Chief Change Officer
#174 Greg Morley: Can “Bond” Save Us From an $8.9 Trillion Employee Meltdown? – Part Two
Wed, 12 Feb 2025
Greg Morley has spent years navigating the high-stakes world of corporate culture at Moët Hennessy, Disney, and Hasbro. Now, he’s here to call out the biggest myth in business: that belonging is just a “soft” concept. DEI isn’t one-size-fits-all, and Greg Morley is here to prove it. In Part 2, he breaks down how companies get inclusion wrong by ignoring cultural differences—why the West’s love for metrics doesn’t always vibe with the East’s emphasis on harmony, and what businesses can do to bridge the gap. Expect real talk, sharp insights, and of course, a few gems from Bond. Key Highlights of Our Interview: The Crisis of Workplace Loneliness “Workplace loneliness isn’t just a personal issue—it’s a challenge organizations must tackle to foster belonging and inclusion.” The Employee-Employer Power Flip “The workplace dynamic has shifted—it’s now a buyer’s market for employees who demand recognition, safety, and belonging.” Redefining Diversity “Diversity isn’t just what you see—it’s also life experiences, generational perspectives, languages, and abilities, visible or hidden. Most of our diversity at work is invisible. Who someone marries, whether they have kids, or cognitive differences often go unnoticed—but they matter.” Start With Yourself “Change begins within. Reflecting on personal experiences of inclusion or exclusion can help leaders empathize and create a more welcoming environment for others.” East Meets West “In the East, inclusion feels more organic, driven by community and connection. In the West, it’s often about achieving measurable outcomes and hitting diversity targets.” _________________________ Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Greg Morley --Chief Change Officer-- Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself. Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs, Transformation Gurus & Bold Hearts. 6 Million+ All-Time Downloads. Reaching 80+ Countries Daily. Global Top 3% Podcast. Top 10 US Business. Top 1 US Careers. >>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.<<< --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Greg Morley and what is his expertise?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, we are joined by Greg Morley,
a leader in the world of human resources and a master of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Monette, Tennessee, one of the oldest and largest wine and spirits conglomerates in the world. Greg has an amazing story to share, covering the unique experiences that have shaped his leadership style and his strategic approach to DEI.
Greg, let's start with you giving us a bit of an introduction to this book, as well as a brief background on yourself for those who might be tuning in for the first time. This will help the listeners understand where you're coming from. Before we get into the book's content, the lessons and the teachings you want to share.
Thank you for having me back. Really pleased that you and I met each other more than a year ago. And I'm really proud of you and the work you're doing and what you're bringing to the conversation about humanity. So thank you for that. Today, what we're going to talk about is this, the book that I've written called Bond Inclusion and the Keys to Belonging and Connection. A little bit about me.
So I've spent most of my life in HR as an HR business leader and, and a good part of the latter part of my career in inclusion and belonging and diversity. I did write this new book, which I hope is a guide to inclusion and belonging in the workplace.
I've had the experience and great good fortune of leading diversity initiatives in the U.S., Europe, and Asia at major multinationals such as General Electric, Disney, Hasbro, and most recently, my experience with LVMH Moet Hennessy. And I wrote the book to share what I believe are really life-changing lessons I've learned
for how leaders and teams can be more inclusive and embrace company diversity to be even more successful in the companies in which they're working.
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Chapter 2: Why is belonging crucial in the workplace?
First things first, starting with belonging. What do you mean by belonging in the workplace? And why is that important?
Sure. It's a great question. And let me maybe start by why I wrote the book, what inspired me to write the book as a way of addressing sort of the belonging, inclusion, and connection terms of the book. Over the decades of experience I had, both in and in HR roles, but also in roles such as marketing, sales,
and communications and distribution, what I saw was there is an essence of crisis of loneliness at work for some people. And there's a very important role that organizations play in fostering a culture of belonging and inclusion.
And the fostering of that culture of belonging and inclusion is not just a nice thing to do and everybody feels good at work and we go and we have parties and we're happy and we have lunch together. There is data that reinforces that when an organization is diverse, inclusive, and has leaders who lead in an inclusive manner on many measurable aspects, those companies do better.
They do better in terms of innovation. They do better in terms of avoiding risk. They do much better in terms of getting profitable products to market. And they do much better in terms of what would be obvious, which is keeping good people and attracting good people. So there is a business imperative to being good at these things.
And what encouraged me to write the book was I saw all of these sort of good and bad practices over my career, both within the companies I was working with and with others that I had become associated with. And that's why I got to the point of, okay, there's something to be talked about.
And I think finally, what was a driving factor for me was I believe in my core that these things I just talked about are important to individuals and to businesses. And what I saw was we were in the world of diversity, equity and inclusion getting too far away from what I believed was the important
Part of diversity, actually, and inclusion was diverse workforces working well together and creating great business outcomes and great outcomes for individuals. And so that's how I got to the point of writing the book.
I agree with you 100% when it comes to belonging versus loneliness. Early in my career, I was immersed in big organizations, and it was all about work and climbing the corporate ladder. Belonging was seen as more of a soft feeling, something you didn't really think about much. You worked hard, made your boss happy, and got along Maybe you'll get promoted faster and better.
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Chapter 3: How does workplace culture affect employee mental health?
And social media has this double-edged way of impacting people, which is it makes us much more connected, but much less connected. And when we talk about belonging in the workforce, what we're talking about is an individual coming to work and feeling like they can do their best work there, that they're going to be recognized for what they do, that the workplace is a safe place.
Many people don't have safe places outside of work, and it's a responsibility of employers to create a place that's a safe place to work. And why is all of this important? It's important because we want people on our teams and ourselves to do the incremental effort. We all get hired and we get a job description and it says all the things that have to happen.
The reality of jobs is, you know, people do some things on the job description and some things off the job description. And many times a career like the one you were talking about, Vince, where you work hard, you put in a lot of effort and you get ahead and you get promoted, comes from the fact that somebody is doing something beyond their job, the incremental effort.
So belonging is important because it creates this connection somebody has with their role, with their company, with their boss, with their peers, which allows them to feel encouraged to do the incremental effort. And that's how companies win when employees are fully engaged and doing the incremental effort.
As you were sharing. It reminded me of an incident from about 20 years ago when I worked at an international financial institution. At that time, I was a store employee. I received a lot of positive feedback from clients. I was sent to the headquarters for special training, first of its kind, and my boss rewarded me for all the hard work I put in.
My clients recognized it, and I was working incredibly hard, 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. I genuinely enjoyed the work. In your terms, I felt a strong sense of belonging to the role, to the company, and to my clients. The pay wasn't anything special, even under industry standards. But I was so motivated and invested in the work. Then something changed.
my boss left, and her replacement had a completely different style and approach. I wouldn't place blame entirely on this new person, but we didn't get along the way I had with my previous boss. The entire culture and team dynamics shifted the vibe The chemistry, the sentiment, everything fell off. That's when I lost my sense of belonging.
I kept working hard and professionally to serve my clients. But there was an internal conflict with my new supervisor. This eroded the connection I had felt to my work. The result? I quit the job, and it came as a surprise to everyone, clients, colleagues, even those at headquarters. They couldn't understand it because I had been such a hard-knocker, talented analyst. For them, it was a real loss.
For me, the damage was deeper. That's when I experienced my first episode of mental illness, what we would call now burnout. And that burnout spiraled into depression. I'm sharing this now because it ties back to what you said about the sense of belonging or the lack of it.
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Chapter 4: What is DEI and how should it be implemented?
And one of the reasons that I believe it's often difficult for managers to create a sense of belonging. And you experienced it with a manager who knew you, knew how to motivate you, knew what it was important to you, knew how to encourage you. And then you changed to a manager who didn't know you as well, didn't know how to encourage you, didn't know how to recognize you.
And ultimately you left the organization in a probably quite fragile state. Was that second manager, my guess is didn't spend the time to get to know you and understand what was important to you and make you feel that regardless of who you were working for, you were still important and you were still valuable even at your low salary that you felt.
So I think that part is maybe the advice I would give coming out of your very heartfelt sharing is that managers need to get to know the people that work for them. And in a way that you can understand what's important to them, what's important to them in their life, what they need to be successful in their jobs.
And those are the conversations that oftentimes we're not training managers to have, but they're just human conversations. They're just born out of curiosity. And I think that those things are much more important than we give time for.
We've touched upon belonging. Let's move forward to talk a bit about inclusion. How would you define DEI? Or what does DEI mean to you?
So when we define DEI or diversity, equity and inclusion, most people think of diversity, equity and inclusion is relating to things like gender and skin color, perhaps because they're the most visible forms of diversity.
And what I would say is also critically important, and I've seen this in my experience, is it's just as important to understand what experience both life and career experience somebody brings to their job. You know, what generation they come from, what languages they speak or understand, who, do they have any disabilities? Do they have any exceptional abilities?
Those are all things that are important in determining how you build a diverse workforce. The reality is most of the diverse elements that we bring to work are unseen. Now, who I'm married to is unseen. Do I have children or not is unseen. Do I have a cognitive ability or disability is unseen in most places. So this is why we have to get to know the people that work for us.
And when we talk about then why is the word inclusion important or the concept inclusion is, to me, I always imagine the image of an orchestra. So in an orchestra, there are many different instruments and they all have their own role. And at some point they come together in a piece to create a beautiful piece of music and experience a feeling.
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Chapter 5: How can leaders effectively implement DEI strategies?
And I like to, when I'm talking to groups, I like to ask people to reflect on that. What's something that they think about when they were included or when they were excluded, how did that make them feel? And I think that's a real source of power for creating a sense of inclusion for yourself and your coworkers and even your customers. So if you start with yourself, you can impact a lot.
Then you have to build out from there. And I think the last thing I would say in the keys of inclusion is it's very important to search for common ground. It may sound counterintuitive to say we build these very diverse teams and then we want to search for common ground. But in fact, we all want to rally around something. It could be the mission of the organization.
It could be a project that we're working on. It could be a colleague who's stressed and we're trying to help that colleague. I had a situation with a very good friend of mine from university. And when marriage equality was being talked about in the U.S.
15 years ago, it was a very important topic to me because as a member of the LGBTQ community and as somebody who was in a long-term relationship relationship, Access to marriage was important for us and for my help, myself and my to-be husband.
But for my friend who's straight and has four kids and he didn't see the, he wasn't interested in marriage equality, which at first took me very much by surprise. And we had a discussion about it and I said, why is this important? It's important.
I believe to everyone, because it has to do with people being able to love and build relationships and family and support structure with people that they love. And so we came to this point of common ground because that's what that was important to him too. Whether we called it straight marriage or gay marriage was not the issue. So I think it's critically important to search for common ground.
as a way to bring people together and create a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace.
Yes, you are absolutely right. The visible involvement of leaders is crucial, especially in large organizations. That public display of support from the top sets the tone for the rest of the company. When the CEO or key decision makers visibly endorse an initiative, it creates a ripple effect.
People take cues from their leaders, and if the leader is truly committed to a certain direction, it's much easier for the organization to align itself with that. Like you said, in these cases, talk is not cheap at all. It is an important tool to communicate priorities and demonstrate what matters.
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