July 25, 2024 • 39 mins
By any measure, Frances Frei is unusual. She’s a professor, advisor, author, strategist, TED speaker, and spent 2017 at Uber on a leave of absence to lead Leadership & Strategy at Uber for the several thousand employees contending with rapid growth and a quickly evolving culture. Listen to this fascinating conversation in which Frances Frei and Sam Jayanti discuss why leaders who cannot create trust, a learning environment, and empower the members of their team lead to poor business outcomes and company culture. The future is about soft skills and this conversation expains why.
Subscribe to ideamix - Coaching, Performance, and Wellness, and stay tuned for new episodes every other Thursday. On ideamix podcasts, we speak with innovators and coaches to help you build the life, business, and career you want. ideamix is the go-to destination for individuals to find their ideal coach. Check out our website at www.theideamix.com. For comments, questions, podcast guest ideas, or sponsorship inquiries, please email info@theideamix.com.
Subscribe to ideamix - Coaching, Performance, and Wellness, and stay tuned for new episodes every other Thursday. On ideamix podcasts, we speak with innovators and coaches to help you build the life, business, and career you want. ideamix is the go-to destination for individuals to find their ideal coach. Check out our website at www.theideamix.com. For comments, questions, podcast guest ideas, or sponsorship inquiries, please email info@theideamix.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Idemics Performance and Wellness, where world leading coaches
and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve
your personal and professional goals. Foster hi It's Sanjayanti, co
founder and CEO of Idemics Coaching. Coaching has played an
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(00:27):
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If you think someone you know.
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Would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them.
Thanks for listening and see you next time. Today, we're
excited to have Professor Francis Frye join us on the show.
By any measure, Francis is unusual. She's a professor, advisor, author, strategist,
TED speaker, and spend twenty seventeen at Uber on a
(01:27):
leave of absence to lead leadership and strategy for several
thousand employees in a company contending with rapid growth and
a quickly evolving culture. In her day job, she's a
professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School,
with a research focus on the intersection of leadership, operations, strategy,
and culture. She's also the author of a viral TED talk,
(01:50):
how to Build and Rebuild Trust. And I unfortunately did
not have the privilege of being taught by Francis as
an NBA student at Harvard a one hundred years ago.
But I remember a close friend of mine who did
study with her describe her as singular and legendary. So
I could go on and on, but I'd rather that
Francis and I show you rather than tell you about
(02:12):
her work. In the rest of this podcast, Francis, welcome
to our Demix Coaching.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Well, that's the best introduction I have ever had, So
thank you. Well, I will send it to you so
that you would I will send it to my mother.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Fantastic. So I wanted to start us off Franci's with
just a few really quick questions, so simple kind of
yes or no answers, and we'll dive into a lot
of those topics later in our conversation. So number one,
do most companies in your experience put service at the
heart of their business?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Do most leaders understand how to empower their teams?
Speaker 2 (02:55):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Is trust the single mode most important element in the
success of a company?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Number four, do most leaders in your experience exhibit the
self awareness necessary to lead effectively?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
No?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And lost. If you had to pick just one activity
that you enjoy doing in your spare time, what is it.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Watching the deer eat on video in a beautiful deer
sanctuary up in Maine. It is mesmerizing, it's expecting, it's
mesmerizing and amazing, And I do it in the middle
of the night when I have spare time, and I
just love it. Brownfield me, it's amazing. It's called deer pantry.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Wow, Okay, that's very cool. I'm definitely going to check
that out. So Francis. In an article that you wrote
in back in twenty twenty in Management Today, you described
your time at Uber fixing what was then a very
toxic culture, and you talked about encountering three thousand managers
(04:08):
who had been really strong individual contributors were then elevated
to be managers with very little training and the result
that they were very poorly equipped to lead and manage
during a period of piper growth at the company and
a culture of sort of a lack of focus on
developing individuals to be effective in their roles. Right, there
(04:30):
was maybe no time, but this is such a common
problem at companies. More broadly, we encountered daily in our
coaching business, because the skills that get you to that
leadership role are not the same skills that you then
need to manage a team effectively. So you've had these
(04:51):
encounters at Uber, and you've advised lots of companies on
the same issue. What's the underlying structural problem?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
In your view, the structural problem is, I think to
find out why is it that people aren't able to
perform well? And it's not their fault. So whatever the
obstacle is, and it's only ever like one of three.
But whatever the obstacle is, let's just systematically address it,
as opposed to lament it that it's not there. So
(05:20):
if we take radical responsibility for the success of our employees,
we will be able to get there and the three obstacles.
And this is in the language of a colleague of minde.
Ryan Buel's, but they either don't have the capability to
do it, which was the case at uber or they
don't have the motivation, or they don't have the license
(05:41):
or permission, whichever one it is, address it. It's I
find that, like my no answers to all of your
early questions, I didn't I'm a crazy optimist. If I
could say a longer answer, it's no end. It can
be readily taught, So everything you asked for we can
teach it, but we're not born knowing it. I like
(06:03):
to think of it as the secret memos on how
to do it, and we just haven't had wide enough
distribution on the secret memos on how to do these things.
And so I feel like that's what I did when
I went to uber Is. I provided the secret memos
to how to manage and these amazing people that they
didn't know how to manage makes them amazing people.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
It's so true. I mean, you know, these skills are learned,
right in most cases. I mean, maybe there's a minority
of people who just sort of either know these things
or develop them as they go along, But most of
the time they're learned skills, and they're very teachable, as
you've identified. And yet organizations failed to create a structure
(06:51):
and a mechanism to actually shepherd people through these career
transitions and evolutions, right, and so sort of in a
sense set them up to fail. Was that different in
an uber context? Was it common to a lot of
the other contexts that you've seen. I mean, obviously you
knew that context much more intimate decence you were in there.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Well, I think that in hypergrowth it's particularly tempting to
underinvest in development because you're like scrambling to do other
things and you think, well, the ROI of taking advantage
of that next dollar of revenue is more important, and
I'll get to development later, right, I'll just I'll sequence
it to later. Organizations that we see that really benefit,
(07:38):
excuse me, that really benefit. They do a couple of things,
but one is they get very efficient at the development.
So development needed take a very long time. Like you
went to the Harvard Business School for two years, right,
so that is a very long time. But to learn
things that are going to last a lifetime organizations to
(07:59):
train somebody from going from an individual contributor to a manager.
I think that if you, well, we did it in
thirty days, right, and fully equipped people in thirty days,
and it wasn't even their primary responsibility in thirty days.
That was back in twenty seventeen. I think we've gotten
much more efficient at doing it now, and with AI
we can get even more efficient at doing it. But
(08:22):
what most people think is that they don't have good
models to do it. They think it takes a long
time and it's less important than getting the next dollar.
What I like to say is you're going to get
the next dollar, but it's going to blow up in
like a little while, so like, let's do this, solve
it once so that you'll have it forever. But I
understand the pressures that these organizations are under.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So another
of the areas of your research have focused on service businesses,
and you distinguish them very clearly from product based businesses.
Would you explain for our audience that distinction that you draw.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Sure, and that distinction was born out of when I
went and got my PhD. It was in operations and
information management at Wharton, and so if I take the
operations management part of it, up until that point, the
study of operations by academics was entirely in manufacturing. It
was entirely in what we would jokingly say things you
(09:26):
can drop on your foot, and if you can drop
something on your foot, physics applies. You can't pretend it doesn't.
I was obsessed with service organizations for a couple of reasons. One,
it's like well north of three quarters of most economies,
and it had been understudied, and you can't drop it
(09:46):
on your foot, and people can seduce themselves into thinking
that physics doesn't apply. So you can. The lessons that
I came up with for service organizations, most of them
also apply to manufacturing. But you couldn't have protect they didn't.
So I'll give you one example of that, my favorite
example of that. In manufacturing, we know that you can't
(10:08):
be great at everything like cost, quality and speed trade
off against each other. Why because you know if something's
going to be heavy it can't also, you know, it
can't also be light. These two things trade off against
each other. I see so many service businesses that think
it can be heavy in light at the same time
that think you can overcome trade offs just by sheer will.
(10:29):
So I was studying the understudied one because it was
so vast, and two because we were seducing ourselves into
all of these you know, wacky things, and so if
we could just provide common sense to these context we
could make a big difference.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
That's a great way to explain it. I think the
sort of tangibility is is such a key point, right,
because I totally agree with you that the sort of
delusion that you can just will something into being though
they're very contradictory forces competing with each other, you know,
it's sort of an easy.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Time only exists in services because in manufacturing, like quite literally,
physics applies. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So right, So, you know, service businesses are super interesting
to us. Most of the companies we work with there
either in the professional there are either companies in professional
services or their individuals working in professional services businesses. Right
In an HBr article that you wrote in two thousand
and eight, you talked about the four elements that service
(11:36):
businesses have to get right right in order to be successful.
Tell our listeners a little bit about these four elements,
because I found them fascinating, and why getting them right
is not a one size fits all because there is
such a diversity of service companies in the end.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, So the first one, which we called service offering
when we wrote this, then this is back in twenty thirteen.
I like to joke that it would almost get a
classic car license plate. It's almost that old and still
holds true today. But this is the one that in
order to be great, you have to be bad. And
so the example, the manufacturing example, or for the parallel
(12:18):
we always use is the MacBook Air best in class
at weight, worse than class at physical features when in
the dawn, when it had recently come out, when we
started talking about that, and service organizations just they will
talk about what they want to be great at and
they will be embarrassed, but they want to buy what
they're bad at, and we're like, no, no, no, you
(12:39):
have to be equally articulate at both and understand that
the reason I don't have physical features is so that
I can be best in class at weight, like one
is in service of the other, both are equally important.
So that's the first part. If you don't get that
part right, it's going to be hard to make up
for it with everything else I'm about to say. So
that's the most important thing.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
What we're all seeing it sort of it's an articulation
and an acknowledgment of it effectively.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yes, because otherwise, when you're not looking, I'm going to
get better at the things we're designed to be bad at,
which means I'm going to get worse the things that
we were trying to win at. And so we're going
to play an infinite game of whack a mole, and
we're going to lead to exhausted mediocrity, which is what
I tragically see in way too many people and in
way too many organizations. And it's not out of laziness.
(13:25):
It's out of constantly trying to make up for what
we're bad at, as opposed to realizing that is precisely
the fuel of what we're great at. So that's the
first part of the four things. Once you have that,
the second part is, and this is particularly true for services,
is a funding mechanism, and that is you have to
make sure that you get paid now. Of course you
(13:46):
have to get paid. Usually for products, you pay once
and that's it for in services, and what we often
do is that we're tempted when the customer says, oh,
I would like this, we're tempted to give it to
them for free, what we refer to as gratuitous service.
The problem is, if I give you something for free now,
I'm gonna have to charge you later. And what's gonna
(14:08):
happen when I charge you later is I'm going to
raise the price without raising the features, and you're gonna
hate me. So I did something out of love now
that's going to come out of You're gonna end up
hating me for later. But we do things because for
the for free all the time. So if I go
to an organization, I say, tell me all of your
improvement ideas for the customer. Let's say they list fifty,
(14:29):
I'll say, okay, and how many will the customer pay
extra for? Forty of them come off the list? I
was like, stop working on those. Let's work on ones
for which we have a reliable funding mechanism. Let's work
on ones for which people aren't gonna hate us later.
For when we ultimately do have to end up getting
paid for it. So that's the funding mechanism part is
(14:50):
a real thing. That's number two. The third one is
what we were alluding to earlier. We call the employee
management system, and we titled the chapter in Uncommon Service
it's never your employee's fault. And here it's have you
set your employees up for success? Have you reliably set
them up for success? And here's what we know selection, development, promotion, retention,
(15:15):
the employee life cycle. Those four things have to be
mutually reinforcing. So if I hire inexperienced people, I better
give them a lot of training. If I hire experienced people,
better give them a job design with lots of license
in it. Like, it's not that there's better, it's not, oh,
higher experienced, higher inexperienced. I don't care which one you do.
(15:38):
I just know that the rest of the parts of
the employee life cycle and the rest of the parts
of the employee management system better be mutually reinforcing. So
have we taken radical responsibility for the success of our employees.
That's the employee management system. And then the fourth part
is the customer management system. In services, customers can play
(15:58):
an operating role. So it's not just if the employee
behavior influences quality, but the customer behavior might. So healthcare,
for example, how I behave as a patient influences the
overall outcome of my health. It's not like a doctor
can just deliver my health. I co produce it. Well,
that's true in most services, and it's not true in
(16:22):
most manufacturing. When somebody manufactures tied detergent, it just is
as good as it is regardless of what I do.
So we have to select, develop, train, and retain customers
the same way we do employees. So there's a parallel
customer management system. Those are the four things the service
(16:42):
business must get right.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yeah, and I think especially your point about this idea
of managing customers is so often lost on service businesses,
right because either in the beginning stages they want any
customer that comes in the door, and later on it's
because growth is happening relatively quickly, and so there's no
(17:06):
time in a sense to distinguish between the desirable customers
and the undesirable ones. But as you said, if they're
co creating the outcome, unlike in manufacturing, that choice of
customer is incredibly.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Important, incredibly important, and I liked how you said. We
often say that we're looking for customer we're looking for
revenue with a pulse, and we have to be more
discerning than that, just like we are for our employees.
If customer behavior matters, we have to be discerning. But
that is an awfully courageous act for most organizations, but
(17:41):
an absolutely essential act.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, absolutely necessary. And I think you know more on
this employee management idea later, so we'll come back to that.
So I want to shift gears a little bit now
to talk about trust. Yeah, the loss of trust surrounds us.
Consumers of loss trust in products. Professionals have less trust
(18:03):
in their organizations. Citizens feel less trust in their government
and institutions. And even though it's only in some ways
thirty plus years since the end of the Cold War,
right when capitalist democracies became the clear winning model, liberal
democracy itself now is sort of in question because of
this kind of loss of trust. In your TED talk
(18:26):
on rebuilding trust, which I loved and that was based
on your experiences at Uber, you talked about encountering an
organization that was literally on fire because of this lack
of trust. And I would love you to please share
with our listeners that finding and sort of what catalyzed
(18:51):
it in your mind as you went in there, and
how you sort of, you know, in a sense, alighted
on this idea, idea that the loss of trust was
so deep and institutional, and that really you were going
to work to kind of bring this back right.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yeah, So the way I got to Uber, I think
might be useful to just shed a little light on.
When I was asked if I would come out and
meet the then CEO of Uber, I said no. And
it was a former student that asked me, and she said,
I understand you have an opinion based on what you
read in the newspaper. He's a different person than that.
(19:30):
As a favor to me, will you come and meet him?
I of course said yes, because once a student, always
a student, and I flew across the country that I
would never do again, but I flew across the country
to have a relatively short meeting. The meeting which lasted
three days. I postponed my flight home five times because
(19:52):
the meeting just kept going on, and so we talked
about everything. I got to raise every single issue because
Anne and I co author and what we help good
people do hard things. But we take our responsibility to
help good people very very seriously. And I didn't think
he was a good person by everything I read. Well,
(20:13):
at the end of the three days, I was absolutely
certain he was a good person. And he was very
inexperienced in what he had done. For example, the last
company he led had eight people. When I got to Uber,
they had thirteen thousand people and were one of the
most successful startups of you know, by certain measures. And
(20:33):
so he was out over his skis in a couple
of areas, which makes him human in that regard. He
also wanted help. The places where he was over his skis,
in particular, leadership and strategy were two places where I
just happened to be a really good fit. So not
only did I think he was a good person, but
(20:54):
the unique things I can do it just it was
hand in glove. And so that's how I got there,
was to do that. And when I looked around at
the problems, the problems were very consistent regardless of which
stakeholder was. So the employees had lost trust, the regulators
(21:16):
had lost truck writers had lost trust, investors, drivers, like
literally every constituent in some ways had the same problem,
and to me, from my operation's mind, that's a much
easier problem to solve than if everybody had a different problem.
(21:36):
So when I got there and I looked at it,
I was like, I'm just seeing the same thing manifest
again and again and again. And so what we did
is tested whether or not teaching people about trust and
teaching them the remedies to overcome broken trust would work.
And it worked like at an exhilarating pace.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
So you went in in a sense with this concept
of trust, you know, as part of your research and thinking, well.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Well, before I got there, so before I said yes,
I had to test whether or not. So I probably
taught fifteen hundred of the three of the thirteen thousand
people before I said yes, okay. So I was like,
I got to see if the way in which I
communicate works. And I very quickly early on realized trust
is what I should be teaching them to see if
(22:24):
that's it. So I started hearing about it right away,
and then I started teaching it. So I had taught
fifteen hundred people about trust, and it was being absorbed
at a beautiful rate. And then I was like, there's
something I can do here.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
And even though the loss of trust in many ways
was attributable to different reasons depending on the different stakeholders, right.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
It was almost always the same reason.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Okay, so same, so I.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Trust if trust consists of you're more likely to trust
me if you experience authenticity. Logic and empathy was almost
always an empathy wobble. It was almost always I was
so self distracted in myself that I would be okay
with collateral damage of you M fascinating.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yeah, that was in a sense, it was dictated by
company culture.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
I think the company culture was and which was you know,
Travis would often say, like he was diagnosed as I
am as an empathy wobbler, which is, if we're going
to lose trusts, probably for empathy. And as a very
successful founder CEO, his wobble became the cultural wobble right
(23:40):
of the entire and I see that all the time.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Yeah, so is that would you say, of the three
elements that you just outlined, is that the most is
that the one you see most commonly? It is?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
It is? And I was just with an organization this morning,
and fifty percent had empathy wobble and twenty five percent
had authenticity. And twenty five percent had logic. What I
see more commonly is sixty percent empathy, yeah, thirty percent logic,
(24:17):
and then twenty percent authenticity.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Okay, super interesting. So it's by far the lines share.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
So trust lies at the heart of leadership, right, as
you've just identified, and the teams at Uber had no
trust in their managers, and the managers in turn had
no understanding of how to lead or trust in their leaders.
You know, I recently came across CEO who basically described
(24:52):
his leadership style to me as well what I would
characterize I guess as super micromanagy. Right. He sort of
described how every day at work starts with a two
hour team meeting and every day ends with a sort
of one hour team meeting, and that's how he kind
of runs the organization.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Wow, that's an organization built to be a hobby, not
not a company. I mean, no disrespect, but that can't
style on you.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
And you know, and we had this conversation about his
style was such a clear impediment, and we talked a
little bit about Okay, this is what you do at
your company, like what do you do at home with
your family? Like how does that work?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Right?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Nice and he and you know, same tactic and sort
of refusal to accept that it should be or could
be different. Right, And not long after that, I mean,
in a very sad way, the problem with his leadership
style became very evident to him in a homecome text
(26:00):
in fact, not in the work context initially. And it
was that moment where he sort of, you know, realized
that this wasn't working and it wasn't going to work
kind of going forward, and you know, they'd ended up
in sort of a really bad place. Why do you
feel so many leaders struggle to empower their teams and
(26:23):
equally a lot of these behaviors show up at home too, right, Yeah, yeah, family,
and so you know what that experience is like, and
and you see a mirror image of those behaviors in
both spears in a sense, And why do you think
it's such a struggle?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, So I'll tell you how I overcame the struggle
as maybe a way to show what the struggle is,
which is and I overcame it in a parenting context.
But to your point, it can be with partners, parents, employees,
it's all. Which is when I heard Carol Dweck say
there are two ways to parents, and one of them
(27:01):
is the right way. As an insecure parent who was
sure I was doing things wrong, I just didn't know
specifically what I was doing wrong. She had my attention,
and she said, you can either prepare the path for
the child, or you can prepare the child for the path.
So many of us are preparing the path for the child.
(27:22):
So many of us are weed whacking out of love.
So we're not micromanaging out of anger. We're micromanaging out
of love. What we fail to realize is that we're
making people reliant on our presence, and what we want
to do is be preparing the child for any path.
(27:44):
What we want to do is to be preparing people
for our absence, as opposed to making them reliant on
our presence. Right and micromanaging is requiring that people can
only do excellence in our presence, when if we just
put on a different lens, give this context, I could
(28:04):
fix it for you or tell you how to fix it,
or I could interact with you in such a way
that you will be able to do things like this
and beyond in my absence. It's a whole different pedagogy
associated with it. I think we all have to have
the equivalent of that light bulb moment, am I preparing
you for my presence making you reliant on me? Or
(28:26):
am I preparing you for my absence? And the moment
we realize we're preparing people for our absence, that's when
empowerment becomes one of the most beautiful things in the world.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah, so true. I also, you know, think back to
I spent some time at Poalneer and one of the
things that used to amuse me a fair amount was
that there were a lot of old economy companies that
would come through, not just Palenteer, but sort of a
bunch of companies in the valley, and they would come
on these they call them innovation tours, like, you know,
(28:55):
trying to figure out what is it that creates this
culture of innovation in the valley and why are we
not able to replicate it? And the reason was, like
you didn't even have to come here, you know, it
was super simple. It was if you approach running your
business for a position of risk, aversion where you're all
whether the culture is don't screw it up, then that's
(29:18):
what you get right. Whereas if you're incremental right, and
if you approach your business from the position of, hey,
we trust you to take some risks. We understand that
mistakes will be made, but we're sort of here to
back you up. Then you'll get a very different culture, right,
And so many companies are kind of unable to shift
(29:43):
their culture and get out of their own way. Yeah,
you've had tons of experiences with this. I'm sure, what
is that about. And what's an example of have shifted
culture and been successful at that?
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah? Well, I think my favorite large scale example of
a colultural shift with wild benefit is Microsoft. So Microsoft
before Satya Nedella was like I think the prior CEO,
maybe the value of the company at the beginning of
his tenure was the same as that at the end
of his tenure.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And now look at yeah, and now look at what
happened with Satya. And he changed the culture completely into
all of the ways that you would want. Empowerment and growth, mindset,
intelligent failure, like all of the things, did all of
the things. So to me, we have maybe before then
(30:41):
we just people thought that that's some you know, unproven methodology.
But now the most successful companies are exhibiting these traits,
so I expect them to be more contagious. Back then, companies,
even if they weren't successful, we seduced ourselves into thinking,
(31:04):
you know, tough guys finished first, and shouting shows my
Scott Galloway is really wonderful. It's saying, shouting shows my masculinity,
and I'm going to shout, And that's like not at
all what masculinity is. Masculinity is like a beautiful thing
where we're taking care of other people and setting the
(31:24):
conditions for them to thrive. So it's a reinterpretation of
what great looks like. And I think we now have
lots of lots of successful turnarounds. I would say that
Walmart today versus Walmart yesterday another what I guess we
would call an old economy business that is so progressive
(31:44):
in what it's doing, is doing development at a faster
pace than most other organizations. And they have one hundred
thousand employees in the US, and they are using AI
and beautiful ways to empower and develop people in really
progressive ways. So I don't think you, I don't think
you have to be new economy or old economy to
do it, but it does require leadership. Yeah. Doug McMillan Satyinadella.
(32:10):
These are I think you could have them lead any
company and those companies will be successful.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Yeah. So true. So I want to come back to
this idea of human capital management, right. Much of our
work has focused on helping companies design a human capital
management strategy that sort of works for them in a
way to help them identify the right people, put them
(32:36):
in the right roles at the right time, etc. Through
talent assessment, you know, organizational design and team design, but
then also coaching where it's necessary. Yeah, and most companies
in our experience do not think cohesively about that continuum
of sort of recruiting selection, you know, being really clear
(33:01):
about people's roles in a team, are they aligned with
one another, and then gathering feedback, ensuring accountability, and then
coaching for skills where necessary. Give us a couple of
examples of companies that are actually getting this right. Yeah,
you know. It might well be that they've worked with
(33:21):
you in order to get it right, beating this sort
of realistic design. But I'd be really curious.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you my favorite current day example,
which is one that surprisingly few people have studied, but
I believe the entire world is going to know him
in just a minute. And that's service now. So service
now is in the land of tech companies. They have
had faster growth by some measures than any of the
(33:50):
other top growth companies that we have heard of. They're
just under the radar with it. There have their approach
to talent. Jackie Kenny is just a world class head
of human resources, head of people which is a better
word for it. But the whole Bill McDermott, the CEO
and others, the whole world really thinks systematically about it.
(34:13):
So for example, in tech, everyone had layoffs over the
last few years, right I mean, and it was like
super painful in the beginning, and now it's commonplace. Everybody
had layoffs. Accept service now. And it's not that they
sacrifice growth in order to do it, but they could
read the tea leaves early, so they knew when to
(34:35):
slow down hiring. They knew how to have career paths
for people, they knew how to shift people. So they
now get like a million applications for a thousand roles.
Word is getting out one of the top places to work.
Explosive growth, explosive profitability because they do everything you just
said with intention, they do it with intention, and so
(34:59):
you have to be super We're smart, yes, but honestly,
it's a difference between doing it with intention and doing
it without intention, doing it as a priority and doing
it without a priority. And what I like about making
public and so I try to be evangelical about the
ones that are doing it well so that other people
realize it's possible and that you can do the set
(35:20):
of things you just said. And people are like, well,
how do you know. Go look at service now and
be mesmerized by what you're seeing. And it's not magic dust,
it's doing these things systematically.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, totally. I mean I think the intentionality and systematizing
it are the battle everything or the answer. Yeah, yes, yeah,
So Francis, I want to go back to the last
question I asked you at the beginning when we started,
which was watching the deer eat. So how did that start?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know, the algorithms on YouTube, I don't know what's
behind them, but I will admit that I probably dwelled
a little too long on some pet themed and some
animal themed things, and so they've probably caught my dwell
time and they just served up a set of things
(36:15):
and I might have been watching live videos of hawks
in Africa and you know, and so they served up
this deer pantry in Maine, and I just it has everything.
I love one. It helps, like everybody needs help. I
have know of no one that's been successful in putting
(36:36):
Michael Jordan all the way down. Nobody's been successful without help. Well,
these deer need help, and they're deer that are in
the wild, but they need help in the winter months,
and so they have systematically set up a way to
feed them in the winter months without sacrificing any of
their awesome dearness. And they have multiple cameras, which it's
(36:59):
really cool, and the kids do it and they put
out apples and you get to do It's just I
love it. So now that you've you I've said it
to you, allow some time because you won't believe what
you see. Some of the deer have been coming back
for ten years.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
The community has named the deer and you get to
see them and see how they evolve over time, and
then you get to see their offspring. It's really it's
quite amazing. So it has kind of everything I love.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Okay, that's a that's a really good You've you've captured
it in enough nutshell, I think.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
So Bran's any parting thoughts as you sort of think
about the conversation we just had.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, I think that the the one thing I would
emphasize is the importance of coaching and coaching and teaching
these are these are things where we want to get disproportionate,
you know, non incremental gains out of people. Well, and
it is really hard to do this leadership stuff as
(38:03):
a solo sport. We need peripheral vision, and I think
having a coach is a pretty amazing way to have
peripheral vision. And so my parting thought is, don't try
to go it alone. There's no reason to. And there
are people who have devoted their lives to being helpful
(38:24):
to others.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Partner with them absolutely well. I couldn't have said it
better myself. So thank you for that. Thank you so
much for being with us today.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
It's such a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave
us a review. Find your Ideal Coach at www dot
VIIDMX dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski
and singer songwriter Doug Allen
Welcome to Idemics Performance and Wellness, where world leading coaches
and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve
your personal and professional goals. Foster hi It's Sanjayanti, co
founder and CEO of Idemics Coaching. Coaching has played an
important role in my life. It's helped me through my
journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife. IDMX
(00:27):
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Speaker 2 (00:50):
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Speaker 1 (00:51):
Could benefit from coaching, visit our website at www dotidemics
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Speaker 2 (01:03):
If you think someone you know.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them.
Thanks for listening and see you next time. Today, we're
excited to have Professor Francis Frye join us on the show.
By any measure, Francis is unusual. She's a professor, advisor, author, strategist,
TED speaker, and spend twenty seventeen at Uber on a
(01:27):
leave of absence to lead leadership and strategy for several
thousand employees in a company contending with rapid growth and
a quickly evolving culture. In her day job, she's a
professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School,
with a research focus on the intersection of leadership, operations, strategy,
and culture. She's also the author of a viral TED talk,
(01:50):
how to Build and Rebuild Trust. And I unfortunately did
not have the privilege of being taught by Francis as
an NBA student at Harvard a one hundred years ago.
But I remember a close friend of mine who did
study with her describe her as singular and legendary. So
I could go on and on, but I'd rather that
Francis and I show you rather than tell you about
(02:12):
her work. In the rest of this podcast, Francis, welcome
to our Demix Coaching.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Well, that's the best introduction I have ever had, So
thank you. Well, I will send it to you so
that you would I will send it to my mother.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Fantastic. So I wanted to start us off Franci's with
just a few really quick questions, so simple kind of
yes or no answers, and we'll dive into a lot
of those topics later in our conversation. So number one,
do most companies in your experience put service at the
heart of their business?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Do most leaders understand how to empower their teams?
Speaker 2 (02:55):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Is trust the single mode most important element in the
success of a company?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Number four, do most leaders in your experience exhibit the
self awareness necessary to lead effectively?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
No?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And lost. If you had to pick just one activity
that you enjoy doing in your spare time, what is it.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Watching the deer eat on video in a beautiful deer
sanctuary up in Maine. It is mesmerizing, it's expecting, it's
mesmerizing and amazing, And I do it in the middle
of the night when I have spare time, and I
just love it. Brownfield me, it's amazing. It's called deer pantry.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Wow, Okay, that's very cool. I'm definitely going to check
that out. So Francis. In an article that you wrote
in back in twenty twenty in Management Today, you described
your time at Uber fixing what was then a very
toxic culture, and you talked about encountering three thousand managers
(04:08):
who had been really strong individual contributors were then elevated
to be managers with very little training and the result
that they were very poorly equipped to lead and manage
during a period of piper growth at the company and
a culture of sort of a lack of focus on
developing individuals to be effective in their roles. Right, there
(04:30):
was maybe no time, but this is such a common
problem at companies. More broadly, we encountered daily in our
coaching business, because the skills that get you to that
leadership role are not the same skills that you then
need to manage a team effectively. So you've had these
(04:51):
encounters at Uber, and you've advised lots of companies on
the same issue. What's the underlying structural problem?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
In your view, the structural problem is, I think to
find out why is it that people aren't able to
perform well? And it's not their fault. So whatever the
obstacle is, and it's only ever like one of three.
But whatever the obstacle is, let's just systematically address it,
as opposed to lament it that it's not there. So
(05:20):
if we take radical responsibility for the success of our employees,
we will be able to get there and the three obstacles.
And this is in the language of a colleague of minde.
Ryan Buel's, but they either don't have the capability to
do it, which was the case at uber or they
don't have the motivation, or they don't have the license
(05:41):
or permission, whichever one it is, address it. It's I
find that, like my no answers to all of your
early questions, I didn't I'm a crazy optimist. If I
could say a longer answer, it's no end. It can
be readily taught, So everything you asked for we can
teach it, but we're not born knowing it. I like
(06:03):
to think of it as the secret memos on how
to do it, and we just haven't had wide enough
distribution on the secret memos on how to do these things.
And so I feel like that's what I did when
I went to uber Is. I provided the secret memos
to how to manage and these amazing people that they
didn't know how to manage makes them amazing people.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
It's so true. I mean, you know, these skills are learned,
right in most cases. I mean, maybe there's a minority
of people who just sort of either know these things
or develop them as they go along, But most of
the time they're learned skills, and they're very teachable, as
you've identified. And yet organizations failed to create a structure
(06:51):
and a mechanism to actually shepherd people through these career
transitions and evolutions, right, and so sort of in a
sense set them up to fail. Was that different in
an uber context? Was it common to a lot of
the other contexts that you've seen. I mean, obviously you
knew that context much more intimate decence you were in there.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Well, I think that in hypergrowth it's particularly tempting to
underinvest in development because you're like scrambling to do other
things and you think, well, the ROI of taking advantage
of that next dollar of revenue is more important, and
I'll get to development later, right, I'll just I'll sequence
it to later. Organizations that we see that really benefit,
(07:38):
excuse me, that really benefit. They do a couple of things,
but one is they get very efficient at the development.
So development needed take a very long time. Like you
went to the Harvard Business School for two years, right,
so that is a very long time. But to learn
things that are going to last a lifetime organizations to
(07:59):
train somebody from going from an individual contributor to a manager.
I think that if you, well, we did it in
thirty days, right, and fully equipped people in thirty days,
and it wasn't even their primary responsibility in thirty days.
That was back in twenty seventeen. I think we've gotten
much more efficient at doing it now, and with AI
we can get even more efficient at doing it. But
(08:22):
what most people think is that they don't have good
models to do it. They think it takes a long
time and it's less important than getting the next dollar.
What I like to say is you're going to get
the next dollar, but it's going to blow up in
like a little while, so like, let's do this, solve
it once so that you'll have it forever. But I
understand the pressures that these organizations are under.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So another
of the areas of your research have focused on service businesses,
and you distinguish them very clearly from product based businesses.
Would you explain for our audience that distinction that you draw.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Sure, and that distinction was born out of when I
went and got my PhD. It was in operations and
information management at Wharton, and so if I take the
operations management part of it, up until that point, the
study of operations by academics was entirely in manufacturing. It
was entirely in what we would jokingly say things you
(09:26):
can drop on your foot, and if you can drop
something on your foot, physics applies. You can't pretend it doesn't.
I was obsessed with service organizations for a couple of reasons. One,
it's like well north of three quarters of most economies,
and it had been understudied, and you can't drop it
(09:46):
on your foot, and people can seduce themselves into thinking
that physics doesn't apply. So you can. The lessons that
I came up with for service organizations, most of them
also apply to manufacturing. But you couldn't have protect they didn't.
So I'll give you one example of that, my favorite
example of that. In manufacturing, we know that you can't
(10:08):
be great at everything like cost, quality and speed trade
off against each other. Why because you know if something's
going to be heavy it can't also, you know, it
can't also be light. These two things trade off against
each other. I see so many service businesses that think
it can be heavy in light at the same time
that think you can overcome trade offs just by sheer will.
(10:29):
So I was studying the understudied one because it was
so vast, and two because we were seducing ourselves into
all of these you know, wacky things, and so if
we could just provide common sense to these context we
could make a big difference.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
That's a great way to explain it. I think the
sort of tangibility is is such a key point, right,
because I totally agree with you that the sort of
delusion that you can just will something into being though
they're very contradictory forces competing with each other, you know,
it's sort of an easy.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Time only exists in services because in manufacturing, like quite literally,
physics applies. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So right, So, you know, service businesses are super interesting
to us. Most of the companies we work with there
either in the professional there are either companies in professional
services or their individuals working in professional services businesses. Right
In an HBr article that you wrote in two thousand
and eight, you talked about the four elements that service
(11:36):
businesses have to get right right in order to be successful.
Tell our listeners a little bit about these four elements,
because I found them fascinating, and why getting them right
is not a one size fits all because there is
such a diversity of service companies in the end.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, So the first one, which we called service offering
when we wrote this, then this is back in twenty thirteen.
I like to joke that it would almost get a
classic car license plate. It's almost that old and still
holds true today. But this is the one that in
order to be great, you have to be bad. And
so the example, the manufacturing example, or for the parallel
(12:18):
we always use is the MacBook Air best in class
at weight, worse than class at physical features when in
the dawn, when it had recently come out, when we
started talking about that, and service organizations just they will
talk about what they want to be great at and
they will be embarrassed, but they want to buy what
they're bad at, and we're like, no, no, no, you
(12:39):
have to be equally articulate at both and understand that
the reason I don't have physical features is so that
I can be best in class at weight, like one
is in service of the other, both are equally important.
So that's the first part. If you don't get that
part right, it's going to be hard to make up
for it with everything else I'm about to say. So
that's the most important thing.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
What we're all seeing it sort of it's an articulation
and an acknowledgment of it effectively.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yes, because otherwise, when you're not looking, I'm going to
get better at the things we're designed to be bad at,
which means I'm going to get worse the things that
we were trying to win at. And so we're going
to play an infinite game of whack a mole, and
we're going to lead to exhausted mediocrity, which is what
I tragically see in way too many people and in
way too many organizations. And it's not out of laziness.
(13:25):
It's out of constantly trying to make up for what
we're bad at, as opposed to realizing that is precisely
the fuel of what we're great at. So that's the
first part of the four things. Once you have that,
the second part is, and this is particularly true for services,
is a funding mechanism, and that is you have to
make sure that you get paid now. Of course you
(13:46):
have to get paid. Usually for products, you pay once
and that's it for in services, and what we often
do is that we're tempted when the customer says, oh,
I would like this, we're tempted to give it to
them for free, what we refer to as gratuitous service.
The problem is, if I give you something for free now,
I'm gonna have to charge you later. And what's gonna
(14:08):
happen when I charge you later is I'm going to
raise the price without raising the features, and you're gonna
hate me. So I did something out of love now
that's going to come out of You're gonna end up
hating me for later. But we do things because for
the for free all the time. So if I go
to an organization, I say, tell me all of your
improvement ideas for the customer. Let's say they list fifty,
(14:29):
I'll say, okay, and how many will the customer pay
extra for? Forty of them come off the list? I
was like, stop working on those. Let's work on ones
for which we have a reliable funding mechanism. Let's work
on ones for which people aren't gonna hate us later.
For when we ultimately do have to end up getting
paid for it. So that's the funding mechanism part is
(14:50):
a real thing. That's number two. The third one is
what we were alluding to earlier. We call the employee
management system, and we titled the chapter in Uncommon Service
it's never your employee's fault. And here it's have you
set your employees up for success? Have you reliably set
them up for success? And here's what we know selection, development, promotion, retention,
(15:15):
the employee life cycle. Those four things have to be
mutually reinforcing. So if I hire inexperienced people, I better
give them a lot of training. If I hire experienced people,
better give them a job design with lots of license
in it. Like, it's not that there's better, it's not, oh,
higher experienced, higher inexperienced. I don't care which one you do.
(15:38):
I just know that the rest of the parts of
the employee life cycle and the rest of the parts
of the employee management system better be mutually reinforcing. So
have we taken radical responsibility for the success of our employees.
That's the employee management system. And then the fourth part
is the customer management system. In services, customers can play
(15:58):
an operating role. So it's not just if the employee
behavior influences quality, but the customer behavior might. So healthcare,
for example, how I behave as a patient influences the
overall outcome of my health. It's not like a doctor
can just deliver my health. I co produce it. Well,
that's true in most services, and it's not true in
(16:22):
most manufacturing. When somebody manufactures tied detergent, it just is
as good as it is regardless of what I do.
So we have to select, develop, train, and retain customers
the same way we do employees. So there's a parallel
customer management system. Those are the four things the service
(16:42):
business must get right.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yeah, and I think especially your point about this idea
of managing customers is so often lost on service businesses,
right because either in the beginning stages they want any
customer that comes in the door, and later on it's
because growth is happening relatively quickly, and so there's no
(17:06):
time in a sense to distinguish between the desirable customers
and the undesirable ones. But as you said, if they're
co creating the outcome, unlike in manufacturing, that choice of
customer is incredibly.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Important, incredibly important, and I liked how you said. We
often say that we're looking for customer we're looking for
revenue with a pulse, and we have to be more
discerning than that, just like we are for our employees.
If customer behavior matters, we have to be discerning. But
that is an awfully courageous act for most organizations, but
(17:41):
an absolutely essential act.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, absolutely necessary. And I think you know more on
this employee management idea later, so we'll come back to that.
So I want to shift gears a little bit now
to talk about trust. Yeah, the loss of trust surrounds us.
Consumers of loss trust in products. Professionals have less trust
(18:03):
in their organizations. Citizens feel less trust in their government
and institutions. And even though it's only in some ways
thirty plus years since the end of the Cold War,
right when capitalist democracies became the clear winning model, liberal
democracy itself now is sort of in question because of
this kind of loss of trust. In your TED talk
(18:26):
on rebuilding trust, which I loved and that was based
on your experiences at Uber, you talked about encountering an
organization that was literally on fire because of this lack
of trust. And I would love you to please share
with our listeners that finding and sort of what catalyzed
(18:51):
it in your mind as you went in there, and
how you sort of, you know, in a sense, alighted
on this idea, idea that the loss of trust was
so deep and institutional, and that really you were going
to work to kind of bring this back right.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yeah, So the way I got to Uber, I think
might be useful to just shed a little light on.
When I was asked if I would come out and
meet the then CEO of Uber, I said no. And
it was a former student that asked me, and she said,
I understand you have an opinion based on what you
read in the newspaper. He's a different person than that.
(19:30):
As a favor to me, will you come and meet him?
I of course said yes, because once a student, always
a student, and I flew across the country that I
would never do again, but I flew across the country
to have a relatively short meeting. The meeting which lasted
three days. I postponed my flight home five times because
(19:52):
the meeting just kept going on, and so we talked
about everything. I got to raise every single issue because
Anne and I co author and what we help good
people do hard things. But we take our responsibility to
help good people very very seriously. And I didn't think
he was a good person by everything I read. Well,
(20:13):
at the end of the three days, I was absolutely
certain he was a good person. And he was very
inexperienced in what he had done. For example, the last
company he led had eight people. When I got to Uber,
they had thirteen thousand people and were one of the
most successful startups of you know, by certain measures. And
(20:33):
so he was out over his skis in a couple
of areas, which makes him human in that regard. He
also wanted help. The places where he was over his skis,
in particular, leadership and strategy were two places where I
just happened to be a really good fit. So not
only did I think he was a good person, but
(20:54):
the unique things I can do it just it was
hand in glove. And so that's how I got there,
was to do that. And when I looked around at
the problems, the problems were very consistent regardless of which
stakeholder was. So the employees had lost trust, the regulators
(21:16):
had lost truck writers had lost trust, investors, drivers, like
literally every constituent in some ways had the same problem,
and to me, from my operation's mind, that's a much
easier problem to solve than if everybody had a different problem.
(21:36):
So when I got there and I looked at it,
I was like, I'm just seeing the same thing manifest
again and again and again. And so what we did
is tested whether or not teaching people about trust and
teaching them the remedies to overcome broken trust would work.
And it worked like at an exhilarating pace.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
So you went in in a sense with this concept
of trust, you know, as part of your research and thinking, well.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Well, before I got there, so before I said yes,
I had to test whether or not. So I probably
taught fifteen hundred of the three of the thirteen thousand
people before I said yes, okay. So I was like,
I got to see if the way in which I
communicate works. And I very quickly early on realized trust
is what I should be teaching them to see if
(22:24):
that's it. So I started hearing about it right away,
and then I started teaching it. So I had taught
fifteen hundred people about trust, and it was being absorbed
at a beautiful rate. And then I was like, there's
something I can do here.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
And even though the loss of trust in many ways
was attributable to different reasons depending on the different stakeholders, right.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
It was almost always the same reason.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Okay, so same, so I.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Trust if trust consists of you're more likely to trust
me if you experience authenticity. Logic and empathy was almost
always an empathy wobble. It was almost always I was
so self distracted in myself that I would be okay
with collateral damage of you M fascinating.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Yeah, that was in a sense, it was dictated by
company culture.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
I think the company culture was and which was you know,
Travis would often say, like he was diagnosed as I
am as an empathy wobbler, which is, if we're going
to lose trusts, probably for empathy. And as a very
successful founder CEO, his wobble became the cultural wobble right
(23:40):
of the entire and I see that all the time.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Yeah, so is that would you say, of the three
elements that you just outlined, is that the most is
that the one you see most commonly? It is?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
It is? And I was just with an organization this morning,
and fifty percent had empathy wobble and twenty five percent
had authenticity. And twenty five percent had logic. What I
see more commonly is sixty percent empathy, yeah, thirty percent logic,
(24:17):
and then twenty percent authenticity.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Okay, super interesting. So it's by far the lines share.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
So trust lies at the heart of leadership, right, as
you've just identified, and the teams at Uber had no
trust in their managers, and the managers in turn had
no understanding of how to lead or trust in their leaders.
You know, I recently came across CEO who basically described
(24:52):
his leadership style to me as well what I would
characterize I guess as super micromanagy. Right. He sort of
described how every day at work starts with a two
hour team meeting and every day ends with a sort
of one hour team meeting, and that's how he kind
of runs the organization.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Wow, that's an organization built to be a hobby, not
not a company. I mean, no disrespect, but that can't
style on you.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
And you know, and we had this conversation about his
style was such a clear impediment, and we talked a
little bit about Okay, this is what you do at
your company, like what do you do at home with
your family? Like how does that work?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Right?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Nice and he and you know, same tactic and sort
of refusal to accept that it should be or could
be different. Right, And not long after that, I mean,
in a very sad way, the problem with his leadership
style became very evident to him in a homecome text
(26:00):
in fact, not in the work context initially. And it
was that moment where he sort of, you know, realized
that this wasn't working and it wasn't going to work
kind of going forward, and you know, they'd ended up
in sort of a really bad place. Why do you
feel so many leaders struggle to empower their teams and
(26:23):
equally a lot of these behaviors show up at home too, right, Yeah, yeah, family,
and so you know what that experience is like, and
and you see a mirror image of those behaviors in
both spears in a sense, And why do you think
it's such a struggle?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, So I'll tell you how I overcame the struggle
as maybe a way to show what the struggle is,
which is and I overcame it in a parenting context.
But to your point, it can be with partners, parents, employees,
it's all. Which is when I heard Carol Dweck say
there are two ways to parents, and one of them
(27:01):
is the right way. As an insecure parent who was
sure I was doing things wrong, I just didn't know
specifically what I was doing wrong. She had my attention,
and she said, you can either prepare the path for
the child, or you can prepare the child for the path.
So many of us are preparing the path for the child.
(27:22):
So many of us are weed whacking out of love.
So we're not micromanaging out of anger. We're micromanaging out
of love. What we fail to realize is that we're
making people reliant on our presence, and what we want
to do is be preparing the child for any path.
(27:44):
What we want to do is to be preparing people
for our absence, as opposed to making them reliant on
our presence. Right and micromanaging is requiring that people can
only do excellence in our presence, when if we just
put on a different lens, give this context, I could
(28:04):
fix it for you or tell you how to fix it,
or I could interact with you in such a way
that you will be able to do things like this
and beyond in my absence. It's a whole different pedagogy
associated with it. I think we all have to have
the equivalent of that light bulb moment, am I preparing
you for my presence making you reliant on me? Or
(28:26):
am I preparing you for my absence? And the moment
we realize we're preparing people for our absence, that's when
empowerment becomes one of the most beautiful things in the world.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah, so true. I also, you know, think back to
I spent some time at Poalneer and one of the
things that used to amuse me a fair amount was
that there were a lot of old economy companies that
would come through, not just Palenteer, but sort of a
bunch of companies in the valley, and they would come
on these they call them innovation tours, like, you know,
(28:55):
trying to figure out what is it that creates this
culture of innovation in the valley and why are we
not able to replicate it? And the reason was, like
you didn't even have to come here, you know, it
was super simple. It was if you approach running your
business for a position of risk, aversion where you're all
whether the culture is don't screw it up, then that's
(29:18):
what you get right. Whereas if you're incremental right, and
if you approach your business from the position of, hey,
we trust you to take some risks. We understand that
mistakes will be made, but we're sort of here to
back you up. Then you'll get a very different culture, right,
And so many companies are kind of unable to shift
(29:43):
their culture and get out of their own way. Yeah,
you've had tons of experiences with this. I'm sure, what
is that about. And what's an example of have shifted
culture and been successful at that?
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Yeah? Well, I think my favorite large scale example of
a colultural shift with wild benefit is Microsoft. So Microsoft
before Satya Nedella was like I think the prior CEO,
maybe the value of the company at the beginning of
his tenure was the same as that at the end
of his tenure.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And now look at yeah, and now look at what
happened with Satya. And he changed the culture completely into
all of the ways that you would want. Empowerment and growth, mindset,
intelligent failure, like all of the things, did all of
the things. So to me, we have maybe before then
(30:41):
we just people thought that that's some you know, unproven methodology.
But now the most successful companies are exhibiting these traits,
so I expect them to be more contagious. Back then, companies,
even if they weren't successful, we seduced ourselves into thinking,
(31:04):
you know, tough guys finished first, and shouting shows my
Scott Galloway is really wonderful. It's saying, shouting shows my masculinity,
and I'm going to shout, And that's like not at
all what masculinity is. Masculinity is like a beautiful thing
where we're taking care of other people and setting the
(31:24):
conditions for them to thrive. So it's a reinterpretation of
what great looks like. And I think we now have
lots of lots of successful turnarounds. I would say that
Walmart today versus Walmart yesterday another what I guess we
would call an old economy business that is so progressive
(31:44):
in what it's doing, is doing development at a faster
pace than most other organizations. And they have one hundred
thousand employees in the US, and they are using AI
and beautiful ways to empower and develop people in really
progressive ways. So I don't think you, I don't think
you have to be new economy or old economy to
do it, but it does require leadership. Yeah. Doug McMillan Satyinadella.
(32:10):
These are I think you could have them lead any
company and those companies will be successful.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Yeah. So true. So I want to come back to
this idea of human capital management, right. Much of our
work has focused on helping companies design a human capital
management strategy that sort of works for them in a
way to help them identify the right people, put them
(32:36):
in the right roles at the right time, etc. Through
talent assessment, you know, organizational design and team design, but
then also coaching where it's necessary. Yeah, and most companies
in our experience do not think cohesively about that continuum
of sort of recruiting selection, you know, being really clear
(33:01):
about people's roles in a team, are they aligned with
one another, and then gathering feedback, ensuring accountability, and then
coaching for skills where necessary. Give us a couple of
examples of companies that are actually getting this right. Yeah,
you know. It might well be that they've worked with
(33:21):
you in order to get it right, beating this sort
of realistic design. But I'd be really curious.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you my favorite current day example,
which is one that surprisingly few people have studied, but
I believe the entire world is going to know him
in just a minute. And that's service now. So service
now is in the land of tech companies. They have
had faster growth by some measures than any of the
(33:50):
other top growth companies that we have heard of. They're
just under the radar with it. There have their approach
to talent. Jackie Kenny is just a world class head
of human resources, head of people which is a better
word for it. But the whole Bill McDermott, the CEO
and others, the whole world really thinks systematically about it.
(34:13):
So for example, in tech, everyone had layoffs over the
last few years, right I mean, and it was like
super painful in the beginning, and now it's commonplace. Everybody
had layoffs. Accept service now. And it's not that they
sacrifice growth in order to do it, but they could
read the tea leaves early, so they knew when to
(34:35):
slow down hiring. They knew how to have career paths
for people, they knew how to shift people. So they
now get like a million applications for a thousand roles.
Word is getting out one of the top places to work.
Explosive growth, explosive profitability because they do everything you just
said with intention, they do it with intention, and so
(34:59):
you have to be super We're smart, yes, but honestly,
it's a difference between doing it with intention and doing
it without intention, doing it as a priority and doing
it without a priority. And what I like about making
public and so I try to be evangelical about the
ones that are doing it well so that other people
realize it's possible and that you can do the set
(35:20):
of things you just said. And people are like, well,
how do you know. Go look at service now and
be mesmerized by what you're seeing. And it's not magic dust,
it's doing these things systematically.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, totally. I mean I think the intentionality and systematizing
it are the battle everything or the answer. Yeah, yes, yeah,
So Francis, I want to go back to the last
question I asked you at the beginning when we started,
which was watching the deer eat. So how did that start?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know, the algorithms on YouTube, I don't know what's
behind them, but I will admit that I probably dwelled
a little too long on some pet themed and some
animal themed things, and so they've probably caught my dwell
time and they just served up a set of things
(36:15):
and I might have been watching live videos of hawks
in Africa and you know, and so they served up
this deer pantry in Maine, and I just it has everything.
I love one. It helps, like everybody needs help. I
have know of no one that's been successful in putting
(36:36):
Michael Jordan all the way down. Nobody's been successful without help. Well,
these deer need help, and they're deer that are in
the wild, but they need help in the winter months,
and so they have systematically set up a way to
feed them in the winter months without sacrificing any of
their awesome dearness. And they have multiple cameras, which it's
(36:59):
really cool, and the kids do it and they put
out apples and you get to do It's just I
love it. So now that you've you I've said it
to you, allow some time because you won't believe what
you see. Some of the deer have been coming back
for ten years.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
The community has named the deer and you get to
see them and see how they evolve over time, and
then you get to see their offspring. It's really it's
quite amazing. So it has kind of everything I love.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Okay, that's a that's a really good You've you've captured
it in enough nutshell, I think.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
So Bran's any parting thoughts as you sort of think
about the conversation we just had.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, I think that the the one thing I would
emphasize is the importance of coaching and coaching and teaching
these are these are things where we want to get disproportionate,
you know, non incremental gains out of people. Well, and
it is really hard to do this leadership stuff as
(38:03):
a solo sport. We need peripheral vision, and I think
having a coach is a pretty amazing way to have
peripheral vision. And so my parting thought is, don't try
to go it alone. There's no reason to. And there
are people who have devoted their lives to being helpful
(38:24):
to others.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Partner with them absolutely well. I couldn't have said it
better myself. So thank you for that. Thank you so
much for being with us today.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
It's such a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave
us a review. Find your Ideal Coach at www dot
VIIDMX dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski
and singer songwriter Doug Allen
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