Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening and enjoy the podcast. David Burkes is a best
Speaker 1: selling author and award winning podcaster and associate professor of
Speaker 1: Management at Oral Roberts University. David is a regular contributor
Speaker 1: to the Harvard Business Review in Forbes. A popular corporate speaker,
Speaker 1: he's consulted with all kinds of companies, from startups to
Speaker 1: Fortune five hundred companies. His latest book is Under New Management,
Speaker 1: How leading organizations are upending Business as Usual. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much, David for talking to me today. Scott, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for talking to me, and thank you
Speaker 1: for making me sound way cooler than I am. By
Speaker 1: the way, in that biol thank you you are. If anything,
Speaker 1: you understated like I feel like in the inside flap
Speaker 1: of your book it says something like he's a slowly
Speaker 1: rising superstar, Like, I thought it was funny the way
Speaker 1: you wereed that. So let me tell you the real story,
Speaker 1: because this is the only podcast where listeners will actually
Speaker 1: understand that I actually intentionally put in a word in there,
Speaker 1: and it's funny that you mentioned it. So they had,
Speaker 1: you know, the bio that the publisher wrote was, you know,
Speaker 1: David Bergs is blah blah blah, highly regarded, influential, business
Speaker 1: school whatever. And I remembered this really cool study that
Speaker 1: basically showed that people disproportionately wait potential over sort of
Speaker 1: like proven ability, like we're more likely to pick somebody
Speaker 1: who's the next somebody than to pick the person. And
Speaker 1: so I insisted on no, no no, no, no no, a let's
Speaker 1: be humble, but be It might pay off better if
Speaker 1: we say increasingly influential. Right. We're not saying that I'm
Speaker 1: this amazing person, right, but I'm getting there, and maybe
Speaker 1: people will more be more willing to come along on
Speaker 1: the journey, which is, by the way, is the actual
Speaker 1: sort of reflection, Like I feel like I look at
Speaker 1: sort of my intellectual heroes in the field and I'm
Speaker 1: nowhere near there, but I'm working towards it and hopefully
Speaker 1: are they so, I I mean, from the book writing standpoint,
Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan of what Dan Pink does for
Speaker 1: other people's research. Right, So Dan, you know, ed Richard
Speaker 1: Ryan and Edward dec did some amazing research, and Dan
Speaker 1: does this wonderful job of summarizing it. So I would
Speaker 1: probably list him first. Roger Martin is an intellectual hero
Speaker 1: of mine. The Opposable Mind is like I had to
Speaker 1: read it like six times. It's a brilliant, brilliant book.
Speaker 1: And then I mean, that's really so anybody who sort
Speaker 1: of falls in that space. I include in that sort
Speaker 1: of space, Chip Heath, our mutual friend Heidi Grant Halverson,
Speaker 1: this guy Scott Barry Kaufman, kind of anybody who can
Speaker 1: bridge the gap. What I describe it is this, I
Speaker 1: want to tear down the wall between the Ivory Tower
Speaker 1: and the Corner Office, and anybody else who can do
Speaker 1: that I look up to. So you guys are all
Speaker 1: awesome in that, and that's my goal too. Thanks. I
Speaker 1: learn an awful lot from you in this new book
Speaker 1: of yours. I really liked it, by the way, and
Speaker 1: I liked it for a lot of reasons. And one
Speaker 1: reason I liked it is because I really did feel
Speaker 1: like I was learning a lot. I mean, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like stepping into a new world. This organizational psychology
Speaker 1: world is something I don't swim in every day. And
Speaker 1: I thought there were a lot of things that you
Speaker 1: talked about that are really interesting. And yes, they were
Speaker 1: all counterintuitive. And everyone these days says, you know, the
Speaker 1: word counterintuitive, because it's like the thing to say to
Speaker 1: sell books. But I felt like your stuff was totally counterteuitive.
Speaker 1: Can we discuss some of these things, would that be? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely great. So one thing you talk about is salary transparency,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of debate about, you know, should
Speaker 1: we be like revealing our salary to other people should
Speaker 1: we not? And your research suggests that it might actually
Speaker 1: be a good thing. Yeah so, and not only for
Speaker 1: ourselves but for the company, for society. It's got a
Speaker 1: huge benefit. And I was actually I was not expecting
Speaker 1: to come out on this side of it. You know,
Speaker 1: I live in the middle of the country. I tend
Speaker 1: to vote center right. I'm not that I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: an academic, so that's probably the reason it's center right,
Speaker 1: but you know, I'm a libertarian by nature. It was
Speaker 1: not so privacy is a big deal. And I was
Speaker 1: not expecting to come out when this like, no everybody
Speaker 1: should know what everybody gets paid thing. But I looked,
Speaker 1: I mean I looked at the research. I looked at
Speaker 1: the research on information asymmetry. I looked at the psychological
Speaker 1: research and the lab about when people know when people
Speaker 1: are using pay for performance and they know how they
Speaker 1: stand compared to their peers, whether they're told the exact
Speaker 1: number or just where their ranking is, like, they're more
Speaker 1: motivated to work hard to improve their standing. So there's
Speaker 1: a corporate benefit, there's a benefit to individuals from having
Speaker 1: the negotiation benefit of knowing that it reduces that information asymmetry.
Speaker 1: And then I wasn't expecting to find it. Even there's
Speaker 1: even some evidence to indicate that that dramatically reduces the
Speaker 1: gender wage gap. You know, there's still a lot of
Speaker 1: people arguing over what things to factor in in, factor out.
Speaker 1: But like unfactored analysis, if you have the whole United
Speaker 1: States where it's seventy seven cents on the dollar, but
Speaker 1: in like the federal government where they use what's called leveling,
Speaker 1: and there's just there's certain tiers in every job is
Speaker 1: assigned to a tier, and everybody knows what those tiers pay.
Speaker 1: The wage guy shrinks to right around eleven to ten percent,
Speaker 1: which is pretty dramatic. Right, So regardles, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: indisputable that there's something going on here in a sense
Speaker 1: of fairness. And then it also, I mean, it increases
Speaker 1: perceptions of fairness. There's evidence that a lot of people
Speaker 1: who feel discriminated against in the past or taking advantage
Speaker 1: of in the past, or gravitate towards these systems. It
Speaker 1: was really I was not expecting to find so much
Speaker 1: evidence that it's good not just for people, but for
Speaker 1: companies and for society. But I got to the point
Speaker 1: where the evidence was overwhelming and I had to go,
Speaker 1: you know what, you know, this is this. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: might be uncomfortable sharing what we considered to be private information,
Speaker 1: but the benefits of it are make it worth it.
Speaker 1: I wonder how we can reconcile that with the research
Speaker 1: and positive psychology showing that that kind of information, like
Speaker 1: we compare ourselves to relative to others, and when that
Speaker 1: information is salient, it kind of lowers our well being.
Speaker 1: I think it depends on you know, one of the
Speaker 1: uniform things that we see in these transparent companies is
Speaker 1: that before they go transparent, there are dedicated reasons for
Speaker 1: why a person's salary is what. Now that's either levels
Speaker 1: or a lot of places use a formula. I look
Speaker 1: at a company called Buffer that has totally transparent salaries
Speaker 1: and actually post salaries on the internet for all to see.
Speaker 1: But they also post the formula and like, you right
Speaker 1: now can go to buffer dot com slash salary and
Speaker 1: like figure out how much you would make if you
Speaker 1: worked there. Really, and so yeah, I mean try it.
Speaker 1: I mean don't try it now because you'll kill bandwidth interview,
Speaker 1: but later try it. And what that's doing is I
Speaker 1: look at it as it's a feedback mechanism, right. It's
Speaker 1: not that you're comparing yourself to somebody and saying, oh
Speaker 1: so and so makes more than me, So I'm miserable
Speaker 1: if you know that oh so and so makes more
Speaker 1: because they occupy this position that demands more of their
Speaker 1: time or demands this skill set that I don't have.
Speaker 1: Then you have some clear cut feedback. And yes, it
Speaker 1: might sort of gradually reduce a sense of well being,
Speaker 1: but it also sort of gives you that path forward, right,
Speaker 1: and that feedback forward to what you actually need to
Speaker 1: do to kind of improve your standing. Right, But no,
Speaker 1: I mean you're definitely right from that research. I mean,
Speaker 1: in the book, I talk about a thing called equity
Speaker 1: theory that shows that when we're doing these comparisons and
Speaker 1: we feel like two people make the same but one
Speaker 1: earns whereas two people work the same hard or have
Speaker 1: the same skill set or what have you, but one
Speaker 1: person earns more, then we're really frustrated. There's a sense
Speaker 1: of dissatisfaction. There's all all of those similar things from comparisons.
Speaker 1: But interestingly, equity theory kind of comes at it from
Speaker 1: the angle of where our brains are capable of nuance,
Speaker 1: and so we can see if somebody is putting in
Speaker 1: more hours or has a different skill set and that's
Speaker 1: the reason that they're earning more than That sort of
Speaker 1: takes some of that pain of the dissatisfaction off the
Speaker 1: table because we see there's a reason, and if we're
Speaker 1: willing to do those things, we can have that too. Okay, Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I can wrap my head around that. And you know,
Speaker 1: going to the organizational workspace sort of environment, it's there's
Speaker 1: so much controversy about like what are the best like
Speaker 1: practices to support optimal productivity. And you know a lot
Speaker 1: of people are also asking, well, sometimes optimal productivity can
Speaker 1: conflict with optimal wellbeing, And you know, what are the
Speaker 1: intersections in your book where you found that they will
Speaker 1: align with both productivity and well being? Well, so, I
Speaker 1: think a fair question. Yeah, no, no, no no, it's hugely fair.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think that the fundamental thesis of
Speaker 1: underde management is actually kind of that idea that a
Speaker 1: lot of management ideas and a lot of management models
Speaker 1: and practices were built off of a very sort of
Speaker 1: Frederick Taylor Principles of scientific management idea, which was productivity. First,
Speaker 1: we figure out what is the smallest scale repeatable task.
Speaker 1: We optimize for what's the number of times somebody can
Speaker 1: repeat that task in a given shift, and then we
Speaker 1: incentivize to make sure they hit that number right, which
Speaker 1: is very much productivity at odds with well being. But
Speaker 1: as we've shifted from a physical factory to what actually
Speaker 1: Roger Martin said, intellectual hero calls a decision factory. But
Speaker 1: we switch from physical labor to mental labor, right to
Speaker 1: not from industrial work to knowledge work, a lot of
Speaker 1: those assumptions are faulty. And that's really what underdo management
Speaker 1: is calling into question is a lot of these things
Speaker 1: that rest on a bedrock of Frederick Taylor and principles
Speaker 1: of scientific management are at odds with the idea that
Speaker 1: if ideas are the driver of this work, of this
Speaker 1: knowledge work, then we need to think about well being
Speaker 1: in productivity hand in hand. In other words, we can't
Speaker 1: just look at oh, it's our job to drain people
Speaker 1: of their energy and drain people who are sense of
Speaker 1: well being and then hope they have work like balance
Speaker 1: that brings it back up. Now, we have to do
Speaker 1: something that's sort of continuously there. And one of the
Speaker 1: areas in the book that I think is most reconcilable
Speaker 1: with that area is I have a chapter called Ditch
Speaker 1: Performance Appraisals, Yeah, which is all about that sort of
Speaker 1: annual review where you give somebody label and usually a
Speaker 1: development plan. Right, I mean even at a university we
Speaker 1: do this, right, I have a professional development plan I
Speaker 1: have to fill out every year. That's and we go
Speaker 1: out at the end of the year and we go
Speaker 1: through it all. And it's really if you look at
Speaker 1: a lot of the research on when we need in
Speaker 1: order to improve how often we need feedback? It's really annual.
Speaker 1: This is terrible. I mean, imagine, I tell a lot
Speaker 1: of people, Imagine that you were playing a sports Imagine
Speaker 1: you played football and you go out there on Sunday
Speaker 1: and you play really hard, but we're going to wait
Speaker 1: a year to tell you the score. How do you
Speaker 1: get better for next Sunday? Like? How do you know
Speaker 1: what to work on if you're not getting that regular feedback?
Speaker 1: And so what a lot of companies are doing now
Speaker 1: is ditching that annual review and coaching managers on how
Speaker 1: to have ongoing conversations. A lot of these more informal
Speaker 1: conversations that are replacing the annual performance review are not
Speaker 1: just around feedback, but they're also around expectations, my expectations
Speaker 1: for you, yours for me, and also conversations about growth
Speaker 1: and development, in other words, where do you want to go,
Speaker 1: what are your long term goals, etc. I Actually, you
Speaker 1: know what I think about your famous phrase you talk
Speaker 1: about Epaul Torrens often falling in love with a future
Speaker 1: version of yourself. Well, if you're a manager and you've
Speaker 1: never had a conversation with what is that future version
Speaker 1: of yourself that your employees envision, how do you know
Speaker 1: how to coach them? How do you know how to
Speaker 1: give them that right feedback? And so a lot of
Speaker 1: these informal conversations are taking that shape feedback expectations, but
Speaker 1: also growth and developmental goals. And that's a hugely beneficial system,
Speaker 1: especially compared to just we're going to label you once
Speaker 1: a year as meets or exceeds or underperforms. That makes sense.
Speaker 1: What excites you the most about being in the field
Speaker 1: of manas much like why are you in this field?
Speaker 1: And like why do you do what you do? Why
Speaker 1: do I do what I do? So, I mean, if
Speaker 1: we'll go back to that falling in love with the
Speaker 1: future vision of yourself. When I was super young, I
Speaker 1: wanted to be a writer. But when you're really little,
Speaker 1: you don't know the different ways that you can be
Speaker 1: a writer, right, so you think you're going to write
Speaker 1: novels or actually, actually, one time when I was like
Speaker 1: five years old or maybe fifth grade, not five years old, Well,
Speaker 1: one time when I was fairly young, single digits. Let's say,
Speaker 1: at one time when I was single digits, I actually
Speaker 1: typed out like a three thousand word essay letter by
Speaker 1: letter when I was working on by typing and then
Speaker 1: like printed it out and called it my book. It
Speaker 1: was I mean, it was sheer plagiarism, right yeah, but
Speaker 1: I didn't know what plagiarism was of the time. I
Speaker 1: was just really proud that I got three thousand words,
Speaker 1: right yeah, and all throughout like my childhood self, you
Speaker 1: see this idea later it was sort of be a
Speaker 1: novelist or whatever. And I went to university under I
Speaker 1: went to undergrad for that. I studied writing as an
Speaker 1: undergraduate major, and around my creative writing, yeah, like literally,
Speaker 1: I mean it's called literary writing. I studied how to
Speaker 1: write novels and poems and short stories and all that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. And around my junior year was when
Speaker 1: The Tipping Point came out. I think time it was
Speaker 1: when I found a copy of The Tipping Point. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly when it came out, and I read
Speaker 1: Gladwell and it was the first time. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's funny. Now, on the other end of a graduate
Speaker 1: degree in organizational psychology, you look at Gladwell with mixed feelings.
Speaker 1: But one thing he does amazing is he tells a
Speaker 1: story about research, and that just fascinated me, like you
Speaker 1: could take a psychological study and tell it to someone
Speaker 1: in a way where even if they didn't know what
Speaker 1: P values were, they could understand what was going on.
Speaker 1: And that fascinated me, and I read more and more
Speaker 1: and more in that and suddenly became suddenly like it
Speaker 1: was like, Okay, well how do I study more of this?
Speaker 1: And literally not knowing that you could be a science
Speaker 1: writer without going to graduate school and getting a doctorate
Speaker 1: in leadership and a master's degree in orgdynamics and all
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff. I went to school for all that,
Speaker 1: all those sort of things. Yeah, and then when all
Speaker 1: that was over, the goal was always to write about
Speaker 1: this like it was to understand it at a deep
Speaker 1: level so I could write about it. I'll tell you firsthand,
Speaker 1: I'm a terrible researcher. Right, you should never ever, the
Speaker 1: Imagine Institute should never fund a proposal that I am
Speaker 1: on a care more researcher. But what I can do,
Speaker 1: and what I get a lot of joy from doing,
Speaker 1: is writing about other people's research. Is tearing down that
Speaker 1: wall between the Ivory Tower and so the people that
Speaker 1: need to apply that research. And so that's what really
Speaker 1: energizes me. Yeah, that energizes me too. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1: So the two big things that are potential barriers to productivity,
Speaker 1: one you talk about email, the other you talk about
Speaker 1: vacation policies. And in my head, those two things are
Speaker 1: linked to each other because when I go on vacation,
Speaker 1: I want, like, if I go a day without email,
Speaker 1: that's a vacation for me, you know, for me, that's
Speaker 1: a vacation. So yeah, and it's funny and undernew management,
Speaker 1: I actually talk about Daimler Company has a policy they
Speaker 1: call mail on Holiday, which is literally a program that's
Speaker 1: installed on their email systems where you know, you set
Speaker 1: the auto responder like you're away at a conference or
Speaker 1: on vacation, but it then says I'm away of vacation
Speaker 1: and when I return, every email that was sent while
Speaker 1: I was on vacation is going to get deleted. So
Speaker 1: if it's important, you know, I'll be back on March first.
Speaker 1: If it's important, send me it then. And I think,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's brilliant because you can actually
Speaker 1: be on vacation, right, Yeah, that is really brilliant and
Speaker 1: you don't have to feel like this impending doom upon
Speaker 1: your return. Totally, totally but I think it also speaks
Speaker 1: to a larger realization, which was this tool that is amazing, right,
Speaker 1: because it's cheap to send messages and it's asynchronous, meaning
Speaker 1: you can send it now and not have to need
Speaker 1: to catch their attention to call them on the phone
Speaker 1: and need them right that second. You can just send
Speaker 1: it and trust that they'll get back to you later.
Speaker 1: We've really kind of abused the tool because it's so
Speaker 1: cheap to send messages, we send them all the time,
Speaker 1: and because it's asynchronous, we send it whenever we want.
Speaker 1: But we never really dealt with that issue of being okay,
Speaker 1: waiting for a response, And so now we have this
Speaker 1: world where we feel like we always need to be
Speaker 1: on It's nine o'clock at night and I sent you
Speaker 1: an email. How come you didn't reply until eight thirty
Speaker 1: the next day? Well because I was asleep, right, you know,
Speaker 1: and then I was commuting into work, right or I
Speaker 1: was getting my kids off to school and then commuting
Speaker 1: into work. So what really what happened? We kept using
Speaker 1: tool and using this tool and using this tool, and
Speaker 1: we never had a conversation about whether or not this
Speaker 1: tool was the right thing for our communication and collaboration needs,
Speaker 1: and a lot of companies now that I profile on
Speaker 1: enter do management, said forget it, we're done right. Some
Speaker 1: do the mail on holiday thing, but some say, you know,
Speaker 1: we're done with internal email entirely. We're going to design
Speaker 1: a better way to communicate electronically. And so a lot
Speaker 1: of companies are starting to build that. It's usually a
Speaker 1: custom solution, but then there are other options out there now,
Speaker 1: project management tools, collaboration tools like Slack that people can
Speaker 1: use off the shelf. But it's that idea, I mean
Speaker 1: revolutionary concept. Right, have a discussion about your communication needs first,
Speaker 1: then pick a tool. Instead, we picked a tool and
Speaker 1: we didn't really pick it. It It just was invented and
Speaker 1: we all picked up and started using it and we
Speaker 1: never had that conversation about whether or not it was
Speaker 1: the right tool to use. Yeah, you know, you mentioned
Speaker 1: somehow how your book brings together insights from corporate leaders, entrepreneurs,
Speaker 1: and organizational psychologists, because you say they've all been working
Speaker 1: to build a new set of tools. That's the way
Speaker 1: you frame it. Yeah, yeah, well I use that. I
Speaker 1: mean I go to go back to scientific management. This
Speaker 1: is actually one of the principles that ironically, maybe we
Speaker 1: should have kept was Frederick Taylor was famous for this.
Speaker 1: He I mean literally there's one story that he was
Speaker 1: working with a certain factory and he figured out that
Speaker 1: if you were shoveling coal into a furnace, that a
Speaker 1: average mail of working age could shovel should shovel twenty
Speaker 1: one point five pounds of coal per shovel load if
Speaker 1: any more than that, and they'll burn out for the
Speaker 1: end of an eight hour shift, and any less than
Speaker 1: that or not being sort of peak productive. But there
Speaker 1: was a problem. No shovel he could find could hold
Speaker 1: twenty one point five so he designed a shovel specifically
Speaker 1: for that factory for that usage. Right, Yeah, But how
Speaker 1: much of the problems that we're in now are because
Speaker 1: we're using management tools or organizational tools or even sort
Speaker 1: of life management tools that were designed for a different
Speaker 1: era and they're not the right tool. Like that's my
Speaker 1: fundamental thesis is that even Frederick Taylor wouldn't approve of
Speaker 1: what we're doing now because work changed and we kept
Speaker 1: the same tools. Yeah, I mean there's huge analogies to it.
Speaker 1: Education as well. Oh no, absolutely, absolutely, Yeah, both are
Speaker 1: in the wrong kind of model of how to get
Speaker 1: optimal productivity out of people. Right, both are still in
Speaker 1: a very much industrial model, which is based on the
Speaker 1: idea of keeping the system going instead of what are
Speaker 1: the individual needs of the employees, stakeholders, all of that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, exactly exactly. Well, yeah, and that breinges
Speaker 1: the question about burnout because I think that under these
Speaker 1: conditions are almost like causing, like burnout is going to
Speaker 1: be inevitable under these conditions. So you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about some things we can do to prevent purnout,
Speaker 1: So can you tell me a bit about that? So,
Speaker 1: I mean, one thing that I'm hugely in favor of,
Speaker 1: not just for burnout reasons, but for as you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of research on the role of incubation and
Speaker 1: creative thinking and all that sort of stuff, are sabbaticals,
Speaker 1: our vacations longer than a day. You know. Like, on
Speaker 1: one hand, I totally relished with you when you said
Speaker 1: if you do a day without email, that's a vacation.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, like Scott, that's sad. You
Speaker 1: need to take a break, right, I need a vacation
Speaker 1: for really totally totally. And what we find is a
Speaker 1: lot of organizations and this was this is actually cool
Speaker 1: insight I was not expecting to find, but I talked
Speaker 1: about an under management. The first company to start US
Speaker 1: sabbaticals the way academics do was McDonald's McDonald's of all places,
Speaker 1: and then later Intel picked it up. And I think
Speaker 1: most of us are familiar with like sabbaticals being this
Speaker 1: perk of tech companies. But it was literally the corporate
Speaker 1: offices of McDonald's, which is funny because it's the ultimate
Speaker 1: like industrialized burger chain, right, It's this ultimate industrial work
Speaker 1: applied to restaurants. But yet they invented the sabbatical. And
Speaker 1: what they find is that if for decreasing burnout, for
Speaker 1: increasing sort of longevity productivity, also getting a lot of
Speaker 1: insights and also, I mean one of the other things,
Speaker 1: it's not just about rest when you're on sabbatical, it's about,
Speaker 1: you know, academic sabbaticals are about doing research, and just
Speaker 1: professonalbaticals about the same thing, learning new skill sets and
Speaker 1: bringing new ideas into the organization. There's a really cool
Speaker 1: thing there from a nerdy management standpoint that it's also
Speaker 1: a way to stress test a succession plan. In other words,
Speaker 1: if you make somebody leave for longer than a week.
Speaker 1: Then you can actually see who are the people that
Speaker 1: can help do those tasks. And in some cases companies
Speaker 1: will even say like, Okay, this manager is leaving, so
Speaker 1: you're filling their role for the month that they're on sabbatical.
Speaker 1: And why did they pick that person because they were
Speaker 1: next in line. And we get the chance to test
Speaker 1: that person in the role, see how she does, and
Speaker 1: then if it's for her, if it's a good fit,
Speaker 1: then we know who the successor is, and if it's not,
Speaker 1: we have time to find a new one. I love that. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you talk about how you can revolutionize the hiring process,
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly. I think Rod Friedman talks about
Speaker 1: that too in his new book about sabbaticals or about
Speaker 1: that about the hiring process. Yeah, so Ron and I
Speaker 1: both deal with this, and there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: research on this actually, going all the way back to
Speaker 1: Boris Grousberg had a book that made a huge impact
Speaker 1: in like in the academic circles my mind, rod, et cetera.
Speaker 1: I don't know how big of an impact it made
Speaker 1: in other ones, but it was this idea that we
Speaker 1: hire people based on past performance, right, we hire people
Speaker 1: based on whether or not they look like a star. Yeah,
Speaker 1: potential like potential, Yeah, like I tried to do with Oops.
Speaker 1: But what we never consider is when you break performance down,
Speaker 1: the majority of the variance in individual performance is actually
Speaker 1: explained by the team, by the company resources, by a
Speaker 1: lot of other things outside of the person, right, which
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, this should come as no surprise to
Speaker 1: even if you're not an organizational psychologist, because we know
Speaker 1: we all influence each other, right, But yet we look
Speaker 1: at people in a vacuum when we're making these hiring decisions,
Speaker 1: and most of the time we only have one or
Speaker 1: two people inside the company interview that person, and then
Speaker 1: we say, yeah, you were a star at your old company,
Speaker 1: come over, and the performance almost always declines because we
Speaker 1: never gave consideration to fit. And what I talk about
Speaker 1: an underde management is this idea that if team fit
Speaker 1: is important, then why is the team not making the
Speaker 1: hiring decision. And there are a lot of companies, my favorite,
Speaker 1: which is Whole Foods because they have this really interesting model,
Speaker 1: but there are a lot of companies that hire as
Speaker 1: a team. In the case the Whole Food's, actually the
Speaker 1: manager still makes the hiring decision, but the team gets
Speaker 1: a vote after thirty days, so you can't fake it, right.
Speaker 1: You might have been able to fake it with the manager,
Speaker 1: but then you get on the team and if you're
Speaker 1: not a good fit for the team, they can actually
Speaker 1: say no, thanks, we hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Speaker 1: You're not making it up. And John Macki, the CEO
Speaker 1: of Whole Foods even said, like a team doesn't gel
Speaker 1: together until they've kicked somebody off, until they've made a
Speaker 1: definitive statement of this is the less that we hold
Speaker 1: ourselves accountable to. And he didn't make it, so we're
Speaker 1: letting him loose, or, as I like to say, we're
Speaker 1: inviting him to be successful elsewhere. Yeah, that sounds like
Speaker 1: some reality TV show episodes I've seen about totally kicking
Speaker 1: them off the island. Yeah, I mean I hate that.
Speaker 1: I mean that might be the one thing from Survivor
Speaker 1: that was a good idea, exactly exactly. We're on the
Speaker 1: same page here, on the same page. Yeah, cool, really cool.
Speaker 1: And then so what about like open offices or like,
Speaker 1: you know, the design of the office space itself are
Speaker 1: very hot right now, right open offices are very hot. Oh, totally,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure you're familiar with. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of research on collaboration and the power of serendipity,
Speaker 1: and then there's actually an equal amount of research on
Speaker 1: how it sort of drives you nuts, right, how it
Speaker 1: can drive you nuts. I mean, even like I loved
Speaker 1: that Susan Kin started working with Steelcase and sort of
Speaker 1: speaking up for the people that aren't energized by an
Speaker 1: open office plan. But the truth is that like all
Speaker 1: of us, there are some costs to an open office plan.
Speaker 1: So there is some research around collaboration. I think we
Speaker 1: speak about it more than there's actual research there and
Speaker 1: the benefits of it from that standpoint, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of research on how it increases distraction, it increases
Speaker 1: senses of stress. One of my favorite ones is that
Speaker 1: in open office floor plans, people call in sick more often,
Speaker 1: which either means they're legitimately sick or they're sick of
Speaker 1: their office, right. In either case, they call in and
Speaker 1: And what I think is interesting is that it really
Speaker 1: to me, the solution demonstrates and this is where I
Speaker 1: figured you'd like this chapter. It demonstrates the complexities of
Speaker 1: individual differences, right because the solution is to create a
Speaker 1: palette of places where people have this freedom to move
Speaker 1: around into different workspaces, private ones, collaborative ones, really open ones,
Speaker 1: really close ones ones but they're only two or three
Speaker 1: people and really don't have any sort of one place,
Speaker 1: but have the freedom to go from a variety of places,
Speaker 1: because then they can pick based on their individual needs,
Speaker 1: based on the needs of the work at hand, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And one thing I found was really interesting is that
Speaker 1: one of the biggest predictors on whether or not an
Speaker 1: office space will have a positive impact on productivity was
Speaker 1: perceived control. In other words, how much control do you
Speaker 1: think you have over where you work? And if you
Speaker 1: have a lot of it, you're more likely to be
Speaker 1: motivated and be productive. And I think that, again, it
Speaker 1: speaks that individual differences thing. You know yourself, you know
Speaker 1: the environment that you work best in, so giving people
Speaker 1: the freedom to choose that environment can have a huge benefit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I really like that, And it also speaks to just
Speaker 1: a fundamental human need for autonomy totally, totally, yeah, regardless
Speaker 1: of your individual differences. Yeah, very cool, very cool, so cool.
Speaker 1: We've already covered a lot of ground. It's funny because
Speaker 1: I don't want to give it all away, you know.
Speaker 1: So let's go another five ten minutes here and we'll
Speaker 1: pick a couple more things that really have stood out
Speaker 1: to me. Okay, I really like this one. You should
Speaker 1: help your employees quit? What right? This one's actually fascinating.
Speaker 1: This was one of the first sort of crazy sounding
Speaker 1: company policies that I picked up on, and in fact,
Speaker 1: like when I was writing a proposal for the book
Speaker 1: I think I called I think the working title was
Speaker 1: like the Worst Best Practices or something like that, because
Speaker 1: it was this idea of like the best practices that
Speaker 1: just sound absolutely ridiculous, right, and paying people to quit
Speaker 1: was one of the first ones. I mean, I remember,
Speaker 1: I don't remember where I heard it. I think it
Speaker 1: was on the Freakonomics podcast. They talked about how Zappos
Speaker 1: gives everybody the offer right after about three or four
Speaker 1: weeks working at Zappos, after you get through primary training,
Speaker 1: they make you the offer. And it started out as
Speaker 1: a small offer, but now it's somewhere like four thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to quit. You've gone in and you've you've started
Speaker 1: down the path to work at Zappos. But if you
Speaker 1: feel like it's not a fit, we'll make it easier
Speaker 1: for you to say goodbye. Fascinating, which well, and I
Speaker 1: think it's fascinating actually for two reasons. One that the
Speaker 1: one that I didn't see getting discussed anywhere, right. The
Speaker 1: first is this idea of sunk costs, right, which we're
Speaker 1: all sort of familiar with. You started down a course
Speaker 1: of action, and you're going to continue down it because
Speaker 1: you're still down there, even if it's not a good idea.
Speaker 1: You've invested so much you've just got to keep going.
Speaker 1: And the money is sort of a way of making
Speaker 1: it easier for you to self select out even if
Speaker 1: you feel the pull of sunk costs. But the other
Speaker 1: is actually confirmation bias. I mean, if I paid you
Speaker 1: four thousand dollars to quit pen, right, you're not going
Speaker 1: to take the money. But then every day afterwards, when
Speaker 1: you think of that offer, you're going to think this
Speaker 1: must be a great place to work. Because I didn't
Speaker 1: take the money, right, Maybe the money wasn't enough. You
Speaker 1: get my points there. Yeah, whether we're doing it consciously
Speaker 1: or not, we now need to confirm the wisdom of
Speaker 1: our decision to turn down the money. And so we
Speaker 1: look for reasons why it's a great place to work.
Speaker 1: And so the deal is actually it makes even more
Speaker 1: sense thing because you don't have to pay the money
Speaker 1: and you get the benefit. And that's why I mean
Speaker 1: Zappo's literally the sort of the dirty secret of the
Speaker 1: offer is that only about five to eight percent of
Speaker 1: people ever take that. That's why they can afford to
Speaker 1: do it. I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, because it's
Speaker 1: not like everybody's taking it, right, So it's a fascinating
Speaker 1: deal because it gets all of that benefit with very
Speaker 1: little money, and so lots of other companies have started
Speaker 1: emulating it. When Amazon dot Com actually bought Zappos dot Com,
Speaker 1: the offer sort of migrated over, but Amazon changed it
Speaker 1: a little bit. They do it every year, so in
Speaker 1: certain divisions, it's not it's not doesn't apply to everybody,
Speaker 1: but in certain divisions at the one year mark when
Speaker 1: you do your when you do your annual review, which
Speaker 1: is funny, given our prior conversation, you also kind of
Speaker 1: give Amazon an annual review because they give you an
Speaker 1: offer to quit, and it starts small, but over time
Speaker 1: it can get up to five thousand dollars if you
Speaker 1: choose to walk away. That's really cool. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: that's a great example of something that I just totally
Speaker 1: didn't know anything of the research on that topic. That's
Speaker 1: just very counterto So here's another one. You know, everyone
Speaker 1: keeps saying put your customers first, right, it's become like
Speaker 1: a tagline. But you're saying you should put your customer second. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well the heck man totally. Yes, absolutely, the customer is
Speaker 1: always wrong. Okay, maybe not always wrong, but you know,
Speaker 1: we've had this mentality in business primarily, we've had this
Speaker 1: mentality that the customer is always right. And that may
Speaker 1: be true, and customer satisfaction is really important, especially for
Speaker 1: earning repeat business. But it turns out that the way
Speaker 1: to ensure that you can get consistent customer satisfaction is
Speaker 1: to not focus on it. It's a result the system
Speaker 1: that you focus on is employee satisfaction. If you take
Speaker 1: care of your people, if you put your employees first,
Speaker 1: they'll put your customers first. It comes from what The
Speaker 1: cool phrase that I learned from this in looking at
Speaker 1: the story of NEYEIR and HLC Technologies was the value zone.
Speaker 1: In other words, a company's value zone are the people
Speaker 1: that interact with the customer. When you think of a company,
Speaker 1: who do you think of you know, as a customer
Speaker 1: of that company, who do you think of it? It's
Speaker 1: that person that's in the value zone. And so we
Speaker 1: need to make sure that those people know that we
Speaker 1: have their back, that we're not going to throw them
Speaker 1: under the bus, that we're going to take care of them,
Speaker 1: we're going to develop mantle opportunities, that they're not going
Speaker 1: to be starving and hungry, right, but that in every
Speaker 1: way we're going to put them first, not just in
Speaker 1: it's not just a money and a benefits thing, but
Speaker 1: it's also an accountability thing. They need to feel that
Speaker 1: we are accountable to them, not they accountable to people
Speaker 1: higher up in the ORG chart. And if they have
Speaker 1: all of those things, they're more likely to put the
Speaker 1: customer first. And I think this is interesting because I
Speaker 1: was doing a podcast interview a few days ago with
Speaker 1: an education podcast and I never really thought about it,
Speaker 1: but how many of us in education now, especially in
Speaker 1: higher education, use this terrible model that students are our customers. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and okay, I don't really like that model. But even
Speaker 1: if it's true, does that mean that we put them first? No?
Speaker 1: It means, what is the value zone of a classroom
Speaker 1: or the value zone of an education system is a classroom,
Speaker 1: and so do we put that first or do we
Speaker 1: keep the system going first, whether that's higher ED or
Speaker 1: even K through twelve. We need to make sure that
Speaker 1: the value zone of the organization truly is that classroom,
Speaker 1: so that they can sort of put students first and
Speaker 1: put stakeholders first. So I wasn't expecting it till they
Speaker 1: brought it up, Like it's weird. I'm sure you'd have
Speaker 1: this too, when you write a book and then people
Speaker 1: read it and they see stuff that's not there, but
Speaker 1: you're like, that's brilliant. You should have told me this
Speaker 1: a year ago when I was writing it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I go with that all the time. Yeah. I could
Speaker 1: go on to stories about that, but I'll keep this
Speaker 1: interview about you. This is a couple of last questions.
Speaker 1: So why are companies so resistant to changing these practices?
Speaker 1: So one of the things, like, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: change in general people are resistant to. You know, we
Speaker 1: don't really most often we don't really make a definitive
Speaker 1: change until the cost of not changing outweigh the cost
Speaker 1: of changing, right, We have that sort of status quo bias.
Speaker 1: But truthfully, I found the people who are resistant to
Speaker 1: a lot of the ideas in this book say the
Speaker 1: exact same thing. They say, well, what we're doing now
Speaker 1: is working, and what we're doing now is working. It is,
Speaker 1: And it was that's the first thing I sort of
Speaker 1: want to point out. I was like, it is, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. You can't just challenge people a little bar
Speaker 1: for working. That's actually exactly my point. The example I
Speaker 1: use is the internal combustion engine. Right. So I was
Speaker 1: a terrible student of physics and undergrad but I remembered
Speaker 1: one thing, which was that the internal combustion engine is
Speaker 1: only like it maxes out at about thirty percent efficiency.
Speaker 1: In other words, like you put gasoline into it, and
Speaker 1: the energy that's stored in that gasoline, only about thirty
Speaker 1: percent of it gets actually put towards forward motion of
Speaker 1: the automobile. The rest is lost to heat and friction
Speaker 1: and other things in the system. So, sure, it's working,
Speaker 1: but it's only working if you're willing to accept thirty
Speaker 1: percent efficiency. Right, and organizations are actually the same thing.
Speaker 1: If we've moved from industrial brute force labor market to
Speaker 1: a knowledge work mental energy market. Then the best measurement
Speaker 1: of performances is or one of the best predictors of
Speaker 1: performance is engagement. Right, oh yeah, and engagement is caps
Speaker 1: out around twenty percent right in the United States, where
Speaker 1: a little bit better, it's a thirty percent, which is
Speaker 1: exactly where the internal combustion engine is weird. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's working, but exactly what you said, only if you
Speaker 1: have a really low bar of working. And I see
Speaker 1: that there are a lot of companies, especially the companies
Speaker 1: that are really dependent on exclusive skill sets, exclusive knowledge,
Speaker 1: and that sort of war for talent is the word
Speaker 1: we use a lot of times in the business world.
Speaker 1: Those companies made the change first because the cost of
Speaker 1: not changing meant that the people that they needed, who
Speaker 1: had the mental ability that they needed, the knowledge, skills
Speaker 1: and abilities they needed, departed. So they made the change
Speaker 1: first in order to get that sort of talent. But
Speaker 1: that's basically how it's going to work. As soon as
Speaker 1: you start to see too many of that talent leave
Speaker 1: the field in order to get into something that has
Speaker 1: a higher engagement rate, you're not going to change. But hopefully,
Speaker 1: I mean, the visionary leaders are the ones that saw
Speaker 1: this ahead of time. And decided to start making those
Speaker 1: changes to totally abuse the car analogy. The visionaries are
Speaker 1: the people like Elon Musk who go, hey, you know what,
Speaker 1: in order to make this work, we need to do
Speaker 1: away with that whole internal combustion engine thing entirely, and
Speaker 1: then we can make a more energy efficient car. Right,
Speaker 1: And we're still tweaking, and we're still there, and it's
Speaker 1: it's really hard to again, to abuse the analogy. It's
Speaker 1: really hard to see the jump when the alternative is
Speaker 1: not as effective as the status quo. But if you
Speaker 1: wait until after it's more effective, it's too late. And
Speaker 1: I think that's why most companies are resistant to change.
Speaker 1: And it's a shame because it'll be too late. The
Speaker 1: talent will have already left the door. Yeh know, it's
Speaker 1: a shame. And you know, one good way to keep
Speaker 1: the talent is to not just have something that works,
Speaker 1: but have something where they're flourishing. Yeah, you know, like
Speaker 1: you can be in a relationship and you say, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's ship's working, but that no one wants to be
Speaker 1: in a relationship that's just working. You know, you want
Speaker 1: to be a relationship that's flourishing. That's where both people
Speaker 1: are like you know, ecstatic to be around it, are
Speaker 1: passionate around each other. In the industrial era, the unit
Speaker 1: of design, in other words, like the thing that it
Speaker 1: all went back to the building block of an organizational
Speaker 1: design was the product. What do we need in order
Speaker 1: to make this product? Okay, we'll design the whole system
Speaker 1: around that, and that's where we got things like the
Speaker 1: assembly line, and they were great inventions. But if we
Speaker 1: as a company are relying on mental energy, the knowledge
Speaker 1: skills and abilities of our employees to come up with
Speaker 1: our products, in other words, it's not a brute force
Speaker 1: mental or excuse me, it's not a brute force labor thing,
Speaker 1: it's a mental thing. Then we need to ask those questions.
Speaker 1: And the unit of design switches from the product to
Speaker 1: the person because the product comes from between that person's ears,
Speaker 1: and so we need to really focus on design from
Speaker 1: that aspect, and how do we make how do we
Speaker 1: design a system where those people flourish so that our
Speaker 1: products will flourish exactly? Yeah and yeah, Like my friend
Speaker 1: colleague Emasapala has a recent book, Happiness Track, about how
Speaker 1: if we kind of start with the happiness part of
Speaker 1: the equation, then productivity follows from that. Yeah, no, absolutely,
Speaker 1: or I mean I think you had Tom Wrath on
Speaker 1: the show. I had them on my podcast and I
Speaker 1: asked him, I ask everybody, what do you believe that
Speaker 1: most people don't, And he said, I believe that people
Speaker 1: should leave work more energized than when they showed up.
Speaker 1: And I wish I would have heard that while I
Speaker 1: was still writing my book, because I totally agree that
Speaker 1: unless we ask ourselves the organizational design questions like how
Speaker 1: do we create an environment where people get energy from
Speaker 1: doing the work instead of the work drains their energy.
Speaker 1: Unless we can ask questions and design a system like that,
Speaker 1: we're going to lose out. Completely agree. So what's the
Speaker 1: next big change that you see? That's an interesting question.
Speaker 1: I mean, so Underney Management's about every change that I saw. No,
Speaker 1: I honestly wish I knew. I think we're not here yet.
Speaker 1: Like I look at this book as I don't want
Speaker 1: to use the term prophecy, but I mean I look
Speaker 1: at this book as here's where I'm seeing the visionary
Speaker 1: companies going, the most innovative companies going, and the next
Speaker 1: thirty to forty years is going to be a game
Speaker 1: of catchup and the challenges. I would love to make
Speaker 1: the disastrous assumption that I know where we as a
Speaker 1: society and we as humans and our relationships with technology
Speaker 1: and all of these sort of things are fifty years
Speaker 1: from now. But I'm not looking that far out. I mean,
Speaker 1: the truth is, honestly, I'm looking about fifteen years out.
Speaker 1: I have two boys. I have a four year old
Speaker 1: and a two year old, and so they're going to
Speaker 1: hit the workplace anywhere from fifteen to twenty years from now.
Speaker 1: They're going to have that sort of first real job,
Speaker 1: and so my goal is to make that work better
Speaker 1: by the time they hit it. Right, So we're thirty
Speaker 1: percent engagement right now. I'd love to get it to
Speaker 1: at least fifty so that my kids have like a
Speaker 1: coin flip chance of finding a workplace that gives them energy.
Speaker 1: And if we can do that, man like, I'm happy,
Speaker 1: I'm good. I'll call it at that. Right. So I'm
Speaker 1: looking fifteen to twenty years out, and I'm working so
Speaker 1: that my boys can work at an organization that's better
Speaker 1: than when I found it, right, if that's the way
Speaker 1: it put it. Yeah, I mean, this book itself is revolutionary,
Speaker 1: and the ideas and there are revolutionary enough that we
Speaker 1: already we don't need to be thinking about the next thing.
Speaker 1: If we could do these things right this scale, we'll
Speaker 1: take care of the rest on once we'll get here.
Speaker 1: Totally gotcha. Well, thank you, David. I really appreciate this
Speaker 1: chat today. Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just to
Speaker 1: start provoking and interesting as I did. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to read the show notes for this episode or here
Speaker 1: last episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: H