this story really came from them talking about firing their very best [00:23:00] salesperson because yeah, they could be bringing in all the money, right? But what happened if they’re a bit of a a bully and like even not just Gary, he’d be there.

You’ve got Harvard Business School doing research in this area, so saying, 50,000 employees, those who carry toxic traits, they cause way more damage to the company. Lot of customers employee morale, legitimacy against customers and stakeholders, and it’s just gonna cost business an absolute fortune.

This is trying to encourage people and leaders to recognize how ridiculous it is to be focused on that. Like, all the negative things are happening here. Nobody’s talking about them because you are blinded by the revenue that’s being brought in and that, but that isn’t the end goal because this is costing you so much more than you will realize.

Yeah. It’s about the perils of pursuing profit over people and hoping to help people match. [00:24:00] Face difficult conversations. Use this as a tool to open them up and start to value kindness and emotional intelligence in the same way people have always valued iq, 

Elisa Tuijnder: yeah. Yeah. And it’s so important.

It’s what we try and, say every podcast recording every day in my life. It’s like focusing on people is, yeah, of course it’s great, but it’s also focusing on your bottom line. It’s focusing on your financial wellbeing as a company, because you’re losing so much money. Otherwise, if you keep looking in the short term, really, if you’re keeping these people up, they’re giving you short bursts.

Short wins, yeah. Yeah. I’m nodding 

Catrin Lewis: the whole everything you’re saying 

Elisa Tuijnder: yes. So important. Yet something so weird in our human brains that we’re hardwired for this. It’s, yeah, you have to really keep mentioning it and keep talking about it, because it seems to be, it seems to be our baseline.

Going back to, oh yeah, but let’s go back to these short wins. Hey, what kind of feedback have you received [00:25:00] on this latest book and, have you any tales of people going okay, this, I read this and this is, I’ve given it to all my 

Catrin Lewis: employees, et cetera? Yeah I’ve had some really interesting conversations with, mostly with CEOs that I shared it with.

They’d be like, yes, absolutely. I’ve experienced this before. And then helping people just use it as a tool to, as I say, open up those conversations. One of my favorite workshops was sitting with a company that had brought together their global teams. So I’m talking about, from America, South America, we’ve got all the way from Asia, Africa.

They brought together all their continents of the workforce and sharing this with them and seeing how it resonates globally with all, and they’re like, yeah, I know this person. It’s just such a classic business thing, and I just can’t fathom why. With all the knowledge that we have, you need to listen to this tale and really consider how you’re doing business here and [00:26:00] what impact that’s having on the experience of people in the team.

Yeah. 

Elisa Tuijnder: I love as well, there’s something so universal about a fairytale or a tale with, animals. It 

Catrin Lewis: probably brings that, 

Elisa Tuijnder: you’re talking about the global, bringing a global workforce together. It, yeah. 

Catrin Lewis: Has something interesting in there. I’ll tell you something else. Some feedback that I had, which was with a founder of a really great therapy company that I, I spend time with.

So I was speaking with the lead psychologist and he was like, know what you’ve done here? And he’s this is. Using this fairytale approach instead of a textbook style is like, you’ve really touched on a method of therapy that we use called narrative therapy. So that’s a form of therapy that aims to separate the individual from the problem.

When you use a story like this, your employee could then externalize their issues rather than having to internalize them and talk about a [00:27:00] particular person. Yeah. They can use the culture vulture to then open up and rather than, they’ll use like an imaginary world to correlate their experience rather than having to point fingers, cast blame, cause anxiety, cuz they think they’re gonna get in trouble for naming anyone.

So it, I love, I loved it when releasing these books cuz then I can sit and listen to phone calls that are happening in workplaces around me and they’ll say from the little unicorn, oh yes, I’ve known the cynical squirrel. Or, oh yes, I’ve had, I’ve been that fish. Or, oh yeah, culture vulture tell me about it.

And they can do that then in a very safe space, which means they can talk about it without having to feel. You know that I’m talking about an individual here. I’m just talking about my problem that I’ve had. Yeah. In a very safe manner. And I’ve purposefully put it into paperback, Audible and YouTube as well.

So the different learning styles can be accommodated for people. For everybody. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There’s something so interesting [00:28:00] about that, it’s that satire. I was also. As in like using animals and satire has been used for, I would say probably centuries cuz it seems to be able to get away with it a little bit more easy to either give commentary on the current state of affairs or it disengages it a little bit while allowing us to be more free In 

Catrin Lewis: talking about you can play with it, you can be playful with it, right?

It takes us back to. What better to take us back to a play, play full time than a fairytale. We all grew up 

exactly. 

Elisa Tuijnder: Hey. On the podcast we are super big fans of tangible practices. It’s what, it’s baked into our ethos of Management 3.0. We wanna leave our listeners with something that they can start implementing as soon as possible.

So is there anything that you can think of that you want, would like to share to improve employee engagement or to change the view of engagement in the workplace? That is really 

Catrin Lewis: practical, [00:29:00] tangible. Yeah. I do have one, actually. We started doing this about six, seven years ago. Myself and Doug Butler, who was the CEO of Reward gateway, my time.

This doesn’t cost any money. It doesn’t cost any, anything more than his time really. But it covers so many different elements of that engagement bridge model that I talked about. And that is we launched something called Mission Mondays where he would write a blog to the company every Monday.

They would get to work and there would be a communication from him as a leader, open and honest communication. That piece, he would be able to talk around his wellbeing, their wellbeing. He would be able to shout out different employees in that and cover recognition with zero cost basis like that as a recognition tool for employees and making them feel seen and heard at work was higher than some of the monetary recognition opportunities that we put in place.

It was so meaningful for their [00:30:00] leader to be saying on a Monday. Loved what you did last week. Hey Elisa, you absolutely nailed that podcast last week. I listened to it. It was awesome. And it’s there in front of the company for everyone to read and see. Yeah, and it also makes you more approachable as a leader.

It makes, yeah, it becomes a really nice journaling practice as well, which I think is very healthy for leaders to prevent those burnout and just understand their own journey as well. Yeah, and it doesn’t cost anything other than time and discipline. So if you form that as a habit, Honestly, the results of it are remarkable.

Like it, it’s just such a community builder and I think brings a lot of happiness at work. Yeah, it’s 

Elisa Tuijnder: really the perfect example of authentic leadership, right? It’s and servant leadership and bringing all these things together. So it’s such a, yeah, it’s such a simple thing to do, but such a powerful thing, and I can totally see why it’s amazing.

All right, Cat, that was so interesting, so enlightening. And I, if people [00:31:00] want to go and find your books now, cuz I think we’ve gotten them really curious on what they look like now as well. Yeah. So you’ll be able and they want, or they wanna get in touch with you. Hey 

Catrin Lewis: Where’re, where can they do that?

Sure. So the little unicorn and the culture vulture are both available on Amazon and Audible. You can go and find them there. I’m on LinkedIn. Please come find me. Catherine Lewis. And also exciting. I got a third book coming out I think, yay it in the next month. It’s called The Little Monster. And yeah, I would love to hear from you all about how that resonates with you.

It is actually themed on wellbeing, so it Perfect. That’s fantastic. 

Elisa Tuijnder: All right. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Cat. 

Catrin Lewis: Thank you.

Elisa Tuijnder: You’ve been listening to The [00:32:00] Happiness At Work podcast by Management 3.0 where we are getting serious about happiness. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you enjoy our shows, don’t be shy. Write us a review. Share the happiness with your colleagues, family or friends. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn under Management 3.0.