Most organizations say they want people to perform at their best. Yet many of the systems we ask people to operate inside were designed around assumptions about how a “typical” person should think, communicate, learn, work, and contribute.

The problem is that real people are not typical.

Some process information quickly through conversation. Others need time to reflect. Some perform best early in the morning. Others do their best thinking later in the day. Some thrive in highly social environments. Others become overwhelmed by them. Neurodivergent employees may experience the workplace in ways that traditional structures were never designed to accommodate.

When someone struggles inside those systems, the default assumption is often that the person needs to adapt.

But what if the person is not the problem? What if the system is incomplete?

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we sat down with Graham Skidmore, Co-Founder of Harmony Health Institute, to explore what happens when organizations begin designing systems around real human variation instead of forcing everyone through the same model. Graham’s work is rooted in lived experience and in the belief that support should honor individuality across physical, emotional, spiritual, and practical dimensions of life. Systems That Fit Real People wi…

The conversation raised an important question for every leader: how much human potential are we losing because people are spending too much energy trying to fit the system instead of contributing their best work?

One-Size-Fits-All Models Leave Too Much Potential Behind

Traditional systems are often built around standardization.

That makes sense operationally. Organizations need structure, repeatable processes, measurable expectations, and consistency. But standardization becomes a problem when leaders confuse a common framework with a universal human experience.

Graham’s perspective is that many support systems focus too narrowly on what can be measured or categorized while missing the complexity of the individual living inside them. In his work, he advocates for a more integrated approach that considers what a person is actually trying to achieve in their life and what may be getting in the way. Systems That Fit Real People wi…

That same principle applies to work.

Instead of starting with, “How do we get this employee to operate more like everyone else?” leaders can ask, “What does this person need to perform at their best?”

Those questions produce very different systems.

The first encourages conformity.

The second encourages capability.

Accommodations Should Not Be Treated as Evidence of Deficiency

One of the most interesting points Graham made was about the language of accommodations.

In many workplaces, accommodations are associated with disability, limitation, or someone needing special treatment. But when executives receive individualized support, we rarely describe it that way.

Senior leaders have assistants. They have specialized technology. They delegate work outside their strengths. They may have flexible schedules, executive coaching, dedicated support teams, and significant autonomy over how they structure their time.

Those are accommodations too.

We simply call them resources.

That raises an important leadership question: why do we normalize individualized support at the top of the organization while treating it as exceptional elsewhere?

Every person has conditions that improve their ability to contribute. The goal should not be to make everyone work identically. It should be to understand what enables people to spend more of their energy doing the work that creates value.

Technology has made this increasingly possible. Different workflows, communication styles, learning formats, schedules, and work environments can often be supported far more easily than they could have been even a decade ago.

The barrier is increasingly less about capability and more about mindset.

Masking Comes With a Cost

Many people learn to adapt themselves to the workplace rather than expecting the workplace to adapt at all.

They learn how they are supposed to speak, behave, socialize, communicate, and organize their work. They observe which behaviors are rewarded and which attract criticism. Then they build an adapted version of themselves that fits the environment.

For some people, especially those who are neurodivergent, that process can require enormous cognitive and emotional energy.

Graham described how people can become focused on survival rather than contribution. When so much energy is being spent monitoring how to act, interpreting unwritten rules, managing sensory input, or worrying about whether an idea will be received well, there is less mental capacity available for creativity, problem solving, and innovation. Systems That Fit Real People wi…

That should concern leaders.

An employee may look functional while simultaneously using an extraordinary amount of energy simply to appear functional.

The organization sees the output.

It does not see the cost of producing it.

When people feel safer being themselves, some of that energy becomes available again.

Difference Is Information

Companies are extraordinarily sophisticated about using data externally.

They analyze customers, market segments, buying behavior, conversion rates, preferences, demographics, and thousands of other signals. Differences in customer behavior are treated as valuable information.

Internally, differences are not always treated with the same curiosity.

An employee prefers written communication instead of spontaneous meetings, and it is interpreted as rigidity. Another needs more processing time and is seen as slow. Someone works better later in the day and is labeled undisciplined. Another approaches a problem differently and is viewed as difficult.

What if leaders treated those differences as data?

The question would change from “Why can’t this person work the way everyone else does?” to “What information is this giving us about how this person produces their best work?”

That does not mean every preference can or should be accommodated.

Businesses still have customers, deadlines, collaboration requirements, and operational realities.

But curiosity should come before judgment.

Difference may be revealing an opportunity to improve the system for more than one person.

Purpose Gives People Room to Find Their Own Path

One way to create more flexibility without losing accountability is to become clearer about purpose and outcomes.

When organizations rely heavily on command-and-control structures, they often prescribe not only what needs to be accomplished but exactly how, when, and where it must be done.

That can create unnecessary constraints.

If the purpose and expected outcome are clear, there may be more flexibility in the path people use to get there.

This is particularly powerful in knowledge work.

One person may need data before making a decision. Another may think through conversation. Another might need time alone to develop an idea before bringing it to the team.

If everyone is working toward the same purpose and accountable for the same outcome, those differences can become strengths rather than problems.

This is one reason purpose-driven organizations can create more room for individuality. The North Star becomes the impact the organization is trying to create, not whether everyone takes identical steps to reach it.

Inclusion Has to Extend Beyond Identity

When organizations discuss inclusion, the conversation often centers appropriately on demographic representation and whether people from different backgrounds feel welcomed.

But inclusion also has an operational dimension.

Do different thinking styles belong?

Do different communication styles belong?

Can someone process information differently without being treated as difficult?

Can a person ask for what helps them work effectively without being viewed as demanding?

Can leaders distinguish between a legitimate need and an unwillingness to contribute without starting from suspicion?

These questions matter because inclusion is not only about who is allowed into the room.

It is also about how much of themselves people are allowed to bring once they arrive.

A workplace can be diverse on paper while still requiring everyone inside it to behave according to a narrow definition of professionalism.

Real inclusion expands the range of ways people can contribute successfully.

Support Should Be Designed Around Thriving, Not Merely Surviving

One of the strongest themes in Graham’s perspective is the difference between helping people cope and helping them thrive.

That distinction applies directly to organizational design.

Businesses sometimes ask, “What is the minimum adjustment required for this employee to get through the work?”

A better question may be, “What would allow this person to perform at their potential?”

Those are not the same standard.

Graham believes the workplace should become better at identifying what individuals need and testing whether providing that support improves performance. If someone says a different schedule, environment, communication process, or tool would help them work better, the request can be treated as a hypothesis rather than immediately as a problem. Systems That Fit Real People wi…

Try it.

Measure what happens.

If performance improves, the organization has learned something valuable.

If it does not, there is now better information for coaching and deciding what comes next.

That is a far more evidence-based approach than assuming everyone should succeed under identical conditions.

How You Treat Employees Eventually Reaches Customers

There is also a direct connection between internal systems and customer experience.

Organizations frequently expect employees to demonstrate empathy, patience, creativity, and personal attention with customers while giving employees very little of those things internally.

That contradiction eventually shows up.

If people spend their workday navigating rigid systems, feeling unheard, or being treated primarily as units of productivity, it is difficult to expect them to suddenly become deeply human and empathetic when they interact with customers.

The internal experience influences the external experience.

Graham connected this idea to customer service. Businesses increasingly use automation and AI to reduce costs, but the moments when something goes wrong can actually be some of the most important relationship-building opportunities a company has.

A customer who experiences a problem and then feels genuinely cared for may become a stronger advocate than a customer who never encountered a problem at all.

Efficiency matters.

But efficiency should not eliminate humanity from the very moments where humanity matters most.

Whole-Person Thinking Belongs in the Future of Work

Harmony Health Institute’s broader model looks at well-being through multiple dimensions rather than treating physical, emotional, and personal experiences as entirely separate.

Whether or not every organization approaches wellness in the same way, the underlying principle has relevance for leadership: people arrive at work as whole human beings.

Their physical condition affects concentration. Emotional stress affects decision-making. Sleep affects energy. A sense of purpose affects engagement. The environment affects nervous-system regulation. Personal circumstances influence capacity.

These factors do not disappear because someone logged into a business application.

For decades, many workplaces operated under the assumption that the professional self should be separated from the personal self.

That separation was always partly artificial.

The future of work will likely require leaders to become much better at understanding human capacity rather than simply measuring available hours.

Asking for Support Should Sound Like a Business Case

One audience question focused on how employees can advocate for what they need without feeling as though they are asking for special treatment.

Graham offered a useful approach: connect the request to performance.

Instead of framing the conversation only around personal preference, explain what the current obstacle is, what change would help, and how that change could improve the outcome.

For example: this is what I am responsible for producing. This is what is currently getting in the way. If I had this change or resource, I believe I could improve my performance in this specific way.

That gives the leader something concrete to evaluate.

It also allows the organization to test the support rather than debating it philosophically.

Employees cannot control how every leader will respond. But articulating the request in terms of capability and contribution creates a stronger conversation.

It can also reveal something important about the organization.

A company that refuses reasonable conversations about how people work best is communicating something about its culture too.

Neurodiversity Requires More Than Surface-Level Adjustments

When asked for one practical way to make work more inclusive for neurodivergent employees, Graham cautioned against reducing neurodiversity to simplistic advice.

Lowering lights or reducing noise may be helpful for some people, but those interventions do not capture the full range of individual experience.

The deeper question is why the adjustment helps that particular person.

What is happening cognitively, emotionally, or physically?

What kind of environment or workflow enables them to think more clearly?

How can the organization create a more systemic solution rather than only reducing one immediate source of discomfort?

That requires conversation.

Two people with the same diagnosis may need very different things.

Inclusion works best when leaders stop assuming they already know what someone needs and become curious enough to ask.

Trust Is a Prerequisite for Flexible Work

Many debates about workplace flexibility eventually come down to trust.

Can employees work remotely without being watched?

Can people manage different schedules?

Can someone be given autonomy over how they complete the work?

Graham raised a straightforward challenge: if leaders fundamentally do not trust employees to govern themselves or explain what they need to perform, why were those people hired in the first place?

Flexibility does not eliminate accountability.

It changes what is being measured.

Instead of measuring visibility, leaders can measure contribution.

Instead of measuring whether someone is sitting at a desk at 8:00 a.m., measure whether customers are served, commitments are met, collaboration works, and outcomes are achieved.

That shift can be difficult for organizations built around compliance.

But compliance and performance are not the same thing.

The Future of Work Has to Account for Human Capacity

Organizations are investing heavily in technology, AI, productivity tools, and automation.

Those investments matter.

But future-ready work models cannot focus only on technology.

They also have to understand human energy.

People have different sleep patterns, attention patterns, nervous systems, processing speeds, sensory needs, communication styles, and ways of generating ideas.

The industrial-era assumption that everyone should perform the same work during the same hours in the same environment made sense for certain kinds of production.

Knowledge work is different.

The question should increasingly become: what conditions help this person consistently create the outcome we need?

When the answer varies from person to person, that is not necessarily evidence that the system is failing.

It may be evidence that the system is finally becoming human.

Give Yourself Grace While You Learn How You Work

Toward the end of our conversation, we asked Graham what advice he would give a young neurodivergent person preparing to enter the workforce.

His answer centered on grace.

Early career experiences do not have to be viewed as permanent judgments about whether someone is good at work or fits into professional life. They can be treated as information.

One job may teach you that you need more autonomy. Another may reveal how important purpose is. Another may show that a particular environment drains you. You may discover that a schedule everyone else loves does not work for you at all.

That is learning.

Graham encouraged young people to use the period before major financial obligations accumulate to explore what works, what does not, and what kind of environment allows them to become their best. Systems That Fit Real People wi…

That advice applies far beyond neurodivergence.

Understanding how you work is part of learning who you are.

Key Takeaways

• One-size-fits-all systems can unintentionally suppress human potential when they assume everyone thinks, learns, communicates, and performs in the same way.
• Individualized support should not automatically be framed as deficiency. Organizations already normalize significant individualized support for executives.
• Masking differences can consume cognitive and emotional energy that employees could otherwise apply to creativity, problem solving, and contribution.
• Leaders can treat differences as information rather than evidence that someone has failed to adapt.
• Clear purpose and outcomes can create more flexibility around how individuals accomplish the work.
• Inclusion should extend beyond representation to include different thinking styles, communication styles, energy patterns, and ways of contributing.
• Support systems should aim to help people thrive rather than merely helping them cope with environments that do not fit.
• The way organizations treat employees eventually influences how those employees treat customers.
• Whole-person leadership recognizes that physical, emotional, environmental, and personal factors all influence performance.
• Employees advocating for support can strengthen their case by connecting the request to capability, contribution, and measurable outcomes.
• Neurodivergent inclusion should be individualized rather than reduced to a checklist of generic accommodations.
• Flexible work depends on trust and should increasingly be measured through contribution rather than visibility.
• Early-career experimentation can be valuable information about what environments, structures, and types of work allow someone to perform at their best.

Final Thoughts

Graham Skidmore’s perspective challenges a deeply embedded assumption in business: that the individual’s job is to adapt to the system.

Sometimes it is.

Every organization requires shared standards, expectations, responsibilities, and accountability.

But adaptation should work in both directions.

When talented people repeatedly struggle inside a system, leaders should at least be curious about whether the system itself is contributing to the problem. When someone asks for a different way to work, the first response does not have to be suspicion. It can be experimentation.

What happens if we try it?

Does the person perform better?

Does the team become stronger?

Does the customer benefit?

Those are business questions, not acts of charity.

The future of work will not be built by eliminating standards. It will be built by becoming more intelligent about which standards actually create value and which simply reflect inherited assumptions about how work is supposed to look.

Human beings are not interchangeable units.

They bring different nervous systems, histories, strengths, limitations, motivations, perspectives, and ways of solving problems.

The organizations that learn how to harness those differences rather than suppress them may discover that inclusion is not merely something they do for people.

It is a competitive advantage they build with them.

Check out our full conversation with Graham Skidmore of Harmony Health Institute on The Bliss Business Podcast.

Originally Featured on The Bliss Business Podcast Blog

Every leader wants a team that can execute. They want people who take ownership, collaborate well, hit goals, solve problems, and keep moving when conditions get difficult.

But when teams underperform, leaders often focus immediately on effort, accountability, talent, or motivation. They assume people are not trying hard enough, are not committed enough, or simply need clearer consequences.

Sometimes the real issue is something else entirely.

People may want to perform but keep running into obstacles they cannot remove. They may be accountable for outcomes without having the authority, tools, information, cooperation, or support required to produce them. Over time, that creates frustration, disengagement, and eventually resignation.

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we sat down with Michelle Martin, a leadership and team performance consultant, coach, and author, to explore the human side of execution. Michelle brings more than 20 years of experience navigating complex operating environments, beginning on the back of a garbage truck and eventually becoming a national director overseeing fleet operations across Canada for a Fortune 250 company. Today, she helps leaders and teams improve collaboration, navigate change, and uncover what is really standing between them and stronger results. The Human Side of Execution wit…

Her perspective offers a powerful reminder: sometimes the fastest way to improve performance is not to push people harder. It is to remove the resistance making good performance harder than it needs to be.

Underperformance Is Often a Symptom, Not the Problem

Michelle starts from a very different assumption than many leaders.

She believes most people want to do a good job.

They want to contribute. They want to feel useful. They want to succeed at the work in front of them. If that is true, then persistent underperformance should prompt a different question.

What is getting in the way?

Maybe priorities between departments conflict. Maybe a process is broken. Maybe a manager has given someone responsibility without authority. Maybe employees have raised the same operational problem repeatedly and eventually stopped believing anyone will address it.

Over time, those unresolved frustrations create what Michelle describes as daily heartburn. People face the same obstacle again and again until coping with the obstacle becomes part of the job.

That is when disengagement starts to make sense.

If people repeatedly experience a problem they cannot solve and leadership does not remove it, eventually they stop trying to change it. What looks like apathy may have begun as frustration.

Execution improves when leaders stop treating symptoms as character flaws and start investigating the conditions surrounding the work.

Accountability Without Empowerment Creates Resentment

Accountability is essential, but accountability by itself is not leadership.

If an employee is responsible for getting from one place to another, leadership also has to make sure they have access to the keys.

Too many organizations demand accountability while withholding the authority, resources, or information people need to succeed. When performance falls short, the conversation becomes focused entirely on the employee.

Michelle’s experience working her way from the frontline into senior leadership gave her a different perspective. She saw firsthand how employees reacted when leaders kept telling them what needed to improve while failing to examine their own role in creating the conditions employees were navigating.

The more important leadership question becomes: what am I doing, or failing to do, that affects this person’s ability to perform?

That does not remove employee accountability.

It adds leadership accountability.

When those two forms of accountability exist together, performance conversations become more productive because the organization is no longer pretending results belong entirely to the person at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Strong Leadership Often Means Flattening the Hierarchy

Michelle described effective leadership as a shift from directing people to working alongside them.

There are moments when hierarchy is necessary. Someone has to make the decision. Someone has to own the outcome.

But problem solving often improves when leaders temporarily flatten the hierarchy and approach the challenge as a team.

Instead of saying, “Here is what you need to do,” the conversation becomes, “Here is where we need to get. What is stopping us?”

That question creates room for information leadership may not possess.

Perhaps employees need a new piece of equipment. Perhaps that equipment will take nine months to acquire. That does not mean everyone waits nine months before improving anything. The leader can acknowledge the ideal solution while still asking what is possible now.

That balance matters.

Listening does not mean agreeing that every constraint is permanent. It means understanding the constraint before asking people to work around it.

A strong leader can say, “I hear that this would make the job easier. We cannot solve that immediately, so what can we change today?”

That feels very different from pretending the problem does not exist.

Team Problems Often Reveal Themselves Before Performance Drops

Michelle pays close attention to team dynamics because relational problems frequently appear before the numbers show anything unusual.

One signal is conflicting stories.

A leader describes the team one way, while employees describe a very different reality. Different perspectives are normal, but when the gap becomes extreme, something deserves investigation.

Another signal appears in meetings.

People can remain professional and polite while relationships are fundamentally broken. If departments only communicate through the leader instead of directly with one another, that often reveals a silo. If one person raises an issue that another department should already know about, the real problem may be the missing relationship between them.

There is also the absence of natural interaction.

When people respect and trust one another, communication tends to move both ways. When that pathway disappears, teams can still look functional on the surface while becoming increasingly fragmented underneath.

This is why execution is never only about process.

Relationships are part of the operating system.

Leaders Need a Personal North Star

As leaders move higher in organizations, it becomes easier to lose connection with what leadership felt like from the other side.

Politics increase. Responsibilities expand. Information becomes filtered. The employee experience can start to feel farther away.

Michelle recommends creating what she calls a leadership legacy.

The idea begins with three questions: What kind of leader do I want to be? How do I want my team and peers to remember me? How will the business be better because I led here?

Those answers become a North Star.

They give leaders something to return to when organizational pressure begins pulling them away from the person they intended to become.

The second discipline is remembering what it felt like to occupy earlier roles.

What did you need from your manager when you were on the front line? What frustrated you? What made you feel capable? What made you feel marginalized?

Experience becomes valuable when leaders use it to preserve empathy rather than distance themselves from where they started.

Leadership maturity means being able to hold both realities at once: the pressure from above and the human reality below.

Goals Work Better When People Find Their Own Why

Michelle is particularly passionate about goal setting because goals are often implemented badly.

Organizations frequently start with the target.

Reduce spending. Improve retention. Increase productivity. Hit the number.

Then leadership explains why the goal matters to the company and assumes employees should now feel motivated.

Michelle sees a problem with that approach.

Meaning is personal.

Imagine a fleet leader being asked to reduce vendor spending. The corporate reason might be financial efficiency. That is legitimate, but it may not be what creates emotional commitment for the person executing the work.

Perhaps reducing vendor reliance would allow internal technicians to perform more meaningful work. Maybe that leader was developed by mentors earlier in their career and wants to create the same growth opportunities for their own employees.

Now the corporate goal and the personal motivation intersect.

The company wants lower vendor spending. The leader wants to develop people.

That shared outcome creates a much stronger reason to act.

The next step is building the bridge between the current state and the desired state. What barriers have to be removed? What skills need to improve? What systems need to change?

At that point, a goal stops being a number handed down from leadership and becomes a shared project.

Strengths Matter Most When They Are Connected to Real Work

Teams frequently complete assessments and talk about strengths, but the insight disappears once everyone returns to their normal workload.

Michelle prefers to connect strengths directly to work already happening.

If a team has a real problem to solve, ask who naturally enjoys which part of that problem. One person may love analysis. Someone else may enjoy planning. Another person may be energized by conversations or conflict resolution.

This creates a better division of contribution.

It also prevents one of the most common mistakes in team design: repeatedly giving someone work simply because they are good at it.

Competence and passion are not always the same thing.

Someone can be highly skilled at something they hate doing.

Leaders need to understand not only what people can do, but also where their energy increases.

When teams know one another at that level, collaboration becomes less transactional. People begin seeking out the colleague whose strengths and interests naturally fit the challenge instead of routing everything through the hierarchy.

Difficult Conversations Improve When Leaders Put Down Their Story

Hard conversations often become unnecessarily personal because leaders enter them carrying an explanation they have already decided is true.

An employee misses a deadline several times, and the leader begins building a story.

They do not care. They are angry about a previous decision. They are intentionally being difficult. They do not respect me.

Once that story exists, human beings naturally start finding evidence to support it.

Michelle recommends something different.

Put the story on the shelf.

Start with the objective truth.

The report is late. It has happened multiple times. The employee is capable of doing the work. Something is preventing the expected behavior.

Now investigate.

Instead of beginning with accusation, ask, “I know you are capable of doing this, but it is still not happening. What is getting in the way?”

The answer may reveal something entirely different. Perhaps the employee keeps helping another team member. Maybe they are confused about part of the report. Maybe priorities are colliding.

Understanding the obstacle does not mean lowering the standard.

It means solving the actual problem.

Emotional Intelligence Becomes Powerful Through Relationship Management

Emotional intelligence is often discussed as self-awareness and self-management.

Those skills matter, but Michelle believes the relationship-management side can have an even greater impact on execution.

A leader who starts from the belief that employees want to contribute enters difficult conversations differently.

Instead of asking, “Why are you failing?” the leader asks, “If I believe you want to succeed, what is stopping that from happening?”

That creates curiosity instead of judgment.

Michelle also uses a phrase that captures the balance well: “We cannot stay here.”

A leader can communicate that the current situation is unacceptable without shaming the person involved. The message becomes: I want to understand how we got here, I believe we can move forward, and I am willing to help, but staying here is not an option.

That combination of empathy and standards builds trust.

Once trust exists, leaders can have far more difficult conversations without destroying the relationship.

Assessments Should Open Conversations, Not Put People in Boxes

Michelle uses tools that explore psychological safety, emotional intelligence, behavioral preferences, and work styles, but she is careful about how assessments are used.

The value is not the label.

The value is the conversation.

Two people can look at the same problem and worry about completely different things. One may be focused on speed. Another may be concerned about precision. One may enjoy ambiguity. Another may want more information before making a decision.

Without a framework for discussing those differences, people can easily misinterpret one another.

The cautious person looks resistant. The fast-moving person looks reckless.

Assessments can reveal that both are contributing something valuable.

Used well, they create curiosity about how other people think.

Used poorly, they become another way to stereotype people.

The goal should always be greater appreciation, not smaller boxes.

Resistance to Change Often Protects Something People Fear Losing

Change management frequently focuses on where people are going.

Michelle also pays attention to what they believe they are leaving behind.

Resistance can appear irrational until leaders understand the loss underneath it.

Someone may fear losing status, expertise, control, identity, stability, relationships, or even the competence they currently feel in their role.

Those fears are real even when the change itself is necessary.

Michelle likes to make the fear explicit.

Name it.

What is the worst thing that could happen? How likely is it? What happens if nothing changes? What would taking one safe step look like?

Once fear becomes specific, it often becomes more manageable.

The goal is not to convince people that nothing could go wrong.

It is to make uncertainty small enough that they can move through it.

Courage often starts with a very small step.

Love in Leadership Means Turning Back to Help the Next Person

When we asked Michelle what role love should play in business, she connected it directly to service.

Her career began on the back of a garbage truck. Someone helped her become a driver. Someone else helped her become a supervisor. Over time, those opportunities eventually led to senior leadership.

She remembers that.

For Michelle, love in leadership means reaching a point in your own journey and then turning around to help someone behind you move forward.

That might mean mentoring someone, developing their confidence, creating an opportunity, removing an obstacle, or simply being the person who believes they are capable of more.

Few experiences change someone’s trajectory more than having another person genuinely believe in their potential.

Leadership becomes meaningful when advancement stops being only about how far you can climb and starts including how many people you help climb with you.

Key Takeaways

• Underperformance is often a symptom of obstacles, unclear priorities, or broken systems rather than a lack of effort or commitment.
• Accountability works best when employees are also given the authority, tools, information, and support required to succeed.
• Strong leaders examine their own role in team performance rather than placing responsibility entirely on employees.
• Team dynamics often reveal problems through silos, conflicting stories, weak relationships, and indirect communication before performance metrics decline.
• A personal leadership legacy can help leaders stay grounded as organizational responsibility and politics increase.
• Goals become more powerful when employees connect the organization’s objective to a personally meaningful reason for achieving it.
• Strengths should be connected to real work, and leaders should distinguish between what someone is skilled at and what actually energizes them.
• Difficult conversations become more productive when leaders separate objective facts from the story they have created about another person’s motives.
• Emotional intelligence improves execution when leaders use curiosity, relationship management, and empathy without lowering standards.
• Assessments are most useful when they open conversations about differences rather than placing people into fixed categories.
• Resistance to change often protects something people believe they may lose, so leaders should explore the fear underneath the resistance.
• Love in leadership means using your own progress to help create opportunity, development, and belief for someone else.

Final Thoughts

Michelle Martin’s perspective reframes execution as something much more human than simply pushing people toward targets.

Performance happens inside relationships, systems, emotions, constraints, motivations, and expectations. When those elements work together, people often need far less pushing than leaders assume.

The job of leadership is not only to demand results.

It is to create the conditions where good people can produce them.

That means removing obstacles, building trust, connecting work to meaning, helping people use their strengths, listening before assuming, and remaining accountable for the environment leadership creates.

Sometimes that requires setting a harder standard.

Sometimes it requires giving someone more authority.

Sometimes it means admitting that the person who has been blamed for the problem has been working inside a system that made success unnecessarily difficult.

And sometimes leadership is as simple as remembering the person who once helped you and deciding to become that person for someone else.

Execution becomes stronger when people feel capable, trusted, supported, and connected to what they are trying to accomplish.

That is the human side of performance.

Check out our full conversation with Michelle Martin on The Bliss Business Podcast.

Originally Featured on The Bliss Business Podcast Blog

Inclusion is easy to talk about at a high level. It is much harder to build into the everyday language, systems, hiring decisions, customer experiences, and operating choices of a business.

That is where inclusion becomes real.

Beauty and personal care businesses make this especially visible because the work touches confidence, vulnerability, identity, and self-expression. Customers are not simply purchasing a service. They are entering a space where they may already feel exposed, self-conscious, uncertain, or deeply aware of how they are being perceived.

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we sat down with Kyla Dufresne, Founder and CEO of Foxy Box Laser and Wax Bar, to explore how inclusion, sustainability, community, humor, and leadership can work together inside a growing franchise brand. Kyla built Foxy Box from humble beginnings into a bold hair-removal company centered on the belief that feeling confident and cared for should be accessible to everyone. The company has removed gendered language from its service menu, is Green Circle certified, supports local communities through initiatives such as Foxy Fest, and is intentionally building these commitments into its franchise model. Foxy_ Inclusive_ and Sustainabl…

What emerged from our conversation is an important leadership principle: belonging is not created by saying everyone is welcome. It is created by examining all the places where someone might experience the opposite and changing them.

Inclusion Often Begins With Language

One of the most significant changes Foxy Box made began with a customer who simply did not know which service to book.

At the time, like many businesses in the beauty industry, Foxy Box divided parts of its menu into male and female services. That structure had not been created with the intention of excluding anyone. It reflected what Kyla had seen throughout the industry when she launched the business.

But a customer pointed out the problem.

They identified one way but had anatomy that made the traditional service categories confusing. Suddenly, something that had always seemed normal became unnecessarily complicated.

That moment prompted Kyla to question the entire structure.

Why did a leg wax need to be classified by gender? Why did so many beauty services rely on male and female categories when the actual service could simply be described by what was being done?

Foxy Box eventually removed gendered language from the menu. For Brazilian services, where the technique, timing, and anatomy genuinely affect the service, the company describes the appointment based on anatomy rather than gender. Foxy_ Inclusive_ and Sustainabl…

This is a strong example of what empathetic design looks like.

The goal was not to make a political statement. It was to remove unnecessary friction from the customer experience.

Sometimes inclusion begins by asking whether a distinction serves a real operational purpose or whether everyone has simply become accustomed to it.

Businesses Need to Audit the Experience, Not Just the Message

Removing gendered language was only one part of the process.

A company can write inclusive language on its website and still create an uncomfortable customer experience in person. That is why Kyla emphasized that the real test of belonging happens inside the store.

How are people greeted? How does the staff speak to them? Does the person providing the service create a sense of safety? Are employees making assumptions based on appearance, identity, or personal expression?

Those interactions matter far more than a statement on a website.

This is why leaders should think about inclusion as an audit across the entire business. The language needs to align with the training. The training needs to align with hiring. Hiring needs to align with the behavior customers actually experience.

If those things contradict one another, customers will believe the experience rather than the promise.

Bold Brands Still Need Emotional Intelligence

Foxy Box has intentionally built a playful, cheeky, memorable personality.

That energy is part of what differentiates the brand.

But boldness also creates responsibility.

Kyla talked about the importance of understanding the difference between being memorable and being offensive. Humor works when it creates connection. It becomes harmful when the joke depends on making someone feel ashamed, inadequate, or unwelcome.

That line can be particularly important in beauty, fitness, wellness, and personal care because those industries already operate close to people’s insecurities.

A campaign that accidentally communicates “there is something wrong with your body” may generate attention, but it can undermine the very sense of confidence the business is trying to create.

Kyla shared an example of a franchise location using a humorous sandwich-board message that crossed the line from playful into potentially body-shaming. The incident ultimately prompted the company to create an approved library of signage so franchisees could preserve the brand’s bold personality without unintentionally damaging the broader experience. Foxy_ Inclusive_ and Sustainabl…

That is a powerful example of a growing business turning a mistake into a system.

Empathy Can Be Hired For

Culture becomes much easier to protect when leaders know what qualities they are actually looking for.

Kyla and her team went through an extensive branding process that helped them define the traits that consistently showed up in their strongest employees, whom Foxy Box calls magicians.

They identified three qualities: a positive attitude, empathy, and self-responsibility.

Those qualities became practical hiring criteria.

Empathy matters because hair removal is a vulnerable service. Customers are often physically exposed, and the employee needs enough emotional intelligence to create trust, reduce anxiety, and respond appropriately to different personalities.

Self-responsibility matters because the business runs on appointments. Employees need to show up, accept feedback, and take ownership of their work.

A positive attitude matters because Foxy Box believes energy is contagious.

Together, those traits form a useful filter. When a team member is struggling, leaders can return to the original criteria and ask whether the person genuinely has the qualities the role requires.

That gives culture more clarity.

Instead of saying someone “just doesn’t fit,” leadership has a shared language for understanding why.

Customer Comfort Comes From Human Connection

One audience question asked what estheticians can do to help clients feel more comfortable in their own skin.

Kyla’s answer came back to connection.

Introduce yourself. Ask the customer how they are doing. Give them privacy. Notice their discomfort. Use humor appropriately. Make the experience feel personal instead of mechanical.

Those things may sound obvious, but they are often the first things lost when schedules become full and businesses become busy.

The danger is turning the customer into the appointment.

When the business becomes too focused on throughput, the service can become transactional. The person arrives, receives the service, pays, and leaves.

But vulnerable services depend heavily on trust.

A customer may be able to receive the same technical service in many places. What makes them return is often the person who made them feel comfortable while providing it.

That is why connection is not simply a soft skill.

It is part of the customer experience model.

Community Impact Can Become Part of the Operating System

Kyla’s instinct to give back started long before Foxy Box became a franchise.

When she was working independently, if a customer shared a hardship, Kyla often tried to help. She recalled a client facing a large veterinary bill and responded by organizing a waxathon, donating a portion of the proceeds to help cover the expense.

At a small scale, generosity can happen spontaneously.

The challenge is preserving that instinct as the organization grows.

Foxy Box eventually transformed that spirit into Foxy Fest, an annual initiative tied to community giving. What began as an event involving musicians, performers, and fundraising for women transitioning from abusive relationships became something franchise locations could participate in across the system.

Today, locations can organize events, raffles, or other local initiatives, particularly around International Women’s Day and the month of March, and direct the proceeds toward organizations serving their communities. Foxy_ Inclusive_ and Sustainabl…

That is the evolution from personal generosity to scalable generosity.

The original intention remains, but the system allows more people to participate.

Sustainability Requires Operational Commitment

One of the most substantial examples of Foxy Box turning values into systems is its environmental work.

Hair removal generates waste.

Wax, strips, gloves, hair, and other single-use materials often cannot enter conventional recycling streams. Once the company saw how much material its locations were sending to landfill, Kyla said it became difficult to ignore.

Foxy Box partnered with Green Circle Salons, an organization that collects waste from beauty businesses and redirects or repurposes materials through specialized processes. The company has since incorporated waste management into its franchise operations and build-outs. Foxy_ Inclusive_ and Sustainabl…

That transition was not effortless.

The waste had to be separated and stored. Pickup systems had to be developed. There were additional costs. Pricing needed to accommodate those costs. Franchise locations needed designated areas to manage the process.

It took time to make sustainability operational.

That point matters because values become meaningful when organizations are willing to absorb some inconvenience in order to live them.

It is easy to support sustainability when it requires no changes.

The real commitment begins when the value affects the operating model.

Sustainability Should Influence More Than Waste

Foxy Box has expanded its environmental thinking beyond waste disposal.

The company evaluates products based on packaging and sustainability practices. As it develops its own product line, it is considering recycled and recyclable materials. Kyla also discussed plans to partner with Veritree so that future services could contribute to tree-planting initiatives.

The broader principle is worth paying attention to.

Sustainability is not a single program.

It is a lens for decision-making.

When choosing products, packaging, vendors, build-out materials, or operational partners, businesses can ask where something comes from, what happens to it after use, and whether the supplier’s practices align with the organization’s values.

That does not require perfection.

It requires awareness.

Membership Can Create Belonging, Not Just Discounts

Foxy Box also operates a membership model through its Fox Club.

Like many memberships, the model currently provides practical benefits such as service perks and discounts. But Kyla spoke openly about wanting to evolve the experience further.

That is an interesting challenge for any membership-based business.

A membership becomes much more powerful when it shifts from a financial arrangement into a sense of belonging.

Discounts can encourage retention. Community creates identity.

There are many ways that can happen: early access to products, surprise benefits, invitations to events, special experiences, community initiatives, or opportunities for members to participate in the larger purpose of the brand.

When someone begins thinking of themselves as part of a community rather than simply a repeat customer, the relationship changes.

The strongest memberships give people something to belong to.

Franchise Culture Begins With Who You Let In

As Foxy Box grows, Kyla believes one of the biggest cultural safeguards is franchisee selection.

She is candid that this can be difficult because she naturally likes people and wants relationships to work.

That is why the company created criteria.

A franchise prospect cannot simply have capital and enthusiasm. Leadership looks at qualities such as empathy, attitude, leadership capability, and alignment with the broader purpose of the brand.

Kyla asks herself whether she would personally buy from the candidate.

That is a valuable question.

Franchisees become extensions of the brand in local communities. They will hire teams, interact with customers, make decisions under pressure, and interpret the culture every day.

A poorly aligned franchisee can consume enormous resources over a five or ten-year relationship.

Growth becomes healthier when leaders are willing to say no early.

A Franchise Can Create Consistency Without Erasing Community

Foxy Box refers to its larger network as the Foxy Box family.

That idea is reinforced through training, hiring practices, regional gatherings, and regular sharing among franchise owners.

Franchisees discuss wins, struggles, ideas, and updates with one another. More experienced owners can help people who are still learning the business. Regional meetings create opportunities for relationships to form outside of structured calls.

This is one of the strengths of franchising when it works well.

The system provides the operating model, but the network provides shared experience.

An owner does not have to solve every problem alone because someone else inside the system may have already encountered it.

That requires a culture where people are willing to share rather than protect information.

Community inside the franchise ultimately helps strengthen community around each location.

Growth Tests Whether the Values Are Real

Foxy Box has ambitious growth plans.

That makes protecting the culture even more important.

Rapid expansion increases the temptation to accept the wrong franchisee, hire the wrong employee, or compromise on standards because the numbers look attractive.

Kyla believes this is where leaders need clarity about their “hell yes” and their “hell no.”

Not everyone belongs inside every business.

That may sound exclusionary in a conversation about inclusion, but the two ideas are not contradictory.

Customers deserve inclusion.

Employees and franchise partners need alignment.

A company that wants to create an empathetic customer experience needs leaders and operators who believe in empathy. A company committed to sustainability needs franchisees willing to execute the systems. A company built around positive energy cannot consistently tolerate behavior that damages that energy.

The more clearly leaders understand what the culture requires, the easier it becomes to protect as the company grows.

Love Gives Purpose Staying Power

When we asked Kyla what role love should play in business, she connected it directly to longevity.

Entrepreneurship is difficult.

There are periods of growth and periods of uncertainty. Systems fail. People leave. Markets change. Expansion becomes complicated. The numbers are not always encouraging.

If the only reason someone started the business was financial opportunity, those moments can make quitting much easier.

Purpose gives leaders something deeper to return to.

For Kyla, that purpose includes helping people feel confident, creating inclusive spaces, supporting communities, protecting the environment, and building a business people are proud to belong to.

Profit matters.

But love gives people a reason to keep solving the problems required to create it.

Key Takeaways

• Inclusion becomes meaningful when it changes actual business systems, language, training, hiring, and customer experiences.
• Businesses should regularly audit whether categories, terminology, and procedures still serve a real purpose or simply reflect outdated norms.
• Bold branding can remain playful without relying on shame, exclusion, or humor that makes customers feel worse about themselves.
• Empathy can be treated as a hiring criterion, particularly in businesses where customers are physically or emotionally vulnerable.
• Technical service matters, but human connection is often what makes customers feel safe enough to return and recommend the business.
• Community giving becomes scalable when spontaneous generosity is transformed into repeatable programs that local teams can participate in.
• Sustainability requires more than messaging. It may require operational changes, added costs, new infrastructure, and stronger vendor standards.
• Membership models become more powerful when they create belonging and identity rather than relying only on financial discounts.
• Franchise growth should be selective. The wrong partner can create years of cultural and operational strain.
• Consistency does not require eliminating local connection. Strong franchise systems allow owners to participate meaningfully in their communities while protecting the brand promise.
• Culture becomes most vulnerable during rapid growth, making clear criteria for who belongs inside the organization increasingly important.
• Love gives purpose-driven businesses the resilience to keep going when entrepreneurship becomes difficult.

Final Thoughts

Kyla Dufresne’s journey with Foxy Box is a reminder that inclusion, sustainability, and community are not separate initiatives that sit beside the business.

They can become part of how the business works.

Inclusion can show up in the words a customer sees while booking an appointment. Empathy can show up in the person hired to deliver the service. Community can show up in an annual event that gives every location a reason to contribute locally. Sustainability can show up in what happens to a piece of waste after it leaves the treatment room.

None of these decisions alone transforms a company.

Together, they create a pattern.

That pattern tells customers what the company believes. It tells employees what behaviors matter. It tells franchisees what kind of business they are joining.

Most importantly, it turns values into something people can actually experience.

That is ultimately what belonging requires. It is not enough for a company to say, “Everyone is welcome here.”

People have to feel it in the details.

Check out our full conversation with Kyla Dufresne of Foxy Box Laser and Wax Bar on The Bliss Business Podcast.

Originally Featured on The Bliss Business Podcast Blog

Most organizations say culture matters. Far fewer manage it with the same discipline they bring to operations, finance, marketing, or customer experience.

That is a problem because culture is already operating whether leaders design it or not. It shows up in how people respond when something goes wrong, whether employees feel safe enough to disagree, how leaders handle difficult conversations, and whether people believe they are part of something meaningful or simply occupying a role inside a system.

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we sat down with Rob Flanagan, CEO, President, and Culture Co-Founder of Hounds Town USA, to explore what happens when culture is treated as an intentional business system rather than a collection of aspirational values. Rob brings more than 20 years of franchising experience and a background in transpersonal counseling psychology, where he studied human behavior, self-awareness, mindfulness, empathy, and change. Today, he applies those ideas while helping lead a pet care franchise with more than 100 locations. The Mindful Culture at Hounds T…

His perspective challenges a familiar assumption in business: culture is not the soft side of performance. It is one of the systems that produces performance.

Culture Cannot Depend on One Person

Rob has spent much of his career helping emerging brands scale, and one pattern kept appearing. Small companies often begin with tremendous energy because the founder or a handful of passionate people are deeply involved in everything. The values are communicated naturally because the people who created them are present every day.

Then the company grows.

More people arrive. Systems become necessary. Departments form. Processes become more formal. The organization gains structure, but something about the original energy can begin to disappear.

Rob came to believe that the problem was often not growth itself. It was that culture had never been separated from the personalities carrying it.

If one leader is responsible for keeping the culture alive, culture becomes vulnerable every time that person is absent, promoted, leaves the organization, or simply becomes overwhelmed. That is why Rob began thinking about culture the same way he thinks about other business functions.

Operations need systems. Finance needs systems. Marketing needs systems. Culture does too.

The goal is not to remove the humanity from culture. It is to prevent humanity from depending on the availability of a single human being.

Values on a Wall Are Not Culture

Rob illustrated this distinction with a memorable story from his first traditional job at Long John Silver’s.

Like many employees, he watched a training video about the company’s mission and values. The words sounded appropriate. Cleanliness was presumably part of the expectation.

Then reality showed up.

During what his manager described as a “coleslaw emergency,” Rob watched as a trash can was emptied, filled with coleslaw ingredients, and used as an oversized mixing container.

The story is funny now, but the lesson is serious.

An organization can have all the right words and still have the wrong culture.

Enron famously had values. Countless companies have polished mission statements, culture decks, framed posters, and beautifully designed careers pages. None of those things prove how the company actually operates.

Culture is behavioral.

It is the distance between what the organization claims and what people experience.

That is why Rob tries to demystify culture. It does not have to mean ping-pong tables, elaborate perks, or inspirational slogans. It means defining the way people are expected to work together, building those expectations into the business, and measuring whether the experience matches the intention.

Culture Starts Slipping Before the Metrics Show It

One of the advantages of treating culture as a system is that leaders can begin looking for leading indicators rather than waiting for obvious problems.

Rob pays attention to energy and participation.

When people who normally contribute stop offering ideas, something may have changed. When employees begin protecting their department rather than communicating openly across the organization, there may be a trust problem developing. When people respond to important questions with some version of “I don’t care,” that can signal something deeper than a bad day.

Those shifts often happen before turnover increases or employee surveys deteriorate.

This is where attentive leadership matters.

A disengaged person in a meeting may simply be sick, tired, or distracted. Rob shared an example of noticing an ordinarily extroverted team member becoming unusually quiet. Instead of assuming there was a culture problem, he checked in and learned that she was simply feeling ill.

The point is not to diagnose every change in behavior.

It is to notice.

Culture becomes accidental when leaders stop paying attention to what people are showing them.

Apathy Is More Dangerous Than Disagreement

Rob drew an important distinction between empathy and apathy.

Disagreement is not necessarily a sign of unhealthy culture. In fact, healthy organizations often contain plenty of disagreement because people care enough to challenge ideas.

Apathy is different.

When people stop caring, they stop taking responsibility. They protect themselves. They stop raising concerns because they no longer believe anything will change. They may continue doing the job, but they are no longer emotionally invested in making the organization better.

Rob describes the alternative as tactical empathy: intentionally trying to understand the perspective of another person, whether that person is an employee, franchisee, or customer.

Empathy does not mean agreeing with everything someone says. It means caring enough to understand the experience before deciding how to respond.

That creates a very different organization from one where people simply protect their position.

Psychological Safety Requires More Than Saying “Speak Up”

Companies frequently tell employees that their opinions are welcome.

Then someone disagrees with a leader and discovers whether that promise is real.

Rob believes psychological safety has to begin before a conflict ever occurs. At Hounds Town, cultural conversations start during the hiring process. Candidates learn how the organization thinks about values, behavior, feedback, and what it means to participate in the culture.

Hounds Town even uses the term “culture co-founder” to describe the responsibility team members have in shaping the environment every day.

That framing matters because it gives culture agency.

Employees are not merely recipients of whatever culture leadership creates. They are participants in building it.

Rob also makes an important distinction between having a voice and having a vote. People may not have decision authority over every issue, but they should have the ability to speak honestly without being punished for doing so.

Leaders can destroy that safety without ever raising their voice. A dismissive expression, an impatient response, or quickly moving past an uncomfortable opinion can teach someone never to bring the subject up again.

The employee does not need a lecture about psychological safety after that.

They have already learned the real rule.

Listening Does Not Require Agreement

This is where mature leadership becomes important.

Making someone feel heard does not mean implementing every suggestion.

A team member might challenge an initiative, question an assumption, or propose something that ultimately does not fit the broader strategy. The leader can still respond with curiosity rather than defensiveness.

“What are you seeing that I might not be seeing?”

“Tell me more about why you think that.”

“I hadn’t considered it that way.”

Those responses preserve the relationship even when the final decision stays the same.

People can tolerate disagreement far better than dismissal.

When leaders consistently demonstrate that uncomfortable feedback will be heard and considered, people become more willing to share the information the organization actually needs.

That is not merely good culture.

It is better decision-making.

Systems Should Create Guardrails, Not Robots

One of the risks of systemizing culture is going too far.

Culture should not become another rigid SOP that dictates exactly how every human interaction must occur. That defeats the purpose.

Rob thinks about cultural systems as guardrails. They create enough clarity that people understand the expectations while preserving enough flexibility for judgment.

He gave the example of employee travel. Some organizations use strict per diem rules. Hounds Town chose a more flexible principle: spend the company’s money as though it were your own.

That requires judgment.

If someone early in their career makes an expensive choice, leadership can have a conversation about it. The purpose is development, not punishment.

This is where culture and trust become inseparable.

Rigid systems often exist because organizations do not trust people to make decisions. But if every possible choice has to be governed by a rule, people never develop judgment either.

Guardrails allow people to practice responsibility.

Care Can Be Systemized Without Becoming Mechanical

One of the strongest examples Rob shared involves pet loss.

Hounds Town is a pet care company, so the death of a pet can have profound emotional meaning for franchisees, customers, and employees. When someone connected to the organization loses a pet, the company works with an artist to create a portrait based on a photograph and sends it to the grieving person.

The important part is that the gesture does not live only inside Rob’s memory.

There is a process.

Team members know what to do. The picture is collected. The artist is contacted. The gift is sent.

That means the act of care can happen whether Rob is in the office, traveling, or unavailable.

This is exactly what building love into scalable systems looks like.

The system does not make the gesture less genuine. It makes it more dependable.

Hounds Town approaches birthdays, anniversaries, employee transitions, one-on-one conversations, and performance discussions with similar intentionality. The goal is to make sure care does not occur only when someone happens to remember.

Kindness becomes part of the operating model.

Autonomy Helps Culture Scale Across a Franchise

Franchising introduces an additional cultural challenge because each franchisee is an independent owner with a different personality, motivation, community, and vision.

Rob embraces that individuality rather than attempting to eliminate it.

Hounds Town has a brand culture, but franchisees are also encouraged to define their own mission and values for their local businesses. One owner might be motivated by creating a family legacy. Another may want to expand into multiple locations. Someone else may care deeply about giving back to the community.

The franchise system provides structure while allowing the owner’s individual purpose to come through.

That distinction matters because ownership should still feel like ownership.

Rob shared the example of a franchisee who cares deeply about community giving. That value may not be one of the brand’s primary stated values, but it became meaningful inside her local culture, including how she hires and how the business participates in its community.

Consistency does not have to mean uniformity.

A strong franchise system can protect the customer-facing promise while still giving local owners enough agency to build something that reflects what matters to them.

Recruiting Should Start With Why Someone Would Want to Belong

Rob is particularly passionate about job advertisements.

Many job ads begin with responsibilities, requirements, and qualifications. They tell candidates what they will do before giving them any reason to care about where they will be doing it.

Hounds Town reverses that order.

The organization leads with mission, values, and culture. Responsibilities still matter, but they come later.

The underlying message is simple: if this environment excites you, keep reading.

That approach treats recruiting as cultural alignment rather than simply filling a vacancy.

It also increases the likelihood that people joining the organization understand what they are choosing.

A company should not present one personality during the hiring process and reveal an entirely different reality once the employee arrives.

Transparency about culture gives both sides permission to decide whether the relationship fits.

Personalization Starts With Remembering the Person

Rob’s background in transpersonal counseling psychology also influences how he thinks about franchise support.

One principle stayed with him from his training: even when someone’s experience sounds familiar, it is still their experience.

A therapist may hear similar stories repeatedly, but to the person sitting across the room, the story is personal.

Franchising works the same way.

A franchise system may support hundreds of owners through similar challenges. But each owner has a different family, different goals, different motivations, different fears, and a different definition of success.

Hounds Town captures some of that context in its CRM. Team members may document a franchisee’s family information, personal goals, communication preferences, or meaningful life events. If someone’s daughter gets married, for example, that information can create an opportunity for another leader to call and acknowledge the moment.

That may sound like a small detail.

But details are what make scale feel personal.

Systems do not have to erase intimacy.

They can help us remember it.

Culture Needs Leading Indicators Too

One of the most practical lessons Rob shared is that culture should be measured before it becomes a crisis.

Hounds Town uses surveys, quarterly conversations, annual conversations, and recurring questions about how employees are experiencing the organization.

One of their long-term cultural aspirations is powerful: when someone eventually retires, the hope is that they will look back and say Hounds Town was the best place they ever worked and the place where they developed most, both professionally and personally.

That goal creates a useful measurement question long before retirement.

Do employees currently feel they are developing?

If someone says they are growing personally but not professionally, that becomes information leadership can act on. If the opposite is true, that matters too.

Culture problems should not have to become resignations before leadership notices them.

A strong system looks for yellow flags while they are still yellow.

Mindfulness Gives Leaders Space Between Emotion and Response

Rob’s psychology background and meditation practice also shaped the way he approaches difficult conversations.

His practical advice for leaders is remarkably simple: take a breath.

Mindfulness does not have to mean lengthy meditation sessions or spiritual practices. In the workplace, it can simply mean developing the ability to interrupt the automatic response.

When an employee is frustrated or angry, leaders naturally become defensive. The body reacts before the mind has fully processed what is happening. We prepare to argue, correct, explain, or protect ourselves.

A single breath can create just enough space to choose something else.

Rob also recommends simple grounding techniques, such as holding a small object and noticing its texture for a few seconds. The point is not the object itself. It is returning attention to the present moment before reacting.

That pause can transform the quality of the conversation.

Instead of two people exchanging defensive reactions, they have a chance to understand one another.

Mindfulness becomes a leadership capability when it creates space between stimulus and response.

Love Should Be the Leading Role

When we asked Rob what role love should play in business, his answer was immediate: the leading role.

For him, other elements of a meaningful business become byproducts of love. People need to love aspects of the work, the people they are doing it with, and the impact they are trying to create.

But Rob added another dimension that is often overlooked: self-love.

Leaders who are deeply disconnected from themselves may struggle to create environments where other people feel safe bringing their full humanity to work.

This does not mean the workplace becomes a therapy center.

Performance still matters. Accountability still matters. Profitability still matters.

The difference is recognizing that human beings create those outcomes.

Businesses cannot demand people leave their humanity at the door and then wonder why engagement, creativity, trust, and connection disappear with it.

Key Takeaways

• Culture becomes scalable when it is treated as an intentional business system rather than something dependent on one charismatic leader.
• Values and mission statements do not define culture unless everyday behavior consistently reflects them.
• Early cultural warning signs often appear as disengagement, guarded communication, departmental protection, or apathy before traditional metrics reveal a problem.
• Psychological safety requires leaders to demonstrate through their responses that honest disagreement and uncomfortable feedback are genuinely welcome.
• Employees can have a meaningful voice even when they do not have the final vote on every decision.
• Culture systems should function as guardrails that build judgment and accountability rather than rigid rules that turn people into robots.
• Acts of care, such as acknowledging the loss of a pet, can be systemized without becoming less sincere. Systems make compassion more dependable.
• Franchise systems can preserve consistency while giving owners enough autonomy to express personal purpose and local values.
• Recruiting should communicate mission and culture before focusing exclusively on tasks and qualifications.
• Personalization at scale becomes possible when organizations intentionally remember the goals, relationships, milestones, and stories behind the people they serve.
• Culture should be measured using leading indicators so leaders can respond before dissatisfaction turns into disengagement or turnover.
• Mindfulness can be practical. A breath or short grounding exercise can interrupt automatic defensiveness and create space for a more productive conversation.
• Love in business includes care for employees, franchisees, customers, the work itself, and the leader’s own humanity.

Final Thoughts

Rob Flanagan’s perspective challenges the idea that culture is too abstract to manage.

Culture may involve emotion, trust, belonging, empathy, and human behavior, but that does not make it less important than finance, marketing, operations, or growth. In many ways, those business systems depend on it.

The question is not whether an organization has a culture. It does.

The question is whether that culture is intentional or accidental.

Intentional culture does not mean scripting every interaction or manufacturing emotion. It means creating structures that make the desired behaviors easier to live consistently. It means teaching leaders how to listen, giving people agency to contribute, paying attention when engagement changes, and building care into processes so that it does not disappear when one individual is unavailable.

It also requires enough mindfulness to recognize that people are not machines moving through workflows. They bring emotion, identity, family, hopes, fears, and experiences into the workplace because those things cannot simply be switched off at the door.

When culture is treated as a living business system, something powerful happens. Profitability, retention, trust, engagement, and performance no longer have to compete with humanity.

They can become outcomes of it.

Check out our full conversation with Rob Flanagan of Hounds Town USA on The Bliss Business Podcast.

Originally Featured on The Bliss Business Podcast Blog

Some businesses sell products. Some sell services. And some create moments people remember long after the transaction is over.

Hospitality is often where those moments become visible. A cup of coffee, a warm greeting, a thoughtful gesture, or a small act of personalization can completely change the way someone experiences an event, a workplace, or a brand. What matters most is not always the product itself. It is how people feel while receiving it.

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we sat down with Natalie Fairchild, Founder and Chief Inspirational Officer of Pacific Perks Coffee, to explore empathy, hospitality, employee experience, caregiving, culture, and how leaders can build connection into the way a business operates. Natalie founded Pacific Perks in 2007 and has since grown the company into a mobile café experience designed to promote businesses, reward teams, and celebrate important moments. More recently, the company has moved into franchising. Coffee_ Care_ and Inspired Lead…

What stood out most from our conversation was how intentionally Natalie thinks about experience. For her, hospitality is not an extra layer placed on top of the business. It is the business.

The Experience Begins Before the Coffee Is Served

One of the most powerful ideas Natalie shared is that the customer experience begins long before the event starts.

If a client is hosting a company gathering, marketing activation, wedding, or celebration, they may already be carrying stress. They are thinking about timing, guests, logistics, weather, traffic, and whether everything will come together the way they hoped.

Pacific Perks tries to reduce that stress before the team ever arrives on site.

That means confirming details, communicating proactively, arriving early, making contact with the event organizer, and letting them know that everything is under control. Natalie put it simply: if a client has to call asking where the team is, something has already gone wrong.

That standard says a lot about empathy.

Empathy is not only understanding how someone feels after they tell you. It is anticipating what they might be feeling before they have to say anything.

That is one of the clearest ways businesses can make people feel cared for.

Small Gestures Create Disproportionately Large Experiences

The details Natalie described throughout our conversation were often surprisingly small.

A team member might ask the event organizer what their favorite drink is and have it ready for them. A perkologist may make eye contact immediately so a guest knows they have been seen. A team member may introduce two people during an event because they sense a business connection could happen while a latte is being made.

None of these things are expensive.

But they are memorable.

That matters because customers rarely remember every operational detail of an experience. They remember how the experience made them feel.

The old Maya Angelou insight that people remember how you made them feel comes alive in hospitality because emotional impressions are constantly being formed through small interactions. A missed acknowledgment can make someone feel invisible. A thoughtful greeting can make someone feel welcome. A proactive update can make someone feel relieved.

The experience is being created one micro-moment at a time.

Great Hospitality Depends on Seeing People

Natalie uses the word “see” frequently when talking about her employees and customers.

That is not accidental.

People want to feel recognized. They want someone to notice when they walk in, acknowledge that they are waiting, remember something about them, or take enough interest to ask how their day is going.

This does not require a complicated customer experience strategy.

Sometimes it requires eye contact.

Natalie described the frustration of entering a business where employees are busy behind the counter but no one acknowledges that you are standing there. Even if the staff cannot serve you immediately, a simple recognition changes the experience.

That principle applies to leadership too.

Employees want to feel seen.

They want leaders to notice the work they are doing, ask about their lives, remember something about their family, recognize their contributions, and follow up when something important is happening.

Seeing people is one of the simplest leadership practices available, yet it is often one of the first things lost when organizations get busy.

Appreciation Works Best When It Feels Personal

One of my favorite examples from the conversation involved a Pacific Perks company picnic.

Instead of purchasing only traditional prizes, the team created personal experiences and gifts based on what each person could offer. One employee offered a sourdough-making class. Someone else had chickens and offered fresh eggs. Another person offered babysitting or house-sitting. Natalie offered a day at the lake with swimming, miniature golf, dinner, and s’mores.

The gifts were not valuable because of their price.

They were valuable because they came from the people.

That is what made the appreciation feel genuine.

Leaders sometimes struggle with recognition because they treat it as another HR program. They create standard rewards, automate anniversary messages, or provide generic gifts that may be appreciated but do not necessarily create connection.

Personal appreciation carries a different emotional weight because it communicates that someone has been noticed individually.

The more human the recognition becomes, the more meaningful it often feels.

Culture Is Felt Before It Is Explained

As Pacific Perks moves into franchising, Natalie is thinking carefully about how to preserve the culture that made the company successful.

That challenge is familiar to almost every growing organization.

Processes are relatively easy to document. You can create manuals, checklists, operating procedures, training guides, and technology systems. Culture is harder because culture is partly emotional.

How do you teach someone to care?

How do you teach them to make people feel welcome?

How do you ensure that a future franchisee does not simply execute the operating model but also understands the spirit behind it?

Natalie’s approach begins with selection.

She is willing to turn away potential franchisees if she senses that their leadership style, priorities, or pace are inconsistent with the culture she wants to protect. She wants people who believe in building a business around relationships, employee well-being, and thoughtful growth rather than simply maximizing numbers.

That is an important lesson for any company scaling culture.

Training matters, but who you invite into the system matters first.

The Employee Experience Becomes the Customer Experience

Pacific Perks refers to its event staff as “perkologists,” and Natalie spends a great deal of time thinking about how those employees feel before they ever interact with customers.

That is because relaxed employees are better able to create relaxed experiences.

The company has detailed systems for loading, scheduling, timing, travel, checklists, and arrival. Those systems reduce unnecessary uncertainty and make it easier for team members to focus on hospitality rather than worrying about what they forgot.

Natalie also emphasizes flexibility.

Employees can manage availability around family commitments, trips, school schedules, and other parts of life. She described this as giving people permission to live their lives instead of making them feel guilty when they cannot take an event.

That kind of trust influences the way employees show up.

When people feel supported rather than controlled, they are more likely to extend that same care to customers.

This is where employee experience and customer experience become inseparable.

Systems Should Reduce Stress, Not Add to It

Natalie’s operating model includes detailed checklists, scheduling systems, training, and proprietary technology.

What is important is the purpose behind those systems.

They are not designed simply to make the company more efficient.

They are designed to reduce stress.

The clearer the process becomes, the more room employees have to focus on the guest. If the loading checklist is reliable, they do not have to worry about forgotten equipment. If the schedule clearly communicates when to leave the warehouse and when to arrive, they can focus on being present once they get there.

Good systems create emotional capacity.

That is something leaders often overlook.

A complicated process consumes energy. A confusing tool creates frustration. An unclear expectation causes anxiety. Every ounce of unnecessary operational friction reduces the energy employees can devote to customers.

The best systems do not make people feel more controlled.

They make people feel more capable.

Emotional Awareness Can Be Developed Through Reflection

Natalie looks for employees who naturally possess empathy, but she also trains for it.

One exercise asks new team members to think about a terrible customer experience they have had and describe why it felt so bad. Then they do the same with an exceptional experience.

That exercise is powerful because it does not simply tell employees what good service should look like.

It asks them to remember what good service feels like.

By reflecting on their own experiences, they begin identifying the small behaviors that made the difference. Maybe someone ignored them. Maybe someone remembered their name. Maybe a server noticed a problem before they mentioned it. Maybe someone went slightly beyond what was expected.

This creates empathy through perspective.

Instead of memorizing a customer service rule, employees connect the behavior to an emotional experience they already understand.

That kind of training can be far more durable.

Growth Should Never Come at the Expense of People

Natalie is thoughtful about the pace of Pacific Perks’ franchise growth.

She wants the business to expand, but she does not want growth that damages the culture or creates unnecessary pressure on the people involved.

That is why she pays attention to potential franchisees who appear overly focused on working constantly, scaling quickly, or pushing toward a number without enough consideration for quality of life.

She wants growth built on a strong foundation.

This is particularly important because hospitality businesses are deeply dependent on human energy. Employees who are exhausted or disengaged will eventually transfer that feeling into the customer experience.

A business can optimize itself so aggressively that it removes the very humanity customers originally loved.

Scale should strengthen the experience, not hollow it out.

Caregiving Can Teach Leaders About the Limits of Empathy

One of the more personal parts of our conversation involved Natalie’s experience as a caregiver and her work with the Alzheimer’s Association of Oregon and Southwest Washington.

Caregiving strengthened her understanding of empathy, but it also taught her something equally important: caring for someone else does not require destroying yourself in the process. Coffee_ Care_ and Inspired Lead…

That is a difficult lesson for many compassionate people.

There can be an unconscious belief that loving someone means absorbing their pain, matching their stress, or sacrificing your own well-being to prove that you care.

But exhaustion does not necessarily make someone more supportive.

Sometimes it makes them less able to help.

Natalie had to learn how to create healthier boundaries, take better care of herself, and recognize that she could support someone without becoming consumed by what they were experiencing.

That lesson translates directly into leadership.

Leaders can care deeply without taking every problem personally. They can empathize with employees without absorbing every emotion. They can create space for others while still protecting their own capacity.

Self-care is not separate from empathetic leadership.

It is one of the things that makes empathetic leadership sustainable.

Flexibility Is a Leadership Practice

Natalie also challenged the assumption that good work requires people to remain in an office for a fixed number of hours.

At Pacific Perks, the focus is much more on getting the work done and moving the business forward than on being physically present from eight to five.

She was candid that she does not perform well working extremely long hours and does not expect her team to treat exhaustion as evidence of commitment.

That philosophy shows up in the company’s flexibility around family schedules, personal commitments, and daily work rhythms.

Trust becomes the operating principle.

When someone’s schedule changes, the expectation is not that they apologize for having a life.

The expectation is that the team communicates clearly and fulfills the work.

That is a fundamentally different way of thinking about accountability.

Accountability does not have to mean control.

It can mean clarity, ownership, and trust.

Celebration Should Be Part of the Operating Rhythm

Pacific Perks begins weekly meetings with gratitude and celebration.

Employees share something they are grateful for or something they are celebrating personally or professionally. The team recognizes new jobs for spouses, pregnancies, successful events, client wins, leads, and everyday accomplishments.

These rituals may seem small, but repeated rituals shape culture.

They tell people what is worth noticing.

If every meeting begins with problems, targets, missed deadlines, and performance gaps, employees learn that those are the things leadership pays attention to.

If the organization also makes space for gratitude, recognition, progress, and personal milestones, people learn that they matter beyond their output.

The point is not to ignore performance.

It is to create a fuller picture of what work can be.

Love in Business Can Be Practical

When we asked Natalie what role love should play in business, she did not treat the idea as abstract.

For her, love shows up in kindness, flexibility, joy, recognition, connection, and the willingness to make work more human.

She also encouraged leaders not to overcomplicate it.

Try one small thing.

Change the way a meeting starts. Offer one sincere acknowledgment. Ask an employee how they are doing and actually listen. Personalize one part of the customer experience. Give someone more flexibility. Celebrate one thing that would normally go unnoticed.

Then see what happens.

This is one of the most practical ways to build love into scalable systems.

Culture rarely changes because of one enormous initiative.

It changes because enough small behaviors become normal.

Key Takeaways

• Hospitality begins before the service itself, and proactive communication can dramatically reduce customer anxiety.
• Customers often remember small gestures more than major operational details because those gestures shape how the experience feels.
• Making people feel seen can be as simple as eye contact, acknowledgment, personalization, and genuine curiosity.
• Employee appreciation is more meaningful when it reflects the individual rather than becoming a standardized recognition program.
• Strong cultures are protected first through hiring and franchisee selection, then reinforced through training and systems.
• Customer experience and employee experience are deeply connected because supported employees have more emotional capacity to care for guests.
• Good operational systems reduce stress so employees can focus more attention on the human experience.
• Empathy can be developed by asking employees to reflect on how exceptional and poor service experiences made them feel.
• Growth should never become so aggressive that it damages culture, employee well-being, or the quality of the customer experience.
• Empathetic leadership requires healthy boundaries because caring for others does not require leaders to absorb every problem themselves.
• Flexibility and accountability can coexist when teams operate with trust, communication, and clear expectations.
• Gratitude and celebration become cultural systems when they are built consistently into the rhythm of the organization.
• Love in business does not require a massive initiative. Small, repeated acts of care can gradually shape the entire experience.

Final Thoughts

Natalie Fairchild’s perspective reminds us that hospitality is not primarily about coffee, food, events, or even service.

It is about people.

The coffee becomes meaningful because someone remembered your favorite drink. The event feels different because the team arrived early and made the organizer feel confident. The employee experience becomes memorable because a leader noticed something happening in your life and cared enough to ask about it later.

These moments are easy to dismiss because they seem small.

But culture is built from small things.

Customer experience is built from small things.

Trust is built from small things.

And when those small things become consistent enough, they stop being random acts of kindness and become the way the business operates.

That may be one of the most important lessons in hospitality leadership: people do not need perfection to feel cared for. They need to feel seen, supported, and genuinely welcomed.

When a company can systemize that feeling without making it feel scripted, it has created something far more valuable than a good service experience.

It has created connection.

Check out our full conversation with Natalie Fairchild of Pacific Perks Coffee on The Bliss Business Podcast.

Originally Featured on The Bliss Business Podcast Blog