Notes on Resilience
Conversations about trauma, resilience, and compassion.
How do we genuinely support individuals who have experienced trauma and build inclusive and safe environments? Trauma significantly affects the mental and physical health of those who experience it, and personal resiliency is only part of the solution. The rest lies in addressing organizational, systemic, and social determinants of health and wellness, and making the effort to genuinely understand the impact of trauma.
Here, we ask and answer the tough questions about how wellness is framed in an organizational context, what supports are available and why, what the barriers are to supporting trauma survivors, and what best practices contribute to mental wellness. These conversations provide a framework to identify areas for change and actionable steps to reshape organizations to be truly trauma sensitive.
Notes on Resilience
118: Whole Person Management, with Malvika Jethmalani
Today's workplace demands whole-person management: Employees no longer check their emotions and personal challenges at the door.
Guest Malvika Jethmalani, three-time CHRO and co-founder of Atvis Group, talks about the three-step employee listening strategy that forms the foundation of compassionate leadership: listening to understand pain points, analyzing feedback implications, and taking meaningful action.
She shares why many organizations create survey fatigue and erode trust by collecting data without follow-through, and offers practical insights on balancing quantitative methods like engagement surveys with qualitative approaches such as focus groups, as drivers of better business outcomes.
We discuss psychological safety as a business imperative, immersion instead of traditional onboarding, and how politically charged topics like return-to-office policies and DEI initiatives require thoughtful leadership approaches that go beyond performative actions.
Malvika explains why the rise of AI is actually elevating the importance of human interaction in the workplace. As technical skills become more commoditized through low-code solutions, what she calls power skills – the ability to connect, empathize, and collaborate – are becoming the true differentiators. For HR professionals especially, this technological shift creates an unprecedented opportunity to focus on the truly human aspects of human resources.
Malvika Jethmalani is a 3x CHRO and the Co-Founder of Atvis Group – a human capital advisory firm driven by the core belief that to win in the marketplace, businesses must first win in the workplace.
You can learn about Malvika's work on the Atvis Group website or on LinkedIn. And you can learn more about her or contact her via LinkedIn.
We are driven by the core belief that to win in the marketplace,
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
__________
Producer / Editor: Neel Panji
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity.
Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.
#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor
We are in a different time now and employees have different expectations of the role that work plays in their life, and people are increasingly expecting what I call whole person management, and that means, you know, being flexible, and that means that we are no longer in an environment where people are going to check their emotions or their personal problems at the door before they walk in to the office or the virtual office.
Manya Chylinski:Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, manya Chylinski. My guest today is Malvika Jethmalani. She's a three-time CHRO and the co-founder of Atvis Group, which is a human capital advisory firm. Co-founder of Atvis Group, which is a human capital advisory firm, and their core belief is that to win in the marketplace, businesses must first win in the workplace. She and I talked about trust, communication, the importance of listening, psychological safety and how those matter to your people policy. You're really going to enjoy this episode. Thank you for joining us, melvika. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Manya Chylinski:Great to be here, thank you for having me To get us started. What is one thing that you have done in any area?
Malvika Jethmalani:of your life that you never thought you would do Recently, over the past year or so, I've spoken at a few AI and tech conferences and I never thought I would speak on the topic of AI, much less become a user a regular user of AI tools, so I surprised myself on that one. But I think this is one of the many joys of being an entrepreneur, I'm sure you'll agree. You get to constantly discover new parts of your identity that you didn't even know existed. So it's fun.
Manya Chylinski:It is fun. I agree with you. It's a fun part of being an entrepreneur, and I cannot imagine either you or I speaking in an AI conference, so I love that you're that's something that you're doing Very cool. What were you talking about in terms of AI?
Malvika Jethmalani:Last year, I spoke at an AI and HR conference and we talked about multiple topics, everything from building AI-friendly cultures to how do you manage AI transformation within your organization, specifically from a people perspective. Specifically from a people perspective. The conference that I spoke at a couple of weeks ago in Fort Lauderdale we discussed the agentic workforce, we discussed AI could impact how we design work and workplaces in the future, and so much more. Everything at the intersection of AI and people.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, I love that. I love that people are thinking about that and you are helping people understand how culture and people policy intersect with AI. So, oh, very cool. Well, thank you for doing that and I guess, to get started, I'd love to hear what are the first things that you think about in terms of embedding compassion and empathy and those kind of skills into a workplace culture.
Malvika Jethmalani:So the first thing that I think about and that I encourage CEOs and founders to do when I work with them, is put an employee listening strategy in place, and I kind of have a very systemic, a systematic way of walking them through that. So the first step is to listen to your employees, which is the what. So what is on their mind, what are their pain points, what are their challenges? The next step is to analyze the feedback that you've received, that's the so what, the implications for the business, the implications for your people, policies and your programs. And then the third and last step is act, which is the now what. So, now that we've gathered all of this data and this feedback, what are we going to do about it?
Malvika Jethmalani:Often I find organizations will do tons of engagement surveys and there's kind of survey fatigue in their organization but there's not enough action. So they kind of miss that third step, and that's a really quick and fast way to lose trust with your employee population. And the other thing that I noticed organizations doing is, on the listening part, they'll focus either only on the quantitative or the qualitative right, and and I think you need a mix of both on the quantitative, you have things like engagement surveys. You have upward feedback, you have pulse surveys, but then you need the qualitative stuff. You you need the skip level meetings, the focus groups, the stay interviews, the AMA sessions. Not only do you want to bring those two kind of qualitative and quantitative pieces of data and feedback together, but you also want to understand the why behind the quantitative.
Manya Chylinski:So that is the first step that I work on with leaders that I advise and the number of employees and people I have heard say just ask, why don't you even just ask what we need?
Malvika Jethmalani:Basic human need right. We all want to be seen and heard and understood and too many organizations operate kind of in this top-down manner. But if you think about it, it's not just important to listen to your people so that you can create a healthy culture. I think it's better for business outcomes because in most companies your frontline employees are closest to your customers and your prospects and they're intimately familiar with the pain points and the challenges of your customers. So if you give them a voice, you can actually drive better commercial outcomes.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, and I so appreciate you saying that, because I feel that I do hear from people oh, that's a soft skill, is that something we really need? And you're like yes, this directly relates to the dollars coming into your bank account. And I also really love that you use the word trust, because I think that is also such a key and many of us maybe most of us have had the experience of filling out an employee survey, filling out something like that and then never finding out what they did with the data, and that is another form of not being listened to, and then why would you trust to do the next survey or why would you trust to share any information?
Malvika Jethmalani:I couldn't agree more. I worked with organizations who will do quarterly engagement surveys and not even have enough time to look at the data and analyze the feedback and then take action. And then they're already on their next survey and they're going through these motions just because someone decided at some point oh, we're going to have a quarterly engagement survey and I would rather you I have advised organizations that I work with to skip a couple like do your engagement survey, then take really take the time to make things better and take action on the items that your employees give you feedback on, and then, when you've made enough progress, then go back and do another survey to see whether your actions made a dent. And I get this kind of look of shock or like what do you mean? We should skip a survey? But I would rather you skip a survey and take action than continue to survey your employees and not do anything about the feedback that they're giving you.
Manya Chylinski:Absolutely, because in that case, why are you even doing the surveys, other than to check the box that says we're doing these employee engagement surveys? In addition to what we were just talking about actually taking data from the surveys, what are some other things that leaders can do to build trust with it as leaders?
Malvika Jethmalani:So I think one of the issues that I see, especially in the leaders that I work with, is, when you talk about trust, many of them think we need to have more happy hours and events and kind of what I call mandatory fun, and they think that that is going to build trust and they think that that is going to build deeper connections and psychological safety within the team. And the events are great, right, if they're working for you. Great, keep them. But it's not the events that build trust. It's not only the leadership team's ability to listen, as we said, and to act on the feedback, but it's also about making sure that your words and your actions are aligned. So if you made a promise to your people, if you said you were going to do something, then do it. If you decided to pivot, then have the adult conversation. Treat your people like adults and explain the why behind your decisions, especially when you're making tough decisions. And that doesn't mean sharing every little minute detail, but it does mean explaining to people how you arrived at the decision, what were the alternatives that you considered and creating. Also, I think the other thing that drives trust is creating a safe space for people to learn and fail, quote, unquote, fail.
Malvika Jethmalani:And psychological safety is an interesting one because I personally I think you need psychological safety in order to have trust and you know McKinsey has done studies on this that have shown a connection between psychological safety and team performance.
Malvika Jethmalani:But when you talk to leaders about psychological safety they're like, oh my God, here we go again, another buzzword, right. But I think, again, there are real business implications of not having psychological safety and in our time, one of the recent and, I think, catastrophic examples is Boeing. Right, they, in a race to compete with Airbus and capitalize on the kind of booming demand for fuel efficient aircraft, they decided to prioritize cost cutting over speed and speed, over their historical commitment to engineering and quality. And we all know how that ended with the you know fatal crashes involving the 737 MAX and I think it not only did it result in a severe kind of erosion of trust in the Boeing brand and you know, obviously, financial losses and loss of life, but also decline in their stock price, decline in culture and employee experience. Obviously there were strikes. So I think psychological safety is so much more than just the latest buzzword, absolutely critical for business outcomes. Yeah.
Manya Chylinski:I absolutely agree and I appreciate you sharing that example, which is such a clear line from not having that safety to real trouble on the corporate side and on the human side. Companies to say things like, oh, psychological safety is just a buzzword, or to not realize that building trust is a critical piece and that listening is a critical piece what's getting in the way for some leaders?
Malvika Jethmalani:I think for some leaders, at least the leaders that I've worked with sometimes they themselves don't feel listened to and acknowledged. And the other issue is sometimes they are quick to implement management practices and leadership practices that they grew up with and sometimes they don't think beyond kind of the policies of the organization. So I'll give you an example that I dealt with, a real life example. So in one of my CHRO positions we had an employee who had lost her grandmother and in this company we had a three day bereavement leave policy and this employee had to travel to more far away, like Brazil, and she was requesting a week off because she had to travel for the funeral and everything. And my HR team and I, we worked with the manager and he was not open to being flexible at all. We dug deeper. We found out that he had grown up in an environment where taking zero days off was rewarded. You know, you I don't know if you remember the era of like perfect attendance awards. You know people would get right so. So that was the thing and that was the thing.
Malvika Jethmalani:You know, early in my career as well, I grew up with that too like perfect attendance awards were a thing and it was like it was glorified that you never took a day off and you came to work sick, and and so when we dug deeper you know this particular manager he thought that's what good performance was. He thought presenteeism equals good performance. And his other issue was he couldn't understand, he simply could not comprehend that someone else might handle grief differently than him, and so one of the things that he said to me was you know, when my grandmother died, I was back in the office the next day, and he was very proud of that, and so it was simply an exercise of listening to him, making him feel heard, acknowledging that he was in wrong to apply the same policies that he grew up with in his early career. But that he was in wrong to apply the same policies that he grew up with in his early career, but that we are in a different time now and employees have different expectations of the role that work plays in their life, and people are increasingly expecting what I call whole person management, and that means, you know, being flexible, and that means that we are no longer in an environment where people are going to check their emotions or their personal problems at the door before they walk in to the office or the virtual office.
Malvika Jethmalani:We made an exception for this employee, and her situation pushed us to reconsider our bereavement policy, and so we redid the bereavement policy and to state that if you have to travel internationally, following you know the loss of a family member, that you could take up to two weeks off. So we were. I was glad that the situation came up and that we were able to enhance the policy and make it better for future situations. So I think to to come back to your question, what's getting in the way is, often people apply their own life experience to situations and they make the mistake, I think, of assuming that someone else is going to handle situations the same way that they did.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, and that's not a leadership lesson. That's a life lesson in how to communicate with others, and I can see how the way that I was led in a work environment is now going to be the way that I lead. What do you think is the greatest failure in the way that we train leaders when it comes to wanting to lead with compassion?
Malvika Jethmalani:I think I've led and designed many, many leadership development programs and from the ones that I've seen, especially the kind of off the shelf ones is many of these programs fail to teach leaders one fundamental truth, which is that they have to treat their people like humans first, and employees second. I'll give you another kind of real life example that comes to mind. So I worked with the president of a company at one point and he had an assistant who left and we hired someone to replace his executive assistant and he claimed that he was so busy that he couldn't be bothered to learn the name of the new assistant assistant. So let's say, his previous assistant's name was Janet and the new one was named Rita. He would continue to address the new assistant as Janet and she was supposed to respond to the name Janet. So if you right, if you've ever watched the Devil Wears Prada, this is exactly that.
Malvika Jethmalani:I was living this situation and this the president of this company. He had been to a top business school, like top five business school. He had been in multiple leadership development programs, both inside the company and externally, and yet he failed to make people feel seen, he failed to afford them the basic respect and dignity and he failed to honor the humanness of his people and so they wouldn't continue working for him. What we saw was there was this kind of revolving door with his assistant position, and most of his assistants would only last like a year max. And so, in my opinion, most of these leadership development programs fail because they don't even veer into the territory of compassion. I mean, when was the last time you saw a leadership development program that actually even uttered the word compassion or covered that topic? So I think perhaps that's a good starting point is explaining to leaders what compassion is and why it's important in the workplace.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, as you were talking, I remember there was a book a while ago and I don't remember the name, but the theme was everything I needed to learn in life. I learned in kindergarten and I keep coming back to the treat other people the way you want to be treated, because I bet this particular person would not have stood for somebody calling them by the wrong name because they decided they couldn't be bothered to learn their name.
Malvika Jethmalani:Absolutely. You know, I read a Jack Welch book many, many years ago called Straight from the Gut, and one of the things he talks about in that book is the idea of there are leaders who will kiss up and kick down those types of leaders. During his time at GE and, I think, unfortunately even sitting here today in 2025,. There are too many of those leaders, and the way we will combat that is by introducing compassion into our leadership development programs.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, I can see that that is a critical missing piece, and I wish by the time we were in 2025, this wasn't still something that we're talking about. That feels like the exception Me too. If you could implement one non-traditional practice for leaders to promote compassion in the workplace, what do you think that would look like?
Malvika Jethmalani:So I worked in an organization at one time that didn't have onboarding for leaders. They had what they called immersion for leaders. They had what they called immersion. So their leaders, their most senior leaders, did not do any actual work in their first 60 to 90 days. And I would love it if more companies would implement something like that. And so in this company, the executives they would just listen, they would sit desk side with employees, they would meet with customers, they would sit in on product demos, they would use the product themselves, they would go and visit the different offices across regions.
Malvika Jethmalani:This was a global company. They asked lots of questions and their only job was to learn, ask questions and act as a sponge. And they were told explicitly that that was their only goal for their first 90 days. And they were told you know, you're already here, you got the job. You don't need to prove yourself, you don't need to embark on a giant, you know transformation right away. You just need to listen and learn.
Malvika Jethmalani:And I think too many leaders are too eager to prove themselves and leave a mark and they come in and they start making changes too fast and they immediately lose the plot because they lose the trust of the team, because the message that they're sending is nothing you've done for me is good enough, and so they're not showing respect and regard for anything or anyone who's come before them, and they they don't show interest in understanding how things are currently working or what the team's pain points are. It's different if you're coming, you know, into a crisis situation, obviously because you want to take charge right away and stop the bleeding, but for the most part, I wish leaders would just spend their first couple months in listening mode. So if I could implement a non-traditional policy, that would be one.
Manya Chylinski:That is really powerful and it gets at all of the things we have been talking about listening to what is actually happening and what people are thinking and saying, building that trust. Wow, I love that. It is 2025 and we are living in a particularly interesting political and social climate. How do you think that is impacting leadership right now?
Malvika Jethmalani:I think that there are topics that shouldn't be political, issues that have become politicized and are polarizing. So return to office is one that I can think of. Somehow it's become a political topic instead of a business topic and a people topic. Another one is DEI. I advise a lot of CHROs and currently I'm getting lots of calls from HR leaders on this topic, because there's no playbook for what's happening right now.
Malvika Jethmalani:Everyone is kind of figuring it out for themselves and I think but I will say this on the state of evolving DEI the first thing is it's never a bad thing to assess the efficacy of your initiatives and your programs from time to time, because you want to make sure that they are driving the business outcome that you wanted them to drive when you first started out on that journey. So if organizations are reevaluating their DEI programs to make sure they're still effective, they're still doing what they're supposed to do. I support that all day long. I think that we're going to see more of what I call embedded DEI flavor going forward, where DEI is embedded into various practices and policies of the business rather than being this separate thing over there and managed by this separate team that typically sits under HR and it's their responsibility. You know it's not mine as a leader or as an employee.
Manya Chylinski:And.
Malvika Jethmalani:I think that's a good thing if we move in the direction of embedded DEI. So I'm keeping an open mind. But the other thing I'll say is, if you're a company that's changing its practices just because others are doing something or not doing something, then you probably didn't have much of a DEI culture program to begin with, and it was likely performative. So I was working with a founder in a tech company once and he came to me during Pride Month it was like June 9th or 10th and he said Malvika, I think we should change our logo on LinkedIn to the rainbow logo and I can have marketing do it within the next 24 hours. What do you think? And I asked him why. And his response was well, everyone else is doing it.
Malvika Jethmalani:And I asked him you know what else he wanted to do to support the LGBTQ employees in his company and in the community? And he hadn't thought about that. I offered him some ideas. He didn't like them, and so the bottom line was he wanted the logo to be changed, and that is where it started and ended. He had not given it really much thought beyond that and unfortunately, there are too many leaders and too many organizations out there that are like that. They're performative. And so if your reason for doing these sort of check the box things is that everyone else is doing it or not doing it sort of check the box things is that everyone else is doing it or not doing it then and you want to do away with your DEI programs because everyone else is doing that, then I would rather you you just stop, because I would rather you don't do anything than have performative practices in place that are not good for your people and don't drive better business outcomes either.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, the pride story you share. I have a similar one of Women's History Month and we want to champion this and we said, okay, you don't have any women in leadership and you have almost zero women in the entire company. So what else are you going to do besides say that you care about Women's History Month? So it is. I appreciate that sometimes companies look to their competitors for the direction to know what to do, and that is not necessarily wrong on its face, but you do have to have the foundation underneath rather than, as you say, being performative. Thank you for sharing that. So we are at the end of our time, and what is giving you hope right now in terms of compassionate leadership and companies really focusing on their people?
Malvika Jethmalani:You know, I talk to a lot of leaders as part of my day-to-day work, and I think that we are in an interesting moment right now, especially with AI. I think a lot of leaders are realizing that the technical skills, the job-related skills, are becoming more and more commoditized. It's becoming easier to obtain and learn those technical skills. You have AI solutions that offer low-code, no-code solutions, and so, even if you've never coded before, there are solutions out there for you to learn and create products. And I think, as a result of that, what's happening is a lot of leaders are realizing that we need to start placing a premium on what we call soft skills.
Malvika Jethmalani:I don't like the term soft skills. I call them power skills, because I think, in the age of AI, the soft skills will become the power skills. I think those are the skills that will be the differentiators, and so I think, now that leaders are realizing that these are the skills that are going to matter, and our interaction with each other, the way that we engage with each other, is what makes us inherently human, and that is what we need to preserve. We need to preserve the humanness and the human aspects of work. When I have those types of conversations. That is what gives me hope, and I think this is our moment especially. You know, I'm an HR professional and so in the HR world, we've been waiting for decades and decades because we've been so underwater with the administrative burden on our plates, and this is the moment, with AI solutions being able to take some of that burden off of our plates. This is our moment to shine. This is our moment to work on those strategic things that we've always wanted to work on.
Malvika Jethmalani:This is our moment to focus on the human aspects of human resources, and I think that's really what is giving me hope right now.
Manya Chylinski:Wow, that gives me hope, too, hearing that. So thank you for sharing and, malvika, we're at the end of our time. Can you please tell listeners a little bit about yourself and how they can reach you and learn more about what you do Of?
Malvika Jethmalani:course, yes, I am a three-time CHRO and the founder of Atvis Group, which is a human capital advisory firm. We are driven by the core belief that to win in the marketplace, businesses must first win in the workplace, and so you can learn more about Atvis Group at atvisgroupcom. That's A-T-V-I-S groupcom. You can follow us on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn and send me a note. Send me a direct message on LinkedIn if you want to talk anything and all things. People.
Manya Chylinski:Excellent. I will put links to that in the show notes to make it easier for folks to find you. Thank you so much. It's been such a fabulous conversation today, thank you. Thank you so much. It's been such a fabulous conversation today, thank you, this was fun. Thank you for listening. I'm Manya Chylinski. I help organizations build compassionate, resilient teams that thrive by creating environments where well-being is at the core. Often, people reach out to me during times of crisis or significant change, but the truth is that building a healthier, more supportive workplace can prevent issues before they arise and empower your teams to thrive, no matter what challenges come their way. If you're ready to make a meaningful change, I'd love to connect. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe, rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us and if you'd like to continue the conversation, connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my website, www. manyachylinski. com. Thank you.
