Designing A Joyful Workplace Culture With Bree Groff

Workplace culture isn’t just about perks and policies—it’s about designing the conditions where people thrive. In this thought-provoking conversation on workplace culture, Bree Groff—author of Today Was Fun and senior advisor at SYPartners—dives into how leaders can craft environments where workdays are more joyful, sustainable, and human. From navigating “squiggly” career paths to finding fulfillment without burnout, Bree unpacks how purpose, fun, and culture intersect in the modern workplace and why treating each day as meaningful—not just productive—may be the greatest metric of success.

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Designing A Joyful Workplace Culture With Bree Groff

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Bree Groff. Bree is a workplace culture expert and author of the upcoming book, Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). She has spent her career advising C-suite leaders at companies like Microsoft, Google, Pfizer, Calvin Klein, Target, and Hilton through times of significant change. She's a senior advisor to the global consultancy, SYPartners, previously served as CEO of NOBL Collective, a consultancy exploring new ways of working, and holds an MS in learning and organizational change from Northwestern University. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

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It's truly an honor and a pleasure to welcome you to the show, Bree.

Thank you for having me.

The Genesis Of Joyful Work

We had a great conversation. I'm so excited to just explore what has been on your mind lately and also to go on a journey to what brought you to doing all this amazing work in the world. I've just really enjoyed all of the things that you're putting out in the world, and I'm excited about your new book.

Thank you.

We're going to spend time navigating your story through what's called Flashpoints. These are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. I'll turn over to you in a moment, and you can share what you're called to share, start wherever you'd like, and we'll pause along the way and see what's showing up. Sounds good?

Sounds good.

Bree, take it away.

I love the concept of flashpoint. Maybe my first one, I'll start as a child. I think a lot about work and our relationship to work, the roles we should serve in our lives, but maybe my first interaction with work was through experiencing my parents working, like most kids. My mom was a kindergarten teacher. My dad was an elementary school principal, and I remember my mom would always say when she came home from work, most days, not every day, but most days.

She would say, “I have the best days.” She just really had fun. It taught me just like any kid, you grow up in the environment you grow up in, and you think that's normal. It taught me that I'm going to grow up one day, have a job, and that's going to be fun. Most of my days are going to be fun. Similarly, my dad was a principal, and he'd probably had a lot more stress than my mom did, dealing with the board of education and all of that.

Visiting him at his work, I remember seeing how much fun he had with his colleagues, and that they laughed together. He would go on these fishing trips with the building engineer. Even after he retired, they'd still meet for monthly lunches. That taught me, “You should work with people that you like.” I share all this because it was my first introduction to and permission to pursue work that I thought was going to be fun and joyful with people I liked.

You should work with people that you like.

That was embedded from a very early age, that this expectation that I was going to have a good time and that I was going to be welcomed into the world with my skills and talents, and enthusiasm. Life happens along the way, and I learned a whole bunch of other things, but I'd say that was the very first flashpoint, if you will, of permission to share my work, my ideas with the world joyfully.

I love that lens that you take is like this, you've come in from this, let's call it an idyllic view of the world. You see, reality hits, and sometimes it's not quite as rosy as you expect. There's also a sense of maybe navigating with, “I'm not going to let all of that get to me. I'm not going to let it change my view of the way I want to navigate and the way I want to live in the world.” Would you agree?

Yeah. It was a very deep-seated knowledge that some people do enjoy work. If you believe that that is true, then it begs the question of you, “Can this be true for me? I want to try and make it true,” which is just a different orientation than thinking work is called work for a reason. I'm never going to like it, but that's why I get paid to do the painful thing. That's a much different orientation to work where you don't necessarily believe that anybody likes their job. Therefore, you lose the hope that that's even possible.

Converging Advocation And Vocation

It's interesting you bring this up, and I've been having conversations with a few people lately, and the word avocation and vocation and the difference between the two has been coming up and I think it's interesting how, like, how do you turn an avocation into a vocation and marry the two. It almost converges the two. In many ways, the call is here to do is find ways to take something that we really love and enjoy and find ways to merge that into a vocation that we can do. That work becomes joyful, and we can see the ways of enjoying our days more fully. I like that you challenged that word work. Why does it have to sound so like, “Ugh.”

One of my earlier careers was teaching high school physics, and I taught the equation for work in physics is work equals some force times distance. That's it. There's no judgment. It's not like work equals painful force times impossible distance. No, it's just a little bit of effort that makes a difference. Fundamentally, work is just creating something of value.

There's nothing inherently painful about it. Also, on the other end, I also wouldn't say that work needs to be the sole source of our fulfillment or our life's joy. I also take issue with the do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life because that's like a really high standard. It's like, it's a lot of pressure. Of course, some days are not going to be good.

I advocate for somewhere in the middle, as you described it. What's something that we can do that we enjoy? As in. Most days, are you having a good time? Most days, does it feel satisfying to create something? Do you feel proud of it? Are you around people that you generally think are nice and funny, and cool? I think it's a hopeful, but more achievable view of work that work can simply be one joy of many in our lives.

I think in many ways that's what our world now is calling us to do is to find a different way of looking at the work. Maybe taking the view that AI is coming into our world, not as a way to replace us, but to invite us into a dialogue of how do we find the joy in what we do by having a companion along the way that's taking away the things that maybe we don't need to do? Provocation there for you.

Yes, and I hope that's how AI turns out. It's like, “We're like really in the thick of it because there's the way in which it just takes all the jobs and no one has money.” The good way is yes, it alleviates all of the frenetic pace of running around. Much of the work is us pretending to be robots, like not needing to eat all day, not needing to sleep, firing off email after email, and sitting in meetings for twelve hours a day, pretending we don't have bodies that need to walk and stretch in many ways.

We have tried to make ourselves robotic in order to be as productive as possible. From that point of view, thank God the robots are here. AI, take that infinite work day. It's now been coined. You're way better at that. You can work all hours. Leave the imagination to me, please, and the parts that are joyful that would be a good AI future.

Squiggly Paths To Purpose

I love that. Let's get back to your story. I want to hear more. The journey as you got into this idea of like, “Here I am exploring my idyllic life, and getting into the workplace. What happened along this way that got you to this path that you're on?

Super squiggly. I'm happy to tell you all of the weird squiggles. After college, I majored in biology and psychology. I've always had like everything's 2020 in hindsight. I'm like, “I knew that I loved work as a kid. I was interested in psychology.” That's all in hindsight. It was just like, “Psychology is cool. Biology is cool.” After college, I was like, “I don't know what I want to do.”

My parents seemed to have a good time. I took a job as a seventh-grade math teacher and spent the first part of my career in education. I moved out to Pasadena. Did a one-year fellowship in teaching seventh-grade math, which was super fun. In hindsight now, it's exactly the reason why I'm any good at executive offsite facilitation, because if you can get seventh graders to focus and get excited about triangles, you can definitely get CEOs and C-suite teams to focus and have a productive day.

After that year, I was offered a job to follow on, and I was like, “I think I'm going to be an actor.” The other part is like growing up, I had always done dance, ballet, jazz, and acting. I love a good stage performance. I'm like, “I'm in LA. I'm going to do.” I tried to be an actor for a year, which was terribly unsuccessful. You can see me in probably the basement of some USC film students, like a parent's house, some student film that never saw the light of day.

It was so bad. At the time, I was like, it was like so stressful too. “What am I going to make of my career? What am I going to become? Will I be anything?” Looking back, I think, “God, what a great time I had.” That was a lot of fun hanging out with my hipster friends at the beach on a Tuesday, going to auditions, hostessing, and tutoring to make some money. I could go on with all the squiggles, but when I stopped there for a second, that was a big one.

I love that you share that, because it's something about that, which is it almost expands your capacity to play around with different things. I think you see it as squiggly, and of course it is, but there's also an element of learning about yourself in that process. I think you bring all those tools, those elements of who you are, into the work. I think that the learning that we all need to have is being able to play around and not just always take the linear path of ratchet up to the next thing and keep on going this straight line. The straight line doesn't exist like it used to.

No. I'm so glad I had that experience because it taught me risk-taking. I was thankful to have supportive parents. I couldn't fall that far. It taught me that lesson. Clearly, you and my parents are educators. They made a decent salary, but they're not like bankrolling my life or anything. Still, I knew I could support myself through tutoring and waitressing.

I knew that if it didn't work out and I spent my last dollar, the worst that was going to happen is I was going to go live in my childhood bedroom for a while and apply for whatever jobs I could get. This was also in like 2007. It was a little bit financial crisis. I think so often we feel like we cannot take this risk because it's a detour or something terrible will happen. For the most part, people have enough fail-safes in their lives, supportive friends, and family.

Not everybody takes a bit of privilege, but you can take some career risks. If they don't work out, you can just reroute again. Again, not for everybody, not all the time, but sometimes. It's helped me do things like move across the country a few times, take on roles that didn't necessarily feel like “This is me maximizing my career potential, but sounded interesting.” I'm so glad that I did.

There's something about that, like this idea of understanding your risk tolerance, but also knowing that there's plenty of time to get where you need to go. There's no rush. I think a lot of people have this sense of like urgency of like, “Go. I need to get to the top.” The reality is, is that really what's in the cards? Is that what you're really planning for? Maybe that's not what the race is for. The race is for expansion and learning and growing through, as you say, the squiggliness of moving around and getting different experiences that ultimately will then move you faster towards what you want.

Frankly, then you get the benefit of having enjoyed that squiggle or that break. I remember the first consultancy I worked at, the CEO there, maybe I don't really know his age. Maybe he was in his late forties at the time, but I remember him telling the story that in his mid-thirties or something, he took off a year to spend that time with his sons, and they like, traveled all over the world, something like that.

I remember thinking, and you’re like, I was in crunch mode. I've got to propel my career mode now at this point. I thought that year you gave up a year of career advancement. It just felt very subversive because now I was like a little further from my acting days and like trying to climb some ladders. I'm sure did it make him a better parent, human, professional CEO, but also that he had that year of life, which was a beautiful year of life.

None of our clients cares. None of our clients were like, “You only have 27 years of experience, not 28 years of experience. We cannot possibly hire you.” It's really valuing our own days and our own enjoyment of our lives beyond what our time can get for us in the future or what it'll do for our careers. I just think we undervalue that.

Life's Fragility & Work's Value

That's wonderful. Just love your perspective on this. It's just so interesting and refreshing, honestly. I talk to a lot of people and sometimes the realization doesn't come until something dramatic happens or something jostles them out of that thinking, but it seems like you've been wired this way from the get-go, which is wonderful.

Something dramatic happened. I'm to tell you about that, too. It's like always these. Yes, I have always felt this way. I have generally really liked all of my jobs. I've definitely experienced working all hours and doing that thing, but yeah, I have generally been wired to enjoy my work and my jobs. Skipping ahead a little bit, and we can bop around. Something dramatic did happen in 2022.

My mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I took leave from work. At this point, I was a partner at SYP, which is a global transformation consultancy where I had been for years or so at the time. She got this diagnosis, and I was like, “I'm out.” I wasn't even going to take no for an answer. Such a lovely place. I wouldn't have lost my job over it, but I was like, “I'm just taking leave for the foreseeable future.”

My father already had Alzheimer's, and I'm an only child. It was like, “This is going to be me. I'm going to take care of them.” My mom wanted to come out to New York. They were still in Chicago at the time. My mom wanted to come out to New York, get a doctor here, and be closer to our family. She's always wanted to live in New York.

I moved them out, spent about nine months taking care of my mom until she died later that year. My dad's still around, pretty happy. I'm still taking care of him. It was really in that time, that was the precursor or the spark that led me then to write the book and has led me to, I guess, solidify or organize my thoughts on why we work, the fact that our working days come from our finite days on this planet, that existential argument for enjoying our work solidified during that time.

Everything that I talk about is certainly through the lens of that experience and my firm belief that everybody at some point in their life, whether it's ten years away or fifty years away, is going to wish for more days. We shouldn't be spending our weekdays wishing them away, saying, “When can I get when can it be Friday? Can this day be over yet? I hate this month.” To me, it's a real tragedy and something that I'm hoping to fix.

Thank you for sharing that. This is just so wonderful that not wonderful to hear this moment, but I think it's also one of those things that we do need to see the fragility of life and then to cherish it so much that it allows us to see the power of the insight. One of the things that you're reminding me of is that some things that I've done with my clients and the people I talked to is that I always have them think about like, “How are you planning your weeks ahead and think about things that are lighting you up.” If you have nothing in your calendar that lights you up in the week ahead, then maybe it's time to rethink your week because if you're dreading the week ahead, that's not a good way to be navigating your life, right?

No.

"Today Was Fun": The Book's Philosophy

I just love that mentality of like life is finite and we need to be filling our days with things that light us up, and it's not just the weekends that should be the focus. First of all, I just wanted to share that, but also this idea of like, where was I going to go with this? Thinking about your focus on making sure that we're having a more joyful life and making sure work is more enjoyable is something that I want to explore deeper with you and see how that really translates into the book, which I'm so thrilled. Tell people about the book.

The book is called Today Was Fun. Ultimately, I think that's a pretty good metric. If most days, not all days, just most days, at the end of the day, you can curl up in bed and think to yourself, “Today was fun.” I think we won. I think that's a pretty good life if you can say that most days. To unpack that a little bit, the book itself has two parts. The first part is all about how we make our working days more fun, more joyful.

The second part of the book is how do we make our working days not every day. How do we protect the rest of our lives? In other words, also known as our lives from the effects of overwork. I'm writing specifically to, it could apply to many different industries or people, but largely it's like the knowledge worker. The person who's firing off emails all day long, who maybe works in a culture where the pace is fast, the suits are formal, and you're trying to keep your head above water and do the right thing.

It's broken down across two parts into my seven rules for better days at work, which are all a little bit cheeky and fun, like the book is. One is shoveling shit is fun if you like your co shovelers and that, and that chapter is all which I think is true. It's all about camaraderie and how you can find joy through the people in your work. Even if the work itself is not fun, even if you're stressed out, there's so much joy to be found there.

There are two premises to the book. One is, we've been talking about, when you wish away the work week, you wish away your life. We should make the work week worthy of our days. The second is when you overwork, you underlive, and there's just no getting around that. There's clearly an opportunity cost to overworking. Even if you love your work and want to work all the time, sometimes that works for people. Some people are just wired that way.

I never want to tell anybody to follow my advice if they're happy and it's working for them. No matter what are just like our days are finite, our hours are finite. If we are overworking that come that time comes from somewhere. It comes from our rest, our sleep, our leisure, our travel, our family, our friends, and our health. With all of it, I'm hoping to give people better days.

When you wish away the work week, you wish away your life, so we should make the work week worthy of our days.

It's a great invitation. I think in many ways it also challenges the idea that its things are thrust upon us that we don't have a choice, that we just have to do these things. In many ways, we are at choice. We have more agency than we think. I think that is the real power behind what your message is.

This idea that these don't happen because some evil person is sitting behind a desk saying, “Yes, I've got them, my clutches.” It's because you've allowed yourself to accept the things that are happening to you and not allowing yourself to say, “No, I want these things. I want to be able to have fun.

I want to look at the world in a different way and maybe make choices that are more in control of where I want to live.” You said something really powerful earlier about your co-shovelers. That is a powerful shift. It's like, surround yourself in the right environment of people who also make it fun, too.

Gallup has some great research. Having a best friend at work improves employee engagement, which is, I just love that they did some questions about, like they did a survey about this. Also, it's so intuitive. If I think back on the jobs I've loved, it's been one where I do have a best friend at work, like a work bestie, someone to confide in. It makes so much a difference. I'm a big believer that there are always ways to find more fun and joy in your life.

Even if you feel like your workday is out of your control, then my reply is that you just go smaller. If you feel like everyone's slapped meetings on your calendar and you're in back-to-backs and what are you going to do about it? What I would say is when you schedule a meeting, schedule it starting five minutes past the hour so that you can take those five minutes and breathe and eat or do something. You're going to get coffee at some point during the day or water, I hope. When you do, maybe you have like a little bit of cinnamon to sprinkle on top of your cappuccino.

It's something that I call thin-slicing your joy. I talk about it in the book, but sometimes it does feel like my day is not mine. Somehow, I've sold my soul to this company, and it's whisking me away. I'm not in control. You just go small. Think about this for the next minute, what can I do to provide some comfort, joy, and laughter? Even if it's as simple as sending a work friend a little note of appreciation, now you've made their day, and they're going to think, “I should send something back at some point.” There's always hope.

I love that. There are micro moments or small make it small. Even if you have a meeting with someone you don't typically enjoy working with, maybe what you do is just like you make it shorter, and you tolerate it for just that month, that 20 minutes instead of 30 minutes. You try to get through that moment, or like even sending a gift to somebody, or a gift, or whatever they call it. Like that.

You spark up when you're something fun in a text to a friend that you're laughing as you're doing it, smiling when you do it. Even a smile, right? The whole idea of smiling, and sometimes I see myself smiling to myself, and I'm thinking, “Why am I smiling to myself?” It’s because I'm thinking of something that makes me want to smile, and it makes me feel good in that moment. That's a super micro moment.

There's actually quite a bit of stoicism in the book, especially around how do you deal with all the stress because stress is categorically unfun in most situations. At the core of Stoicism is really that you are always the master of your mind. You always have options for how you process your own thoughts. Obviously, stoicism started thousands of years ago before the dawn of like we should also be open to brain chemistry support and therapists, and not everybody's brains are built equally, and it's hard to control our thoughts sometimes.”

That all being said, generally, we do have control over our responses. We can take steps to train our brains to calm down in our bodies to calm down for that matter. If we can do that, if we can grow our own ability to self-regulate when work is getting really stressful, then that's powerful in the way that there's so much about the world and work that we cannot control. At least I'm going to think a nice thought. It's a place to start.

Redefining Legacy Beyond Overwork

Just that small shift is all you needed is just to be able to put yourself in that place of not allowing everything in the world to throw you off base. Wonderful. I think one of the things that I'd love to ask about, and this maybe reflects back to your mother and your father, is looking back and thinking about the life you've lived and say, “What is the legacy that I'm leaving behind? Did I live a good life?” You may be putting yourself in that future state of, “What do I want myself to look back on for my journey?” Do you capture that not just in your book, but also in the way you think about things? It sounds like you do.

To be perfectly honest, I have a love-hate relationship with the thought of legacy. I'll explain. I love it in many ways for what you just described because sometimes putting ourselves in the future looking back provides us a more grounded perspective than what we would have on a day-to-day basis, just trying to get something to eat and finish the emails, and get through the day.

It allows you the perspective of what this all is for. What will I make of the sum of my days and not just my daily experience? From that perspective, I think it's really powerful and beautiful. For myself, as I shared many, if I can say today was fun most days, I think that's a win. That's not to say that I don't also deeply care about impact and other people and taking care of others. Of course, I do, but the reason I don't focus so heavily on legacy in terms of what did I do for the world is because I think that purpose and meaning, and legacy focusing in that way within a culture of overwork can be sometimes dangerous.

Of course, I am pro-purpose, pro-meaning, pro-legacy. These are all beautiful concepts within a culture of balance and sustainability. Often, I see leaders and employees thinking about what impact I want to have in the world. What's the legacy I want to leave? They're thinking so far out in terms of the impact and the big picture of the success I want to have. In the process of pursuing those big, lofty goals, they're sacrificing their lives in this moment.

We only get to live one day at a time. The only option for me to experience life is right now with you in this conversation. To sacrifice our happiness with some notion of a delayed gratification as I'm going to work hard for this month, year, decade in service of my legacy, I think that can be sometimes dangerous because it's different than delaying the gratification of like, “I'm not going to eat this cookie because I want to be healthy.”

That's a good delayed gratification. It’s because what you're delaying is some like hedonistic, bad for you pleasure, but work sometimes when we think of I'm delaying the gratification of enjoying my life, but I'm going to work so hard. I'm going to climb the ladder. I'm going to get the promotion. It's okay that my kids are going to bed by themselves, and I don't see my partner, and I'm not exercising, doing any of those things.

What you're delaying is your enjoyment of life. You're delaying the time spent with family and friends. You're delaying taking care of yourself, your health, mental, and physical. You can tell I've got a bit of a beef sometimes with like, the way we use purpose and legacy. That's the love-hate relationship with the word that it can sometimes get you. I think it's important to remember that if you're not enjoying your days, most days, that is worth. Paying attention to and making a change.

Thin-slice your joy—find moments of delight even in a chaotic workday.

I'm glad I asked it because this is exactly why. I just love the way that you frame it. Your book Today Was Fun it's got a backwards or presencing to it, not a tomorrow will be great, which maybe that's a future book for you. I don't know. I think there's something about that which I value. I think we should be valuing a sense of presency to it. That's a word.

The way you framed it as well, I mean, the concept that comes to mind is the gap in gain thinking. When we think about how far we need to go to get the thing that we want, it gets us always wanting and always seeking. That can be daunting. It feels like we're always missing something. When we come from gain thinking, it's like we appreciate and we can be grateful for what we have and where we are and how far we've come and all the things that we are, and not be feeling like we're missing something.

I think that's where I really appreciate where you're speaking of. It doesn't mean that we don't want to make a bigger impact, or that we cannot make a bigger impact. Of course, we will, but when we come from that place of gain, it's the sense of, I've done great things, and I will continue to. I'll just give you a little appreciation for who I am.

I love that framing. I will do great things. I did great things today, and I will continue to. That's so beautiful because it puts you in the present moment and appreciating that what I did with this day that I have on this planet was good and enough and meaningful in and of itself. It wasn't simply the input to future breeze success one day. It was good today.

I think it's a reminder we often need to have for ourselves. I think there's often for me and you, I think sometimes we just, we still get stuck in that.

For sure.

I think your book's going to be a nice reminder for people to say like, “Let's come back to where we are and really think about where we are and how are we having fun enjoying our moments in this very moment.” We've covered a lot of ground, but I want to make sure are there any of the flashpoints that you'd like to share before we go too far along?

The Joy Of Writing And Self-Expression

What are some other good flashpoints?

What was it like to write a book? Did you feel as though this was something that you're like, “No big deal,” or was it, “I'm ready for this?”

I felt like I was ready for this. I know other authors describe it this way. This is really how I felt. I felt like I had the book inside me knocking to get out. I also know not all authors feel like this, but I felt like I just opened up my skull and the book fell out. I don't know why I feel. This is not to make anyone who finds writing painful or hard feel bad because there's lots of other parts that I felt were hard about the process, but the writing part, I think I had just accumulated all of these learnings and lessons and ideas that I wanted to share that were ready to go.

I think also consulting as a practice does something to you where you dampen a lot of your own points of view in favor of supporting your client to bring about the world that they want. There's some consulting where consultants are like, “This is what you should do.” This is what I think. A lot of the consulting that I've done is much more enabling, empowering. It's like CEO, CHRO, like what do you want for your culture? What do you see for your business?

I'm helping to draw that out and then helping them make that a reality, which was obviously amazing. It's like a playground for me to learn in and see many different cultures. I was never in that process. This is what I think your company should be like. Of course, over that time, I developed a point of view about what work should be like, about what the best cultures that I saw looked like in leading my own consulting teams, of what the best team cultures that I could create, like what I did do that created happy teams?

I just felt like I had all this stuff I wanted to share so desperately. It just took some organization and some really good editing. There's a lot of blabbing, and then my editor, Sarah, was like, “They don't need to know this.” I was like, “Okay. Thank you.” It was joyful. I love writing. I love a good turn of phrase. I love a little comedy in my writing to the degree that I can say the book is funny. I think it's pretty funny. It was joyful. I was playing. To me, it was art. It's not a business card. For me, it was really like an act of self-expression, that, of course, I hope people buy and is commercially successful. The motion of it was one of, I want to share a perspective with the world. I loved it.

I have to say, even just like experiencing the lead-up to the book and everything you've been sharing on social media. It's not performative. It feels like it's you on a page and you bringing yourself out into the world. This book seems personal, but also very much like it's alive in you. It feels like this is going to be something that really expresses you fully.

I'll also mention that along the lines of what you shared, oftentimes we're in receiving mode before we write. Receive before we transmit. When you're in receiving mode, you're just continuing to receive messages from all the different things you're doing. You let that all land, you take it all in, and then when you're ready to transmit, it just comes out. That's why you said it was fun and playful, because you were ready and it just was ready to be out. If you try to force it out, it's not going to come.

I have learned that about writing. Sometimes I have a prompt in front of me and I'm like, “I don't know what to say.” I'm like, “It's a bad prompt, different prompt.” Yes, that's always my point of view that often we create a quite struggle with something great, like I really struggled for it, and therefore it is beautiful. I find a much more successful writing when something feels easeful when it comes a little bit more naturally, which is also part of my philosophy of work too. Not everything has to be a struggle for greatness. Sometimes it can be an easy flow to greatness.

Not everything has to be a struggle for greatness—sometimes it flows.

Modeling that way is important, especially as you said, you've worked with a lot of C-suite and people who have been in really big high positions. I think the key thing is to make sure that they don't have to be struggling for their work. People always have this view of, “It has to be challenging. It has to be this hard slog.” The reality is, maybe it doesn't have to be. Maybe we can view things differently. I think that's also the call to action here for people at senior levels of don't make it harder than it needs to be. Maybe you can change the way you look at your job and make it easier.

Greg McQueen wrote Effortless. He has so many great things to say about this. One of his quotes I love is “Maybe it's not hard because it's hard. Maybe it's hard because we haven't yet found the easier way to do it.” I think it was Jeff Bezos who said, “If I have an important thing to do, I'm going to give it to the laziest person I know, because they'll find the fastest way to do it.” Anyway, I love the way that the script is flipped on its head, that, sure, there are some things that are really hard and are worth it, but also not everything is.

Books That Shaped Bree

I just realized that we're going on time here, but I have one last question for you. I've been asked what 1 or 2 books have had an impact on you and why?

I think this is my answer. Every Agatha Christie mystery, specifically the Poirot mysteries. I know this isn't like a high-brow answer, or maybe it is, I don't know. Here's why. I read Agatha Christie almost every night. I love the genre, the cozy mystery genre. I was telling my daughter about the book one time, and I was like, “It was really funny.” She's like, “Murder's not funny.”

She was like five at the time. I'm like, “I guess so.” I love a cozy mystery. I think I love them so much. Here's another, I guess, fact that maybe you might illuminate some of this. I've always been a really bad fiction reader in that it's never felt productive. I should say I wrote the book I needed to read as well. I'm from reading nonfiction or something about work. I feel like I'm learning something along the way, but reading fiction has always been like, “I'm just going to have fun.”

That doesn't seem like a good use of time. I should be doing the dishes, or like improving this or that, or getting something done. I have the pleasure of being crazy. Something about Agatha Christie mysteries, they just like sweep me away, especially to another time period, to another place, that it allows me to relax into them and to take pleasure in my own pleasure of reading. They've really helped me. They've been like my gateway drug to fiction reading, I guess, in some ways. They've meant a lot, and they're just cute.

I remember the movies that they used to have for her books way back in the day, which it just were always so much fun to watch. In the books, I read them when I was younger. Now I'm like, I'm going to go pick up an Agatha Christie and I'm going to go read it because I'm inspired by what you shared. Thank you for bringing that in.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. If you have not read it or seen it is the best. Hands down, so good.

That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Anything else you want to share before we wrap up?

No, I've had such fun.

This was wonderful. I cannot thank you enough for sharing all the stories, the insights. Your presence is enough just to bring such a wonderful presence into the space, and all the insights have been wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.

Thank you, Tony. This was great. I appreciated you having me.

Of course. Before I let you go, what's the best place for people to find you? Where can they learn about your work?

Yes, you can find me at BreeGroff.com. From there, you can subscribe to my Substack. You can order the book, which would be amazing. You will love it. I don't know if I mentioned it, but it's all snackable vignettes. It's no ordinary business book. There's even a crossword puzzle. The audiobook is fun. It sounds more like a podcast than an audiobook. I hope everyone enjoys it. From my website, you can go to the book, subscribe to Substack, and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Wonderful. Thank you again, and thanks to readers for coming on this journey. I hope that you are going to start planning some fun things in your life, start thinking about your weeks and days in a different way. I know Bree has just changed our view on the world. Thank you so much, and that's a wrap.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Bree Groff
• Bree Groff on LinkedIn
• Bree Groff on Instagram
• NOBL Collective
• Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously)
• Effortless
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

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