The Art of Stability: Leadership Strategies for Uncertain Times

Mo Fathelbab: Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, President of International Facilitators Organization. People and Strategy is a podcast from the SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives in the field of human resources. Each week we bring you in-depth conversations with the country's top HR executives and thought leaders. For today's conversation, I'm excited to be joined by Maureen Cawley, chief People Officer at Saatva, a company focused on luxury sleep solutions. Welcome, Maureen.

Maureen Cawley: Thank you so much for having me, Mo. It's great to be here.

Mo Fathelbab: Great to have you with us. Maureen. I wanna start with a little bit of your career journey. Tell us, uh, how you got to where you are today.

Maureen Cawley: Sure. So I joined Saatva about four years ago, March, 2021, and the mandate was to help bring our values to life for the team. So to get to that point was a journey through HR, starting in a target store in Bethel, Connecticut, making my way through corporate positions. And then finally being ready to assume a head of HR role for a growing company like Safa.

Mo Fathelbab: All right. Well, that's a quick journey. Love it. Uh, so in this current day and age, we have a lot of, uh, change happening. We have ai, we have executive orders, we have natural disasters. What has been your approach when navigating through difficult times such as these,

Maureen Cawley: Yeah, it's, it's a great question, Mo, because when you say difficult times such as these, it's really a five year. Question. So if we think back to 2020 and the change that came five years ago, which none of us could have possibly been prepared for, and then all of the after effects that we've been living through, people are experiencing a lot of change fatigue.

And so I think it's incumbent as us, particularly as HR leaders, to try to create a stable environment wherever we can. And so what we find is. Creating stability doesn't mean avoiding change necessarily, but it often means avoiding unnecessary change and helping to direct our team's attention so that they know what they need to pay attention to, what they need to address, and what they can deprioritize in all the noise and clutter and, and headlines and all the distraction that comes out.

Helping the team to stay focused, um, really is a key driver of stability for us.

Mo Fathelbab: And can you share a story about how you navigated a specific challenging situation?

Maureen Cawley: Sure. So I gave some thought to that question, and I remember the job that I had before Sava. I had joined as a head of hr, a small data-driven marketing firm in Manhattan, and I was so excited about this job. They hired me to help them control millennial turnover. So they hired all these bright students right outta college, and they were finding that they were having a very hard time retaining them beyond 12 to 18 to 24 months.

They hired me. They knew I could help. I knew I could help. I was so excited. I joined right around Labor Day, October of that same year. My boss, the head of the organization, called me in and told me he had some great news. We were being acquired by a Fortune 1000 company based outta Minneapolis, and it's gonna be great.

There'll be opportunities for clients, opportunities for the team, opportunities for me, and we need your help with due diligence. So I really, I was excited. I went home, I said to my husband, you know, Liam, great news. This, this company I just joined we're being acquired. I must have sounded so naive because he looked at me and said, Maureen, are you gonna lose your job?

Mo Fathelbab: Uh oh.

Maureen Cawley: And it was a great question that I hadn't considered because of how positively this acquisition had been framed to me. Um, but it gave me a really strong lesson in, you know, framing is one thing and then the reality is something else. So. In this instance, the leadership team did such a nice job of setting the terms of the deal in advance that we were actually able to retain the team.

I stayed there for four and a half years post um, acquisition. Most of the team stayed on as well, and I can tell you that it wasn't easy. And you can only imagine that the amount of change that comes to employees when something like, like an acquisition or. You know, a global pandemic, these kinds of things that seem to be coming out of left field and happening with more and more frequency.

Um, balancing through those challenges is hard, but I really do believe it makes us much more resilient as leaders and actually as organizations as well. I.

Mo Fathelbab: I love that. So, something you talked about is, uh, an expertise in retaining, uh, people, especially millennials. I'd love to learn some of your lessons on, on how you do that.

Maureen Cawley: Well, it starts with listening. I, I do believe it sounds very simple. You have to understand as an HR leader that you can't retain all the high potential talent that you want to. You. You'd love to retain everybody throughout their career. You'd love to see them grow for 20 years or more. That's just not the reality for most people.

Most people need to take their opportunities where they can find them, and so. What I believe one of the keys to retention is understanding employees' career needs, both at sort of a macro level within your organization, but then also at an individual level as you identify your high performers. Because what can happen is if you are very skillful about creating career paths and helping your employees to see where their growth can lie, whether that's inside of the company or outside of the company, you're removing a friction point.

Because if employees see HR as pure, only working for the company, only looking out for the company's best interest, they wanna keep me here. Whether it's good for me or not, you won't. You won't connect, you won't make progress, and you'll actually find yourself in conflict sometimes with high potential employees if you can be seen as a partner and allow the organization and the employees to recognize that you really want what's best for both parties.

So if you're a high performer and you're thriving here and I can keep feeding you new opportunities, you might as well take them and keep growing as high as you can. If you're finding that you are sort of topping out at the organization, we don't have to kind of reframe that and pretend that that's not a reality.

If it is, we can work together on. Developing your pipeline beneath you, helping build the bench, creating new opportunities for all the employees who will have to step in when you do eventually step outside the organization for your next opportunity. So I think that that balance between what's best for the employee, understanding the career path needs, and then understanding really from a succession planning standpoint, what your organization needs is key to retention.

It's that level of truth and transparency about career paths.

Mo Fathelbab: You know, I love that. 'cause I've always thought when hiring someone, this is not about us being impressed by you and then later finding out we have a mismatch.

Maureen Cawley: Right.

Mo Fathelbab: is about us finding out if there's a match from the start, whether this is right for you and for us.

Maureen Cawley: And then understanding and being realistic that a great hire who's been with you for three, four years made a great impact on your organization. It's not a failure necessarily if they leave. Sometimes that's just, they've reached the end of their employee lifecycle with you. So I think having realistic expectations that the goal can't always be retention forever.

Sometimes the goal has to be the best impact for the amount of time that we're working together.

Mo Fathelbab: I love that. I love that. I think that. It's a fresh and interesting perspective 'cause why keep you on if it's no longer serving one of our needs?

Maureen Cawley: Right, exactly.

Mo Fathelbab: Yeah. Lovely. So you are in the sleep business and that does not escape my attention. 'cause I know sleep can be a challenge for, uh, a lot of us, uh, especially as we get older and I've certainly had my own challenges and ups and downs with it.

I think I'm figuring it out. So tell us more about that and what attracted you to that business and, and, and what about it means something to you personally?

Maureen Cawley: Wow, that's a great question. Sleep means a lot to me personally. So I, I'm in my free time. I'm a mother of two young children, and so if you speak to anybody with young children, they'll tell you that sleep is critical If you know that if your family has a good night's sleep without interruptions.

Everybody's in a better mood. Everybody has more patience. Everybody has a better sense of humor with one another, and so that's not true just in my household. I believe that's true in everybody's household. Whether you've got young kids, whether you have pets, whether you have a high pressure job, particularly if you're an athlete, um, wherever it is in your life that you need to perform at your best, you need a good night's sleep to do that.

Mo Fathelbab: Yeah.

Maureen Cawley: And so if you, if you think about athletes in particular, they need sleep, they need training, they need fuel. Those are really the top three things and. If you, if you're a career person and you have a big meeting or you're making a big pitch, you know you need a good night's sleep the night before. You need to eat properly and you need to practice and be trained.

And so to work for a company that can meet one of those core needs for top performing people, um, in any aspect of their lives. It really speaks to me, and one of the core values at our company is we call it it total life success. And I love that because it means that my job is to help our employees feel empowered, rested, energized, whether that's professionally, personally, whether that's their physical health, their mental health.

It all comes together into how we greet the world in front of us. And so at Safa, we believe that if we can offer a restorative night's sleep. We can help you greet the world in a much more positive way.

Mo Fathelbab: So from an HR perspective,

Maureen Cawley: Mm-hmm.

Mo Fathelbab: how are you applying that for all the employees at Safa?

Maureen Cawley: It starts, it really starts Mo with a great product. Because if there's integrity in the product and you really believe that what we are offering lives up to its brand promise, whether you are designing the website, whether you're talking to customers on the phone, whether you're talking to customers in the viewing room, you have something that you can stand behind if, if you've ever experienced an organization where that's not the case and the salespeople are trying to sell widgets and you know the tech team's just trying to get their paycheck, it.

It really is hard to build a strong culture on top of that. So as an HR professional, I'm grateful that the core of the business and the product lends itself to integrity throughout the entire business model.

Mo Fathelbab: What do you think HR should think about as it relates to wellness? When we talk about the sleep component, so a lot of companies and a lot of the podcasts we've had, we have a lot of, uh, CHROs talk about the importance of mental health and physical health and being supportive, not even just for their employee, but the employee's families in some cases. can they bring sleep, uh, into that conversation? Because I haven't heard that before, but I think it would be really interesting 'cause as you said, it drives so much of how well we do when we wake up and, and actually go to work.

Maureen Cawley: If you think about it, Mo, the, the last, when's the last time you heard someone ask, how are you today? How, how are you? And the person says, oh, I'm tired. I'm tired. It's culturally, we've sort of. We've sort of made it very gl glamorous to say, I'm tired, I'm overworked, I'm exhausted. I didn't sleep well. I just got two hours of sleep last night.

That's, that's not actually healthy. And so for us at Saatva, we don't glamorize overworking. So there, there, there, I promise you there are not merit points. If you email me at 11 o'clock at night, I'm not getting that email and saying. Wow. Good for you, Mo. You're really up working hard. I'm looking at and saying, Mo, are you resourced appropriately on your team?

Um, do you have enough time to focus during regular business hours to get your work done, or is it one of those times where you're crunching on a project and you are a late night owl focus person? That's fine, but. To understand culturally what we value. And that's not something that I can just talk about to the team.

That's something that every manager has to understand and respect. Um, if you think about a retail team, for example, consistency in scheduling is very, very important. So if you wanna talk about mental health for a retail team, are you equipping them with good policies so they don't have to get in front of customers and be confronted with conflict because.

Policies, the products lends itself to smooth interaction. Are you keeping the schedules consistent so that people can plan their lives around their work? Um, are you offering medical, dental, vision benefits? Are you inviting your employees to use your product? These are all components I think that really help employees to unlock all the benefits at your organization.

It has to be. At every touch point with the company for employees, just the way you'd expect customers to experience positive interaction in their journey.

Mo Fathelbab: Yeah. So before we get back to, uh, stability at work and how to navigate all that, what are some of your tips, uh, on, on really getting the best sleep you can.

Maureen Cawley: So my tips for getting the best sleep you have to prepare, prepare for sleep like it's an activity. And so what I mean by that is we all know you should turn your phone off before you go to sleep. How many people actually. Do that, right? So at a certain time in the evening, turn, you know, really stop with your phone.

Um, I encourage a, a regular analog alarm clock instead of using your phone so that it's the last thing you see at night or the first thing in the morning. Um, make sure you're, you've got good pajamas, you've got good sheets, obviously you need a great mattress. Make it dark, right? And establishing the routine for yourself, even as an adult.

We all know that children, for example, need routine. As an adult to instill those same routines and ensure that you're really preparing for sleep, actually does unlock a great night's sleep.

Mo Fathelbab: Wonderful. Thank you for those tips. And I think, uh, having a cool

Maureen Cawley: Yes.

Mo Fathelbab: is also one of those things that you said.

Maureen Cawley: you, if you can, if you can, and you know some people, you live in a, in a warm environment or you don't have control over your heat, what can you do? Can you get a fan? You know, can you crack a window? There? There, there are. You know, within your control to bring in some coolness. Absolutely. Yes.

Mo Fathelbab: Thank you. Thank you. Good stuff. So back to creating a culture of stability

Maureen Cawley: Yes.

Mo Fathelbab: turbulent times. What tips do you have to offer to other HR leaders?

Maureen Cawley: I think when we're talking about creating a culture of stability during turbulent times, which is, I would categorize the last five years as quite turbulent

Mo Fathelbab: I.

Maureen Cawley: focus, focus priorities. I think is key for HR leaders. So prioritizing and ensuring that your team knows what the North Star is really allows them to filter out distractions.

And I often think stability doesn't mean avoiding change. It does to me mean avoiding unnecessary change.

Mo Fathelbab: Mm.

Maureen Cawley: So to as leaders, we are responsible for helping our employees focus their attention. And so if you, you know, every new idea is presented as a new company direction. It's exhausting for the team.

They're already dealing with all the external noise that's happening in our world. So when we tell them, look, you don't have to worry about that yet. We don't have to pay attention here, but what I do need you to do. On a daily basis or monthly basis, whether that's ensuring that every customer interaction is meeting our expectations, whether that's meeting deadlines for your new code or getting the most out of your upcoming sprint.

Um, by helping shape priorities for the team, we can really create quite a lot of stability.

Mo Fathelbab: Thank you. So, um, you're also, uh, certified as an executive coach, and, um, you said that that has been very helpful in your role as CHRO. Uh, can you tell us more about that?

Maureen Cawley: Sure. So I took my executive coach certification with a company called a Center Coaching out of Raleigh, North Carolina, and I actually became certified as an executive coach as I was onboarding into my role at Safa. And so at the time you can wonder is that, are you biting off more than you can chew?

You're taking on a new certification, you're taking on a new job. It actually really helped me to go through both of those changes at once because a lot of executive coaching is listening

Mo Fathelbab: Hmm.

Maureen Cawley: it's, it's quiet and it's introspective, and there are concepts in coaching that are. Much more focused on the interaction.

So how, after you leave this room, how do you feel about how we were interacting? What has this interaction done for our relationship? Where's your head space? After having interacted with me, and I think as hr, that's particularly helpful because I don't need to win every interaction that I have. As a matter of fact, it's not helpful if I do.

Most often, I need my relationships to be strong and resilient. And that comes from working with leaders, trusting their instincts and having the flexibility and the confidence to know that we're, we're going to navigate boundaries. And you might have ideas that I think are way out of bounds. But I have to trust you to work through them and come back in and leaders most often do.

So for me, the mindset that comes with executive coaching has been tremendously helpful as a head of hr.

Mo Fathelbab: I'm curious, um, how many times or can you think of an example where somebody has said to you, I didn't like the way that conversation went. I.

Maureen Cawley: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and I think the coaching mindset gives you the opportunity to know when it's happening. When you know you're in an interaction and the wheels are just coming off and you're in conflict, and I think oftentimes knowing we can end this call, we'll come back, right?

Maybe, maybe emotions are high, maybe we need to revisit this. Maybe I'm surprised by your interaction and I, I need to kind of take a little space to anticipate where this conversation's going to go, but allowing that time can be abundant. And we don't have to muscle through if that's not ultimately the best for the company and the relationship.

Um, what's what's been really helpful at Saatva Mo in that, in that way is we've introduced, most of our leaders have read the 15 commitments of conscious leadership. So the very simple concept of above the line and below the line and that common language. So if you and I are having an interaction and.

My behavior is dropping below the line and it's no longer becoming of a leader. You can call me out and say, Hey, Maureen, I think you're below the line on this.

Mo Fathelbab: Hmm.

Maureen Cawley: it gives me the opportunity to, to call back and consider how I'm showing up in the interaction.

Mo Fathelbab: Can you give us a little more detail on the above, the line, below the line model? I, it's beautiful. I'd love to just hear your words to, to help our audience understand it a little bit better.

Maureen Cawley: Sure. So the way that that concept works is. Is the above the line mentality is that my life is happening, things are happening by me,

Mo Fathelbab: Mm-hmm.

Maureen Cawley: I'm a participant in the way that my life is playing out below the line. Thinking really lend is a victim mentality of things are happening to me. And so if you think about your work in terms of partnerships, and if you think about how you can be in a driver's seat in any conversation, because you can always control your own behavior.

It allows you to show up as a leader who is collaborative, you know, who's fun to work with, who's outcomes oriented, versus someone who's concerned about themself, concerned about their own outcomes or blame culture. All of that would be below the line. So for us, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Mo Fathelbab: No, I, I, I love that. But I'm gonna challenge you for a second.

Maureen Cawley: Sure.

Mo Fathelbab: just yesterday, a friend of mine's like, I might lose my job because of what's happening with the executive orders, and I'm just not in a good place. So to me, that sounds below the line. How do you get somebody to go above the line when in fact maybe they're not in control of what's about to happen and they're just terrified by it?

Maureen Cawley: Yeah, I think it's, that's a really great question, and I think we all have friends who are going through that situation right now. And to your point, it's not helpful to look at that person and say, well, buck up. Where's your positive attitude? You need to be above the line. The concept of the above, the line, below the line thinking is that we all spend time above and below where do you live, right?

So of course, when something tragic or objectively difficult is happening in this, in this scenario, very, very, um, objectively to your friend. We can accept the reality of this situation, but we can't live there. So what can we do? What can we do? Right? You might not, you can never control if a company is going to do a reduction in force or eliminate your position.

Um, that's a really a reality for all of us. We can never control that. We can control. Are we updating our resume? Are we keeping our network fresh? How are we thinking about what's happening to us? And using it to tell our career story? How can we propel ourselves forward? Maybe your friend doesn't wait to see, right?

Maybe your friend starts applying to other jobs. Maybe your friend, you know, starts to take action so that whether the outcome they're concerned about happens or not, they're better prepared. Um. It's not, it's not easy, but it's, it's important.

Mo Fathelbab: I love that. Uh, something else you mentioned from the 15 principles of conscious leadership was, could the opposite be true?

Maureen Cawley: Yes.

Mo Fathelbab: us about that.

Maureen Cawley: That's my favorite commitment in the 15 commitments of conscious leadership. 'cause it requires you to expand your thinking. Take your friend as an example. If I, I could be losing my job. Um, this is totally outside of my control. This is a horrible situation. That's a very real and valid way to approach it.

What if the opposite were true? What if this were wonderful? What if this were the best thing that could happen to you? And now this, at this point, your friend is getting very annoyed with you, but, and it's, it doesn't mean that it is, it doesn't mean that what you're saying to them is a fact. And the opposite is true.

It's just inviting the opportunity to explore that possibility. Because oftentimes we become narrow or we, we think we know the truth. Sometimes we do, but I, it is particularly in this environment, being able to explore mentally that there's possibility outside of what you hold to be true, um, can be a very beautiful thing and can really free up space, um, for someone to have a better outcome than if they're stuck within sort of a rigid set of mental boundaries on any topic.

Mo Fathelbab: And I think you had an example related to capitalism about that, about that, uh, principle.

Maureen Cawley: Yes. When I was learning about that principle, I was sort of down on capitalism at the moment. I was feeling, you know, a little depressed about corporate life. This was several years ago, and some, the woman I was coaching with, she looked at me and she said, Maureen, what if the opposite were true? And I said, what if corporate were wonderful?

And she said yes. What if corporate were wonderful? What would that look like? And you have to pause and set aside, you know, your set of beliefs that that's not true. And imagine, okay, well what if corporate did good for people? What if corporate did good things for the environment? And then you start to realize.

Corporate roles and capitalism provides career opportunities. It provides opportunities for entrepreneurship. And all of a sudden that sort of deeply held limiting belief, whether you're still anchored to it or not, you're, there's room and space. And I find, I find that that particular commitment is very helpful to me because.

It's not helpful to anybody. If I'm limited in my thinking. It's very helpful if I'm open to possibilities, even if I come back to my original perspective. That openness makes me a much better leader.

Mo Fathelbab: I, I love that. Um, so the other thing that, uh, that I think we touched on a little bit in our prep call is just this notion of being, um, to total life success. Tell us what you mean by that. I.

Maureen Cawley: So total life success means that you're thriving in your life professionally, your personal relationships with your family, with your friends socially. You've got your physical health, you have your mental health. We really believe at SVA that. People should have success in all of these components of their lives.

And so we love to hear that our employees have lives outside of work. Whether you are into dance, whether you're into theater, whether you're into sports, you know, whether you have a really strong social network and encouraging employees, um, and leaders among us. To really embrace what it means to, to them to be successful comes back to our company tenfold in happy, productive employees.

Mo Fathelbab: I love that. What a wonderful conversation. One last question for you.

Maureen Cawley: Sure.

Mo Fathelbab: One piece of advice that has shaped your work or life the most?

Maureen Cawley: I think the one piece of advice that shaped my work and my life is to control what you can control, and you can't control everything, so you have to relinquish what you can't control and accept the accept reality and work towards the most positive possible outcome that you can.

Mo Fathelbab: I love that, and that's where we'll end it for this episode of People and Strategy. A huge thanks to Maureen for this valuable conversation. You can follow the People and Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, podcast reviews have a real impact on podcast visibility. So if you enjoy today's episode, leave a review to help others find the show. Finally, you could find all our episodes at our website, SHRM dot org slash podcast. Thank you for listening and have a great day.