A (3:44)

There's a bunch of problems, but I think the core problem for a lot of companies today, even more so than I wrote the book, is that the traditional path of growth is going to be problematic. We're coming out of a decade of zero interest rates and growth at all costs, and growth that frankly burned out the team. And it was really about the destination. I think five years ago you said, we're going to grow 50% this year. People like, let's do it and let's go to the moon. And now they're kind of like, oh, God. My analogy is it used to be if NASA was trying to put a aircraft on the moon, maybe it should be if Elon Musk was going to put an aircraft on the moon. On the moon. On Mars. Sorry, we've done the moon on Mars and we sent the thing, it landed on Mars, we opened it up, we're live streaming this around the world and all the astronauts are dead. Do you really think people are going to be like, cheering for that? And that feels a lot of what growth has felt. So I think the problem is how do we bring people along on the growth journey rather than growing the vehicle and sort of constantly burning people out and swapping people along the way. And that to me is the win, win. And I think it's going to need to be the playbook of businesses that can grow by growing their people for the next decade.

B (5:05)

And when you say growing their people, you don't just mean skills?

A (5:11)

No, not at all.

B (5:12)

What do you mean?

A (5:13)

It should be obvious, but people are the same inside and outside of work. And let's think about remote work. It's not like your employee Sally, who's super grumpy and low energy and rolls out of bed and is terrible with prioritization, then turns on her computer and miraculously, she has a ton of energy. And it's good at prioritization. This is the same person. And so I think there's a whole lot of holistic Things that we can do to help people improve their capacity and my sort of framework around that. But there are things that will make them better at their job and there's always skill training to do in your job. But you also need to have people ready for the next job in a growing organization. But these are things that should make people better parents and better spouses. And again, if you get better at time management, if you get better at energy management, if you get better at prioritization, if you get better at discipline, these are things that not only help you inside the workplace, arguably they might help you more outside of the workplace.

B (6:16)

How are people thinking about teams? That isn't right. What's the out of box management practice?

A (6:22)

There's still a little of bit of authoritarian management around, I think as, as a practice that is based on power and power dynamics. This came out of military and military leadership. Interestingly enough, the military really doesn't use this anymore. In fact, General Stanley McChrystal has a great quote. He says, if you get to where you're supposed to go and the order that I gave you doesn't make sense, execute a different order. That's a very different style of management than would have existed 20, 30 years ago. So we shifted. But I think a lot of people still think that leadership and management are about power and about, oh, now these people work for me and I can tell them what to do. And I just don't think that works anymore. The opposite, the way opposite of that doesn't work either. But to me then the new management style is how do I have more of the connection? See the person, help the person. At the same time, I am still rigorous about my standards and the goals and our values and upholding these things. And I just don't think those things are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think leadership works best when you have both of them. And you can have really different conversations with people around, hey, look, love your performance, but this behavior is just not acceptable here. Or love you as a person and you're like my favorite person ever. But this performance just isn't acceptable around here. And I think, I think both are needed to create healthy growing companies. And my perspective is I'm not sort of a growth at all cost person at all. But I do think that organizations are sort of, even today it's so fast, they're either growing or they're kind of dying a slow death. I'm not sure. Unless you work in a total monopoly business with some physical defensive barrier which is falling down every day, you can just afford to be the same every year, year over year. Ten years ago, if you owned an olive grove and it was the only olive grove, you know, in the whole thing, and you had been producing that oil, that might have been enough. But now there's climate changes, and it might be about using AI technology to figure out when to water and not to water, and someone else is now importing that because they're making those same olives in a lab in another country. And so the business cycle's just really fast these days, and I'm not sure you can afford to just do the same.

B (8:49)

So one of the challenges, it seems to me, is pace. It's pacing. It's like running a marathon.

A (8:55)

It's a fast marathon now.

B (8:56)

Yeah, yeah, it's a fast marathon, but you can't sprint for the first mile because you're not going to make it. So you have to keep at that edge. And on the show, we've had a lot of conversations about what kind of a product work is. And one of the just increasingly clear signals we're getting is that work is a transformation offering. And the definition of a transformation offering, according to Joe Pine, is something where after you consume it, you're different, so you're the output of the thing that you are using. And so, so much of what you've written is about building, and it's building along a lot of different dimensions. But I'd argue that you're very focused on this being a kind of a transformation offering. And I want to talk about the dimensions, and I want to get into each of them, because as designers of work, we can think about these as being, I don't know, features, qualities, design attributes that we want to build in. So you've written about spiritual capacity, intellectual capacity, physical capacity, and emotional capacity. And one of the first thoughts I have when I see this is. And I've gotten this feedback from people on the show, which is, I don't think a company's job is to build spiritual capacity. In fact, some people have said, I don't think a company's job is to transform anybody. But you do. Why?

A (10:32)

I don't think you can have a transformative company without transforming people. And let's be clear, spiritual capacity, it sounds religious. It's not to me. This is about understanding who you are, what you want most, and the standards you want to live by. For a lot of people, it's their core values. And here's the thing. I was speaking to a company's leadership team yesterday, and I showed this list of leadership standards that a company had given me the previous year. And I was like, look, these are great. You know, they said for the talk, these are how you want leaders to behave in your company. But you can't tell people what type of leader that they are going to be. And if you go with Jim Collins definition of Level 5 Leader, Level 5 Leader is the transcendent leader that changes the organization. It is deeply based on humility and self awareness. And so I don't think you can be a great leader without making sure you understand your own instruction manual. Having done this work for so many years with so many leaders, their leadership style is deeply affected by life experiences, childhood things that they're trying really hard not to do or they're trying to double down on things that were important to them and they lead in really different ways. The best of those leaders has total awareness of all of that. The struggling ones do not. Helping leaders unlock what is unique about their leadership style, where it comes from. So I mean I can give you an example of this. Again, having done this work, there are a lot of people for whom a personal core value or their why is some aspect of trust. And having worked with these people a lot over the years, I will tell you that in most cases they had a major violation of trust in their life, childhood. Otherwise that has caused them to be someone who very quickly sizes up people and they can be trusted or not trusted. And people that are not trusted are outside of the circle. So you can imagine for a leader who is not aware of this, but this is how they're operating, how this becomes really problematic. So people on their team are 10 minutes late for a meeting, they miss a deadline, they can't be found at 3 o' clock in the afternoon. And for that leader, these are very deep, visceral things of this person cannot be trusted. And they completely shut them out and put them in a penalty box and throw it out. And I've been through this discussion over and over and you start, I can literally go through their team with them. Yep, Jane's, she's in the penalty box, she's not getting out. So if that's how you're operating and you don't know it, you have huge blind spots. If you know it and you understand it, you're not going to change at 40 years old. I mean this stuff's pretty baked in. You're going to sit down with your team and people that onboard say dart, I just want you to know as a leader, trust is really important to me. And I give out trust early. Once it's broken, it's really hard to get back. And I will try to let you know that. But here are the types of behaviors and things on my team that really erode trust. And trust can be a great leadership guide point, but it can also really screw you up. I mean, the flip side is we saw someone who was a trust leader who trusted someone because they had done a project with them in the past and they didn't look at the work closely enough and that contractor did a horrible job on the product. The problem was everything was about you are either in the circle of trust or you're out of the circle of trust. I can give you 10 other examples like this where the person's authentic and best leadership style is deeply affected by something where they're not aware of it until they do that work. And when they do that work, I think they start to unlock their best leadership. And if you think you can build a transformational product without great leaders, you're kidding yourself.

B (14:20)

What are some of the other examples? It was an interesting phrase that you had there. Trust me, leaders.

A (14:26)

So another example, we had someone doing their core values on our leadership team and they had a total epiphany around. They had a parent as a child who was always embarrassing them. The parent, really, they loved the parent deeply, but they lacked self awareness. You know, too loud in the room, one drink too many, wrong joke, just always sort of an issue. Well, self awareness had become really important for this person. And when people on their team showed any signs of lack of self awareness or small things that wouldn't bother you and I, they were all over them. And similarly, whether they put them in a pelly box and they just hadn't realized it and then they were able to articulate that. You know, I had someone recently doing this work who realized that they had a core value and a why of better way and improvement. It was really important to do things better. And so these type of people like being given new challenges, working on new things. They struggle at steady state. And actually they shared a story about growing up in a town that no one ever got out of because of the work and the education system. And so for them, getting out of that town and making it was because they learned and got better and did things differently. So you can see how that's a core orientation from someone, how someone leads and shows up. Again, I'm not a psychologist, but having run a professional services business for almost 20 years, it's not far from it because I Don't ever have a prime. My product is people. Customers are people, partners are people. And when you really have conversations with people around what's going on and you learn these things, you see that fundamentally a lot of things that show up in the workplace come from outside the workplace and things that, again, I'm not encourage anyone to change. I actually think they need to lean into their strengths and understand where their strengths become potential weaknesses or problems.

B (16:16)

First of all, I like the way, for instance, that you're talking about how things that you do at work are exactly the same thing in your family.

A (16:26)

Yeah. By the way, the trust people, when they describe their friendships, small group of really close friends. They've been with them for 15 years. Very hard to break in and become a new friend. Friend who violates that trust is gone forever.

B (16:39)

It's the same story, and it is deep. So my wife's father was an alcoholic. Core to our marriages. I tell the truth and I follow up on my promises because that's what her trigger is. And so does she work?

A (16:55)

Does she leave?

B (16:56)

She's been a teacher.

A (16:57)

Yeah. How does it go when kids lie to her and don't follow up on when they said they would do something?

B (17:03)

Well, adults, it's not so much kids. But I will tell you, with adults, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. She gives kids a break. They're kindergarteners.

A (17:12)

Oh, kindergarteners. Yeah. Anything with kindergarteners, it's their parents. So I agree with that. Yeah.

B (17:18)

But also, there's something that you're doing that not everybody does, which is you are thinking whole human. And it's not like a formula. No, we're humans, and let's engage whole human to whole human. And a lot of that just has to do with listening and expecting people to be human. Right.

A (17:42)

And there's a big caveat in this. I am a big believer that cognitive dissonance is one of the most powerful forces that we deal with every day. And if Dart is on my team and Dart's, let's just do sales, that's easy. He's been a 50% of quota for a year now. And like, this can't go on. What do I typically do? I would start disassociating myself from Dart. I would. He's lazy. He's whatever. He's a bad guy. So that when I do the thing that I have to do eventually, which is have the conversation that it's not going to work out, I can feel better about myself. This connecting with humans, to me, again, it is not like, oh, we're a Kumbaya, whatever thing. I actually think this gives you an opportunity to dive into these things and embrace the relationship. Like, like Dart, I've known you for a while, I love you, but this sales thing is just not working out. What's going on here? Do you want to be in sales? Like, we can't keep you in this role at 50% of quota. Do you want to try something else? Can I help you find another job? Do you want to be in a different industry? I'm going to lean into the relationship to have the hard conversation rather than try to make you out as a bad person so that I can solve that dissonance in my mind that I have to do a bad thing to a good person rather than realizing you have to do bad things to a good person and make the person bad in your mind. I think, like, why don't we lean in the other way around?

B (19:03)

Yeah. First of all, this is one of the main themes of your TED Talk, which is about eliminating two week notice.

A (19:09)

Yeah. And this is my new book that's launching next week.

B (19:12)

Oh, really?

A (19:13)

What is the new book, Rethinking Two Weeks Notice?

B (19:16)

Well, the fundamental idea there is no humans end relationships with two weeks notice outside of work. Why would we think that's okay there? And I want to say what you articulate about cognitive dissonance, which is the ability to split your feelings about people as people and their performance. So explain that because I'm not going to do as good a job as you do.

A (19:45)

You can be a great person and have horrible performance and that could be for a variety of different reasons. And if I have the relationship, I can lean in. The notion of functional medicine says that we try to figure out the source of the problem, don't solve the symptoms. Right. So three people have a headache and you give them a Tylenol. That's going to make the headache go away. One's dehydrated, one is allergic to gluten, and one has a brain tumor. The Tylenol is not going to solve any one of those problems. So similarly, if you can engage in that conversation with the employee, like, look, you seem to disconnected what's going on. You might find a variety of different things. You might find that they lost their childcare and they're just struggling with a schedule temporarily. You might find that they're interviewing every morning and that's why they're disconnected. Or you might find they regret switching from marketing to sales and really want to go back because you're willing to have that discussion rather than just fire the person because performance is poor. There's a couple potentially better outcomes that can come out of that. But just to be clear, the employees are only giving two weeks notice because there is not the psychological. The company has to create the environment of psychological safety. And where these are okay, like when we implemented this, our own open transition program, we said, look, if you come and talk to us about not being happy or want to do something else, we promise you and you can go on glass door and tell everyone, we will not walk you to the door. We want to have these openings, we want to have these conversations so we can figure out what the next step is. And we will try to give you the time and space to do that. And often we had these 90 day transition plans where people continued working and they could start looking for a new job and they didn't have to hide and do that. I mean, again, stupid old playbooks. We are not in the world of pensions and lifetime employment. We're just not even at great companies. You're talking two and a half years. If they're under 30, people will be like, two years is great. Even if I love the company, that's enough. And then I move on. So we kind of need to evolve our departing process away from this expectation that no one's ever going to leave, which just doesn't match up with reality in any way.

B (21:54)

How do you design into a company? And actually this is a general question which is that you have a set of beliefs as a leader, but you have a whole organization made of people. And you're not the only one creating this environment. So one of the questions is how do you scale it? And in particular, it's the question of psychological safety, for instance. So in order for you to have that kind of conversation with somebody where you can sit down and say, look, it's fine if you leave. You're not a bad person because you're not performing great. You just. It's not working in this role. So first of all, how do you create that kind of safety? And then the second question is, how do you build a company in which that's a part of the fabric?

A (22:40)

It's just gotta be part of the operating system and the culture. And these things take time. You cannot go from a place that fires people the same day and tells them to leave, that they give notice to saying, just talk to everyone. Because obviously they haven't seen that even with us. It took a lot of repetition and a lot of time. Look, culture is what you reward explicitly or implicitly and humans respond to what is rewarded. So if you start saying, hey, there are bonuses for the amount of notice that you give us. If you give us 90 days notice before you leave, there's a $2,500 bonus, people might start to say, huh? I guess they mean this. If you start sharing case studies of Sally came to us and said that she wanted to move on, and we had a discussion and we helped find her this job, and we did this, then people go, huh? You start to change the reward system to say, hey, look, actually, people who leave in this way get accolades and support. You know, again, we're all kids. At the end of the day, what are we getting slapped or what are we getting rewarded? So people who leave in this way seem to have the management teams and support and accolades, and people who, despite all of this, don't do that and leave the old way, they seem to be not rewarded and not helped. And the company's not happy about that. So I want to do the behavior that people reward both explicitly and implicitly. Right. Rewards don't always have to be financial. It's just what you celebrate. So if you celebrate people doing those things, if you back that up with financial rewards, then eventually people will realize that you're serious about that.

B (24:16)

And people talk.

A (24:17)

Yeah, they tell the next person that it was safe, you know, and they go on glass door or otherwise. Right.

B (24:23)

And so it's not just what you say. It's not just what you do.

A (24:26)

It's definitely not just what you say. If there's anything I have learned from leadership and parenting, one and the same is that people will do what you do, not what you say.

B (24:35)

Yeah, that's for sure. And, gosh, I can't remember who it was I was talking to. I guess it was Alder Yarrow, which was like my fourth episode, who pointed out that people are always testing their environment. That's how we learn. It's almost like echolocation, which is you try something in the environment and you see what comes back, and you try something in the environment, and if you find out that there's a wall over there or if that it's on fire over there, you won't go there anymore. And so this idea that people are constantly sensing their environment for what's true and what's acceptable, what do kids do?

A (25:12)

What can I do? What can I get away with? If you're looking at. And this is sort of a departure, but I think it's relevant what standards leadership upholds and supports is how people will Behave. If you want to understand the difference of what's going on on certain college campuses right now. By the way, these campuses all have the same rules. All their books say the same thing. Otherwise there's one group of leaders who's not getting political and upholding those rules and other sets of leaders who have given people a one warning and two warnings and then not enforced them. And that is where you see mass chaos on the campuses. They're like, we know you're saying that. We know you don't mean that. And so this is just how humans behave from kids to college students to adults.

B (25:57)

To what extent do you write this down in your company and to what extent is it held in everyone's minds?

A (26:07)

You can write things down, but I think there's so many where you. What we were just saying, there's so many companies that have statements and values and things that aren't true. For me I. It's actually the stories. It's the stories you tell and the stories people hear that impact the behavior. So you see a company with a great culture and they normally have these stories they tell. They tell these stories that support their core values. They start that go against their core values. I still do the onboarding even though I don't lead the company anymore. I'm the chairman and I. I have these 10 year old stories that I tell that are these kind of historic examples of people living our core values and that becomes the operating system and how you hope that people behave and that they want to be one of those stories you could make people. I mean was proven in these prison experiments and otherwise. But you can make people behave in totally different ways by putting them in different environments and cultures that reinforce one behavior or the other because we're all human and will respond to that.

B (27:08)

I like that foundation of story. Part of the reason I like it is each story is kind of a metaphor. It's not an abstract description of what to do. It's a concrete description from which we would derive principles that we would apply in other places. But we learn from the story in a way that we wouldn't from some sort of dictionary definition of something.

A (27:33)

No. And think about it. Religions and how tribes and passed down for gener. I mean I'll give you an example. So the quintessential story in that TED talk and in the book is about. And this sort of. So is the principle in a story. And if you were an employee like how would you react to this? So we'll call him David. So David was a really Good employee of ours, he was showing some frustration. He had some problems. And because we have this sort of policy, someone sat down like, David, what's going on? You seem frustrated and you're causing some problems. And otherwise, like, well, I loved working with data a lot, and my job doesn't have a lot of data these days, and I really like that part of the job, and I want to do more of it. And, you know, we talked it over and we were like, look, we don't have a data analyst role that's coming up anytime soon, but let's think on this and brainstorm this and see if we can find something different for you that'll fill your bucket. And so again, he felt safe to start that conversation. No less than a week after that conversation, I get an email from a very large Fortune 500 public company that we have a relationship with saying, look, we have this role on our team that we really need in our partner program, this sort of global data analyst, and sent me the thing, and I looked at it and I shared it with my team, and we were like, this is exactly the role that David wants. So we talked about it, and we were like, look, we'd be doing him a disservice if we didn't let him go for this. And I wrote this person back. I'm sure they were super surprised because everyone's super skeptical, like, you're trying to dump your trash on me. And I was like, look, we actually have someone on our team who we know wants to do this, and I am happy for him to interview on this. I promise you, he's not our trash. He's very good. We just. We have this kind of program, and we know he wants to do this. And then I went to David and I said, look, we don't want to lose you, but, like, you should interview for this job. Maybe realize it's what you, like, don't like whatever. David gets the job, moves to California, doubled his salary, worked for that company for eight years. And I should tell you that not necessarily related, but not unrelated, that company just hired us as a client. Seven years later.

B (29:49)

Hey, everyone, I want to let you know about some upcoming speaking events if you happen to be in the Great Lakes area. On September 30, I'm keynoting the HR track at the UWEBC 27th Annual Emerging Best Practices in Technology Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The conference pulls in some fabulous speakers to discuss topics across all of business, not just HR. Also in Oakland, California, September 17th and 18th, two of our past Guests have and Work for Humans will be speaking at the Responsive Conference. Bree Grof will be talking about her sparkling new book Today Was Fun. And Simone Stolzoff will be talking about his next book. So check it all out@revolutionive.org use promo code elevenfold. That's eleven fold to get a substantial discount. All right, hope to see you there. I have similar stories, and I don't think I've told this one on the podcast, so I can tell it now. On my teams, we monitor on a monthly basis how rewarding is each of the kinds of work you're doing right now. And if something starts getting unrewarding, either because it's not feeding us or because it's too costly for us to consume for some reason, we step into it. Well, I had a team of people who were doing nothing but data analysis, and I had a couple of creatives on the team, and the creatives were like, we are never going to win the kind of work that we actually want to do. And so we stepped back and we said, is there an adjacent service to what we're already providing that might have a larger creative component so that we might actually expand the scope of our services to win the kind of work that you do want to do? So we looked at what was there, and we saw that employee experience research and design was something that was going to. Was actually going to feed these two team members.

A (31:39)

And it made sense for the business.

B (31:41)

It was something that the business needed. But there's a fair degree of uncertainty about what the business needs. And so testing the internal market to see whether or not there's an appetite for it and if there's a need. And we did that by just putting up a sign that says we do employee experience design to see if anybody would come. And. And somebody came and we started practicing the service with them. And it turned out to be very needed inside the organization. And we established it as an internal service that one of those people retired in that role. So she went 10 years as the head of employee experience design.

A (32:16)

And this all happened because you had.

B (32:17)

That conversation and we had the agency to do something about it. In fact, at the time, I went to my management and say, hey, I'd like to expand the scope of the team potentially in this direction. And they said, no, I'd like to train my team in employee experience design. Can I do that? They said, yes. And so some agency is granted and some agency is taken. So that sort of thing. I completely agree. It makes a team that owns itself.

A (32:45)

So this stuff Is not hard, it's not unintuitive to people. It's just. It's different. Right. If you're operating this thing of, we work, we don't talk about leaving, we don't talk about problems, keep it to myself, then you never really have a chance to address some of these things. And like I said, they're very different root issues when you get into these things, they're very different causes. And you might solve the wrong problem if you can't have. Have a real discussion. And I think if employees realize that, hey, you know, if things aren't going to work out here, otherwise this company's still going to treat me well and have real discussions. And I think that's almost a reason why you'd want to feel more comfortable even working there. Because eventually I'm going to leave. Right. And, you know, I want a place that is respectful and handles things like departures and adults. And so, I don't know, I think they all become more reason to even work at the company.

B (33:46)

I think that this ties back to the how fast are we running the marathon question, which is that you run as fast as you can in the direction of growth, but you don't run so fast that your body fails. Right. You don't run so fast. So you have to leave enough capacity in the system to have those thoughtful conversations that you're talking about. And I don't mean time in the day. I mean the attention that goes into building and growing the capabilities of the organization.

A (34:20)

Yeah, you know, it's the hamster wheel problem. You gotta work on the organization. If you're just running the hamster wheel all the time and not actually fixing some of these problems and getting into this, you're not gonna have any improvement as a baseline. There's a lot of baseline practices that I think good organizations use. One of those is quarterly off sites. And we used to do one day, and then we stopped at two day. And no, no one on our team can get off two days. Because you come together every quarter. The first day is, let's get off the hamster wheel. Let's work on the business, not in the business. Let's work on the people, not with the people. And that first day is sort of reviewing the last 90 days, what we got right, what we got wrong, where the problems are otherwise. And then the second day is what we looking forward to those 90 days, and what are the people situations. And you flag all the problems. So you leave that meeting like, look, we need to address these three people things. And we need to address that in two weeks. And I think if you're always running around like a chicken with your head cut off, you don't step back to solve some of these problems.

B (35:30)

I want to dig into some of the things, the capacities or capabilities that you recommend we build on teams. I want to get a little deeper into some of them. Inside spiritual capacity. There's understanding, purpose. And this is all about helping team members understand their personal and professional purpose. How individualized is that? Because one way that I have seen companies do purpose is we're going to tell you what the purpose of the company is and we're going to sell the heck out of it. And it's not individualized. The other one would be it could be highly individualized and it might be unrelated to the company. So how individualized is that work?

A (36:14)

So that's a great question. When we do it, it is 100% individualized. When we take people off site, when we do leadership training for a day or two, and I think they're pretty surprised. Wait, we're not talking about the company core values or otherwise? No, you know, the company core values. But I help you figure out your personal core values. And by the way, if they're not aligned to the company core values, you're probably going to leave and it wasn't going to work out anyway. So we probably should move on from that as as soon as possible. So this is not company propaganda. We did a session last week. I've had more follow up calls of people saying, I can't believe we spent so much time on this. I had a major unlocks, I went home and I talked to my husband, I talked to my wife, like. Cause again, they realized it's the same things at home for them. And do you mind doing a follow up call with me? I'm trying to sort out some of the edges around. Like people were genuinely excited about this because it was something that was improving for them. So I think this is really trying to solve for them and help them figure out. And look, there's things from the heavy stuff of what are your core values? Or what is your why? Down to more of the Colby and strength finders. But like what do you do? Well, but I can tell you like one of the people had a core value of include all perspectives. Like super important for them to do that, knowing that about that person. There are things that I would ask them to do if they were on my team and not ask them to do, like go rush and make a decision on this and don't talk to anyone that's going to be like kryptonite for that person. You're asking them to do something that is the opposite of their course date versus look, I need to get quickly a consensus. I need to get a temperature on where all of our clients sit on this because we need to make some big product decisions soons and I want to make sure we're building that is the exact person that I would want to have do that. So some of this stuff is heavy, but some of this stuff gets down into even assessments on what's your communication style, what's your strength, what do you do? Well, first understand it for yourself and then understand it for the others that you work with to understand where you're maybe having some problems. But people always do bring up, what if someone does this and they're the opposite Values that come. I'm like, well, they weren't going to work out anyway, so maybe they'll save you some severance if they opt out after that.

B (38:26)

One of the interesting phrasings is that it's about understanding purpose, but it's about aligning values. And so understanding purpose is a self understanding, it's a self comprehension. But then aligning values is. I'm trying to come up with a data model in my head for what that looks like. There's a few values that we hold as indisputable. We all need to agree on those values. But then there's probably a broad set of values that can go beyond that, like not the core essential values.

A (39:00)

I have some strong feelings on this. I think that some of the stuff that's been undone in the last week, I would say over some of the practices of the last year around people being a little bit afraid to speak up and state the obvious around things. And one of those terms that people were that I think got gaslit a little bit was cultural fit. Cultural fit does not mean we are a homogeneous bunch of people and we hire everyone that looks like and feels like us. But the basis of any organization, whether it is familial or religious or otherwise, is that you have to have. Otherwise you're just a collection of people. You have to have some common threads that are sacrosanct. It doesn't mean that you agree on everything. It doesn't mean you approach them on the same way. One of the examples that I give is it's fine that if you have a friend that's an atheist and you're very religious, you might have some good friends that are atheists. And you hang out with them or otherwise you don't really want them in your Bible study group. You don't want them every Sunday morning be like, this whole thing is crap, I don't believe it. Like that's just not the glue that holds that group together. It doesn't mean they're not your great golfing buddy and you hang out with them otherwise. So I think we're kidding ourselves if we don't think that the glue to holding an organization together is some real shared, non compromising values. Now sometimes what those values are like in the case of Enron is not what people say they are. They're there. You know, Enron's values were kind of take huge risks and deal and cheat and do whatever you need to do to get ahead. That is not the stuff they had on their wall that said integrity and respect. Because everyone knew that's not how you make money and get promoted at Enron. These are the things again, I hope people are not afraid to say anymore. And I don't like this cultural fit. I understand when people say Silicon Valley you're trying to hire all the same people, but you need cultural ad, whatever we want to call it a little bit of semantics. We are not saying you need everyone the same. I think you need people that think differently and have different perspectives. But if you don't have a few core things that you agree upon about why you're there, then you're just kind of a collection of people.

B (41:09)

Is there a proportion of the organization that says this is touchy feely stuff and I'm just here to work and you don't have to make me happy? I will tell you, I actually run across this which is, no, let's talk about what you really want to do. And it's sort of like, this is not about what I want to do. This is about me getting work done. This is a contractual arrangement between me and you. You don't have to worry about my feelings.

A (41:36)

It's a little bit all across the board. I would say if that's someone who isn't willing to discuss anything that would help them be better and doesn't want to be part of a team, then that's also sort of a cultural decision you're making. You know, I had someone who's in my elevate club on one of the calls say, look, I can't get these people to come to the office or engage or whatever. They just want to do their work and they want to be left alone or otherwise. I was like, look, it's up to you to decide whether that's okay as part of your culture. Do you want some free agent aspect to your organization or is that not what you're going to allow? This is why you get the big bucks, because you got to make that decision. But I'm not sure you can play both sides of that coin. I think you either say, look, this is a performance driven environment. We won't talk about this sort of stuff. You get your work done or you're fired. You know, if it's not good, you're fired. That's the opposite. Right? That's what that sort of culture would be. If it's all about just doing your work whenever, then if you don't get it done, then there's not even be a discussion and we're going to just fire you and we don't even need to talk to you. People really want to work on that too. So I think after Covid and the great resignation, there are a lot of people seeking this more transactional work environment initially. But then you have all people saying they have record loneliness and record depression and otherwise. And look, if you can't create some reason that people want to work at your company, it's really hard to run a business as transactional. Only I want to work when I want, how I want, on what I want. That's great if you're driving an Uber or delivering to Instacart, but being part of a high performance team, that just doesn't fly. And so I think you have to. The leader has to take a look at what kind of business that I'm running if I'm running Uber, not my employees. But it's fine if all my drivers have an individualistic. They're all kind of like small business owners. As someone once said, if you had a freshman come onto University of Alabama when Nick Saban was coaching and said, look, I see the playbook. I got my own style. I like how I do things. I got my own way of doing that. No way that's going to fly with any college coach. We've got a way of doing things here. You're part of the team. This is a team thing. So I see a lot of people eschewing the team thing in terms of rugged individuality. I also see record levels of loneliness and depression. And I do wonder why people don't make that connection.

B (43:57)

Well, I mean, this is very related to one of the other capacities that teams should build that you describe, which is emotional capacity. And there are components to that there's building relationships, there's emotional intelligence, there's conflict.

A (44:13)

Resolution and resilience and agency. And a couple.

B (44:17)

And resilience. And agency. Okay, agency. Let's talk about agency.

A (44:22)

I give you a great example of agency.

B (44:24)

I'd love a great example. And then I have a question about it.

A (44:27)

Sure. Acceleration Partners, a company I founded, is a professional services firm. We work in partnerships with software firms and help to implement and run their software for clients. There was a company years ago in our industry that while they had technology, they also had a services practice. And they would constantly be wanting us to bring our clients to them to use their platform. But they competed against us in service. And it got very awkward at stages. And then a new company came into our industry and they were software only, and they built a services team and they came and met with us and they asked us what features our clients want, and the software was better. And they were sending us leads, which the other company never did because they would keep the services pieces. And we started doing a lot of business with this client and we were honest with the other company around why we weren't doing business with them. Your product's old, it's expensive. You compete against us otherwise. I was at our big industry conference in London and a couple people came up to me telling me that they had heard from multiple people at that first company that they were telling people that. And we were sort of one of the biggest players in the industry. The reason why we were doing so much work with this new company was because they were paying us kickback fees under the table to do work with them. Now I offered a massive reward for that because it was patently untrue and out of nowhere and had to call the CEO. But it just was interesting to me because we told this company multiple times directly why we weren't working with them, but it was easier for them to place blame on some external nefarious factor than to change the things that they had the possibility to change. And we see this a lot with sales teams. There's a lot of sales teams. And to me, this goes right to the leadership. They never lost a deal. That was their fault. It was the customer. They got screwed by the competitor. It was the timing. That is a leader who allows that team to talk about all external variables and not look internally. So this to me is all about agency and locus of control. In terms of saying, look, what our sales team does is when they lose a deal, they have someone call the client who's. Who's just allowed to Ask questions and not respond, and ask them five or six questions about why they went with a different vendor otherwise, and they bring that back to the team so the team can do an internal debrief on it.

B (46:49)

First of all, I like the tying of agency to locus of control, which is, what are we going to do about it? Everything can be up to us. And focusing on that. When I first came into business, I worked as a criminal defense investigator, and I worked for this investigator who thought nothing was impossible, absolutely nothing. The concert was sold out that he wanted to go to, and it was the day of the concert. He thought, I have agency in this. This is before the Internet. He went down to the emergency room and he put up signs saying, I'll buy your tickets for this concert. And he immediately got a call because somebody had gone to the emergency room and they couldn't go to the concert. There's always a way was his attitude. There's always, always away. One time I was in San Francisco minding my own business. On the weekend, I'm at a bookstore, and the phone rings at the bookstore, and the person says, are you dart? And it's because my investigator employer knew I'd be in a bookstore. And so he started calling every bookstore and he wanted to ask me a question. But so much of what I see with agency is carried with us. And it seems to be something I don't know exactly, but this is one of the things with work as a product, is that you go to teams and you say, well, work's a product. And so teams, we're going to work on making that product better for you. And managers, that's part of your role. And the response is, I don't have control over the nature of work here. And there's a surrender and a. It may have been learned, but it may have been something that they learned 20 years ago.

A (48:29)

I look at everything from sort of a leadership viewpoint. Not that external things don't happen, but what can we learn? What can we do differently? How can we get better? Right. That should be your orientation, irrespective of whatever your politics are. The Democrats got creamed in last week's election, and I just found it very interesting to watch the news in different channels. And there's a famous thing now where an anchor on MSNBC said it was a flawless campaign. And one of their points I was at flawless was they got this celebrity sponsorship, and this celebrity never sponsors anyone. And I thought of this when you said product, because this is like the person saying, God, no one bought our product. But our marketing was brilliant. But no one bought our product. Right. They just don't get our marketing. What a silly thing to say.

B (49:16)

Here's a classic example of that related to work. The number of people I talk to who say, people these days, they just don't want to work. I try to hire people and nobody will take the job. That's absolutely not what you would say if you were selling a product. And there's a moral aspect to it.

A (49:33)

I marketed this job, and no one wants to buy it. Right. Maybe it's the job.

B (49:37)

So I'm selling a product and people aren't buying it. They must be lazy. There's a moral layer to this and sort of a contempt for people not buying your product. Well, maybe it's not the right product.

A (49:51)

And then that is the complete analogous. So, you know, I heard some Democratic strategists lay out, hey, this is what we screwed up, A, B, C, and D. And if we don't change this, it's not going to get better. And then others blaming the customer. Right. Which is basically what you're saying. And I just think it's interesting because that's the same dynamic. It's the same leadership lesson. You can't blame the customer. You can't blame the person who doesn't want to buy your crappy job.

B (50:18)

Well, it's interesting. I think the lesson that a lot of people are taking out of this election is it's not how we campaigned. We're never going to elect a woman. We can't put women up for the presidency because it's impossible.

A (50:32)

That's just an easy answer. Right. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah.

B (50:36)

And actually, it may be true. I. I'm not saying it's not true.

A (50:39)

Right. It could be true.

B (50:40)

I am saying that if that's the only lesson you learn out of it, then you're gonna lose again.

A (50:46)

Yeah. And that's what I've been most interested in. And I would've been interested in it the other way, too. I mean, look, winners write the history. And if it flipped, you'd have totally different narratives, but you'd have to make changes and you'd have to adjust. And so I think this agency thing, there's always stuff that happened. Covid happened. Covid decimated the restaurant industry. Right. It was a thing that you couldn't control. There was a fair amount of restaurants, though, who were like, look, we are a certain type of product and service. We are not going back until this is fixed, and we are not going to change anything. And we'll wait it out. And most of those were out of business. There was another ones are like, look, I've got staff to feed or otherwise. I know we never did delivery, but they signed up for every delivery service. They figured out how to sell wholesale stuff. They set up tents outside and got heaters, and they did whatever they needed to do. Both of them had the same thing happen to them. One set took a look. We're going to do everything that we can do given that there's a global pandemic. And the other, we're like, look, we can't do anything. Global pandemic. We're going to wait until this thing's fixed and then we'll go back to what we were doing.

B (51:49)

Yeah. And it's very interesting, at least in my town. What's happened is we now have outdoor dining.

A (51:55)

Yeah, exactly.

B (51:57)

And take out beer. Two huge improvements. You can go to Taqueria and get takeout tacos and a beer.

A (52:06)

Yeah.

B (52:07)

And that was because the situation forced everybody to think differently. And those with agency said, we can do something different.

A (52:14)

We're not going to sit around and wait and see what happens to us.

B (52:18)

By the way, I was lobbying with the California government for takeout beer before the pandemic through the California Restaurant Association.

A (52:25)

People want to pay twice as much to buy takeout beer. Like, you can let them. I don't know.

B (52:31)

But now we have it. I haven't found this person to have on the show yet. Somebody who can talk about unlearning learned helplessness. And honestly, I don't know how deep that goes. And I don't know. I just. It's a mystery.

A (52:50)

It is one of the greatest problems of our time. In fact, the article that I wrote last week after the election talked about. You probably saw this. It was one of the most prestigious private schools in New York, the Feldstone School. $65,000 a year high school, middle school, told their students that there would be no homework the night of the election. Fine. But if they were too distressed to come to class after the election, they could skip and there'd be counselors available and all kinds of stuff for them. So pre catastrophizing this for a group of people that is teaching learned helplessness. And again, let's look at the data, let's look at the outcomes. We've got more stressed and depressed people ever. And disproportionately impacting the kids that have the most resources in a historic time of prosperity. Maybe it's something that we're Doing differently. Maybe it's something that we're teaching differently that's not having the outcome that we're looking for. It should get people curious as to why that is. And again, this learned helplessness, I think it's only getting worse in the workplace because it's the default method of parenting. You know, it's let's prepare the path for the kid, not the kid for the path, and understand that stuff goes wrong and you don't get your way sometimes and you screw things up and you learn from it and you move on. But this trying to stop any bad consequences or bad feelings or otherwise, it shows itself in the workplace 10 years.

B (54:17)

Later, which is a segue into resilience. Because resilience is you get knocked down and you don't stay down. And it's about saying, I'm going to get up and I'm going to do something different.

A (54:31)

It's also a muscle. You cannot build it without using it. So it's not an intellectual exercise that is desperately missing from people's comprehension and awareness.

B (54:46)

What is it? If it's a muscle, let's talk about what is that muscle?

A (54:51)

My grandmother had a back problem and she was basically sent to bed. They would never do that anymore because they've learned if you just put someone in bed forever, all of their muscles will atrophy away and they won't work anymore. And that was not the right solution to her back problem. If you don't ever walk, your leg muscles will not work. Like you actually need to be pushing on them. They need resistance, they need to get sore. They sort of contract. And so a coping mechanism or resilience, it's not something you learn about. It's something you have to be like, I didn't get the color crayon that I wanted and I survived. I didn't get into the school that I wanted and I survived. This person broke up with me and I survived. And what's amazing is we are taking away these low level disappointment things from people that really. I know when you're seven, it feels like the end of the world or your friend won't play with you otherwise. But these are actually the practice swings for when you really have some things that start to not go your way. But each of those builds a muscle. It doesn't mean you're not sad or mad or angry or whatever. And I'm what? While I'm incredibly sensitive and appreciative of real mental health issues, if you label everything mental health, then it also does a huge disservice to people that have true mental health issues. So because you're disappointed, mad, sad, angry, frustrated, these are normal human emotions. They are not signs of a necessarily of a mental health problem or struggle or needing to withdraw from society or need day or days off.

B (56:29)

Now, if I wanted to build the muscles in my legs, I'd go walking. If I want to build resilience, I don't know, do I knock myself down? I don't know.

A (56:38)

As an adult, you would try to put yourself in more uncomfortable situations, right? You take a risk, you'd ask someone out, you try a food you hadn't tried before. You get lost walking around a city, right? You would just do things that border your comfort zone. As a kid, it is almost all going to fall on the parents to not intervene in that organic process. Similarly, as a leader, right. One of the big things that we talk about is understanding in the organization below the waterline and above the waterline mistakes, those mistakes that will sink the ship and those mistakes that while not comfortable, are important and people just have to make the above the waterline mistakes themselves. So we realized long time ago our managers would correct clients monthly reports a lot before they went out and they got accused of micromanagement. Well, I know I've been working with clients for 10 years. You forgot to say this. And I know they're gonna ask you about it and they're gonna be annoyed and you're better on being ahead of it. The problem we realized was if they were always fixing the problem before they saw it, the person just got annoyed because they never actually saw the problem. And you kind of had to let them send the thing to the client. Again, not a mistake that's going to lose you $1 million client. But you actually had to let them have that pain and then review it with them rather than trying to stop it from the first place. Because then they got really annoyed that you were just suffocating them.

B (58:00)

Yeah, my kids would do something that looked physically dangerous. I assess, is this a hospital thing or is this an ouch? And if it was an ouch, I'd say, you know, if you climb up onto that thing, it's likely to tip over and you'll get hurt.

A (58:15)

I wouldn't stop them. Yeah.

B (58:17)

And yeah, they got hurt.

A (58:20)

My favorite invention that was helped my kids development, I joked about in an article. For me, it was not as important as electricity and water and air conditioning, but it was these ropes course, this contraption that one side locks while the other side unlocks, which basically let People build these massive self service rope courses with green, blue and black because you couldn't get hurt. You could do the whole thing yourself and you couldn't get hurt. And that's a classic thing for when you're on your kids. And they had moments where they were very uncomfortable, but I knew they were a hundred percent safe and I was willing to let them struggle and cry through those moments to figure out how to get out of it while other parents were looking at me in horror. And by the way, my son figured it out and the next time he flew through that thing and taught all his friends in it, I wasn't going to rescue him because I knew he was actually safe. It was just really uncomfortable.

B (59:14)

Yeah, yeah. I call that the greenhouse effect, which is that you want to give as much room to grow and the greenhouse is just the walls beyond which it's dangerous.

A (59:24)

Right. You need some skin knees.

B (59:26)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (59:29)

Your people need some skin knees. You can't save them from everything. It's a struggle for client service company. No one loves having those mistakes made in front of clients. But I don't know how else you grow unless you make a few of those.

B (59:44)

What's an example of a below the waterline mistake?

A (59:47)

I'll just contrast. An above the waterline mistake would be managers going away for a week. They lead the weekly call rather than skipping the call with the client. They let their associate do the weekly check in call and they record it and they go over it after. And they probably make some mistakes below the waterline when mistake would mean one of your biggest clients is really pissed, really upset about something. You're on vacation and you might ask the associate to take that call when they've never done anything like that before and it has the potential to have the client maybe leave you. Right. That would be a below the waterline mistake versus a just housekeeping check in call when everything's going well. So I would not let the associate take the latter call and I would encourage them to take the former call.

B (60:36)

I was just thinking about the Andersen consulting. I can't remember what it was that they did wrong.

A (60:41)

Arthur Anderson. It was Arthur Anderson.

B (60:43)

Yeah, it was Arthur Anderson, wasn't it?

A (60:45)

Yeah, it was the Enron fraud.

B (60:47)

The good news, if it's really, really below the waterline, you can just rebrand.

A (60:53)

Right. It's really, really below the water. The whole thing wiped out. That to me is this is where both parents and leaders who are all the same thing, different from leadership figuring out again, I want my kids to Make a lot of mistakes. I don't want them to make ones that are going to ruin their lives.

B (61:10)

That's right. Yeah. These are again related, which is you could be the controlling CEO who mandates things that are going to make you never make above the waterline mistakes. But if you do that, you've eliminated agency.

A (61:28)

Yeah. And by the way, if you do that, you're probably eventually going to have a massive below the waterline mistake because people won't tell you that they made mistakes. The quintessential story of that is the story of Volkswagen and their diesel engine. So the authoritarian leader of who hated failure ad board failure told the market that were going to make an engine that had this amount of efficiency and this amount of exhaust. And when the engineers got to the end and they realized they couldn't make both work, they were scared to tell them. So they put all their engineer. They said, look, we can't fake the mileage because people will see it, so we can fake the exhaust. And they came up with a cheater thing and ended up costing Volkswagen $8 billion in all these years. And that was a hundred percent because they were afraid to go to the leader and be like, it doesn't work.

B (62:17)

So I ask a couple questions at the end of the show. The first one is, what job do you, Robert, hire your job to do for you?

A (62:25)

I hire it to help make me a better leader. At the end of the day, I.

B (62:30)

Mean, it's completely fits with everything you've ever written. Completely fits. Your first book, Elevate is absolutely how do I as a leader build my capacity, spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional? So you buy it as a transformation product. Is that a complete list of what you hire your job? Are those all the dimensions that you hire your job to help you make it become a better leader? Have you advanced your idea of what that growth means since you wrote Elevate?

A (63:04)

Yeah. The more that you are spending your day helping other people do their job well, rather than figuring out what they need to do, you know, and part of that, I think, is first who, then what. You assume as a CEO that you're not smarter than any of those people in any of those disciplines. And so if you want to figure out what. And I've seen this over the years when we were struggling with a what, like how do we build technology or how do we solve? My job was to find a brilliant cto. I tell them the problem and them to tell me the solution. So I really believe in that first two. Then what from the executive or the leadership seat.

B (63:44)

And in terms of building intellectual capacity, what is your intellectual frontier? Where are you still discovering and feel like you need to discover?

A (63:57)

A lot of it is intellectual capacity. Is this sort of 80, 20 right around where do we spend our time? And what are the systems and processes that get us sort of the most outcome? So for me, it's still trying to figure out as much. I think what should I not be doing? Is what should I be doing? We're all good at adding, we're not good at taking away.

B (64:18)

I like that part of it because it's a design technique, which is to ask, let's look at the thing that we.

A (64:25)

All the new features. Yeah.

B (64:26)

And what can we take off and. And the best example of that is those bikes that don't have pedals for little kids. We took off the pedals and now we don't need to have those stupid trainer wheels that never worked and didn't teach us anything. And it's better.

A (64:40)

Yeah. And I think organizations have been adding for a long time and I've noticed that the last couple years are what can we take away? And no one will notice.

B (64:50)

And not just nobody will notice, but it might be better.

A (64:54)

Yeah, exactly. And people yell and scream, we can't do without this. Otherwise by day four, no one notices that it's missing.

B (65:02)

What does your job cost you?

A (65:04)

It costs me living in the pre. And I'm going to say, when I say my job, I'm not the CEO of the business anymore. But let me look at it through that lens. I think it cost me living in the present because I spent a lot of time thinking about the future and it cost me time with friends and family. These jobs are heavily demanding now and I have no regrets. But for sure that there was a cost there.

B (65:31)

Right. And that's why under emotional capacity you have mindfulness, which is helping to try to get into the present a larger percentage of the time.

A (65:41)

Exactly. And that's not where my default mode was, the business. It was what's next? What can we do better? What can we improve? And I think that's appropriate for the business. But sometimes it's hard to be in the present.

B (65:55)

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. Where can people learn more about you and in particular, where can they learn and be ready for your upcoming book?

A (66:04)

Yeah. So the book is out on Amazon for pre order rethinking two weeks notice or audiobook or wherever you might find it. All of my books, books, podcasts Friday for newsletter everything course on core values is at Robert Glazer G L a z e r.com Great.

B (66:22)

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show.

A (66:25)

Thanks for having me.

B (66:30)

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.