Unsolicited Advice: How Alex Cooper and other creators can build a psychologically safe workplace

Summary

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Fixable – Unsolicited Advice: How Alex Cooper and Other Creators Can Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace

Podcast: Fixable (TED)
Hosts: Frances Frey (Harvard Business School Professor), Anne Morriss (CEO & Bestselling Author)
Date: May 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode responds to recent allegations about a toxic environment at Alex Cooper's Unwell Network (producer of "Call Her Daddy"), where reports highlight patterns of staff mistreatment, fear, and high turnover. Frances and Anne use this case to explore the core concept of "psychological safety" in the workplace, examining why it matters, how it breaks down, and what leaders—especially powerful creators—can do to build truly safe and high-performing teams. The episode culminates in actionable, direct advice for Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan, and by extension, for anyone in a fast-moving, high-visibility creative business.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the Problem: Unwell Network and Broader Relevance

• Allegations include abusive behavior from Matt Kaplan (co-CEO): yelling, berating, blacklisting threats, and fostering a culture of anger, fear, and high turnover.
• Frances and Anne note this pattern is common in media, where creators can wield more power than their management skills support.
• The issue transcends media—for instance, Boeing suffered similar breakdowns despite extensive management systems due to lack of psychological safety.

"Media is one industry where creators often have more power than their leadership ability or management systems can reliably support."
– Anne Morriss (02:58)

2. Psychological Safety: What It Is, and Why It Matters

• Definition: The belief that one can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and disagree without fear of punishment, embarrassment, or sidelining.
  • Not about making things "nice" or "comfortable"—but about truth-telling, especially up the power chain.
• Cited as maybe the most reliable predictor of team performance.

"Psychological safety creates the foundation for excellence. And the absence...can destroy entire businesses."
– Frances Frey (04:10)

"It’s not about being nice...it’s about whether it’s safe to tell the truth."
– Frances Frey (04:02)

Upside vs. Downside (Stakes)

• Upside: Teams with psychological safety outperform others dramatically with the same resources.
• Downside: The toxicity of an unsafe environment metastasizes—risking not just new projects, but the entire franchise.

"If you get this wrong, the whole show, all of the shows, get shut down, because unsafe environments feed on themselves."
– Frances Frey (05:54)

3. Amy Edmondson’s Research (Google’s Project Aristotle, Hospitals, etc.)

• Amy Edmondson’s work: Nurses saw opportunities to save lives, but only those in psychologically safe teams spoke up.
• Two kinds of risk:
  • Performance risk: If I don’t speak up, we may fail.
  • Interpersonal risk: If I do speak up, I may get in trouble.
• Psychological safety is about ensuring the performance risk "wins"—so people share ideas and concerns.

"The tale of two risks...psychological safety is the tale of the interpersonal risk and versus the performance risk."
– Frances Frey (08:28)

4. The Recipe: How to Create Psychological Safety

Frances and Anne outline the "minimum viable design"—three core practices for leaders:

1. Set the Stage

Provide clarity on the work and its purpose—preferably with a noble cause.

"Let us all know what the work is, why the work is important...You want people to feel the stakes."
– Frances Frey (09:14, 09:57)

2. Invite Participation

Make clear you need input, and use "situational humility":

• Say: “I’ve tried, I got this far—can you help?”
• Use open-ended questions.
• Structure participation so meetings are orchestrated (not just “go around the room”).

"A trick on how to invite participation is to do it with situational humility...I couldn’t do it on my own, I need your help."
– Frances Frey (10:45)

"Psychologically safe environments are managed...what’s the process?"
– Frances Frey (12:41)

3. Respond Productively

How you respond to input and mistakes matters most—especially when you disagree or hear “bad” ideas.

• Show appreciation for any participation, even if the idea seems off-base:
  • "Thank you for being the first one to speak." (19:42)
• Handle mistakes as “information,” not failure:
  • New mistakes ("new beeps"): Celebrate as learning.
  • Repeated mistakes ("old beeps"): Fix the system/process, not blame the person.

"Our job is to give them a participation trophy...I do not give out many participation trophies—but in these cases, I want to show appreciation for your speaking."
– Frances Frey (19:19)

• Crucially: Leaders must sanction bad behavior (e.g., bullying, yelling) or it spreads. If leaders don't step in, the damage compounds.

"If there is bad behavior...it is the job of the leader to step in. It will have an outsized impact."
– Frances Frey (23:26)

Bonus: Process Hacks & Postmortems

• Assign someone to be the “designated skeptic” (“devil doll”) in meetings, or use “red teaming.”
• After-action reviews: After a project, evaluate not just outcomes, but whether the group followed the right process for psychological safety.

"Organizations that work on both style and substance...tend not to read about themselves on the front page of the newspaper."
– Frances Frey (26:22)

5. Application: Direct Advice to Alex Cooper & Matt Kaplan

• Diagnosis: Probably started with clarity and inclusivity ("set the stage"), but as people got "smarter," they shifted from seeking input to dictating—not maintaining process or humility.
• Key problem: Lack of appreciation when staff spoke up about problems or offered dissent, and poor handling of mistakes (condemnation vs. curiosity).
• Most glaring: Failure to sanction bad behavior—if leaders let threats or aggression go unchecked, the culture rots and the toxicity spreads.

"In 2026, if we do not sanction bad behavior, not only does it continue, it spreads because we have just told everyone else this is what high status people do."
– Frances Frey (36:26)

• Redemption is possible: A sincere apology, visible changes in process, and explicit invitation for a "do-over" can bring the majority of people back into the fold.

"We as a human species are super responsive to redemption...I would [offer] an apology, specifically acknowledging what happened, showing the new things we’re putting in place, and invite people in for a do-over...I bet you would get at least 80% of the people who march along with you."
– Frances Frey (36:40)

The Simple, Powerful Apology Framework

1. Own It – Explicitly acknowledge the harm and cost.
2. Fix It – Detail new procedures and how they'll be measured.
3. Show, Don’t Tell – Demonstrate, over time, that a new era of safety exists.

"It’s a big deal, but the solution can happen within a single Monday to Friday period. This is a one-week problem, and it’s so fixable."
– Frances Frey (37:49)

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Notable Quotes & Key Moments

• On the cost of missing psychological safety:

  "It could take down the beautiful thing...it is the job of the co-CEOs to fix it."
  – Frances Frey (05:54)

• On humility in leadership:

  "When I don’t know, I ask open-ended questions. When I know, I’m still supposed to ask open-ended questions because it’s not about me—it’s about the people I’m asking.”
  – Frances Frey (32:23)

• On the importance of sanction:

  "It is someone’s responsibility, or else it gets worse. Back to the pack leader: that’s the pack leader. If you see any form of talking over, or bullying, or yelling...it is the responsibility of the leader to step in."
  – Frances Frey (23:26)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [02:23] — Introduction of Unwell Network controversy
• [03:43] — Defining psychological safety
• [06:43] — Amy Edmondson’s research & “tale of two risks”
• [08:58] — The three steps: set the stage, invite participation, respond productively
• [09:57] — Detailed breakdown of “set the stage”
• [10:45] — Inviting participation and humility
• [17:35] — Introduction to “respond productively”
• [19:19] — Participation trophies & responding to mistakes
• [23:26] — Importance of sanctioning bad behavior
• [25:36] — After-action reviews & process improvements
• [30:30] — Returning to Alex and Matt, diagnostic advice
• [36:26] — Sanctioning and the spread of bad behavior
• [36:40] — The power of apology and rapid repair
• [37:49] — This problem is "so fixable," can be solved in a week

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Final Takeaways

• Psychological safety isn’t fluff: It’s the foundation of top team performance and innovation.
• The recipe is simple, but requires discipline: Set the stage, invite participation, respond productively—and above all, leaders must actively address (and sanction) bad behavior.
• Even the worst environments can be repaired quickly—if leaders own it, fix it, and show the change.
• For any workplace, but especially for creators suddenly at the top: Leadership isn’t just about new ideas, but setting—and defending—the rules for how those ideas get safely surfaced and acted upon.

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For further information or to submit a workplace challenge for advice, reach out to Fixable at [e-mail] or 234-FIXABLE.

Transcript

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[Anne Morris]

This episode is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple card users get 2% daily cash back on purchases made in store and online, whether it's for big ticket items or everyday purchases. When they use their Apple Card with Apple Pay now, that's a benefit that's just too good to pass up. You could be earning 2% daily cash back when you use your Apple Card with Apple Pay to buy turmeric for your signature curry, 2% back on flights to visit the family in Tucson, and even 2% back on your kid's new tuba. You can. You might even be able to get 2% back on a tuba tutor, not an Apple Card customer. You can apply in the wallet app on iPhone subject to credit approval. Apple card issued by Goldman Sachs bank usa Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at Apple co benefits. Hello, everyone. I'm Anne Morris. I'm a leadership coach and recovering CEO.

[Frances Frey]

And I'm Frances Frey, a professor at the Harvard Business School. And I'm Anne's wife.

[Anne Morris]

You are listening to Fixable, a podcast from ted. On this show, we fix workplace problems that feel very unfixable.

[Frances Frey]

It's oddly, our idea of a good time.

[Anne Morris]

Yes. Yes. All right, so here's the context for today's conversation. Frances. Alex Cooper's Unwell Network is in the news, which produces the wildly successful podcast Call Her Daddy.

[Frances Frey]

I Am actually a very big fan of this show.

[Anne Morris]

I know you are. I can imagine that this one hurts a little bit. So according to new reporting from Bloomberg, there are credible allegations that Alex's husband and co CEO, the accomplished producer Matt Kaplan, has a pattern of yelling at staff, berating people on set, threatening to blacklist employees from ever working in Hollywood again. Anger, fear, high turnover, all have reportedly ensued.

[Frances Frey]

I am so sorry to hear this. It is a pattern we see a lot in media companies.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah, media is one industry where creators often have more power than their leadership ability or management systems can reliably support.

[Frances Frey]

But this doesn't just happen in media. It happens in workplaces where it feels too risky to tell the truth. Listeners may remember that we did an episode on Boeing where employees also didn't feel safe speaking up.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah, Boeing feels like the opposite of the unwell network in some ways. A storied brand with layers and layers of management systems. And yet in some ways, the same thing happened.

[Frances Frey]

It felt too risky to speak up. And then planes started malfunctioning. You can draw a pretty direct line according to multiple reports.

[Anne Morris]

So, Francis, is there a name for what we're talking about here?

[Frances Frey]

Yes, we're talking about psychological safety, which simply means the. That you can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, disagree, all without being punished, embarrassed, or sidelined.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah, it's not about being nice or making work comfortable, which sometimes confuses people.

[Frances Frey]

No, it's about whether it's safe to tell the truth, especially to someone more powerful than you are. And it may be the most reliable predictor of team performance we have. Psychological safety creates the foundation for excellence. And the absence of psychological safety can destroy entire businesses.

[Anne Morris]

All right, so here's our plan for today. We're going to define this psychological safety thing, talk about how to create it on your own team, and then circle back to Alex and Matt with some unsolicited advice.

[Frances Frey]

Oh, this sounds long overdue and an excellent use of time.

[Anne Morris]

All right, let's do it. Okay, so, Francis, I want to capture the upside of getting this right, but also the downside of getting this wrong. So talk to us about the stakes.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, so the stakes are when you get. When you create a psychologically safe environment, your team thumps every other team by orders of magnitude. You can have the same inputs, the same materials, and you will outperform dramatically. So when you get this right, and it's relatively straightforward, you really get dramatic outperformance. It's quite thrilling.

[Anne Morris]

And so Alex and Matt, they have, you know, one very one wildly successful podcast at the center of this ecosystem, and they're trying to get a bunch of other projects off the ground and help them get traction. So if they're listening, as unlikely as that is, but if they're listening. So part of the upside here is you're getting everything. You're getting everything off the ground or more things off the ground. But I think the bigger stakes for them is that this Call Her Daddy franchise is at risk in this current moment.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. When you ask me, what's the downside? So what's the stakes? What's the downside? A downside. They have built this beautiful thing. They're now doing something else over here. This could go so wrong. It could take down the beautiful thing. So to be super clear, this could go bad enough that the whole show, all of the shows get shut down because when we have a psychologically unsafe environment, it just feeds on itself. So what I would say is, oh, my gosh, it's doable. And I don't condemn you for not knowing. People aren't born knowing. But now you know. And let me be super clear. It is the job of the CO CEOs to fix it. And you now have a recipe, and you now have a choice.

[Anne Morris]

Your colleague, our dear friend Amy Edmondson, is associated with really identifying this variable as a critical driver of team performance. Will you talk about some of the research that she did that led us to this point?

[Frances Frey]

So for her PhD, she was studying operating rooms, and she was looking to find something not psychological safety. She was looking to find something else. And in her data, the something else didn't exist. And so she was sad. And as she was going through the data, something else became amazingly clear, which she had asked lots of questions of people about how safe do you feel in the environment? If you see something, do you say something? All of these additional questions, and much to her surprise, those questions influenced whether or not the operations were a success. Those questions influence whether or not the patients lived or dies at a startling rate.

[Anne Morris]

And the way you've described this research to me before is that she was looking across nursing teams and across all of those teams, nurses were seeing opportunities to save lives. So everyone was seeing the opportunity, and only some of them were speaking up. Frances, I love this nursing example because you have made the point that we all have some version of saving lives in our organizations, even if the stakes aren't as explicitly high. You've talked about this as a tale of two risks. What do you mean by that?

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. So the two risks that are going on in our minds are that there is. If I don't speak up with my good idea, we're not going to perform well. So that's the performance risk. But if I do speak up with my good idea, I might get in trouble. That's the interpersonal risk. And so psychological safety is the tale of the interpersonal risk and versus the performance risk.

[Anne Morris]

All right, so let's get into the second part of our conversation, which is how you create psychological safety on your own team.

[Frances Frey]

The minimum viable design for psychological safety.

[Anne Morris]

Minimum viable design. And people have built careers and written beautiful books about this, and you should go read them all.

[Frances Frey]

But if you're only going to do three things, but if you are only

[Anne Morris]

listening to this podcast, these are the

[Frances Frey]

three things that will work.

[Anne Morris]

Here's your way through it.

[Frances Frey]

Okay, Number one, set the stage. Let us all know what the work is, why the work is important. What is this thing we're setting sail to do. Two, invite participation, credibly convince people that we need their help to get to whatever destination that we're going to. And three, respond productively to whatever participation comes forward. In step two, if you do those three things, set the stage, invite participation, respond productively. You will be well on your way to a psychologically safe environment.

[Anne Morris]

Great. So let's pull on each of these threads. So we're going to set the stage first.

[Frances Frey]

And when we set the stage, what you're really doing there is framing the work. What's the work that we're doing? Why is it so important? And if you can get a noble purpose inside of it, awesome. Now, if you are in healthcare, I think it's really easy to frame the noble purpose. I've joked before that if you're selling tobacco, it's a little harder. So you have to do more or less work to come up with the noble purpose of the why for the work. It will make everything else easier. If you do that, you want people to feel the stakes of what we're doing, and you want to frame that up front so that we're not confused.

[Anne Morris]

All right, so now let's invite participation. So tell us more about this.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, when we invite participation, it's the pro tip. A trick on how to invite participation is to do it with situational humility. And situational humility is, I tried to do this. I could only get this far. Can you help me get the rest of the way there? Do you see the humility that I couldn't do the whole thing myself, and now you really want to step in so your version of situational humility, I couldn't do it on my own. I need your help. You want to ask open ended questions that really gets them going. So don't ask for the right answer. Ask when this happened, what do you think might be going on? You want to just warm up people's thought processes and vocal cords.

[Anne Morris]

Got it.

[Frances Frey]

So you want to ask questions that people are frothing at the bit to answer. And so that's the inquiry part. Part of it is to get their voices going, but the other is that we are going to find all kinds of things on the table that we're going to be able to work with after this. And then the other way to invite participation is that if we're not careful, we will resort to everyone should speak the same amount of time. And one of the reasons that people really dislike meetings is that we have some egalitarian context. So, oh, let's go around the room. And then by the time we get all the way around the room, everybody wants to leave the meeting or at least they're on their devices and have left the meeting. So you really have to think about process. Psychologically safe environments are managed. So what's the process? So I might ask, does someone have an alternate point of view? That's the way of doing it. Does someone else feel like this? Like you want to have some orchestration so that it's not just we're walking in a row, everyone saying things, but it's actually there is a conductor orchestrating, orchestrating. Take looking over who's speaking, who's not speaking, what's being done.

[Anne Morris]

Nice. So somebody's in. It's almost like there's a pack leader there in charge. Everyone's going to be okay.

[Frances Frey]

I don't see any psychologically safe environments where there's not a pack leader because we just resort to too many other default dynamics. And so for the second part for inviting participation, if I'm trying to give the minimum viable set with humility, inquiry, explicit process, if you do those things, you are well on your way to having a fair fight between that interpersonal risk of speaking up and a performance risk of not speaking up.

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[Anne Morris]

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[Anne Morris]

Now tell us about Respond productively. What's in that bucket?

[Frances Frey]

So for responding productively, you have to show appreciation for people's participation. And that's easy when they say something really smart and it's harder when they say something a little dopey. And you still have to do it even when they say something a little dopey because you are appreciating the attempt and they're role modeling the act of participating. Reserve judgment and just appreciate that they spoke. Speaking will become contagious. That's the first one. The second one, mistakes are going to come up. The way in which you treat mistakes will either serve as a way to amplify everything that's going to happen next or just shut it all down. And then sanctions. If there is bad behavior and listen, when anyone is doing this work, it's because there was bad behavior. When there is bad behavior, whether it is what goes on in the meeting, yelling, threatening, what goes on after the meeting of bullying and things like that, it is the job of the leaders who impose sanctions. And if you don't, the situation gets worse because it becomes contagious. You've both emboldened the people who did it themselves and you have sent a signal to everyone else that they too can participate in this negative behavior. How we respond makes this a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. And so to respond productively, no matter what anyone says, our job is to give them a participation trophy. And you know, I do not give out many participation trophies.

[Anne Morris]

No, it's your least favorite thing.

[Frances Frey]

It's my least favorite thing to do. But in these cases, I want to show appreciation for your speaking. I'm not judging what you said because if you speak and I judge what you said and I judge it harshly, we have just closed the mouths of most of the other people in the room. So I have to, for example, thank you for being the first one to speak.

[Anne Morris]

I see you do that all the time.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, it's gratitude for the attempt. It is absolutely not talking about the judgment of the idea so that other people will also speak. And it's really hard when someone says something that's a little dopey, you still have to give the appreciation trophy. Time for judging is later, it's not now. Got it. But that's the first one. The second one is when people make mistakes, and they will. The way in which we treat failure either silences or opens up the dam of awesomeness in a room. Most of us, when we see failure, we condemn it and that has a silencing effect. And when we see success, we celebrate has a naive view of success and failure. And this comes from the work of Amy Edmondson, which won't surprise you that she first started on psychological safety and then she talked about failure because they're so related. And essentially it works like this. Most of us are happy when somebody reports a success and we're sad when somebody reports a failure. There's an intermediate step which is there are some failures that are as good as success and those are failures that we're experiencing for the first time. So Amy's book is called the Right Kind of Wrong. What's the right kind of failure? One that no one has ever tried before. When we learn something that doesn't work, no one else has to try that again. It's actually a blessing. So what we have to do is take care in the room. What we and Amy and I refer to these as new beeps and old beeps. If you have a failure that for the first time, it's a new beep, treat it like a success. He is delighted about how much information it just gave. If it's a repeated failure, if it's an old beat, and that's something that we really want to rid ourselves from, resist blaming the individual. It's a process problem, not an individual problem. We didn't set up the systems to root out those repeatable errors. Let's go and fix that. So the whole way, if you don't treat failure this way, it will silence it. And if you ask me what's the, what's the number one determinant of a psychologically unsafe environment? It's how people respond to failure. How people respond to what they perceive as failure, how people respond to mistakes. They jump at it, new or old, and they blame the person. I promise you, your environment just became unsafe.

[Anne Morris]

Can I ask you one question about the beep metaphor? Where does that come from?

[Frances Frey]

That comes from an electric maze exercise. It comes from a pedagogy that we have where we try to get groups that to find the non beeping path through a maze. And as they're Working towards it. If you hit a beep, you go back to the start. So responding productively is. We have to show appreciation. We have to have the right frame of mind on failure. And then the last part is sanction. And I just want to say that if there is bad behavior in the room, it is someone's responsibility or else it gets worse. Back to the pack leader and that's the pack leader. And so if you see any form of talking over at the light end or bullying at the high end or yelling or any of those things, it is the responsibility of the leader to step in. It will have an outsized impact. So sanctions must occur and they are the responsibility of the leader.

[Anne Morris]

I feel like this part of the equation is an under discussed part of the equation. It feels very important to me.

[Frances Frey]

It's, I think, I think all of these, the responding productively I think is where most well intentioned people fall short on psychological safety because they don't respond productively. They set the stage, they invite participation, but they don't take responsibility for responding productively.

[Anne Morris]

So let me offer a couple of other ones that I have seen work or I'll give you one more and I'm curious to get your reaction. You know, we, we worked with a team at one point that brought a devil doll to meetings and would just hand it to someone. Not the squeakiest wheel in the crowd. Usually hand it to someone and say your job is to be the skeptic in the room, ask hard questions, really push on. This red teaming is a philosophy that the software industry has used for decades to test for vulnerabilities in a system. There's a team assigned to find the problems and speak up. This strategy of giving people the job of speaking up as a way to reinforce how important it is and how safe it is. I am making it your job to do this speaking truth to power thing. What's your reaction to that as a tactic here?

[Frances Frey]

I love it. Because remember, in invite participation there's humility, inquiry and process. These are all beautiful process solutions. So instead of just hoping that the right people will say the right things, let's take deliberate intentionality to the process. And I'm going to ask you to be the skeptic. I'm going to ask your team to do this. Any amount of curation of process. Thumbs up.

[Anne Morris]

Awesome. Okay. And then you have some thoughts on kind of this after moment. As you know, I think this is the most underused technology in the workplace right now. But the power of a good postmortem or after action review to reinforce all of these critical signals around psychological safety. Talk to us about that.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. So I think that after you have done something, you have two things to learn. I'm going to call it style and substance. The substance is the stuff to learn on the thing we were talking about. Did we. What did we learn? What were the cements? We talked about these three things. We decided on this, and that's usually what we focus on in an after action review. But what's at least as important is the style with which we set the stage. Invited participation, responded productively. So what went well and how could we do it even better next time? Organizations that work on both style and substance, well, not only do they improve at a faster rate, but you tend not to read about them in the front page of the newspaper because they have nipped in the bud all of these things that if we read it in the newspaper, it didn't happen once. It happened and happened and happened and happened. And this is a way to make sure it doesn't happen.

[Anne Morris]

Got it. Okay, so I do all of these things. And take me back to your original tale of two risks framing what happened. What's the payoff?

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, so the payoff is I'm in a room and I have some good ideas. If I contribute those good ideas, we will be better off. So do I feel safe to contribute those good ideas? The interpersonal risk is if I speak up, I could get my head cut off. So I have to make sure in a psychologically safe environment, it wouldn't occur to me not to give my great ideas. In an environment where I'm going to get yelled at for making a mistake, I'll choose inaction or you know what, or worse.

[Anne Morris]

There's no way you're getting access to my good ideas.

[Frances Frey]

Oh, zero chance. In fact, I'll probably go do it and hide it, because I don't, because the consequences are unjust and uncomfortable.

[Anne Morris]

The reason it is worth it for leaders and organizations to spend time on this is because by reducing the interpersonal risk for me as a member of this team to give you all of the information, all of my ideas, all of the opportunities for improvement, for me to tell you there's a surgical instrument that we left in the body, you know, by. By getting this information, then my ability to perform as a team goes up dramatically and my.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. My ability to catapult our team's performance goes up dramatically.

[Anne Morris]

Better said. Okay, I love it. Foreign.

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[Unidentified Male Driver]

We're lost. It feels like we're going round in circles. I'm gonna ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're trying to get to the state fairgrounds.

[Unidentified Male Passenger]

Well, you're gonna take a left at the old oak tree at this here road. Nah, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.

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How is their signal out here?

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T T Mobile and US Cellular are coming together. So the network out here is huge. We get the same great signal as the city, saving a boatload with benefits. And there's a five year price guarantee too. Okay, here's the turn.

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[Anne Morris]

So Francis, let's return to Matt and Alex, co CEOs of this business. Now that we have this lens, what advice do we have for them?

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, so I go to a diagnosis before a prescription. I'll tell you the things that are very likely given what we publicly know. So we publicly know that there was yelling, threatening, ultimately quitting.

[Anne Morris]

Yes, those are our main.

[Frances Frey]

Those are our main things indicators. So I feel confident in saying that if we set the stage for the work and the purpose of it, we probably did it once in the beginning and we didn't return to it often enough that it was noble and framing. And I bet that was totally true in the beginning. But we have to set the stage, if not every meeting and if not every day, certainly every week and preferably there. So I think we just, we forgot, we just didn't get in touch with the nobility of the purpose. And that's I think really important for good behavior to happen. So that's the first one.

[Anne Morris]

And nobility defined, you know, this isn't a healthcare organization, but nobility defined is we're doing this thing that is bigger than us.

[Frances Frey]

We're doing this thing that's bigger than us.

[Anne Morris]

We're doing this thing that matters.

[Frances Frey]

Oh my gosh. We are getting important people in the minds of our listeners in a way that no one else is.

[Anne Morris]

Millions of people are consuming our worldview with every single episode we're making.

[Frances Frey]

There is a noble purpose behind that, but we have to explicitly say it. So I would say that the setting the stage probably, we probably had closer to a one and done approach to it and we have to bring that in in terms of inviting in participation. It also makes me feel like we probably did in the beginning with humility and inquiry and process.

[Anne Morris]

But it's because we legit didn't know. We were all doing the same thing

[Frances Frey]

because we legit didn't know. And this is the difference. When I don't know, I ask open ended questions. When I know I'm still supposed to ask open ended questions because it's not about me, it's about the people that I'm asking the questions to. And so you just get the sense that when some of them started to know that they went from questions to they changed the punctuation to periods and even exclamation points.

[Anne Morris]

So the inquiry to advocacy journey went

[Frances Frey]

totally from inquiry to advocacy is what I would guess happened here. And you lose so much awesomeness. If I'm just being told, well then I'm also not thinking and if I think one of the things you're telling me to do is not a good idea and let's say I send up a test balloon, I don't think it's a good idea, well then I'm not going to bring it anymore and I'm

[Anne Morris]

just going to shrink more and we're just speculating. But if we look at the patterns of teams we have worked with in crisis, this is a very common trajectory.

[Frances Frey]

And then I think the third one is really where the big. Where I would be willing to bet money on the third one, which is when people bring up things in the meeting, particularly things you don't want to hear, do you thank them? It just does not get the sense that you get a. You have to give a participation trophy for the act of responding or no one else will respond. And so I get the sense that not only did the appreciation not happen, also the response to failure didn't happen to me.

[Anne Morris]

That seems like a big part of the story. The response to mistakes.

[Frances Frey]

Oh yeah. So like you're condemning people for new beeps is one of the most tragic things a leader can do because then nobody is going to try to take risks and we're going to do things in private as opposed to. Here's the beautiful thing about a mistake. If we wring out all of the learning of a mistake, we will be better tomorrow than we are today. If we go shoot the messenger, we are worse tomorrow than we are today.

[Anne Morris]

Millions of people are listening to every episode. The system has figured something out. The people who are making this podcast know how to do a lot of things. And so our informed, intelligent guess here is that when people did make mistakes, instead of bringing curiosity to the systemic roots of those.

[Frances Frey]

Where.

[Anne Morris]

Where did we fall down on training?

[Frances Frey]

It's what did Francis do wrong?

[Anne Morris]

What did, where do we fall down on hiring? You know, Francis, why did you this up? Don't do it again. You're never, I'm never gonna let you get hired again in Hollywood. It sounds like we were on that side of the spectrum in responding to mistakes.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. So successes. You can be happy about new beeps. You should be happy about old beeps. You should investigate a process fix. I get the sense that they didn't do either for new beep or old beep and that that just became a very tense and that by the way, if you want to increase the number of bad beeps, respond that way to them. It will happen because no learning is occurring and people are terrified and they're cowering.

[Anne Morris]

Got it. And then your third point, and then

[Frances Frey]

the sanctions and now the sanction. And let's just be super clear, in 2026, with whatever dynamic you have in a workplace, if there are people that are yelling, if there are people that are threatening, and there is no one else stepping in for sanctioning, if we do not sanction bad behavior, not only does it continue, it spreads because we have just told everyone else that this is what high status people do. So it has to be somebody's job to sanction. Whose job is it? It's either the CEOs. In this case, there's co CEOs. And so if one co was doing it, it's now one person's job. It's the other person's job to sanction. And let's say you don't want to be that person, then you got to hire someone, call them a COO if you want. You have to hire someone for whom it is their job. If you don't sanction, you could get everything else right and it unravels. And if you think you can normalize that because it's like a Mad Men old days, sorry, 2026, you can't.

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[Anne Morris]

Nice. So what is your advice for this team going forward?

[Frances Frey]

Well, here's the beautiful thing. We as a human species are super responsive to redemption. We really are because we're here. We love the place, we want it to do well. So I would an apology specifically acknowledging what happened, showing the new things we're putting in place. I'd even talk about psychological safety and then invite people in for a do over that's going to let us do our best work. I bet you would get at least 80% of the people who march along with you.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah. And I know we've talked about repair on this show, but I think this is a beautiful opportunity to do those three steps. So own it, you know, acknowledge the harm and the cost here. Fix it. So talk about all the procedures we're putting in place, like how we're going to change going forward and how we're going to know it's working. And then to your point, really show, not just tell the fix that's happening, which is stop it. Which is that third point, which is really, really reveal that it's a new world.

[Frances Frey]

And I don't want to minimize how big of a deal this is. I think it's a big deal, but the solution can happen within a single Monday to Friday period. Yeah, this is a one week problem. And it's so doable. It's so fixable.

[Anne Morris]

And it's so fixable. This is so fixable.

[Frances Frey]

If you want to be on Fixable, Please call us at 234- FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253 or email [e-mail].

[Anne Morris]

Fixable is a podcast from ted. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris and me, Frances Fry. This episode was produced by Rahima Nassa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang Daniela Balaurasso and Roxanne. Hi, Lash.

[Frances Frey]

And our show was mixed by Louis at Storyyard.

[Unidentified Male Driver]

We're lost. It feels like we're going round in circles. I'm gonna ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're trying to get to the state fairgrounds.

[Unidentified Male Passenger]

Well, you're gonna take a left at the old oak tree at this here road. Nah, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.

[Unidentified Male Driver]

How is their signal out here?

[Unidentified Male Passenger]

Here T Mobile and US Cellular are coming together. So the network out here is huge. We get the same great signal as the city, saving a boatload with benefits. And there's a five year price guarantee too. Okay, here's the turn.

[Unidentified Male Driver]

Actually, can you pull up the way to a T Mobile store?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T Mobile today and get built in benefits the other guys leave out. Plus our five year price guarantee. And now T Mobile is available at US Cellular stores in Hermiston. Best mobile network based on analysis by Ooklo Speed test intelligence data second half of 2025 bigger network. The combination of T mobiles and US cellular network footprints will enhance the T mobile network's coverage price guarantee on talk text and data exclusions like taxes and fees. Apply CT mobile.com for details.

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