Why Human Connection At Work Matters With Moe Carrick

Human connection isn’t just nice to have at work—it’s essential for thriving organizations and healthier communities. Moe Carrick, work futurist, cultural architect, and best-selling author, unpacks why fostering genuine relationships in the workplace activates talent, boosts engagement, and radiates beyond office walls. Drawing from her diverse experiences—from guiding leaders through crises to balancing career demands with personal life—Moe reveals how empathy, meaningful dialogue, and a reimagined approach to performance reviews can transform organizational culture.

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Why Human Connection At Work Matters With Moe Carrick

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Moe Carrick. Moe is the Work Futurist, a Cultural Architect and the bestselling author who helps leaders and organizations turn workplace friction into fuel for growth. With over two decades of experience working with companies of all sizes, from Nike to nonprofits, her research-backed methods help teams align, scale and create cultures where connection drives performance. She's a TEDx and South by Southwest speaker, recognized by Thinkers360, Fast Company and the US Chamber of Commerce. Moe is on a mission to transform the way we work. She enables people to thrive in business to succeed. It's truly a pleasure to welcome you to the Virtual Campfire.

Thank you, Tony. It’s so good to be here. Thank you for that great intro.

I feel like this is long overdue. I’ve been so thrilled to get to know you over the years and I love your work and I love the way you show up and your passion for really driving connection with people at all aspects of what you do. I'm thrilled that we're going to have this conversation. Let’s get the fire started.

Thank you. Yeah, me too. We've been waiting

Embracing Urgency: A Life-Altering Diagnosis

Moe, as we do on the show, we share people's journeys through what we call Flashpoints and these flashpoints are the moments in your life that have ignited your gifts into the world. Of course, you have many, but I want to make sure you have a chance to share what you're called to share and you can start wherever you'd like. Along the way, we'll pause and see what themes are showing up. I'm going to turn it over to you and you can take it away. Are you ready?

I think I'm ready.

Alright, no pressure. This is your life, Moe. Take it away.

I love the expression of flashpoint and I have been thinking about a little bit how you like to roll. There is a flashpoint that stands out in my mind, which happened when I was pretty young and I was new in my career. It happened to me right at the transition from college to my first professional job. What happened was I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma and it was caught in a routine exam. I did not know what melanoma was. It was diagnosed after having had a physical for my first job after graduating from college, which was to work for Outward Bound. I was going to be a guide in a wilderness setting and I had to have a physical and I was like, “I can't pursue the career that I want.”

I can't be outside because the doctor's like, “No, you can't be outside. You can't be in the sun. You have to just be careful for the rest of your life.” I was like 23 and they took out a very large portion of my back. This is what strikes me as a flashpoint. The surgeon said, “Today this surgery will take out this amount,” which is about as much as a fist, but he said, “As recently as five years ago, we would've taken your whole arm and several ribs.”

I was like, “Keep the research coming for cancer.” I’ve had melanoma since and my most recent one was a few years ago. They just took a very small excision. At the time, for me being 23 or however old I was, it was a real flashpoint because it caused me to realize that I did not have infinite time. It created me this sense of urgency, this carpe diem of like, you don't know. There's a lot of cancer in my family. I had always known that that was a thing. I think that was one of the first flashpoints where I thought, “Don't waste time.”

I don't want to say wonderful, but it's wonderful to hear that when you know the vitality of life, you appreciate it so much and you start to really amplify your impact from that.

I think that is accurate. It did feel like it created this sense of urgency for me.

Twenty years old, to hear that and your life is just getting started at that point and it's tough to navigate cancer at that point.

Yeah, it was. It was scary. The other thing that happened at that point that's a flashpoint that I think is interesting for me is that during that process, my father, both of my parents of course were very worried and, but my father called my physician. My father was quite charismatic and he somehow convinced the physician to talk to him about my case.

I was very angry and annoyed because A, it violated HIPAA, but B, I was at that age of I was emancipating from my parents and I wanted to own this setback and this illness as a private matter. Not that I didn't need their support, I did, but I remember a rumble with him and I remember that feeling of like, “I'm an adult now.”

I think in our society, we don't have that many rituals for the transition to adulthood. For me, that flashpoint was a moment when I realized actually, you get to claim how you're going to handle this and how you want to proceed in the context of this work. I knew he was afraid and it was out of the best intention that he did that, but it was informative for me about how we do emancipate as young adults.

That wasn't something I expected to hear, but it's really an interesting way to look at. You want to be in control of your journey, especially in this type of journey. I'm sure your dad was in this place of just caring. He cared deeply and just wanted to see that everything was being taken care of.

Yes, totally. Now as a parent, of course, I’ve been on the other side now so many years later and realizing how horribly powerless it feels when you are a parent and you can't access your kids' medical records anymore. You become an advisor to them rather than that parental control. I'm sure it was a loss for him. To a certain degree, it was a little bit of a loss for me because I also realized the doctors coming to me for my decision. At the same time, it did feel empowering. Whatever age we are, that's an important emotional state for us to get grounded in. It's like we have choice and we are powerful in the context of our own lives. I think until that diagnosis, I didn't fully sink into what that meant for me on my own.

Growing up fast, that's really what it feels like. You reminded me of a story that a past guest, April Rinne. Her story of just growing up fast the passing of her parents and having to figure it all out and this is a moment where you had to really figure out how do I navigate my life at this age and figure it all out quickly because you don't know how much longer you're going to have.

You don't. I think of April often because of what happened to her at such a young age with losing her parents. One of the things that I do remember and that I think is one of the reasons that landed for me as one of my flashpoints is that it did create a high sense of urgency, but it also created a feeling of gratitude for being healthy because I survived that cancer, obviously.

That was many years ago. I survived that cancer. I, another choice point I had to make because, as I mentioned, I had just started my career as a wilderness guide and I was going to be working on a sailboat and I would be outside in the Florida Keys. I gave brief thought to internalizing what the doctor said and allowing that to say to myself, “I won't go. I'm going to turn down this job, I'm going to find a different career.”

I remember the choice of being like, “No, I'm not going to do that.” Instead, thinking through and starting to research. Back then, it was early days around melanoma research and even things like finding sun protective clothing were difficult. Now I can cover myself head to toe really easily and be outside in just about any conditions and still feel safe.

Back then, there wasn't as much of that focus. I remember thinking, “What am I going to do? How am I going to protect myself because I'm going outside? My career is going to be outside.” I remember that feeling of like, “I am going to be outside. This is not going to limit what I'm doing, but I'm going to have to find a way to do it to decrease risk.” Thus began a very long relationship with sun protective clothing.

We are powerful in the context of our own lives.

When there's a will, there's a way. You find a way. I think that also weeds its way into the way you help other people navigate. Hearing people say like, “I can't do that,” or, “This is impossible.” I'm like, “Anything's possible if you're willing to commit to making it happen.”

I was talking with a client about that around shifting mindset, instead of being fearful of what's going to happen, being aware of what is possible. Some of that may have come to me by nature, like in terms of my personality, being hardwired perhaps as an optimist, but I think some of it came from that particular flashpoint.

Navigating Career Chapters: When Passion Shifts

Tell me what happens next. You decide to give it a go. You're out there doing your Outward Bound ventures and what happened next?

I think another flashpoint for me was actually when I found myself in that career needing to make another change. I was a full-time guide for, I think it was 3 or 4 years, which basically means back then, it meant working for about $25 a day, living in your car, traveling really all over the world, but mostly around the continental United States. Taking courses in the summer, going somewhere else, leading courses in the winter.

I really did love the work. I was an innovator and worked for a program. At that time, that was a partnership between Outward Bound and inpatient therapeutic treatment for chemically dependent kids. I loved that work as well, having come from a family where alcoholism was a huge factor. Both mattered to me. I remember a flashpoint after doing that work for a while. In the field, I was with a group of kids and there were four of us as staff. For some reason, I don't remember the conditions why, but I found myself alone on the trail.

I was either ahead of or behind everybody and I was just thinking. I realized I had this deep visceral moment of like, “I am miserable. I don't like this work right now.” I was feeling deeply lonely. Part of being a wilderness guide means you're away from your friends. I was in my twenties. I was trying to have a relationship with a boyfriend. I felt very isolated and I felt this tension. The flashpoint for me was like, “I love this work but I'm not sure I can keep doing it.” It was very low wage and I was financially independent at that point and I had some dreams of a different life than the one that I was doing.

For me, the flashpoint, what I remember in my mind was just this centering of like, “You're not thriving in this particular job and that's okay.” That was the part because I think I had probably felt unhappy before, but I didn't think it was okay. I was really operating very much to like, “I'm going to make this work.” For context, I would say, Tony, back then, it was in the 1980s and there were not very many women in that work. I felt very much like a trendsetter.

I was a mountaineer. I was like living out my dreams of like being a certain woman, living this independent life and then to realize like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to plan big expeditions. I want to do something else. And then of course I was anxious, like what is that going to be? It was that moment of feeling like, “I'm on the other side of the decision. I will leave this particular job sometime soon.” I think it started me really on what has become a lifelong journey for me of understanding more deeply why we work and how important work is to our identity.

There's something about what you shared here. It's taking that the perspective of this you've chosen of that choice and seeing it as this was a season, it was a time for me and it served its purpose and now it's time for me to move into something else. It wasn't a mistake. It was actually a chapter and I'm ready to maybe transcend that and move to something else. I always think about this idea of transcend and include what was, but now move on and create what's the next chapter for me. Don't look at it as like, “That was a bad thing I did. I made a bad choice.”

I love what you're saying there because relatedly, one of my favorite mantras has long been it all made sense at the time. I think that when it comes to work, especially, but also other dimensions of our identity, when we hit an ending, we feel grief and we feel loss and we feel anxiety about what's coming. It's very easy to overfocus on what we've lost as opposed to like saying, “That now becomes me. That's in me.” You know what, Tony, in that particular job, that job has never left me. I cut my teeth on group work. I became good at process facilitation. All of those things are deeply embedded in who I am. I do not have any regret for my years in that occupation and in that job and other jobs that were related to it at all.

I think that's such a powerful mindset. We hear a lot about younger generations now who are career hopping. I just work really hard to debunk that because I'm like, that's not actually what it's about. Loyalty, the way it used to be in organizations is dead. People are looking at their careers for in this way, like, “This is making sense for me now.” That's a choice. It may not make sense for me tomorrow.

It makes a lot of pressure for employers to figure out, “How are we going to keep the talent that we want?” I think it's a real dynamic. Of course, like everything, that cycle time has sped up in the convening years since I had my flashpoint. Where people used to have 2 to 3 careers in their lifetime, now it might be 17 to 19. I think it's powerful. It all made sense at the time.

I think the key thing that an employer and an employee can do is to make sure that the time when people are there, you make it meaningful. You make it meaningful on both sides of the table. Make sure that their meaningful experiences so it's not just like a haphazard leap through different experiences and then there's no learning and there's no value exchange between employer and employee. Instead, there's meaningful exchange of impact on both sides. Both parties are left feeling like they gained in this process.

Yeah, totally. I love that, that both are benefiting and there's a, an element that you're referencing there that I love, which is the element of choice. When I think about that flashpoint for me, I can tap into the emotional state that I was in and one of the feelings I had was one of entrapment because I was literally a million miles from nowhere. I couldn't leave. There were only 4 adults with 12 very ill children. I had to stay. I felt trapped, but I also felt like, “No, Moe. You can't leave this job right now. You can't walk out of the woods and go get a coffee. That's not an option.

You can leave this job in a planful way that meets your needs and honors your employer and you have choice about how you do that. I think it's really important to remember, as employees in particular, the choices we have when we are engaging and contracting with our employer in a work relationship because it can easily feel. I can tap into that feeling of like, “I'm a victim I'm trapped out here in a job I hate.” It's like, “No. Nobody's trapped me out here. I chose this.”

You chose it but you also have, you can make a choice to do what's next. I think what's liberating about this and the way you described it as really powerful because a sense of you make the decision in your mind that I’ve made a shift of that I will do something different and soon you start to say, “I'm not trapped. I am okay. When I get down from this mountain or when I get down from this experience, I will start moving towards whatever's next. It starts to almost create that positive momentum almost from the moment that you decide. What happens is it gives you the ability to take the steps you need to create whatever's next.

From Judgment To Humanity: Corporate Leaders Revealed

Do you want me to keep going? I don’t know how many flashpoints you want. There's so much ground to cover.

I do. That's a problem when you have a 63-year-old in your podcast. I’ll speed it up because I’ll tell you two more that come up for me. There are so many and when you've lived a rich life like I have, there are just so many. When I think about in particular, like in the context of the virtual campfire and the audience you serve around the world of work, I think another flashpoint for me was graduate school.

After I left that miserable day in the wilderness, I enrolled in social work school because I was really interested in being a clinician, but a friend of mine was enrolled in OD school, in Organizational Development, and she invited me to join her for the day and I did and I loved it and I decided to switch majors.

I got my master's in Organizational Development instead of Social Work. Early on in that career, I don't know how long I was working as a professional, but I had the chance to work with a group of executives. It was also in an adventure context, which I did for many years working at a venture context with corporations. I had a chance to work with a group of senior executives from Union Carbide. Do you remember Union Carbide had a horrible accident where I think 90 people perished in an explosion of a train here in the US and many of these executives had been on station when this happened.

I wasn't the primary host of their event, I was a hired gun, hired facilitator to work with the team. It was a flashpoint for me because I realized in listening to these executives process, and it was a strategy planning retreat, it was a corporate retreat, but they were also doing some team development work. It hit me between the eyes and working with them that the trauma that they had collectively gone through of leading the organization in a loss like that was profoundly impacting how they would lead forever.

I was just a witness to that, but it caught me, it really caught my attention because I think as a young professional with a lot of idealism, I had some opinions about corporate mucky mucks that were actually very judgmental. These are profit-mongering, Wall Street people who are damaging the world. I had judgment about corporate greed, but sitting with these executives all back way those many years ago was the first glimmer for me of like, “These are just people too.”

They are not immune, they are transformed, they have grief, they are under tremendous pressure. It was an opening for me for what has now become my whole career. The whole backlit process is around supporting and holding space for those leaders to do the hard work that they do. That moment was the time, I guess, for me when they became human.

It's such a wonderful way to look at it. I have to agree with this idea, this idea that, at the core, people don't get into these corporate roles with the intention of like, “I want to do as much evil bidding as possible.” Maybe, I don't know.

No, they don't.

They're just people and what happens is sometimes they just get into really tough situations. If we can just hold them in that way and say, “How can I help this person get what they need so that they can move into a positive place, into a place that's going to help them get what they need?” I think that's one of the beauties of the work that you're doing and the work we do collectively is how do we help these humans make the right choices, get the right support they need to show up in the best possible way.

The challenges they face are material and the impacts they have are material and it impacts the world. That's what I mean by material. It doesn't only impact those individual humans. It's one of the reasons I think I’ve stayed in as long as I have in this work of consulting and coaching to organizations. I do believe that how those leaders show up changes the people they interact with, the systems they interface with, the communities that they serve, the communities they live in and ultimately the world. I really believe that's how change happens. That was a powerful one for me.

How leaders show up changes the people they interact with, the systems they interface with, the communities they serve and live in, and ultimately, the world.

The last one I’ll share even though there are many little micro flashpoints, but the one that I think surfaces for me per your question is probably the flashpoint of becoming a parent. I have three grown children and a stepson. I'm now in the phase of becoming a grandparent. I remember profoundly the part I wanted to mention to you as a flashpoint is obviously having a child was transformative for me in the way it is for many.

What the flashpoint I wanted to name relevant to this show was trying to be a parent and working. That has been my life story. I’ve always worked and even to this day, my children are all grown now, but I still feel this, I would call it this unrelenting pressure. Am I showing up in the world of work well enough and am I showing up in the world of, and I'm going to say parent, but it's really like family member, community member, friend, lover, partner, human? Those two buckets, the work and my life and my relationships, has created such a tension in my life at times I’ve felt like I just sucked at both and at times I felt like I was kicking it in one and the one was suffering.

At times, I felt like, “We're okay now. We're like in a groove.” I’ve come to see now that of course I'm not alone. All of us are on this journey of figuring out how do we find work that supports us but also feeds our souls and gives us purpose and also be in a relationship to the people in our home environment, wherever that is, that are so essential for our ultimate spiritual fulfillment around relationship. Those two things can seem opposing and I want to help us as a worldwide community help make them less in conflict with each other.

The Parenthood Puzzle: Balancing Work & Life

I feel that viscerally, just the sense of like it's one of those things that we all struggle with, as you said, and it's almost feels like you do the best you can with what you have at any given time and know that even with that, that's all that people can expect. All that you can expect of yourself is to do the best you can.

That might mean that sometimes it's going to be dialed up and sometimes it's going to be dialed down in one area versus another. This idea of balance is just, I don't know, I still feel a challenge with the word of the work-life balance because that actually means that you are at an equilibrium at all points and it's not true. There's always going to be one that's going to be taking up a lot more space than the other.

We don't need to demonize the other. I think that's what you're speaking about and I love it. For me, the word that popped into my mind as you were talking is grace. Grace with each other. I was thinking when we were prepping for the show, I was sharing with you, we had had a conversation. I had an idea, I floated to you for partnership and you were like, “Yes, I'm all in,” and then I have failed to deliver it and I still plan to.

The grace with which you receive that, the grace with which you hold space for that. I'm not naive enough to know that in the world of work, we can't be willy-nilly around expectations, but at the same time, who we are is who we are at work as well. The boundaries we used to have in place around work and life are gone, thankfully. Now there's this opportunity for us to bring so much grace and space and care with one another for whatever it is we're dealing in each and to be able to be grounded in what's good enough.

Cultivating Connection: A Workplace Imperative

You planted a seed earlier and I just wanted to see if we can give it some water, this idea of the humanity inside of the workplace and having the impact in communities and the social impacts that we can have. I think the through line around this is how do we create human connection in a more meaningful way? I would love to hear more about your thoughts around what you've seen done well and where have you seen it really take hold, where it's not just a nice-to-have but it really impacts the way things are done inside organizations. Do you want to take that?

I do. We've been measuring in organizations for a long time in employee engagement. I understand why we also measure culture. There are lots of different things we measure in organizations and I’ve been studying and working in countless tools. I have more than 1.5 million data points of my own research at point to why human beings do work. It's what the subject of all three of my books and it's not changed.

Why we work has not changed. Yet what interferes with us feeling enlivened by our work, those two things are connected. What enlivens us at work is connected to why we work and employers and employees are often still missing each other around connecting those two things. What I see happening is that employees go into the world of work with high hopes and then they find that some of their most basic needs are not met.

The one we're talking about right here in particular is our need for human connection. It's a primal need as important to us as food, water, shelter, safety and security. If we work full-time, we spend more time at work than we do anywhere else. Our connectedness at work becomes one of the most important reasons. You hear it when people leave, they say when they're asked at exit, “Why do you leave?” “I have a broken or fragmented relation with my boss. Lack of trust in a team that became hostile.” These are the reasons people end up not thriving.

If we work full time, we spend more time at work than anywhere else. Our connectedness at work becomes one of the most important reasons we stay.

For me, there's two different big buckets there. One is in order to activate the talents of our people for success. In order to get everybody bringing their best at work, we need to ensure that we're providing as employers ways for them to have deep roots of connectedness to activate those talents. Not bringing my best means I'm retired on station, that means I'm bringing one-tenth or one-one hundredth of my good stuff to work and I'm leaving the rest at home, which is a lot more expensive to employers than employee churn.

The pressure begins to be on employers to figure out what's the algorithm, what are the different pieces of structure and process that I need to have in place in my system, particularly in terms of culture, leadership and team dynamics that focus on that connectedness? That's all part one. We can go into detail there if you want, but I think part two then for me is this deep hope and this feeling that I have is that that radiates everywhere else. Workers go home. All of us.

We go home. We live in community, we live in homes and in apartments and in villages that have ways of operating that are impacted by what it is that we have left when we come home and how we interact in those communities interfaces at a state level and at a national level and at international level is my belief. Those same attributes and character behaviors matter. Part of that is around businesses being responsible for their impact on communities as well.

We've seen some of that really illuminated with changes caused by COVID-19, like businesses who aren't having workers come to geographic locations anymore and really devastating local economies, let's say, of food service restaurants and coffee shops in places like downtown San Francisco who don't have workers coming anymore because people are at home. That's a downstream impact of remote work that impacts all of us on a meta level.

To me, there are those two big places. There’s what's happening that connects us internally to bring out our best and then there's what happens that we carry forward into community from the workplace that increases our social connection. Tony, you know this. We're living through a period of huge loneliness and social isolation. Social capital is on the decline in every space and place out there, including work. There's a crisis happening simultaneously to the dynamic we're talking about here.

Healthy Inside, Radiant Outside: Organizational Well-being

Just something that's dawning on me. Maybe this is where all the threads start to connect as I think about a healthy inside creates something that radiates outside. We usually think about it from the individual. If you keep your body healthy, then what happens is your mind thinks clearly and you are able to do a lot of things that your actions are able to radiate more positively.

I think the same thing can be said for a healthy environment inside an organization that really allows a person to thrive inside. Good connections, meaningful work, the right types of ways that people can go home and then show up for their community for the people around them, for the ways that they're contributing outside of work then becomes a healthy inside-outside context.

I work a lot in the healthcare setting and I’ve also done a lot of work with first responders and my cousin is a police officer. He and I had a really rich conversation one day about the impact of trauma for frontline workers and for the first responders face. We see this in healthcare workers really also at every level and how much he has appreciated the support of his boss in particular. My cousin's retired now, but in his environment and his team to have strategies for dealing with secondary trauma that they face in the course of their work.

It's not extra if in the case of a police officer. They're just exposed to trauma as bystanders and as helpers over and over again. He has spoken really profoundly of what it meant to him in terms of his own well-being and the health of his family to have a way to integrate those two experiences. I think that's true in other settings different than healthcare or first responders in ways that really matter. However, we tend to act like one stops and the other begins as opposed to actually they're both happening at the same time. I'm working and I'm connected in my community at the same time at our best. I don’t know if that makes sense.

It makes a lot of sense. It's great to be able to think of it that way because it's almost like we need to be an integrated whole, which doesn't mean just integrated whole at work. It means integrated whole everywhere. It's not only an A nice to have, it's actually how we feel fully expressed as humans. I think that's the goal.

Totally. The crisis that we are seeing of disconnection right now has causative contributions. It's happening for reasons it's not happening spontaneously. I just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. Have you read it yet?

I have, yeah.

Heartbreaking book but really powerful. For those that haven't read it, he's really unpacking the dual events of the advent of the smartphone, combined with childhood being seen as dangerous with child abductions and stuff in the ‘80s. These two factors have contributed quite a bit to the rise in anxiety and also social isolation. Now we're seeing young people entering the workforce with limited social capital skills.

In other words, they're not as fluent in how to connect in real time, not through digital means. Also, in every workplace, we have the rise of AI and machine learning impacting every job in the land, including yours and mine. I think we are in this period now where we have the chance to really get clear in discerning what the connective labor is, to use Allison Pugh’s term. She uses that term in her book The Last Human Job. What is the connective labor that's so critical to our sustenance as human beings and to keep us thriving even while we integrate technology in how we work? Both matter but technology is limited and it's limited in terms of human connection. It can't do that.

Technology is limited, especially in human connection.

To bring this back to what you shared earlier, that's a choice we have to make. It's not out of our control. We have to make the choice to say, “I want to make sure that the connectiveness that we create is intentional and not just by default forced into technologies or based on what everyone else is expecting. This should look like we can all individually and collectively create that path that we want.

It takes some effort. I was thinking. I was sitting out in my garden and my husband came home from running an errand, it was on the weekend. He walked by and I was on my phone and I was scrolling. I was scrolling LinkedIn or Instagram or something and I didn't say anything to him. I saw him come by and he walked by and then he came back and then he said, “What are you doing?” I realized like absolutely nothing. I'm connected to people that I don't care about, that don't matter to me, watching stupid videos that are not doing anything to enhance my relationship. It's a Saturday and I have this person who I'm in relationship with who wants to engage and I think of the many minutes of my life that I’ve lost.

I'm not saying that like social media isn't important. For many of us, it's how we sell and market our businesses. It's how reconnection. I'm not down on it 100% but I think as you said, it has a place and a space in our lives and we have to make really conscious choices. Tony, you were asking about where I'm seeing organizations do this really well and I’ll give you one example.

I work with a community health center here in my town. They're called Mosaic. They provide service to thousands of people here in our town. Really good, award-winning community health center. I’ve been working with them for years and they've implemented a bunch of our programs, leading people program, etc. One of the things that they've implemented is our monthly meetup process, which is a dialogue-based way to talk about performance monthly.

In the process of implementing that system, they have eliminated their annual reviews. What they have going on there is so enticing because employees from the front lines of the C-suite are having regular meaningful relational conversations, connecting conversations with one another every month. It's hard to do, especially on the provider side because these people are seeing patients, they're busy. It's not like this is easy and it's not that it doesn't have problems.

However, they've gotten so much lift in the health of their culture, in the engagement of their people, in the overall morale and in recruiting the talent they need to serve the population, which is hard in healthcare right now. Partly because this one process that they've implemented with rigor and consistency is being operationalized in a way that emphasizes connectedness between humans and it attaches people to the organization. When you talk to people who work at Mosaic, they say consistently, “I love it here. I love working here. It's like, “Can you bottle that?” That's what every employer in the land wants.

People dream of that, that's for sure.

Totally. They pay millions yes to try to get that. It's this simple tool and I don't mean simple like it's not simple to operationalize, but it's profound when you actually begin developing chops for having that conversation compared to the legacy inherited way of talking about performance, which is once a year with rating and ranking systems. We know that gives us no evidence that people actually improve over time.

You said it's not easy. It's hard to get there, but the reality is start somewhere. Start and see where it goes and you never know this could be the thing that's going to change everything. I think that's the great way to look at it.

You get better over time. I have another system, another client who is a beverage manufacturer. They've implemented that same tool and the CEO and I were debriefing something and he said, “It took us about a year. I feel like the system took about a year before we got good at these conversations. They were really awkward at first.” I was like, “Thanks for hanging in there.”

Transformative Reads: Books That Shaped A Life

Persistence pays off. I know we're getting close to the end. We could talk for days.

I know. We could go on and on

I do have one last question for you if you're willing to entertain it. What are 1 or 2 or more books that have had an impact on you and why?

I love to read. It's one of my private passions and so I loved your question because I'm like avid reader. I was a kid who would read the Sears catalog when I was little. I’ll read anything. If you could see my desk right here, there's ten books stacked up. I think that there are so many that have impacted me, but I’ll talk about 1 that I remember and 1 that's current. One that I remember is reading Wallace Stegner's novel, The Angle of Repose. I was born in California but I was raised in New England and I had fantasies of the American West. I was captivated by the story of our First Nation’s indigenous people. I wanted to understand more about the open space of the West.

I now live in the West and I blame Wallace Stegner because that book gave me a view of a Western landscape that I didn't know existed. How I read that book, a little side note, was that my mother drove with me when I moved from New England after grad school to Seattle. My mother drove with me cross-country and we read it aloud to each other, which was just beautiful. Wallace Stegner is one of her favorite authors. That's one book that allowed me to escape and I love good fiction that is a story of time and place.

A book that's captivating me a lot right now, I mentioned already, is The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World from Alison Pugh. I think I'm loving Pugh’s research. She's a sociologist and I actually don't love reading nonfiction even though I write it. I don't know about you, but it's hard to keep my tension with nonfiction. What I love about what Pugh is doing is that she's really taking this moment in time, this rise in AI.

In particular, she's talking about jobs where connective labor is a critical part of the job that's typically undervalued, underpaid, and also largely women's work. She's saying like, “What is this thing we call connective labor and how does this time in history allow us to actually see that work for the value that it is?” That is what I’ve often felt about teachers, counselors, people leaders, physicians and mental health workers, these are going to become the highest paid jobs of the future because they cannot be done by machines. I just love that there's like a researcher out there who's looked at this in a broader way and I'm enjoying the way that she's framed it up quite a bit.

Yeah, it's funny. I’ve got that book on my shelf and I haven't had a chance to really pick it up and really dive deep but now I’ve been inspired to take that leap. The story you shared about the other book, I just love it when you have a story about it, that moment of you'll always remember that book because of that journey with your mother. There's something so beautiful about that.

I guess the other piece I would add about that, and thank you for reminding me of that because I think it's helpful for all of us to think about those stories that we have and what they carry with them. For me, that story was like a literal drive into the Western landscape with my mother who was born and bred in the West but had raised me in the East, exploring a landscape that had more space in it than I ever imagined was possible and just feeling the connection to her.

It's helpful for us to think about the stories we have and what they carry. 

She's now passed. She died during COVID and not a day goes by when I don't think of my mother and that particular memory around that particular book and my love of reading like comes a lot from her. Thank you for asking the question and for reminding me of that thread and that through line because it's an important one for me.

I hate to say goodbye.

I know. This has been so fun. I don't want to do the rest of what's on my day.

It's just been such a wonderful conversation and everything that you've shared has been just so powerful. I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation with you. Thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve loved every moment of it.

Thank you for having me, Tony, and thanks for putting together such a great show. I love it and it's just an honor to be in dialogue with you always.

Thank you so much. I’m taking that with me. Before I let you go, though, you’re not off the hook yet, you’ve got to share with people where they can find you and what's the best place to learn more.

Absolutely. Thank you. The best place is probably going to be straight to my website, which is Moementum.com. I'm also quite active on LinkedIn. I’d love to have people follow me there. I'm on Instagram too, but it's more for fun. If people are on Instagram, happy to join me there too.

Yes, definitely go check out Moe and she shares so many great insights and stories, so do go check out her work and her books are amazing. Definitely have fun exploring. That is a wrap.

Important Links

• Moe Carrick
• Reshaping Our Relationship With Change: Living A World In Flux With April Rinne
• The Anxious Generation
• The Last Human Job
• The Angle of Repose
• Moe Carrick on LinkedIn
• Moe Carrick on Instagram

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