Chief Change Officer - Greg Morley: Can “Bond” Save Us From an $8.9 Trillion Employee Meltdown? – Part Two

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Greg Morley has spent years navigating the high-stakes world of corporate culture at Moët Hennessy, Disney, and Hasbro. Now, he’s here to call out the biggest myth in business: that belonging is just a “soft” concept. DEI isn’t one-size-fits-all, and Greg Morley is here to prove it. In Part 2, he breaks down how companies get inclusion wrong by ignoring cultural differences—why the West’s love for metrics doesn’t always vibe with the East’s emphasis on harmony, and what businesses can do to bridge the gap. Expect real talk, sharp insights, and of course, a few gems from Bond. Key Highlights of Our Interview: The Crisis of Workplace Loneliness “Workplace loneliness isn’t just a personal issue—it’s a challenge organizations must tackle to foster belonging and inclusion.” The Employee-Employer Power Flip “The workplace dynamic has shifted—it’s now a buyer’s market for employees who demand recognition, safety, and belonging.” Redefining Diversity “Diversity isn’t just what you see—it’s also life experiences, generational perspectives, languages, and abilities, visible or hidden. Most of our diversity at work is invisible. Who someone marries, whether they have kids, or cognitive differences often go unnoticed—but they matter.” Start With Yourself “Change begins within. Reflecting on personal experiences of inclusion or exclusion can help leaders empathize and create a more welcoming environment for others.” East Meets West “In the East, inclusion feels more organic, driven by community and connection. In the West, it’s often about achieving measurable outcomes and hitting diversity targets.” _________________________ Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Greg Morley --Chief Change Officer-- Outgrow Yourself. Change Ambitiously.  The Global Go-To-Source of Raw Human Intelligence  for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs, Transformation Gurus & Bold Hearts. Global Top 3% Podcast on Listen Notes. Top 20 US Business Podcast on Apple. Top 1 US Careers Podcast on Apple. 5+ Million All-Time Downloads. Reaching 80+ Countries Daily. >>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Oshul is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, we are joined by Greg Morley, a leader in the world of human resources and a master of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Monat, Tennessee, one of the oldest and largest wine and spirits conglomerates in the world. Greg has an amazing story to share, covering the unique experiences

that have shaped his leadership style and his strategic approach to DEI. Greg, let's start with you giving us a bit of an introduction to this book, as well as a brief background on yourself for those who might be tuning in for the first time. This will help the listeners understand where you're coming from before we get into the book's content, the lessons, and the teachings you want to share. Thank you for having me back. Really pleased that you and I met each other what more than a year ago and I really proud

of you and the work you're doing and what you're bringing to the conversation about humanity. So thank you for that. Today, what we're going to talk about is this book that I've written called Bond, Inclusion and the Keys to Belonging and Connection. A little bit about me. So I've spent most of my life in HR as an HR business leader and and a good part of the latter part of my career in

inclusion and belonging and diversity. I did write this new book, which I hope is a guide to inclusion and belonging in the workplace. I've had the experience and great good fortune of leading diversity initiatives in the US, Europe and Asia at major multinationals, such as General Electric, Disney, Hasbro, and most recently my experience with LVMH Mo at Ennessy.

And I wrote the book to share what I believe are really life-changing lessons I've learned for how leaders and teams can be more inclusive and embrace company diversity to be even more successful in the companies in which they're working. First things first, starting with belonging. What do you mean by belonging in the workplace? And why is that important? Sure, it's a great question.

And let me maybe start by why I wrote the book. What inspired me to write the book as a way of addressing sort of the belonging, inclusion, and connection terms of the book. Over the decades of experience I had, both in and in HR roles, but also in roles such as marketing, sales, and communications, and distribution. What I saw was there is an essence of crisis of loneliness at work for some people, and there's a very important role that organizations play in fostering a culture of belonging and inclusion. And the fostering of that culture of belonging and inclusion is not just

a nice thing to do and everybody feels good at work and we go and we have parties and we're happy and we have lunch together. There is data that reinforces that when an organization is diverse, inclusive, and has leaders who lead in an inclusive manner on many measurable aspects, those companies do better. They do better in terms of innovation. They do better in terms of avoiding risk. They do much better in terms of getting profitable products to market and they do much better in terms

of what would be obvious, which is keeping good people and attracting good people. So there is a business imperative to being good at these things. And what encouraged me to write the book was I saw all of these sort of good and bad practices over my career, both within the companies I was working with and with others that I had become associated with. And that's why I got to the point of, okay, there's something to be talked about. And I think finally, what was a driving factor for me was,

I believe in my core that these things I just talked about are important to individuals and to businesses. And what I saw was we were in the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion, getting too far away from what I believed was the important part of diversity, equity and inclusion was diverse workforces working well together and creating great business outcomes

and creating outcomes for individuals. And so that's how I got to the point of writing the book. I agree with you 100% when it comes to belonging versus loneliness. Early in my career, I was immersed in big organizations, and it was all about work and climbing the corporate ladder. Belonging was seen as more of a soft feeling, something you didn't really think about much. You worked hard, made your boss happy, and got along, maybe you would get promoted faster and better. Some would call it luck.

Others would call it politics. That's just a normal corporate lie. But when you talk about belonging in the workplace, especially now that you've absorbed it and you've been involved in different cultures. I'm curious, why is it so difficult to develop a true and sustainable sense of belonging for employees? And how can we nurture that sense given all the complexities of corporate life?

There are many aspects to this, but let me focus on a couple of them. The first is that the world is changing in terms of the work, and especially since COVID. And I just read an article this morning which highlighted this. The arrangement or the agreement that employees and employers have has flipped. It's a buyer's market in a way now for employees to go in workplaces where they believe they're going to be recognized.

They're going to be rewarded. They're going to be heard and they're going to feel like they belong. going to be rewarded, they're going to be heard, and they're going to feel like they belong. Now, that's happening in a time when individuals are more and more isolated because of things like social media. And social media has this double-edged way of impacting people, which is it makes us much more connected, but much less connected. And when we talk about belonging in the workforce, what we're talking about is an individual coming to work

and feeling like they can do their best work there, that they're going to be recognized for what they do, that the workplace is a safe place. Many people don't have safe places outside of work and it's a responsibility of employers to create a place that's a safe place to work. And why is all of this important? It's important because we want people on our teams and ourselves to do the incremental effort. We all get hired and we get a job description and it says all the

things that have to happen. The reality of jobs is, you know, people do some things on the job description and some things off the job description. And many times a career like the one you were talking about, Vince, where you work hard, you put in a lot of effort and you get ahead and you get promoted comes from the fact that somebody's doing something beyond their job, the incremental effort. So belonging is important because it creates this connection somebody has with their role, with their company, with their boss, with their peers, which allows them to feel encouraged

to do the incremental effort. And that's how companies win when employees are fully engaged and doing the incremental effort. And that's how companies win, when employees are fully engaged and doing the incremental effort. As you were sharing, it reminded me of an incident from about 20 years ago, when I worked at an international financial institution, at that time I was a store employee. I received a lot of positive feedback from clients.

I was sent to the headquarters for special training, first of its kind, and my boss rewarded me for all the hard work I put in. My clients recognized it, and I was working incredibly hard, 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. I genuinely enjoyed the work. In your terms, I felt a strong sense of belonging to the role, to the company, and to my clients. The pay wasn't anything special, even under industry standards. But I was so motivated and invested in the world. Then something changed. My boss left.

And her replacement had a completely different style and approach. I wouldn't place blame entirely on this new person. But we didn't get along the way I had with my previous boss. The entire culture and team dynamics shifted. The vibe, the chemistry, the sentiment. Everything fell off. That's when I lost my sense of belonging. I kept working hard,

unprofessionally, to serve my clients. But there was an internal conflict with my new supervisor. This eroded the connection I had felt to my work. The result? I quit the job, and it came as a surprise to everyone. Clients, colleagues, even those at headquarters. They couldn't understand it because I had been such a hard worker, talented analyst. For them, it was a real loss. For me, the damage was deeper. That's when I experienced my first episode of mental illness, what we would call now burnout. And that burnout spiraled into depression.

I'm sharing this now because it ties back to what you said about the sense of belonging, or the lack of it. When that sense is lost, especially in a role where I had thrived and found purpose, the consequences were a severe for both my career and my health. It was a perfect example of how critical belonging really is. It's a case study which makes the point of the lessons of the book. And I think it's important, I want to recognize you for sharing that story because many people go through those kinds of episodes and oftentimes the loneliness occurs because we don't believe other people

have had that experience or are going through those things either in the past or people that we work with. So it's very powerful that you share a story like that that's personal and that can give encouragement to others. You made this mention about you were working hard and you were loving what you were doing and you were getting recognized, but you weren't necessarily feeling like you were being well paid. At some points in our career, maybe all along our career, people will feel like they're not being well paid, but the payment that you are getting in terms of satisfaction,

encouragement, self-worth, and the longer-term development in your career far outpaced what you believe maybe you should have been earning. And there are two critical people in the organization. It's us and our manager. And one of the reasons that I believe it's often difficult for managers to create a sense of belonging. And you experienced it with a manager who knew you knew how to motivate you knew what it was important to you knew how to motivate you, knew what it was important to you, knew how to encourage you. And then you changed to a manager who didn't know you as well, didn't know how to encourage you, didn't know how to recognize you. And ultimately you left the organization in a probably quite fragile state.

Was that second manager? My guess is didn't spend the time to get to know you and understand what was important to you and make you feel that regardless of who you were working for you were still important and you were still valuable even at your low salary that you felt. So I think that part is maybe the advice I would give coming out of your very heartfelt sharing is that managers need to get to know the people that work for them. And in a way that you can understand what's important to them, what's important to them

in their life, what they need to be successful in their jobs. And those are the conversations that oftentimes we're not training managers to have, but they're just human conversations. They're just born out of curiosity. And I think that those things are much more important than we give time for. We've touched upon belonging. Let's move forward to talk a bit about inclusion. How would you define DEI? Or what does DEI mean to you?

So when we define DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion, most people think of diversity, equity, and inclusion as relating to things like gender and skin color, perhaps because they're the most visible forms of diversity. What I would say is also critically important, and I've seen this in my experience, is it's just as important to understand what experience, both life and career experience, somebody brings to their job. You know, what generation they come from, what languages they speak or understand, who, do they have any disabilities,

do they have any exceptional abilities? Those are all things that are important in determining how you build a diverse workforce. The reality is most of the diverse elements that we bring to work are unseen. Now, who I'm married to is unseen. Do I have children or not is unseen. Do I have a cognitive ability or disability

is unseen in most places. So this is why we have to get to know the people that work for us. And when we talk about then why is that included, why is the word inclusion important or the concept inclusion is, it's to me, I always imagined the image of an orchestra. So in an orchestra, there are many different instruments and they all

have their own role and at some point they come together in a piece to create a beautiful piece of music and experience a feeling. And it's the job of the manager, the leader, to understand which pieces they need to bring to different projects, different work streams, different situations to create a beautiful piece of music, which can only be done in an orchestra by an incredibly diverse field of instruments, which is also what we see at work. Outcomes at work are better from an innovation perspective, from a profitability perspective, from a risk and compliance perspective, when you have diverse teams. And going back to this

diversity of all the different elements which are seen and unseed. So the manager is the conductor? Yes. So the manager is the conductor, but also think about the conductor as a rotating role. If you're, if you're project managing, then you could be the conductor. If you're running a business or employee resource group, you could be the conductor. It's just a matter of appreciating the differences in the workforce, trying to get the best out of the people so that they feel included. And then what is included mean? It means that when I'm at work and I'm doing work, I feel like my voice is heard.

I feel like I'm respected. I feel like I am in a safe place. I feel like I'm respected. I feel like I am in a safe place. I feel like I'm recognized for the work that I do. And all of those things get back that point about incremental effort, which is when those things happen, then people will do more work harder and feel a real connection to the organization

and ultimately a responsibility for the success of the organization and for the person's colleagues. All these ideas sound great, but when it comes to implementation, things get much harder. Like many great concepts, as when they are put into action within big corporations or even small teams, it is the execution that often derails the original intention. From my experience, how can those listening, whether they are managers, CEOs, or others in leadership roles, actively implement good ideas? I know this might be a big question, but I'd love to

hear more about your perspective from an execution standpoint. are there certain things a CEO or leader should focus on to set the stage for success so that when they delegate the tasks to others, the implementation stays true to the original vision? Yeah, great question. And my belief is that it's easier than it seems. And it's easier than we make it out to be. If you're trying to change the culture of an organization, it takes time. And say, culture, change your culture to organization

takes three to five years, really to change one. And that's with everybody working in alignment and understanding. To change the culture of a team, like you experienced, can happen almost overnight for better or for worse, depending on the leader. In the book, in my book Bond, I identified five different keys to inclusion, which we called them.

And I'll just highlight a couple of them because you talk about example CEOs. So there are a couple of things that I picked out from my own experience and in the interviews I did with others, which I think are critical. The first one is that leadership matters. So inclusion starts with the CEO or the most senior person in the organization or a manager. Assume that your own team is a company, the manager is the CEO. It's not a, inclusion is not a matter for HR, inclusion is a matter for the organization. And when employees see

leaders practicing inclusive behaviors, calling on people in meetings, making sure that people have a voice, recognizing good work, sharing their own stories as you've shared your own story, these are all the things that make a difference. And just the physical presence of a senior leader in moments that are important to the organization as it relates to inclusion are important. And I'll give you a specific story that happened when I was in Hong Kong the last time. So I was doing a talk about the book and the lessons of the book at a pretty large organization. And I was told that the senior management don't normally come to these kinds of events.

So, which is unfortunate because they, you know, they matter. Right before the talk started, the senior management team, the CEO and the senior managers all came into the room. And I took the opportunity during that talk to them and encouraged them to be there and be present. Because what I saw when they walked into the room was a room full of a hundred plus people really brighten up and lighten up. And so that's what I say when leadership matters,

just being there makes a big difference. I think there's maybe one or two other things that are particularly important. It's important that we start with ourselves. So there are many things in an organization that we can and cannot change. And the more senior you are, maybe you have more impact over a larger group and the more senior you are, maybe you have more impact over a larger group

and the more junior you are, your impact is narrower. But we can all start with ourselves. So we all have stories of feeling included or excluded. And I like to, when I'm talking to groups, I like to ask people to reflect on that with something that they think about when they were included or when they were excluded? How did that make them feel?

And I think that's a real source of power for creating a sense of inclusion for yourself and your coworkers and even your customers. So if you start with yourself, you can impact a lot. Then you have to build out from there. And I think the last thing I would say in the keys of inclusion is it's very important to search for common ground.

It may sound counterintuitive to say we build these very diverse teams and then we wanna, when then we wanna search for common ground. But in fact, we all wanna rally around something. It could be the mission of the organization. It could be a project that we're working on. It could be a colleague who's stressed and we're trying to help that colleague. I had a situation with a very good friend of mine from university. And when marriage equality was being talked about in the U.S. 15 years ago. It was a very important topic to me because as

a member of the lgbt community community and as somebody who was in a long-term relationship access to marriage was important for us in my for my help mice myself and my mice Mike to be husband. But for my friend who stray and as 4 kids and he didn't see the, he wasn't interested in marriage equality, which at first took me very much by surprise. And we had a discussion about it and I said, why is this important? It's important, I believe, to everyone because it has to do with people being able to love and build relationships and family

and support structure with people that they love. And so we came to this point of common ground because that's what that was important to him too, whether we called it straight marriage or gay marriage was not the issue. So I think it's critically important to search for common ground as a way to bring people together and create a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace. Yes, you are absolutely right. The visible involvement of leaders is crucial, especially in large organizations.

That public display of support from the top sets the tone for the rest of the company. When the CEO or key decision makers visibly endorse an initiative, it creates a ripple effect. People take cues from their leaders, and if the leader is truly committed to a certain direction, it's much easier for the organization to align itself with that. Like you said, in these cases, talk is not cheap at all. It is an important tool to communicate priorities and demonstrate what matters. Execution might line with the people below the leader, but the leader's voice serves as a signal of endorsement, setting the stage for everyone else to follow suit. The power of a leader's voice goes beyond,

I think, what we can imagine. I have had many situations in my career where individuals who worked for me or with whom I worked or we worked on projects together would mimic back to me things that I had said to them that had an impact on them. Either an impact on them personally or their career or the work they were doing. And those are things I don't even remember saying. And as leaders in an organization at whatever level, don't underestimate the power of your voice and your presence.

And in my six years at MoHennessey, launching and working on diversity, equity, and inclusion, The number one key to success of having a great outcome or great outcomes was that for a period of time, the CEO who's a very respected individual in Moat Hennessy and in the LVMH group would every time he stood in front of a group, talk about why it's important that we have a diverse and inclusive organization. He didn't have to spend 15 minutes. He could spend two minutes talking about why that was important to the innovation,

the evolution, being an attractive company, being an attractive brand or brands to consumers, knowing consumers, all of these things. People pick up on that. Now, he probably would do that in the top of 25 or 30 minutes, he'd take a minute or two to talk about diversity and inclusion. It made a huge difference, because people picked up on those cues that if it's important to the CEO, then it might be important to me. And that's how the voice of a leader has impact on others. Speaking of using the power of leaders and voices

to emphasize the importance of DEI, it's true that DEI has become a politically charged topic, especially in light of the upcoming presidential election. There's been an evolution in how DEI is perceived, with some viewing it as part of a border walk movement. How do you address the misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding DEI in this current cultural climate? It's a great question because it's one of the reasons I wrote the book, which I saw this kind of fraying of the core of what I believed was important, which is

creating inclusive environments. There's a great article which I would encourage anyone to read, There's a great article which I would encourage anyone to read, and it was published last week by our mutual friend Todd Sears, who's the CEO of Out and Equal. And he was addressing the issues that have arisen in recent weeks with large companies backing away from targets and commitments in diversity, equity and inclusion. And he makes a point, makes a number of points, which I think are just absolutely spot on, which is in none of the cases where you've seen large companies back away from commitments in terms of measurement or commitments in terms of public accountability, have they backed away from initiatives that they are doing internally with their employees or even with their marketing initiatives? So what I know about what's happening

in the world is that there is a very public stance that some companies are taking and that's, I think, to align with the views of probably the majority of their customers. Then there is a back-of-the-house or internal discussion around these topics which hasn't really changed. So take for example, a company, a large company, extends benefits to nursing mothers. Nowhere are people taking those benefits back because they've now become the normal companies are extending benefits to domestic partners or spouses, maybe where they can't marry in different places around the world. Companies are not retracting those benefits.

What companies are doing, which is to play a safer game, which is to be less high profile during this period of, I think, more intense scrutiny over diversity, equity, and inclusion should be scrutinized like any other investment in the company. And unless we have a strong case, then there's a responsibility by a company to push back on it. Now, the political external view is going to be quite intense, I think, for the foreseeable future. What we have to do as practitioners and companies and as managers and companies is go back to the core, which is we know inclusive environments have better business outcomes. We know diverse teams create better business outcomes. We know that inclusive leaders

drive better business outcomes. And so that's what we need to be focused on. And if for a while companies need to be less public about that, then so be it. My next question is, you've worked extensively across different regions. You're American, but now you're based in France. American, but now you're based in France. You've also had experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. With that kind of global perspective, I'd like to hear your thoughts on DEI practices. Through your eyes, what are some of the key differences between Eastern and

Western approaches to DEI? Are come from an American or Western perspective. Could you compare both sides, East and West, in terms of how they practice DEI, the challenges they face, and how they tackle these problems? Great question and the insight about culture is spot on. The evolution that I went on from Disney to Hasbro to Moet Hennessy was important because at Disney,'s a basically an American multinational company it has a way of doing things which is fairly consistent around the world. Hasbro, similar. Moet Hennessy, very different because as you mentioned Moet Hennessy is a conglomerate and it's a conglomerate

within a conglomerate which LVMH is a holding company in conglomerate within a conglomerate which LVMH is a holding company and a conglomerate. So of the 26 different companies that exist within Moat Hennessey and when I talk about companies it's things like Dom Perignon or Belvedere Vodka or Hennessey Cognac or Vulpico Champagne, Cloudy Bay Wine, it's very different products that come from very different places and therefore have very different cultures. What's important about the prep to sing of creating inclusive cultures is you have to understand the culture of the organization before you come up with a solution. And I tell this example in the book where a guy I was working with, a friend of mine

from Hong Kong, he did a lot of development work in East Africa, worked for an NGO. And one of their mantras was, don't just do something, don't just stand there, do nothing. Now most of the time you say, don't just stand there, do something, right? If there's a fire or there's a refrigerator is open, don't just stand there, do something, right? If there's a fire or there's a refrigerator is open, don't just stand there, do something, close the door. But in development work with their view is sometimes doing something right away is the worst thing. So we need to have positive intent about how we want to change organizations,

but we also need to be observant. We need to understand the culture. We need to understand what's important to the people in the organization. And again, back to your powerful story, we need to understand the stories that exist in the organization. So why is that relevant then when we talk about

a kind of East-West approach to diversity and inclusion. So what I found in Asia, because of the more collective environment and collective culture that exists, is that we really do need to start with the stories of people in the organization, rather than starting with the KPI that we want to achieve. So we know that in Asian Eastern culture, family collective culture is much more important than it is maybe in many places in the West. So it's important to understand what are the stories

of people in the organization and how do those stories get told so that the people around those people can create inclusion or create inclusive environments, not because we're doing it because somebody gave us a KPI, we're doing it because it's part of the family. And that I think is an important nuanced approach to way we develop diversity inclusion strategies in Asia versus the way it would be done in the US or to some extent in Europe. So you have to start with the culture of the organization and the culture, which is the

dominant culture in which the organization works. So if it's Hong Kong culture, it's Japanese culture, whether it's Taiwanese culture, and then build out from that, versus saying we're gonna have 50% target on gender, and then we can't scale that to the whole organization, which is much more of a Western way of approaching something. You are bringing back a lot of my own memories from the corporate world.

Well, it may not have been related to DEI. I remember, whenever there was a new policy set by the headquarters in the US, especially from the senior leadership, they would often say, let's do the same thing Asia too. But we would push back and say, Asia doesn't work that way. It's often seen as a monolith. But in reality, Asia is as diverse as Europe, with many countries, cultures, and even differences within a single country. Even when they say, oh, it's just the Chinese market, they don't realize the vast differences between Chinese communities, whether from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland China.

And within mainland China itself, people from the North, South, East, and West all have their own unique cultural dynamics. So a one-size-fits-all DEI policy transcribed from elsewhere just doesn't work in Asia. The diversity within Asia-Pacific requires a more nuanced, localized approach. No. And get back to why is it important? It's important that company cultures are inclusive because we know that the outcomes are better. It's important that company cultures are diverse in the context of the diversity of the workforce

and the consumer base where they operate because we know that there are better outcomes for the business. How you get there has to be tailored by the individual location and the individual company. It's not what I would say is something we have to avoid is that diversity and inclusion doesn't work in Asia. That is just positively wrong. It doesn't work in Asia from a Western perspective or in a Western application, but it's as or more important that in Asia or in Africa or in Europe, South America, North America, that inclusion is practiced and is part of the culture that creates better outcomes for an

organization. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.