C (11:22)

Sure, Absolutely. I started Outdoor Voices five years ago on a mission to build the number one recreation brand. And the goal here being how many people in this world can we get moving? I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, super outdoorsy place, played a lot of sports growing up. I was the hurdler, basketball player, soccer player, and loved at the time wearing brands with the credo harder, better, faster, stronger. Because when you are a young athlete, the goal is to cross the finish line first. I ended up not pursuing athletics through college and when I went into college, athletics took on a whole new meaning. It was no longer about crossing the finish line first, and all about how am I going to motivate myself to get my butt out of bed and move. And so it was after college that I realized there's so many people out here that need that motivation. And it's not going to be motivation around pressure to perform, but really around how do we create a company that approaches activity with moderation, ease, humor and delight and brings this idea of play back into adult life? So we're five years in, we have nine stores currently, five more coming, and we're having the most fun time of our lives.

A (12:30)

How does a young person that comes out of Boulder, Colorado, who is a great athlete and has this kind of passion and vision, but how do you bridge between having that vision to this type of execution?

C (12:44)

Yeah, I look back to playing team sports as something that's really been important And a lot of our team today has kind of that in common. Because when you learn how to work towards a common goal with the team and there is this competitive nature, like, you get really good. So though we are recreational and our kind of mission is for fun, we pursue that with excellence and the pursuit of progressing and getting really great. So there is this winner mentality, but it's all about personal best versus competing with others. And so we attack it with that same all in committedness, but it's attacking the mission around. Hey, it's play, it's lighthearted, it's recess, it's fun.

B (13:25)

And you've talked a lot about your culture. Tell us a little bit about how you fostered a winning culture that's not necessarily about winning at all costs or winning on someone else's standard.

C (13:38)

Yeah, there's this film called Personal Best that Marielle Hemingway's in, and I'm really inspired by it because in that movie it's all about progress, not perfection. But it's every day I wake up and have the drive to get better. And that's really what we instill and find that our community wants, like, they want to get better and continue to improve. But it's more about how am I getting better by making myself a happier, healthier person through moving and connecting with people through activity versus lining up on the track line and trying to make winning my number one goal. So the happiness, I would say, and we really believe that endorphins make you happy is ultimately what people consider kind of the number one criteria for winning.

B (14:21)

That was our conversation with Ty that was so funny. I stood in for Big Cat on an episode of the Corp. I was actually very excited because I liked Ty Haney, but I can remember filming it standing up next to a rod in the KFC studio. So hopefully you liked a little flashback. But I think the point about building community, which was always so, so core to the DNA of outdoor voices, is really special. And my bet is that that's where she leans to take the brand forward. And I do think there is a really hard part about when you take someone else's money and you put it into a business, there's expectations and a need for that money to return. Like, that's. That's the transaction, that's the partnership. And it will be interesting to see how not just tie, but how founders and brands and communities develop and how they balance that tension between nurturing and growing and building community, which takes time and takes care and isn't necessarily rational or practical or profitable. And the VC community and communities are saying, hey, we're the bank, we gave you money. What are you going to do with it? Show us the results. And obviously that tension has always existed with startups and always existed with community driven brands. But it is interesting to see how in some cases the VC world and the money comes first full circle. And in other cases, the founder comes full circle. All right, our next guest is Mita. I'm going to meet, I'm going to have you introduce yourself. So give everyone your illustrious background and what you do.

A (16:02)

Hi everyone. I'm Eda Malik. I've been both a marketing and HR executive. I'm on a mission to fix what's broken in our workplaces. I'm a Wall Street Journal in USA Today bestselling author and really excited about my next book that's coming out, the Dubbel Emails at Midnight.

B (16:16)

Ooh, and tell me about the nasty lady that emails at midnight. I have been this woman.

A (16:22)

I was that nasty lady. I had been that, that lady. But it is the double emails of midnight. What good leaders can learn for bad bosses. And then the book opens with the story of a boss who never had had time for me during the day except at midnight when she then decided to consistently empty out her inbox and dump it to Mike.

B (16:39)

Can I back up a second? It's strange to have worked in both. Is it strange? I think it is to have worked both in marketing and in hr. Like, how did you bridge those two jobs?

A (16:50)

Yeah, I actually don't think it's strange. I think I went from thinking about one of the most valuable stakeholders, which is the consumer. How do you surprise and delight people over Chron addicts and swellings and surfaces they didn't expect? And then you actually flip this descript and think of employees as. Yeah, report stakeholder. And having surprise and delight then at work and their experiences.

B (17:12)

Totally. It's funny, I always describe myself as a frustrated HR person, but I'm really a marketer by trade and it's kind of the same thing. Oh, I love that. But talk about fixing the workplace and you talk a lot about inclusion in the workplace and I love how you describe somebody who just dumps their inbox or to do list into yours. And I think so many leaders are guilty of that. What's your advice for how people can step through that or navigate that better both as the boss and then also as the person?

A (17:45)

Well, as the boss, I think about sort of if I think about my calendar like I think about my wardrobe, how do I declutter it. What are meetings that am I meaning to me in? What's FOMO versus Jomo? How do I delegate even more? And how do I find more time during the day to actually coach, to teach and train? And you would actually think with the rise of AI, all the embracing we're doing with technology, that you'll be able to scale things and be able to have more and more time to actually be human and connect with the people. Like that should actually free up. Just because it's a good time for me to do work doesn't mean it's a good time for someone else to receive ccd. I'm not saying that people don't work different hours, but I'm saying how do I feel when I receive that? And I think that's important when we have power in the workplace. She can still hear you.

B (18:32)

She can hear me. Okay, sorry, we're having like an Internet issue. And then how do you, you know it's funny because I've dealt with, I've experienced this a lot. I think anybody at work has experienced it a lot. Where you have the person who's relentless and it's relentless on Sunday night and it just, it makes people tense and I think it creates fear and it creates resentment. When you are working for or working with someone who has that behavior, what is your advice to people for how they should, should, should address it?

A (19:04)

It's the Sunday scary is starts on Sunday.

B (19:07)

Right.

A (19:07)

I've been there and I look the trap I've fallen into and I love that you're asking this question. Is that I'm responding.

B (19:13)

Yes.

A (19:13)

Yeah. On Sundays. So you have to retrain and manage your boss. I had a boss who would routinely Text me at 6am Random thoughts on projects, non urgent things. And rather than responding over text, I'd be trained them and I would respond over email at 8:30. And so I'm not saying that always works but I think we have a responsibility to set and try to keep boundaries. And so again it's like how did I know my boss was emailing at midnight? Because I was responding and checking emails. And so how can you try to retrain or have conversations with the boss where you feel like there's safety and you're able to get back?

B (19:51)

Yeah, I think that's, that's great advice because I am like that. Like I have ideas all the time. I'm a sharer, I want to share my ideas, I want to bring people in, I want to ask a lot of advice and opinions. But I think it can seem like an assault. Like I, you know, I'm like looking at Jessica, my assistant right now and she's like, yes, you assault me. But I, I think your perspective is great, which is just because I don't think you're. And you tell me actually so disagree with me on this. But I don't think you're a bad boss. If you are sharing and you have requests and you have ideas, I think everyone can be retrained to be better. But I also think you do have agency at work to say, you know what, I am going to engage and I am going to play. I made this mistake for a decade of my career, which is I would never have dreamed to push back or to create a different forum or to respond not in kind. I do think employees today are feeling more agency and I think that's a great message. And then I also think there's a good, you know, part of it is you should experience a lot of different bosses and they will bring different things to you. And everybody kind of has a tackle at work which is you might be a great leader, but you're over communicative or you might be under communicative, but you're very respectful of boundaries. And how do you help people manage that dynamic? Because it is, at the end of the day, it's a human dynamic.

A (21:23)

It is a human dynamic. And I would say a bad boss for me might not be a bad boss for you. And so you have to think about that, how the scales tip from being a good boss to a bad boss to a good boss. And we all have these moments. You know, when I think about the book the Devil Equals at Midnight, out of the 13 bosses I chronicle, three of them had a devastating impact to my mental health. So you have to really think about when you ask the question, like, is it that they are a bad boss for me in that moment, is there something happening in that environment? You know, I've learned the hard way that I can't change other people's behavior and only change myself. So if it's a situation that's untenable, you should absolutely, I say make the escape plan or imagine strategy. But also I've had a boss, you know, maybe in that moment I wouldn't use the word bad, but potentially tough, difficult, exhausting. And what he was trying to do was he was trying to teach me and train me. And I'll never forget, I'll give him like a 15 page depth, right slide depth. And what he would do is he would not Even look at the contents of the slides. He would just look at the titles and give it back to me and say, this slide just says, we launched an innovation in 2025. What does that mean? Because most executives will never look at the details. They'll only look at the titles of the slides. They don't have time. And so that could have been a bad boss moment. But he was not micromanaging. He wasn't redoing the deck and giving it to me. He was teaching me. Yeah. And he had high standards. And I'm telling you, that moment from, like, years and years ago, I still carry with me. It was this lesson of how to tell stories in the workplace through day. And so that's the difference. I think you have to sort of understand, are they teaching you, training you, or are they trying to, you know, unknowingly not get the best work out of you?

B (23:01)

Yeah, I think that's a great point. Do you think that people want to be taught at work?

A (23:06)

I think so. I think, particularly early in your career. I mean, I certainly did. I think that if you. I don't know. I mean, I think humility is a quality we should all have as leaders. There's so much to keep learning and so much to be teaching. I don't. I would think that more people want to be embracing and learning.

B (23:25)

I think that one of the things that's changing at work is I'm not sure people want to be pushed. The way I was pushed early in my career was hard and fierce and probably not appropriate, and that's okay. Like, that's my journey, and those are my shoes, and everyone else has different shoes. But I worry, not worry, but I wonder about it at work, which is you see the movement of feedback versus feed forward, and, you know, what is criticism? And, you know, I do think there is this question about, do people want to learn at work? And I think it's hard to make generalities about it. And you can't make, you know, you can't make generalizations. But I also. I really liked what you had to say, which is, there are great bosses and leaders and mentors and partners for you at work that may be great at different times in your career. And understanding what you're looking for is a really big part of that. So I wonder about that. But I also am like, gosh, maybe I don't know.

A (24:36)

I think it's also the job of a leader to create that learning environment and to want to help people to learn and teach them new things. Now the person has to be open minded. I think part of what you're seeing too is that loyalty is dead. There's a lot of layoffs happening in the workplace. I think people are scared and sometimes they're on autopilot. They're like, I don't have time to learn. I'm just gonna sit here and get what needs to be done done. I'm afraid that I might lose my job or that something might happen. And so I think that there's that reaction too. But I think when, you know, when's the last time a leader sat you down and offered to teach you something?

B (25:08)

Yeah, it's such a gift. Like it's a great, it's a great gift. And how do you, how would you, what's the advice you would give to people as they're interview a boss? And also the dialogue that like when I interview people, I'm like, look, this is how I am. Like what you get is what you get with me. Like this is what you get. And I like that dialogue because I never want someone to come in with me and be surprised. And I think it's a good tactic for me and I think it's a good learning and it's a good piece of feedback for anyone who I work with. But how would you approach that and what do you counsel people to do?

A (25:50)

I love that you role model that. Not everyone does that. Not everyone's that honest. In an interview, people ask me, what are the signs that you might be working for a bad boss? Like how do you know? During the interview process, I actually talk a lot about watch for non verbals. If the person is disinterested, disengaged, interrupts, seems bored, is repetitively late. When it's like rounds and rounds of interviews. I mean that's like the preview. It's the movie trailer.

B (26:16)

Yeah.

A (26:17)

What it might. Well, you have to work there, right. Because you would expect on the interview you're going to be on your best behavior. Just like you said, you're like, this is how I am to work for. I want it on the table because guess what, it costs a lot to hire me. And then I weave and replace me. It's like two and a half times my salary and go through that process again. So I think it's really important. I also think, you know, I always say once you get the offer and you're in the driver's seat, I've done this. So if you gave me an offer, I'm going to actually ask for 30 more minutes of your time to Ask you questions about what it's like to work for you, what's feedback that you're working on? What does success look like for me in the first 90 days to have those honest conversations, which you're not likely going to do during the interview process because I'm trying to convince you of my candidacy and I don't want to be asking too many questions.

B (27:05)

That's interesting. So you almost create a pre decision moment where you move from selling your skills and winning people over to the mechanics and of how actually is this going to work? What is your expectation of me? What's my expectation of you? I think that's great perspective.

A (27:24)

I've done that for my last, I think, five job offers in my career. Right. I did that as I got more senior, but absolutely. And I think most of the hiring managers were happy to have that conversation.

B (27:36)

Yeah, it's easy for them.

A (27:38)

Process is over. I really want you to join. Yeah, let's have a conversation of what it's like to work with each other because it has to be about a mutual fit.

B (27:45)

Yep. I totally agree with that. I agree with that. And I think it's great. And your writing is great in that it's a relationship. Like, you both have to come into this with an understanding of what you're each going to get out of it. And sometimes things go astray, and sometimes things are, you know, are awry. But knowing what you're getting into and knowing what you're comfortable with and also where your boundaries are is. Is so empowering. Where do you think most people get it wrong? During the interview process in general.

A (28:24)

Sorry, Kitty.

B (28:25)

Oh, sorry. Just in general, like in. Not in the interview process, but in the. Managing your relationship with the devil.

A (28:33)

Yeah. You know, I think I'll say where. I'll be honest of where I've gotten it wrong. You know, going from doing to directing is the hardest moment in your career. And I watch too many people fail out too many companies that don't provide resources. Because let's go back to the history of work and manufacturing. If we were on a factory line and we were both like, putting together widgets and I outpaced my goal for the day and I kept doing that. And they came to me and said, oh, my God, you're so great. We're going to promote you now. Now you're in charge of the whole line and widget makers. And I'm like, well, I'm just really good at making widgets. I don't know if I could teach other people to do it. But that still exists in our workplaces. I do something really well, really great expertise, and it's like, congratulations, Mita, now you get to oversee 10 people. And I'm like, well, I don't want that. Right. So you think what's really broken is this fact that, like, you can be an individual contributor, you can do really well and have great expertise. And why can't I continue to excel and evolve in my career without ever having to manage people right? And I think some companies are getting this right, particularly in tech. With engineering, we'll see traps to be developed. That's really just around individual contributors. But that's where. That's where I think we get it wrong, is that we set people up to lead and we don't actually give them any support or guidance on how to do it.

B (29:48)

No, I agree with that. It's funny. I am on the board of a company and we have this conversation all the time, which is the bias shouldn't be that to be more senior. It means that you manage people. You can be most senior and be an individual contributor. And there's nothing wrong with it. I think there's this prevailing assumption at work that if you can't manage people, you're somehow not as great. And it's just not true. Some people are good at managing people and some people are terrible at managing people. And there's nothing wrong with that. I also think that workplaces, as they get more stretched financially and you look at the margins and this, that and the other thing, the amount of time and investment in training is nil. And so most people get, you know, to the assembly line. Most work is an apprenticeship, in my opinion. And it's all about how do you make the most of this apprenticeship and what does the apprenticeship give you? And as you get. As managers get more stretched or more challenged, you see, you know, one of the things I spend a lot of time looking at is you think about the span of control, like span of controls are increasing, the number of layers are going down. But it's create. It's exacerbating a lot of these problems. Where I think your. A book like yours is really helpful because it kind of teaches you as the employee and as the boss, how you should best navigate it. Because your company isn't necessarily going to do that for you.

A (31:15)

They're not going to. That's why your podcast my book. There's so many other resources and ways to learn. If you don't have the resources in.

B (31:21)

Your organization, that's awesome. So give Give us your, like, three best pieces of advice for navigating. Successfully navigating work and not losing yourself in the work.

A (31:36)

Well, I think number one is to really self reflect on your own behaviors. You know, that's one of the reasons I wrote Double Eagles at Midnight. It's really easy to point to other people and how they're harming you or what they're doing wrong. But really self reflect and think about one or two things you want to work on. I think most of us know when we're behaving badly or we're feeling stuck. And I think there's power in silence. It's uncomfortable to sit with yourself and to have that conversation, to be like, here are things that I need to be working on. Ask for feedback. I don't even say it's feedback, it's coaching. You know, if you are wanting to think about the things you want to work on, you have to tell people you have to ask for help and let them know. You know, it's like my dream of becoming a second time published author. Like, I can't just keep that dream inside me. I have to ask for help and tell people these are the things I want. I think that's really important. And I think, you know, number three is like having a community you can lean on more and more. As I in my career, I have distinguished between coworkers and friends. Not all coworkers are friends and so to be careful who you confide in. But I've also had a really strong community to help me and I also really encourage people. Careers have highs and lows and highs and lows again. And so go back to the things that help you build your competence. For me, that's writing. I look walking, I would say running, but it's really jogging, right? Spending time with my kids, ways in which I can go back. So, like, if work is chipping away at you and there'll be those moments you have things that go, you can go back to and you remember who you are and the value you bring to the world.

B (33:09)

Meeta. That's awesome. I talked about this in my last podcast, but there's a woman in my work like a girl community who has a great phrase with her partner where she says, if not this, then better. And it was funny. I was like walking up the stairs to the train this morning and I'm like, you know what? Like, if we could just embrace that mentality at work and also about your work, which is if this isn't working, there is something better. If you aren't working in this. There's a better version of you. And giving people the permission to have that self reflection, not permission, but the encouragement to take a step back to understand your part in something, to understand what you you want out of something and who you want to become because of something is really incredible. I love that. I love that line. I'm going to take that with me. Well that's great. So Mita, tell people where they can find you. Find your book, find your past books. Like Give us the how do we follow Mita?

A (34:11)

Yeah. Well, thank you. The Devil emails at midnight. What good leaders can learn from bad bosses. You can find it on Amazon in your local independent bookstore and you can find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to meet new people. So please reach out to me. And I'm on mitamallic.com and thanks so much for having me. Okay, great.

B (34:25)

Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Mita. We'll talk to you soon. Okay, so our final segment we're going to talk about compression culture. So one thing I was in our work like a girl Slack Lindsay shared this post yesterday. We were sharing kind of random posts and it was by a woman named Malvika. I think her name is Malvika Bhatt. She's on Substack. She's a dual PhD from Northwestern. She has a degree in I think computer science and communications and she studies the creation and diffusion of knowledge online. There's a little bit of controversy around this Malvika where she's being accused by another substacker of plagiarizing that substacker's work. Side note, it's so interesting, like every platform goes through its tea and also the drama of one creator versus another, this is obviously plagiarism is pretty serious and we're especially on a platform like Substack, so be curious to see where that nets out. But the article itself, the post or the letter that Malvika wrote on Substack was about compression culture. And the headline of her post is compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting, which is something I completely agree with. So one of the things that was interesting is I then went to ChatGPT and I was asking ChatGPT about compression culture in general. And what's interesting about compression culture is the phrase actually technically belongs to the workplace. So compression culture is a phrase when your company cuts resources and your company cuts headcount that you are expected to do more with less. So kind of leaning back to the Conversation with Mita when your workplace, when you get a devil as a boss and you have fewer resources and you have less time and you don't have as much opportunity or availability of people or things or stuff to help you, compression culture is this feeling of drowning at work because there's more and more responsibilities, there's less and less resources, and there's still the same amount of performance expected of you. In this, this case, compression culture has to do with something else. So one, I thought, I thought that was an interesting feature. And I think a lot of people are feeling compression culture right now. There's so much uncertainty in the economy, startups are struggling to get to profitability. Tariffs and general uncertainty are increasing the pressure on margins. So compression culture, I think in the workplace could merit its own podcast. But in this case, compression culture has has to do with how everything is synthesized. And there was a bunch of pull quotes from this article that I thought were super, super interesting. And essentially Malvika's point is that compression culture is making us uninteresting because it is taking away the journey of how you understood something and how you became something as a result of experiencing it. So instead of reading a book, you're going to read the synopsis. It's like life has been cliffnoted and you're not bothering with the pain and the experience and the learning and the boredom and the struggle of going through something. Everything is just Uber Eats. Everything is Cliff Notes. It's summarized for you, it's delivered to your door. There's no thought required, there's no pain involved. And as a result, it is making people less interesting because people, people are experiencing less of a journey. And I Can you go back to what I pulled the quotes I had? So like so, for example, here's a quote from this, which is we've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency, one that wants love without awkwardness, wisdom without confusion, transformation without the growing pains that crack us open and rebuild us from the inside out. And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essential experience human. The most essentially human experiences the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty and the transformative potential of things that resist compression. Compression culture doesn't just change how we think, it changes what we expect from every aspect of the human experience. We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, and that transformation should be instant and effortless. I thought that was super profound. And I think it's very true. You look at people, they used to work out. Now you take Ozempic. You used to go to the grocery store or make dinner. Now you just order delivery. You used to slog and struggle through your work or through your journey to become something else. You used to go to to church every week and sit through like an ungodly, interminably long sermon. And you did it not because there was a prize at the end of it, because it was a ritual and it was an experience that taught you something. We're doing less and less of the experiences that teach you something and we're sitting less and less with things that are awkward and difficult. So that is my parting thought. I don't have any answers or insights on it, but I do think it's true and I think it is affecting the human condition and I especially think think it is affecting how we think about work. Because no matter how you slice it, unless you have the entirely AI generated company that requires no humans and is all shortcuts, it's not going to create the result that is fulfilling for anybody network. All right, so that's our episode. If you would like, please give us a rating and a review. Please share. Please follow me on Substack. I have not plagiarized anyone, which should be very evident. If you've read me on Substack, you can follow me at Erica Follow Work like a girl on Slack, join our newsletter, be part of the movement and we'll see you back here next week at work.