This episode features an interview with Laila Tarraf, author of Strong Like Water. After losing her parents and husband, Laila learned that compassion was essential in her personal and professional life. Prior to writing her book, Laila served as the Chief People Officer for Allbirds and Peet’s Coffee, and was the Vice President of HR for Walmart.com. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Laila to discuss leading with love, harmony between company values and felt experience, and psychological safety.
This episode features an interview with Laila Tarraf, author of Strong Like Water. After losing her parents and husband, Laila learned that compassion was essential in her personal and professional life. Prior to writing her book, Laila served as the Chief People Officer for Allbirds and Peet’s Coffee, and was the Vice President of HR for Walmart.com.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Laila to discuss leading with love, harmony between company values and felt experience, and psychological safety.
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“It matters more that what your stated values are mirror the felt experience, than what those stated values are. There's a cognitive culture, which is what you say your values are and the stated words. And then there's the emotional culture. It's like, ‘Okay, but how does it feel? How are people talking to me? How are we relating to each other?’ And the greater the dissonance between those two things, that's where you run into issues because then, employees are like, ‘Well, we say it's this, but what I'm seeing is this.’ And that's where trust breaks down. And so it actually hurts you to have these beautifully well-articulated values and the accouterments that come with whatever you think employees are looking for; free lunches or workout rooms, but you're not able to talk to your manager. You're not clear on what your role is. Conflict is swept under the rug, So, it becomes passive aggressive. It's all of those things. It's your felt experience really, that is the true culture and the other things become like window washing and that actually ends up hurting you because then you lose the trust.” – Laila Tarraf
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:52): Laila’s background
*(05:58): Segment: Story Time
*(06:14): Laila discusses her book Strong Like Water
*(17:17): Laila’s advice for leading with courage and love
*(27:49): Segment: Ripped From The Headlines
*(28:29): Skills leaders need to have to guide employees through challenging times
*(31:24): Segment: Asking For a Friend
*(31:49): What future changes in leadership Laila expects
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Links:
Connect with Laila on LinkedIn
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: So Laila, how are you today?
Laila Tarraf: I'm doing well.
Thank you, Amanda. How are you?
Amanda Berry: I'm doing really well. Thanks for asking and thank you for joining me. I wanna start off and just understand a bit more about you. You have a very impressive background. Can you talk about your career journey and how you got to where you are today? .
Laila Tarraf: Sure. That's a, that's a big question.
I went to a business school at HAAS, at UC Berkeley, and I graduated in 1998, and that was the beginning of the first internet bubble, as maybe you'll remember, I'm not sure how old you were around that time, but there were a lot of opportunities and I had spent the previous. Seven years as a recruiter, and I really wanted to try to move out of recruiting and move into more of a central sort of strategic business role.
And there were all these crazy dot coms that were popping up and I had the opportunity to work for a web van, which at the time was this. Was sort of the poster child of the first internet, bubbled Goldman Sachs put all this money into it and it was a last mile delivery to the consumer groceries, and of course it imploded.
It was just an idea before its time. But my eight months as the director of recruiting there made me an expert in e-commerce. And so then I got the opportunity. Go to the very first iteration of walmart.com. Walmart at the time had been trying to build a website since 95. It was still very early days, and they couldn't get the talent they needed in Bentonville, Arkansas.
So they. Decided they would open up a walmart.com out here in the Bay Area, and I was employing number seven and I worked for Jean Jackson, who was the CEO from Banana Republic. And after a year building the company to 250 people, she said, Hey, why don't you consider the HR role you've been doing it? It.
And my first impression was, oh, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not an HR person. I'm a, I'm a business person, . And, you know, thank goodness I, I took the role because it really ended up being a, a really wonderful career for me. And what I didn't see then, that I recognize now, is that HR was really going through an inflection point.
I think before the two thousands it was. Pretty downstream, more compliance and administrative focus. And then I think with the internet and all this focus on talent, and there was a statistic that was going around at the time that said that a really good engineer versus an just an okay engineer could improve your revenues by 10 x.
So then with all those folks on talent, all of a sudden the competencies in HR. Around learning and development and talent acquisition, they began to be more important, and that was what I really loved to do, so I had a chance to do that. We built walmart.com from zero to about 650 million, and after about seven years, all roads led to Bentonville, Arkansas.
And I didn't wanna move to Arkansas, so I reached out and learned about the Chief People Officer job at Peet's Coffee and Tea, and was the Chief People Officer there for the next seven years. Really, that's where I learned and honed my craft working for a public company. And then I, I took a little bit of break, came back, did about seven years in private equity and human capital, and then most recently at Allbirds, where I was able to lead through.
Pandemic and, and everything that's happened over the last few years. So three big HR roles in operating companies. All kind of a slightly different phases, or a startup to high growth. One that was a subsidiary of the Fortune One company at the time. One that was a public company that went private, and then the last, a private company that went public.
So I've seen different iter.
Amanda Berry: You've had your hands in
some, some really impressive companies, walmart.com. I mean, that's still going really strong today. You know, it's, they're trying to rival Amazon if, if they aren't already, so that, that's pretty impressive.
Laila Tarraf: Yeah. I think they call it Walmart e-commerce now, or, yeah, they don't call it walmart.com anymore.
It's fully integrated into Walmart, Inc. Now.
Amanda Berry: So we're gonna move us into our first segment story time. Welcome
to Story Time, story time. Lemme give you a story
among those other accomplishments you just spoke of. You're also an author. You recently released a book in 2021 called Strong Like Water. What inspired you to write that
Laila Tarraf: book? Oh, about a dozen years ago when I was at Peet's, I was in my first year really learning how to be a leader and an executive, and I was a new mom.
I had a, a little girl that was two years old, and in the following four or five years, I ended up losing my husband, my father, and my mother in pretty quick succession. And that was really the first time I had ever experienced. That level of loss in my life. So up until that point, I'd never really allowed myself to really to go deep in any sort of sort of icky feelings, anything less than or happy and positive.
and if anything negative did happen, I just sort of ignored it or intellectualized it or reframed it to the positive. I was very, very good at that. And it's not like those are bad qualities, but I really ended up using them as coping mechanisms to deal or not deal as it were with the messiness of life.
And when I suffered those losses, it was very clear to me. I just had to get real. I couldn't. what I was going through for probably the first time in my life, if not for me, but so I could model what healthy grieving looked like for my little girl. And so the original motivation in writing my story was that I didn't wanna forget the details of everything that had happened so that I could.
My daughter Nadia. The story is she got older, but as I made my way through the losses, having to keep it together and raise a child alone, I realized that I couldn't compartmentalize my feelings anymore and keep my personal professional life separate. And the more I brought those two things together, the more I.
my facade, my sort of happy, happy no matter what was going on. And I started to write down insights I was having and how differently life was showing up for me. Much more authentically. Conversations that were a lot more intimate. Vulnerable, much more fulfilling. And when I shared with friends some of these things I was experiencing, More often than not, they would say, oh yeah, me too.
I do that. Oh yeah, I, that really resonates with me. And that's when I started realizing, you know what, the details of my story might be very specific to me, but we are all on the same journey in life. I think it's this inner journey back to our true and authentic selves, right? We're we're born in our true essence, and then we sort of, Personalities and defense mechanisms and coping mechanisms to hide the things that we think don't serve us.
And we live sort of this fragmented life until something shakes us into recognizing that, oh no, actually this is only a part of me and it's a little stressful and it's. Inauthentic and then we start bringing back all those pieces that we, we had cut off from ourselves. And so I thought if I could tell my story around that realization for me and how I have tried to become more whole and live a more wholehearted life, then perhaps it could resonate with others that might be in a similar place or struggling with something that I was struggling with.
And that's kind of what's what's happened.
Amanda Berry: Wow. That's an amazing story. Do you mind if we kind of dig into that a little bit? I, I have a lot of questions about the book and I'd love to love to get your thoughts on it. Well, lemme start with like, what do you want people to take away? If they were to go out and get strong like water, what do you hope they take away from
Laila Tarraf: it?
The book can be read on many different, Levels on one level, one lesson I'd like readers to take away is that times of adversity in our lives really provide us with opportunities for growth if we allow ourselves to be present and really feel what's coming up and, and not denying it, and allowing ourselves to feel the pain associated with loss rather than making you.
does actually make you more resilient and stronger. It's counterintuitive, but it's true. I think another layer on this is as a woman working in business, it's easy to adopt. The more patriarchial examples of power, strength, aggression, driving for results and lose touch with the other side of the coin.
The more traditionally feminine qualities and, and I'm not talking about gender here, it's sort of the yin and the yang, right? Tenderness. Nurturing compassion that I think can be every bit as powerful as the driving and the aggression. And the key is how you combine them skillfully. That was, that was my journey.
I only knew one expression of power and it was the one that I was looking around. I'm like, okay, that's how these guys are acting. I'm gonna do that too. . And I think on the deepest level, I would love for readers to feel. that self-forgiveness and self-love are really the paths to accepting ourselves. And if you allow yourself to stay present to what life brings you, then you'll really be able to experience the full beauty alongside the pain of whatever life brings.
And I. Like them to learn. As I did that, leaning into the resistance. We all feel when we're scared or nervous or just don't wanna deal with something is what will ultimately set us emotionally and spiritually free.
Amanda Berry: I, I love that lesson. I, and I, I just wanna relate to that for a second. I know, I know you spoke about the loss you had, but I know I've been in a position where feeling that loss and I, I remember consciously making the decision that I'm going to live in this cuz there's no easy way out of it.
So I'm going to accept it. And I think that's the fear. I know that for a second I had like, it feels weak and vulnerable and awful. Like I'll never climb out of this, but I just made the decision. There's no way through this other. Working through it. There's no easy way out of it.
Laila Tarraf: I mean, you're way smarter than I am.
I fought it . It was a street fight because it was tied to my story. You know, my story growing up was I had to be strong and capable and that was the only thing that would keep me safe. And subconsciously I was worried, scared that if I didn't show up sort of really powerfully that I would lose all my.
and when your story becomes your identity considering shifting, that is really scary because it feels like, well, if I'm not that person, then who am I? Right? It's like losing your identity in a way. . Yeah,
Amanda Berry: mine was, I was afraid it would manifest in ways that would be even worse if I didn't just face it. Uh, just, just like really, like it's gonna come out somehow.
I honestly felt like as part of that like power image thing, is I don't want other people to see it in, in ways that I can't control me and maybe right, wrong or indifferent. So I'm just gonna work through it and it's only mine really to own and deal with. And the only way through it is to face that I move on and then other people won't have to deal with it with me.
Laila Tarraf: That's really smart. It's true. Because the only way out is through, right? I think Dick Han says that. Yeah,
Amanda Berry: exactly. And I can't recommend this book enough. I've had it here and I, the first sentence on the front, that subtitle, How I Found the Courage to Lead with Love in Business and in Life. I wanna talk about like, there's a moment where you, you, you made the decision and you had to find that courage, but I wonder if you could just help us understand what it was.
Before this, I mean, you've talked a little bit about the ways you saw power and leadership before, but maybe just pull back that curtain a little bit and help us understand your leadership style before writing this book, experiencing this loss and
Laila Tarraf: writing this book. After my book came out, I asked a friend of mine who I'd met@walmart.com, and then she came to work at Peet's.
I said, Hey. I said, did I used to be a Just tell me , because you know, you don't always see yourself clearly. Yeah, right. And, and like, what did I used to be like? And she goes, no. She said, I, I wouldn. , ever use that word, which is nice. , she said. She said The difference between how you were before and how you are now is before.
I would never have gone to you with a really hairy problem because I didn't think you'd make the space to just listen. and kind of work through it, and that hurt, but it was really Yeah, true. I, I was such a problem solver. I, I mean, you couldn't even finish sentence. I, I got the answer, . I got it. I got it. I seen this.
I go, and I, you know, I may not have been in the smartest, but I was the fastest, and I, and I took pride in that and I just wanted to wrap it up and put a bow on it and put it away because I had no ability to stay with any sort of messiness in terms of the feelings. I was very direct, I was quick, I was solution.
I tackled big complex problems. Maybe sometimes I bruised people's egos or didn't pay enough attention to how they were feeling because I just wanted to get to the answer. And then when I got to that answer, I wanted the next answer, and on and on and on. And so I think how I've changed now is I just try to make a lot more space for the conversations and you know, I think.
Leading through the pandemic. I could never have done that had I not learned that very important lesson because leading through the pandemic we had no answers. And it was really just making the space for the conversation and allowing people to be scared, be anxious, be worried, and have the ability, the capacity to hold that and yet provide some guidance in however way we.
And so what I ended up doing was creating sort of principles that we would communicate to folks about what was important and how we would make decisions, even if we didn't know exactly what those decisions were. What we were prioritizing.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. And I might be oversimplifying this question and asking for an over oversimplified answer here for our listeners.
What are some ways they can start shifting that mindset to, to lead with courage and love, to find the courage to lead with love? Is there some ways that you've seen work for people that listeners might be able to adopt in their life, to begin to identify this as an issue and, and
Laila Tarraf: evolve. Marshall Goldsmith, who I think was like the first coach ever.
He's coached some of the best CEOs, and he did a workshop at HAAS after I graduated and he said, look at you. Oh, you freshly minted MBAs. You're just dying to add value, aren't you? ? And we were all the same. And he said, the next time you're compelled to say something, I want you to do two. First breathe, count to five and breathe.
So pause and ask yourself, will my saying this? Increase their level of commitment. And if it doesn't, don't say it cuz it's not for them, it's for you. So I think pausing. really seeking to understand what is this person saying to you? A lot of times we're not listening, right? Practicing active listening.
Are we really listening to what the person is saying or are we coming up with our own response in our head, waiting for their lips? Stop moving so we can interject something. If we really stop to listen, to try to take in all the information, their body language, their tone, their mood. , then people feel really heard, and that is what makes people feel cared for and loved.
That's it. That's all it takes. I used to think that I had to have the answer. Most of the times people don't really want the answer. They want you to listen. They want you to empathize. You may need to give guidance or brainstorm. It kind of depends on the conversation, but it really. How you bring love into the equation is really seeing the other person, and you do that by truly listening and empathizing with what they're saying.
It doesn't mean coddling that the challenge here is how you integrate the two extremes. There is listening, there's empathizing, which are skills, but there's also setting expectations and. , and it's how those two things come together and coexist. I think that is the hap trick for leaders. Everyone's gonna do it with their own personal style, and what I've seen is it's much easier to be sort of command and control and sharp elbowed, and it's also easy to be a little bit like a den mother.
Everything's fine, but nothing gets done. But how do you bring all those qualities together to set expectations, establish boundaries. And also make the space for listening.
Amanda Berry: as I'm listening, you talk about that and I hope that this is appropriate, but I, I get images in my head when you say like, sharp elbows versus den mother.
Right. I, I automatically think of gender. Mm-hmm. . Right. And to what degree do you see like gender education background playing a role on this?
Laila Tarraf: I think it's in 80, 20, 20. I had very naturally more what would be called masculine leadership traits. Right? I, I was very comfortable pushing back. I was very comfortable being direct and, you know, I'm a woman and there are lots of men that are much softer in their approach, so it's not, Strictly men and women, but I think it's kind of in, in 80 20.
And, and I also wonder, I don't know this to be true, but I think things have changed so much in the last 10 years. But you know, 30 years ago it was definitely much more top-down, hierarchical and a lot more men than women in senior roles. And so I think for women like us that came up in that environment, You see more of us that are able to go toe to toe like that in those more senior roles.
My sincere hope is that that is changing, and I see it changing already because I see even male leaders now. Leading in a much softer, more balanced way. And so I think that's part of what's come out of the pandemic and also all the social unrest and the fact that we're talking about unconscious bias.
We're a lot more aware of what some of these traits have been that no one would talk about before. And now I think we're becoming more aware of them and trying to be a little more. .
Amanda Berry: So let's talk a little bit about that. Early two thousands, you, you were@walmart.com, you sort of already spoke about that, and then you went on to Peet's as the Chief People Officer.
And I'm just wondering, over time what have you seen differences within these companies or just trends a long time that you can talk about that's helped companies be successful?
Laila Tarraf: Yeah, it's funny. When I went from Walmart to Peet's, I became much more popular in the Bay Area. Nobody wanted to talk to me when I was at Walmart.
And Peet's was so beloved, and I mean, politically and culturally, the two companies could not have been any different in that Walmart was very right-leaning, headquartered out of Arkansas, and Peet's was very left-leaning. It was founded in Berkeley. Walmart was more focused on operational excellence.
Pete more focused on product quality, and both companies had really strong values focusing on doing the right thing. Respect and care. and their cultures were real assets and enablers to their mission and their strategy at the same time, even though their cultures lean to to different directions, I saw very quickly how having a strong culture can be a little bit of a double edge sword in a way because the values tied you together.
They also became a reason or an excuse not to change, and I heard the same thing from my barista in the Berkeley store that I did from a Walmart executive, or you know, oh, we don't do that here. That's not our culture. . And so I think it's interesting. Everyone wants a strong culture, especially now people really recognize how that could be the real difference maker in how people show up, how they work with each other, the values you align to.
The other side of that is making sure that you don't use that as an excuse not to continue to evolve. Cuz we live in a dynamic world. .
Amanda Berry: Yeah. It feels like companies are very focused on culture. They wanna create a good culture, a good employee experience. And as you were just talking about that, and this, this may be sort of just left field question, but it, it feels like a lot of companies are striving for like, The same culture.
They wanna have beers in the fridge, ping pong tables or you know, it feels like there's a couple good examples that have worked. You know, they look at the sort of, the flexibility of maybe like a Google and people try to match that, but in reality, like sometimes it doesn't match that. Do you think there's a lot of danger in a lot of people trying to, trying to match this, this like perfect idea of what they think the perfect employee culture is, but then not being able to deliver
Laila Tarraf: it?
Yeah, that's really well said. It matters more that what your stated values are mirror the felt experience than what those stated values are. There's a sort of a cognitive culture, which is what you say your values are and the stated words, and then there's. Emotional culture. It's like, okay, but how does it feel?
How are people talking to me? How are we relating to each other? And the greater the dissonance between those two things, that's where you run into issues because then employees are like, well, we say it's this, but what I'm seeing is this. And that's where trust breaks. and so it actually hurts you to have these beautifully well articulated values and the accoutrements that come with whatever you think.
employees are looking for free lunches or workout, you know, rooms, but you're not able to talk to your manager. You're not clear on what your role is. Conflict is swept under the rug, so it becomes passive aggressive. It's all of those things. It's your felt experience really, that is the true culture, and the other things become like window washing and that actually ends up hurting you because then that's, like I said, you, you lose.
Employees are super smart. You can't be fake about it. It's better that you don't say anything. It's better that you don't even have values if you don't. If you're not gonna live them, cuz you're putting a stake in the ground saying This is who we are, this is what's important to us, and they're watching.
Yeah. It feels
Amanda Berry: like if, if any of our listeners have ever worked at a place where you were told the culture's this, then you get there and it's wildly different. You, you know that probably within the first couple days. Yes. And I can guarantee we all go, uhoh, this isn't gonna be
Laila Tarraf: good. Well, and you, they feel betrayed.
I heard Adam Grant and Esther Perel talking about this. , our relationship with companies used to be, it just used to be more transactional. I mean, on, on, on some level, of course, our relationship with every job is transactional cuz we give our time and we get money. But, uh, There's been a movement to connect more deeply with employees, right?
To say, no, we care about you as human beings. And when you do that, when you break that trust, it really is a betrayal. It feels like a personal betrayal. No longer like, oh, okay, well this, this isn't working. I need to go find something else. It's. Much deeper. And I think that's what we're seeing now. I mean, I'm hearing some of the news around employees getting let go, tech companies and what are you gonna do to support them?
And lemme tell you, in the nineties when people were getting laid off, nobody was asking how you were gonna support the employees through that. It was just like, sorry, you can go now. So things have really shifted in 20. I wanna move
Amanda Berry: into our next segment. Wrote from the headlines. You hear the news xray.
Xray. Read all about it.
Our stories ripped from the headlines, ripped from the headlines.
Because that's exactly what I wanna sort of touch on, right? 2020, a lot of things shifted because of the pandemic, right? Culture and employee experience really became forefront because we really got to see the promise of, we care about employees and then we have to see it in action, right?
It changed the, the workplace, it changed a lot of things, right? We saw people moving to remote. Now we're going, you know, people are going back or doing more hybrid. There's lay. So given the big shift we've had over the past few years with work culture and leadership and leadership style, what are some critical skills that you see or you believe leaders needed to have, should have had and will need to continue to have to weather this storm?
Laila Tarraf: Uh, that's such a good question. We talk a lot about establishing psychological safety these days, right? And that is the belief that you can make a mistake and you won't get punished, right? So those types of cultures are what we're striving for. But again, in order to have organizations that are, that are learning organizations and ones with a growth mindset, that high psychological safety has to be matched with.
Leaders and managers being able to hold people accountable. So you really, really, really need both. And so some of the leadership qualities and skills I think that allow you to lead from that place where you're able to show high care. And create psychological safety, but at the same time also hold people accountable, which is being more directive.
Some things that come to mind is frame the problems that you're solving as learning problems, not execution problems, because if it's about learning, then it creates a lot more space and it engages everybody in the problem to come in and try to figure it out. I don't know. Let's see. Let's try to figure this out.
That right there eases a lot of the anxiety. I think leaders acknowledging their own fallibility. Like, I may have missed something here. I'm not sure. Let me hear from you. That creates safety to speak up. Modeling curiosity, huh? How did we get this right here? I was expecting that being approachable, being accessible and approachable, holding people accountable to.
Transgressions because if you don't do that, then you're basically signaling to everybody else that they could just do what they want and you can do it in a kind yet firm way. So I, I think those are some of the skills that are necessary. And what I'm seeing now is that, , the pendulum has swung. And more leaders now are, I think, being not very clear about their expectations or what's possible or what they will do.
And I understand it, right, because now the, the cultural norms have shifted. And the norms now are much more overtly taking care of your employee, but you're not taking care of them. If something is true and you're not telling them, or something falls and you're not telling them, right. So I think it is having the courage to be able to say the things that you know aren't going to be well received and deal with that aftermath.
Amanda Berry: All right, Laila, I'm gonna move us into the last segment asking for a friend who's
asking for a friend. Hey, asking for a friend.
I wanna reach back to what you were just talking about, the psychological safety and the shift in leadership. We've talked a lot about the past 20, 30 years and what has shifted, given this, what do you expect to change in the the next
Laila Tarraf: 10 years? I think flexibility is here to stay. Thank God, , I mean just this, this nine to five in the office.
Commute two hours a day. I really, really hope those days are gone. I know that companies now are kind of going back to, you need to come back into the office, but I really don't think five days a week is going to ever come back. I'd be very surprised. I think at minimum we'll have four day work weeks, and within that there will be flexibility.
Well, we've been trying to have four day work weeks for two decades, and companies are just afraid to go there, and I think now, companies are like, okay, please give us four days. I was reading the other day that some larger companies were having some employees do Monday through Thursday and others Tuesday through Friday, and they cover the one day.
So I think that is going to be a shift. I think greater flexibility, I think greater tolerance around remote. I think the question is going to be how do you do it in a way that is. Yes, because the minute you do it for one employee or a set of employees and not another, they're gonna wanna know why. So I'm not saying you can't treat the employees differently, but there needs to be certain principles around it.
Like, you know, your job has low interaction with other people. It's a lot of, maybe it's a lot of data entry. Maybe there are certain days, like if you're running payroll and you don't need to talk to anyone, you don't have to be in the office perhaps if you manage a certain size or team, depending on their level of experience, if they need you there.
Work is so much around learning by osmosis too, right? And sort of the apprenticeship model. So we are losing something, not being around each other. And I think most people don't wanna sit in their home all day a long and work via Zoom. So really it's what is that balance that's going to work for the company, the business that they're in, and the types of employees they have.
I do not think it's gonna be one size fits all. There's gonna be lots of stuff written about it, but I don't think we're gonna establish one playbook. Yeah,
Amanda Berry: I, I think some of that, I love that. And I think some of that in my mind can be attributed to having the rise of multiple generations in. Workplace, right?
You've got, you still have baby boomers, gen X, I think we both talked about, we're in the Gen X, we have millennials, gen Z, right? They're all coming together now in the workplace, and they can have very different opinions on a variety of issues, even flexibility in the workplace. So my question to you, being a leader in HR for so many years, how can HR and people leaders really lean into this and help people find a common.
Laila Tarraf: I mean, you think it depends on the size of the company, right? The companies that I've worked for where there's a few hundred employees in the home office, it's a really manageable number. And I think having a point of view of what you want from a leadership perspective. Like, you know, we want people to come back three days, four days, we want this, but then.
Sharing how that decision was arrived at and be like 80% certain that that's what you wanted. But be open to hearing from employees how it lands with them, because it's impossible to see it from ev everyone's point of view. But what we tried to do at Allbirds was to sort of lay out the problem, which is okay, you've got people touching product, people who touch product and material.
Cannot do it from their home. So for that group of people, we're gonna treat you this way and here's why. Questions. Problems, suggestions. Great. Let's take 'em. And so then it's establishing those kinds of parameters and principles and in a way co-creating but not, not going and saying, go, what do you think we should do?
really kind of having it fairly well sort of thought out, but leaving space and room for listening to feedback. That might bring up a point where you're like, oh, I didn't even think about that. That's a really good point. Yes, thank.
Amanda Berry: I, I feel like the key there to me hearing you say that is, here's where we're at.
Let's hear your feedback and, and trying to get ideas that you didn't know about it or, you know, maybe not a thought of ahead of time.
Laila Tarraf: It, it's that curiosity piece. And then in the end, you will never meet all the needs for all people all the time. Sadly, someone's always gonna be upset at something. And in that case, I think you just have to have the ability, the courage to say, This is the direction we're going.
It doesn't seem like that fits with what's important to you. Is there any way we can bridge that gap? And if not, then this may not be the place for you. I, I think where it becomes really hard is where, You have employees that want 50 different ways of doing it, and the company's trying to be really accommodating, and then they stand for nothing, , and then nobody is happy, right?
There has to be some, some stake in the ground.
Amanda Berry: Well, Laila, this has been a lot of fun. Before I let you go, let our listeners know where they can find you.
Laila Tarraf: Sure. I have a website, www.lailatarraf.com, and I have an Instagram feed, which is laila.tarraf, and on LinkedIn. Great.
Amanda Berry: Thank you so much for joining today, Laila.
This has been a lot of fun.
Laila Tarraf: Absolutely. Thank you.