Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Hey, thanks for joining me today on Titans of Transition. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Please check the show notes for additional information. Also, please like and subscribe to this channel. 0:16 [upbeat music] [whooshing] Hey, Brad, dude. Thanks a lot for dropping in here with me. [laughs] For sure. Yeah, so- Always... 0:27 I, you know, this whole remote work thing, you know, y- I think you and I have talked before about how I facilitate a VP of IT CIO group for life sciences, and there's 30-plus. 0:40 And, you know, since COVID hit, we've had so many things we've had to pivot on. Obviously, that's a technology leadership role, and so those guys had to, in the early days, really focus on that. 0:52 But what I'm hearing a lot lately, and in fact, just a week ago, we had a, a monthly meeting, and we dedicated the full hour just to talk about the social impact and the, uh, organizations that they are part of trying to navigate completely changed, uh, 1:16 models in terms of facility support and what roles are, should be in the office, what roles should be hybrid, you know, what level of freedom to choose. And boy, it runs the gamut on cultures and stuff. 1:31 And so I know, you know, i- in your, uh, your work life, um, and your, uh, involvement with social media marketing and, uh, you're really on top of kind of the fast-paced world of remote work anyway, but you've had some recent changes in your situation as well. 1:51 So just interested hearing your thoughts 'cause, you know, I wanna kinda bring some, some dialogue into this space, maybe add some value, and I, I think you're a great person to talk to, so. 2:01 Not to mention that you're my son-in-law, so that's pretty cool too. [laughs] It helps. 2:05 [laughs] Y- no, I think this is, uh, like you said, I think there are rooms all over the world, but also all over the US of just having these same conversations. 2:14 It's like the, the good thing about COVID was it was binary. It was like all of us at home, you know- Yes [laughs]... t- it was, it was, you knew. 2:22 It's like until a thing happened and there was a change, this was gonna be our reality. Now we're opening up into this world of gray areas. 2:29 It's like, you know, there are, there are vaccines, who has availability, who doesn't, and so peop- leaders are trying to think, "Okay, 2:36 the things that have kept us out of the office are now gonna be removed or a little less gnarly to deal with. So what are we gonna do? Are we gonna go back to the office? Is it just shifting straight back?" 2:48 And so I think everybody's kinda thinking, okay, you know, one of the great things about this is we've seen some stuff work really well. We've seen people are more efficient. 2:57 People are, um, delivering more work in a shorter amount of time. There are issues of, uh, you know, fatigue doing this too much. There's issues of not, uh, having the social connections and all that. 3:11 I could, we could go by those point by point and, and talk about how most of those are really because we're in the middle of a pandemic- Yeah... not because we're working from home. 3:19 It was a f- And, and so I think- It was a forcing function- Yeah, go ahead... right? So it just, it forced us to take a fresh look, um- Yeah... 3:27 as we talked about a few minutes ago before we pressed record, it forced us to take a really fresh look, um, at why are we doing things the way we are doing them. Do we need to keep doing them that way? 3:38 Is there a better way? What's worked well? All those kinds of questions and answers, yeah. Yeah, 'cause now the, the COVID gave us this, that, that forcing function to try to do it. 3:48 I remember the, the, the agency I was working at last year, um, you know, the week before we shut everything down, we did a work from home, like, experiment day, like a dry run because they w- they saw we were probably, this was probably coming. 4:01 It was starting to happen in Europe. And so they said, "Hey, everybody just go home and work Thursday and Friday." And it was mainly the tech, the IT department doing it 'cause they were like, "We wanna see what breaks." 4:10 Yeah. What servers do we not have access to? Whose tools don't work? Who can't get on the VPN? All that stuff. And they quickly fixed all those little tech issues, and then it was off to the races. 4:20 And so there are things that have been, um, that are more difficult if you just take the way that we've operated. 4:27 I work in advertising, so in large swaths, the way that we do what we do now is the same way that they did it 80 years ago. 4:34 And, and so if you then take, those processes are probably a little antiquated now in the office, but then if you try to translate them to a new, um, environment or a digital space, it just doesn't work that well. 4:46 It's like the, the metaphor I've been using is it's like when the transition from, like, horses to cars happened, and you get all these people who are like, "Well, I got this new car, but it doesn't fit in the stable where I kept my horse. 4:58 Maybe we shouldn't do cars." 5:00 And then, and, and you're so tied up in these preconceived and, and old ways of working that you think are default, and you don't realize that it's just in tech, that's just where we arrived at how we work. 5:11 It's not necessarily the best way to work. Yeah, I, there's these pre-established, uh, and this, this author I'm gonna cite here, Paradigms, the paradigm guy, Joel Barker- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... 5:21 wrote a book years ago, um, called The Business of Paradigms, I think, and he talks about paradigms as being these sets of rules about the way things operate. And, um, his point was basically that 5:36 it's not sort of something e- even i- on the conscious level as we think about, you know, rules for working or meeting rules or anything like that that you could look at. 5:47 They operate at a subconscious level, so you tend to filter what's possible. You throw out data, throw out other ideas. They don't even register. And when you go through a change like this- 6:01 He calls it the going back to zero rule, I think he calls it. You know, and that tends to be like new product inventions you see that, where someone will dominate a space and someone- Mm-hmm... 6:12 will come out with something brand new. And one of the examples he cites is the, the digital watch, 6:20 and how that was actually invented by one of the mechanical watchmakers in Switzerland, and his own internal people wouldn't even listen to him. He went to a- Yeah... 6:32 watch convention in Asia, and somebody at Seiko started talking to him, and they came out with, I think, with the first digital watch movement. Um, but it's, it's that thing, it doesn't even register. 6:42 So when you have something like COVID, to your point, it's like, oh my gosh, we can't operate the way we used to. What do we do now? 6:52 And so I can only imagine, because let, let me just go back to your point and, and help you expand on it a little bit or, or ask you to. In your space and your industry in advertising, 7:04 there's just, there's a whole bunch of different aspects to, to serving your, your customers. There's first of all winning them. How do you go on site now? I mean, wasn't that a big part of it? 7:16 Wasn't there sort of a schmooze factor in there and sort of getting that physical, that, you know, really connecting with someone in physical space? How does that work now? Yeah. 7:26 I think that is actually one of the things that I think actually really does benefit from in person- Yeah... is, is one, the, the making the connection with a client. 7:37 I, I do a lot of new business, a lot of sales, a lot of pitching. It is easier to do that in the same room. Um, but I've had a lot of success doing it digitally. 7:47 When you, when everybody else you're competing against, when it's an even playing field- Yeah... and everybody's coming at you in these little boxes, it's actually a little bit more, in some ways, fair. It, it's... 7:57 Somebody else could have, you know, a little nicer suit than you- Yeah... or a little more polish. Yeah. But the work isn't better. They won't bring you more value. 8:05 Now granted, some of the work that I do, it, that's part of the game. 8:08 It's they want people that look a certain way to tell them certain things because, you know, I'm, I work at a, in creative agencies and have usually more traditional business clients. 8:17 So they, that's part of the, the trade-off. So the, the in-person stuff is definitely important. 8:23 I think what we've seen in consulting, advertising, a lot of these, is the massive amounts that companies used to spend on travel. 8:30 I mean, my, the, the amount of money that my company spent just for me to travel last year, pre, the, just the, the March to March before COVID, tens of thousands of dollars for me to go do meetings that could've been phone calls [laughs] and go have work sessions that could've been emails. 8:47 Yeah. That, that's, that's, that's a really obvious one. I mean, as a technology leader in the past, we were always pitching on the early days video conferencing to save travel money. But it never really- Mm-hmm... 8:59 delivered because, you know, the paradigm was so entrenched that those sales executives and those, uh, executives that were customer-facing were still traveling anyway. Um- Yeah... so that's, that's really interesting. 9:12 I wonder how it's impacted your, your back end team that supports you when you do pitches and things of that nature, the digital movement. Yeah. 9:22 I, what's fascinating is I think, like, a lot of things are actually working better, and the things that are broken are again us trying to take old ways of working and making them work in a new context. And so I mean, 9:34 I, I've got this whole point of view of, like, there's a reason that offices, you look at a startup office, the generic, like, millennial office with a ping pong table and all the food you could ever want. Yeah. 9:43 [laughs] And they got a barber shop and a blowout bar and, and you know, you never need to leave. Um, those were, those became adult playgrounds- Yeah... um, that it wasn't really a need. It didn't make the work better. 9:58 It was a game to compete for talent and in the same way that people had crazy stock options and good money. And so, and that was in the tech world where they had a reason to compete for talent like that. 10:08 But you know, it come, that, that bridges over to the creative world, the advertising world, the finance world, where people see their friends working at offices like that. 10:16 And then you fast-forward and all our offices are open floor plans- Mm... based on a lot of walk and talks and, and, and stuff like that. 10:23 But what it means is it destroys your ability to do deep work, it destroys your ability to actually get in the zone and find a flow state and create some real, real smart thinking and, and the interruptions are just, like, tantamount. 10:37 Insane. Yeah. You can't, can't do anything about it. And so we allow our, our days to just be destroyed, our ability to think deeply completely removed because we feel like we're getting some sort of, some sort of... 10:53 The magic happens at the water cooler. Yeah. But I, we say that- Right... but I don't know. I've never seen... For me, the magic has never happened at the water cooler. Yeah. 11:02 And, and I think it does, that, that, the, the physical proximity meant you actually didn't need to develop relationships with people because yeah, I'll see that guy Tim tomorrow, the account guy. 11:12 I'll see him tomorrow when we're getting bagels. Now I have to think, okay, I work with Tim every day. We live in different places. I gotta make sure that we have a weekly meeting where we're checking in. Mm-hmm. 11:22 I'm texting him to see how he's doing, how's his personal life, how's his... We have to change our relationships and be more- Inten-... thoughtful- Intentional... intentional. Yeah. 11:31 Yeah, I think that's really true, and I, I think, uh, you touched on something too about, um, 11:39 this whole, and I used to call this a mile wide and an inch deep because you would, even when you were on proximity before COVID, you're, you were on site and you were having meetings, people would tend to go from one meeting to the next to the... 11:51 We talk about Zoom fatigue, but, but- Yes... even back then it was happening, and I used to joke about people. You know, it seems as though in an organization you would... 12:03 go from one meeting to the next, and there really wasn't any time to do any deep work. Mm-hmm. 12:09 Um, so you kind of were just talking about what you talked about last time and recapping what you thought you were gonna do, but it didn't really happen. 12:17 And it put people under a lot of stress even back then to start going offsite, off hours to do the actual deep work. 12:26 But it seems as though this has been a real, uh, amplification of that problem now, um, in terms of, uh, not having focus time. So I was... 12:38 And, and I had a c- a conversation with a, someone I'm coaching about that just this week, and saying basically, uh, what you're saying is you have to be a lot more deliberate about it. You have to really... 12:50 You know, it's kind of like you get inculcated into having this invasion into your, your work time of meetings and not saying, "We hear about it. Just say no to a meeting if you're not gonna be able to contribute." 13:02 But you really have to be deliberate about that as well, as well as what you're talking about, the one-on-one relationships being very intentional and deliberate about making them work too. 13:15 Yeah, I think there's, there's definitely an over-reliance, especially in my industry, but I n- I, I, it's, it's, it's true everywhere, on meetings that meetings is what has happened. 13:24 We need to do any task, and any task we need to do- [laughs]... the, the bare, the smallest unit of measure we have is a 30-minute meeting. And when we're in the office, it was wildly inefficient. 13:35 The battles we would fight to get access to the 30 rooms we had- Right... for an office of 300. Has to be. The number of times I was meeting in hallways with people. 13:45 And these spontaneous interactions of I'm leaving a conference room, you're entering the conference room, "Oh, can I talk to you about this thing really quick?" Those aren't spontaneous serendipitous moments. 13:56 Those are, we're both in back-to-back meetings from 9:00 in the morning until 6:00 at night. We're not gonna have any time to talk. I can send you this email, but you probably won't see it till tomorrow. 14:06 Let me just say this real quick. That is not... That's just, that's saying, um, that proximity is the same as serendipity. If, if you remove an over-reliance on meetings- Yeah... you allow people to do deep work. 14:18 And if I know that, Joe, your schedule's not back to back to back, then when I'm working on something, I have that aha moment, I need your opinion on it, I can call you, I can text you, I can... 14:29 I don't need to then look at the calendar, book a room, go, or come to your desk and interrupt you if you're in the middle of doing something. I can send you a message. 14:37 We can have the relationship of you know if it's urgent, I need you right away, I'm gonna call you. If it's just a Teams message, you know you've got some time. 14:45 And, and you do have to be more, um, thoughtful and specific about it. You have to over-communicate about it. You have to get it in writing and put it down so that everybody's on the same page. Mm-hmm. 14:56 But it really does... Th- th- there are so many tropes of, you know, you can't collaborate remotely. Well, that's totally not right. [laughs] No. 15:07 [laughs] I've spent most of my 15-year career working with teams in LA, teams in San Francisco, teams in New York while I'm in Chicago or wherever, um, and doing incredible creative work. 15:18 You know, it's too hard for employees to learn the ropes for onboarding. 15:23 Yes, if you are onboarding the same way that you used to, which is we spend one day walking them around the office and have them fill out forms and watching videos, yeah. But you need to reimagine. 15:32 You know, like, creativity only happens in person. Talk to any of the Fang companies, talk to Facebook or Apple- Right... or Amazon or Netflix or Google or any of, Twitter, all these companies that are saying 15:45 centers of creativity and not needing a physical location. You know, in-person interaction is when you build culture. Your employees by and large are millennials and below. Yep. I met my wife on Tumblr. Right. 16:02 Most of my best friends are from the internet. My deepest connections are half people I knew in real life and half people I met online. 16:10 So just a- again, there is a generational shift, but there is a feeling of I, I think we're at a, a, a cataclysmic paradigm shifting, you know, fifth industrial revolution type of moment where I see people that I work with that are, 16:27 that are leaning in to figure out how to do it well and do it different, and they're finding success, and they're finding the new tools, and they're finding new ways of doing it. 16:35 And then you've got the old guard- Mm-hmm... which is not necessarily just an age thing, but it is largely- Yeah... higher ranking people also. Um, they, they're just kinda like biding their time. 16:46 We just gotta get through this. There's, I, you know, they're, they, they, they're not even trying to learn how to use Zoom correctly, much less go find- [laughs]... other tools to replace how we collaborate. Right. 16:57 You know? And so there's a, there's a lot of stuff that's broken right now because people just aren't trying to fix it because they're biding time waiting for when they don't have to worry about this anymore. 17:06 And I think the big moment that's coming is if you are a company, an organization, and you work in a way that a majority of your employees can operate from home, which, and it, it's a yes or no, you've seen if it worked in the last year, you've got probably two to three years to figure out how to make your organization... 17:25 In my opinion, I'd love to talk about remote, remote only versus hybrid models. Yeah. Yeah. 17:31 If you don't build your organization to be remote only, and then figure out where an in real life, a physical presence is needed, um- Absolutely needed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. 17:43 Not it's it could be, not, you know, it needs to be the only thing that can happen. Right. Like, you can't replace me flying to Memphis to go meet with the client face to face. Right. 17:53 But that's probably one of the only parts of my job that you need that. There are other parts that you maybe- And it's a lot less frequent than it used to be, right, in our, in our mindsets. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Totally. 18:04 So, so there's a lot of things in the way, but I, I think that that's... 18:08 W- when you talk about the groups that you're talking about and, and, and discussing what the next moves are, we're entering a time of even more uncertainty. 18:15 It's gonna go longer than I think any of us really believe or want to believe. Um, and so- You gotta start planning for not just how we're gonna come out of this, but 18:26 look, the n- the Department of Defense has been telling us for a decade plus that the biggest threat to our economy right is a pandemic. 18:33 And they didn't say we were gonna have one and then it was never gonna happen again. Right, right. Yeah. And so if you just spent... 18:37 If all you learn out of COVID is how to get back to a version of what you were before, and then something, God forbid, knock on wood, happens in the next one to five years, 10 years, and you're just back, you will be, you will be lapped by- Yeah... 18:51 the people that didn't do that. You know, it just... What popped into my mind as you're talking about the, you know, the returning to work and, and, and being really deliberate about kind of 19:00 questioning when you have to be on premise, um, is this whole, whole notion that, that, um, we assume that people wanna go back to work. 19:13 And so we had a discussion this last week with the CIO group that as they were talking about how to respect the individual's right to choose for their own safety, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 19:25 And there's a, there's a legal thing here. I mean, you can't require someone in this situation to go back to work in, in certain positions for sure. 19:34 Um, and then what if they wanna go back to work and you don't really need that position back to work? So this, this whole gray area speaks to the longer tail on this pandemic thing than what we assume, right? 19:47 We th- "Okay, we're back- Yeah... to normal now." Well, no. Things... Now we're into a whole different how does, how has this impacted the employee resource, right? 19:57 So now you have to respect those individual decisions and accommodate them, and be, and be intentional as leaders to accommodate them, and have the m- work models and support structures- Yeah... 20:12 for that, um, to, to, uh, accommodate those decisions. Plus, here's another thing that, that I just wanna throw at you and get your thoughts on. 20:21 I see somewhat of a parallel here in terms of, uh, the human resource when we outsourced, uh, decades ago to India on the technology- Mm-hmm... area, right? 20:31 So we- there was a big movement to outsource to reduce cost to India. And, you know, pros and cons. Worked in some cases, didn't. 20:39 But one of the things as a technology leader you had to struggle with was in the early days you would identify some really hotshot resources in India that you really liked through the firms that you worked with. Mm-hmm. 20:54 After a while, w- because they were remote, there was a lot of competition in India with these outsourcing firms in country for those resources. 21:05 These guys became like marauders that would go back and forth, and it became very difficult for you to hang on to a good resource. 21:13 I predict that now people are remote, they're not sticky to the organization the way they used to be, where they lived in a city where the work was, you know, maybe there was only a few f- companies that lined up with their career that were the good companies to go to. 21:31 That stickiness has been removed. So now as leaders and HR heads, you have to think about the fact that there has to be a culture that really supports that individual in a brand new way. 21:42 I don't know if you- you guys have talked about this where you're at now, but to me that's something... 21:47 It's the whole pressure on the change in leadership and how you have to engage with your employees I think is something else. Yeah, I think that 21:59 that's probably the bi- if you go out like five years from now, 10 years from now, the biggest shift is gonna be that to me really the power being put back into the hand of the employee, um, of being able to have a little bit more control over, over everything. 22:14 You know, there's a lot, there's so much to be said in what you'd like to unpack and what you just covered with. If you just... 22:20 Okay, if you are a company, just- I'll just say an agency 'cause it's the world I come from, but anything. Yeah. If you're an agency... Look, every, every company is doing these surveys. 22:29 How are you enjoying working from h- how are you not, what's... And I mean, I've seen every number, but they are all, every study I've seen, at least 50% of these employees are saying, "Oh, I wanna, I'm... 22:40 We're never doing a full-time." And a lot of employers you see are sending out lists, "How many days would you prefer to work from home? Would it be one to two, two to three- [laughs]... three to four?" 22:50 They don't give a all the time. [laughs] They don't do a full rem- they don't give that option- Yeah... 'cause they don't want that answer. And so I think that- that's a perfect example of where we find ourselves. 22:59 They don't even... Companies, leaders are scared to even think about what that looks like because it, it just breaks how you think it's supposed to work in your brain. Um, I also think there's als- things about leaders. 23:11 What is their value? Yeah. Are they really need to be paid that much if you're not physically there? So there, there's a whole thing there that keeps these systems, um, kind of built in and not, not being changed. 23:21 But if you... So if, if we, if you're surveying, people are loving it. Work is improving. Sure, there's the stuff that we have to deal with. 23:29 People don't have places to work, kids are there, but again, that's all COVID stuff. Yeah. That's not remote. Zoom fatigue happens because you're also doing, you're doing your happy hour with your friends. 23:38 You're doing your therapy with your therapist. You're doing church on Sundays. Yeah. You're doing all of it in Zoom. Yeah. If everything else was back to real life and it's just working as digital- Yeah... 23:49 it, it, it takes a lot of the stresses away. And so if you just think, I, I, I think of it like this, okay? You decide maybe we'll do a hybrid model, maybe not. 23:56 We'll do, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, uh, dip our feet in, but we won't really go in. If you have one major competitor that does, all of your talent is gonna go there. That's what's gonna happen the next two years. Yes. 24:08 That's a definite- It's the people that-... competitive advantage for holding on to employees. Yeah. If you go remote first and say- Yeah... "This is what we are. We're building for this." Yeah. 24:16 The people that want that are gonna f- are gonna flock there. 24:19 And there's gonna be a big competition, but it's, it's gonna be really difficult for companies that they're gonna have a drain of their talent so quickly and- And they're also not gonna be positioned. 24:30 The biggest issues in my industry are y- you've got... You know, I, I work in advertising. We ad- I advertise and sell brands, every kind of brand you could ever want. Brands for rich people, poor people. 24:44 Brands for blue states, red states, purple states. B- brands for every demographic and type of human. 24:49 Um, but the employees that I work with that do this work are by and large people that live within 30 miles of three cities in the United States. Hm. 24:59 That creates all kinds of homogeny based on did you have the money to be able to move to one of these places- Right... or did you just happen to be born in one of these places? I find what you, what... 25:10 Usually at an agency you go and it's half the people there worked their ass off or had a- [laughs]... had some sort of come up to get there. Yeah. And the other half are from the burbs. Yeah. And they just are there. 25:20 Yeah. So it's not the best talent, and when we, all we talk about in my world now is, how do we get more diverse both demographically but thought? Like, 25:29 I can't tell you the number of times I've been in a room talking about selling a product that is bought by people on the lower half of the socioeconomic scale, and everybody in the room talking about it are from the higher half of the ex- economic scale. 25:43 That diversity is what is hard. You know I'm from a rural place in Tennessee- Mm-hmm... and have lived in a big urban place for, for the last decade. 25:51 That, those differences, um, I think makes the worse, the work worse and all of that, and we're all just going to the same watering hole for talent. This explodes that. This means you can go get people in small towns. 26:03 You can go get people in second tier regions that are just as talented if not more talented, but for whatever reason they can't or don't wanna leave their families. 26:12 They don't wanna relocate to one of these two or three cities. People were m- moving from where they are to where the work was since the beginning of humanity. Yeah. This changes that. Yes. 26:24 To where, where you live is where you want to live as an individual, and then the thing that you use to fuel that monetarily is separate- Yeah... and, and not the main driver. And so 26:36 i- it's a hu- that, that shift is i, I think so many people are, like, down in the weeds of, like, okay, but is it two days or three days a week? It's like you gotta zoom out a little bit and think about really- Yeah. 26:47 So that's, like, an ad- Why would we not- An adaptation- Yeah, go ahead... on the old paradigm rather than really... 26:52 Because really I think you've really pointed this out well, that it, it truly is this go back to zero situation. Go back to zero rule. 27:01 A paradigm shift has occurred, and those organizations that can take advantage of the benefits of that shift, for them competitively are gonna be the ones that succeed. 27:12 Um, you touched on a thing about leadership and, you know, a couple different thoughts about not really being in touch with, with the people they serve in terms of, uh, being in discussion to make decisions. 27:26 But I also think this, this shift has, has exposed sort of a weak underbelly of leadership capability and management capability that's actually been there for years. 27:38 You know, the typ- typical progression is for initial, uh, initially leaders or managers to get in those roles based upon their excellence within their domain. You know? What... 27:51 You know, in the technology space it's like, "Oh, I was a really good technologist. I was a programmer. I was a hardware guy," whatever it may be. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. I was successful there. Oh, okay. 28:01 Well, we need to pay you more and you should become a manager, right? 28:05 So and then you immediately move these, this situation that people would move into would be, okay, now you need to drive, uh, meeting deadlines and all those kinds of things. 28:16 But the soft side, the human side is not really something that gets focused on very much at all. 28:23 And, you know, even going to sort of the mundane one-on-ones and how you support your employees and how do you in- get leverage out of growing and developing your, your staff. 28:34 Sort of in many cases an a- an afterthought for a lot of different leaders and managers. For those that are really good, people wanna work for, it's not. Uh, you know, they say that people leave their jobs. 28:46 They don't leave their jobs, they leave their manager. And so- Mm-hmm... I think pulling people remote like this now has put a huge amount of stress on what has already been there. 28:57 Um, and, and one way of also exposing that is, you know, this whole situation is before the pandemic is, "Oh, this person wants to work remote. Should we let them?" And they're like, "Well, I don't know. I don't know." 29:10 Mm-hmm. "They're not gonna do their job." Well, let me tell you something. Exactly. People that aren't doing their job weren't doing their job when they were on premise, and someone wasn't- Yeah... paying attention. 29:19 And it wasn't about going to, and being activity based, going to meetings all the time. It was about getting the results that were needed and made a difference. That doesn't change. 29:28 The individual who, who gets results gets results. They could be on the moon and they'd be, as long as they had air and water and [laughs] oxygen- Yeah... they could be getting results. You know? 29:36 So anyway, that's some thoughts around that. What do you think about the impact in terms of leadership and the type of leadership changes you think are needed, uh, in this new world and new economy here? Yeah. 29:49 I think it's, it has huge... It has huge impact on both 29:55 what, what the, the relationship or style that you need from a leader, and then also, which I'll talk about first, but then also the just kind of the relationship between employer-employee is, is dramatically different and, and will be. 30:09 And, and you have to be cognizant of both those. The leadership part, like you're saying, like, there's such a... When you're not under one roof, so much of that, "Hey, we can't let them go work remote. 30:20 They're gonna take advantage of us. They're gonna not be there. They're gonna be on a beach si- s- um, sipping a pina colada not doing the work." That is such a we don't trust our employees. Yeah. 30:31 We have to be their parents. So just bar, bar one it's like- Look, leaders haven't had emotional intelligence for a long time. Mm-hmm. That's a thing that we've been talking about- Yeah... pre-COVID. Yeah. 30:41 And so understanding what your employers are go- what your employees are going through is a, a, a, a leadership skill that is lacking across the Fortune 500. But, but definitely, and something that's, that's growing. 30:55 You have to trust your employees. You vetted them, you interviewed them, you hired them. 31:00 If at that point you don't believe, you think that they're gonna try to take advantage of you, then you have other deeper issues you need to deal with- Yeah... as an individual and as an organization. Yeah. 31:10 Because if you can trust people, you can give them autonomy to deliver the work they need to in the way that they want. When we talk about, like, having just the... 31:20 If you trust someone, you give them autonomy, and you're agreeing on what the measure of success is. How do we make sure this person's being productive? So much of that used to be measured on time. Were you here? 31:31 Did they get here when they were supposed to? That was crazy. And were they... Did they leave early? That's it. 31:34 And if you, if you remove yourself from that and you just start from zero in a vacuum and you say, "Okay, I'm gonna start a company and I need Joe, you to do something for me," and I say, "Joe, do this," how am I gonna measure if you did it or not? 31:46 I'm probably gonna see if you did it. [laughs] What a thought. 31:49 And, and, and if I s- [laughs] Well, and the thing is, is like if I say on Friday, if I say, "Joe, I need it Friday," and you get it to me Friday, why do I care if you did it all in 10 minutes on Monday or if it took you 40 hours to get there? 32:04 That's the point. It's like there, there's a thing about craft when you learn something really well, it's, it's like it took me 10 years to be able to do that thing for you in 10 minutes. 32:15 You're not paying for the 10 minutes, you're paying for the 10 years. And so if you don't trust me and you wanna know how I got to the solution, like I'm showing my work in fourth grade math- Mm-hmm... 32:27 it's, it just creates this dynamic. And so if you start to say, "Okay, actually, here's what I want. I don't care how much time it takes you to get there, I wanna see the productivity. 32:36 I wanna see the results, not the time it took you." You can do it anytime you want. 32:40 I don't care if you start at 7:00 in the morning, I don't care if you start at 7:00 at night, you need to be available for this block in the middle for, to communicate and for meetings. Yeah. 32:47 My boss right now is, you know, she's... We're very transparent. She's like, "Look, I'm done about 4:00. I'm gonna go do family stuff. I'm usually back on for a couple hours in the evening." 32:58 And that's how she works and so I know I'm not gonna get anything. And she also knows not to blow up my inbox at 10:00 PM- [laughs]... just because she's working. That's because she's a dad. 33:07 She knows she can schedule it to send it to me at 9:00 AM the next morning. So- And that's a great example. That's being intentional. Knowing- Yeah... you know, preferences, knowing work styles. But again, to your point, 33:20 assuming trust until, assuming someone's trustworthy until they prove otherwise, you know? [laughs] Yeah. I mean, there is the other- Yeah, and it's-... side of it. I mean, it's not a complete blank check. 33:30 It, it, so there is that part of it. 33:32 If some- if someone comes up short, you work with them and they still keep coming up short, yeah, well, then you have, have things you need to talk through and, and paths you need to go on. But it's- Mm-hmm... 33:40 it's starting with this sort of old school maybe assumption that someone's gonna try to take advantage of you for some reason. Yeah. Totally. It's bad. 33:49 And that, that, and, right, which opens up to the larger conversat- if you build the relationship with your employees and your talent, which is... 'Cause that's what we're talking. 33:57 They're not, we don't talk, we don't call them employees anymore. It's talent- Yeah, yeah. It's talent... because other people want them. Talent management. And so, totally. 34:04 Look, I, a- a- if you've got churn like crazy and a revolving door, you don't need to worry about this. If you're just, like, using people as chattel to get your product out there, that's fine. 34:13 But if you're trying to get high-level talent, you have to change that dynamic. The best way I've... 34:18 The, the shift that's happened, the, and I can't, I think this is a Harvard Business Review thing, but I don't remember where it originally came from, was the shift in the relationship between an employer and employee and the, like, the, the, the contract- Yes... 34:32 that's between them. 34:33 Where previous generations or previous ways of working, it was I, okay, employer is going to give me money, and that money is gonna be consistent, and there's gonna be some sort of certainty that that thing's gonna keep going for years, and pro- and you go back fr- far enough, for my entire career. 34:52 Yes. I, you're gonna give me- Yeah... stability and money, and I'm gonna give you everything. I'm gonna give you my, my, all of my time and all of my soul, 35:03 and I'm just gonna be stuck there and I'm gonna hope you don't downsize me. And that was just kind of it. 35:08 Now, because those, those career lifelong jobs don't exist anymore, but also just because it's not what people want, they're, when you talk about going to work at a tech company or how I talk to my managers and people is I look at it and the, the, as tours of duty. 35:24 I say, "Okay, I just did two years with this company. I'm now thinking about..." And I have goals and aspirations, and I got those. Mm-hmm. "So now what's the next two years of my tour of duty here look like?" Yeah. 35:36 And, and through that conversation it's yes, you're gonna give me money, but you're also gonna give me, I need these three skillsets, not to make me more valuable for you, but to make me more valuable for where I go next. 35:50 The job of the employer is to help make the employee more hireable. 35:55 One, because it makes their work better, it makes their value go up, but then also you're, you're creating value in that employer, and so it makes them... 36:02 It, you're not sticky because you're getting the free haircut, it's sticky because this company knows what I want out of my career, knows where I wanna go, not, not just within that organization, but outside me personally. 36:14 Yeah. 36:14 And so when you start talking like that, and you can talk to your boss and say, "In the next two years I wanna learn how to manage people, I wanna learn this tech platform more, and I need to get some PR for myself. 36:25 What do you need from me?" [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, no. And, and l- So totally true... and then set up that value exchange. 36:30 And I, uh, there has been some people that I've main touch wi- maintained touch with for decades- And they only worked for me for maybe five or six years. 36:39 But in the space of that five or six years, I think one of the reasons why we stayed in touch is because we had open discussions about what their, their, their vision was for their careers. 36:49 And did it mean I didn't, I, I, I didn't have a selfish desire for them to stay at the company I was at at the time? Of course I did. 36:57 But when it came to the point where they outgrew the opportunities that we had for them, or it wasn't a good fit, there just wasn't enough runway, I totally supported them leaving. You know? Yeah. 37:09 And, and that's a great- If you're only-... rich relationships. In some cases, I went to another position in a diff- different company, and guess what? I had more runway for them, and they came back with me. You know? 37:20 Yeah, yeah. And, and- Yeah... in one case, I wound up, I ended up working with a guy as a peer, [laughs] you know, at the new company he was at. So yeah, I think that's just great observation. 37:32 I think that's really, really true. And those kinds of, you know, work... You, you talk about you work for an at-will company. Well, guess what? That's, that's bidirectional. [laughs] You know? Totally. 37:43 You know, we're sort of like migrant workers in a positive way, where, you know, we're going to where the work is, and the work fits us. It's, it... But you're right. 37:52 The old paradigm, you know, and I, I have family fr- family and friends who worked at, you know, Kodak, for example. And that was just one of the beloved companies for just the reason you talked about. 38:03 You could expect to go to work at Kodak out of high school and retire at Kodak and have all the pension and medical benefits after your retirement from Kodak. Well, Kodak isn't really around like that. 38:15 I mean, they're a small company now. Um, those things don't ex- hardly exist anymore. So yeah, it's a totally different mode. And to your point, I think COVID is actually ratcheting that up now- Mm-hmm... 38:27 that kind of situation. So those are, those are great. I know your time is short, so I need to s- we probably need to wind the conversation up here a little bit. But you're right. There's tons of things to unpack here. 38:36 [laughs] I could... I, I really think like, see... And, um, we, we should do this, like, a, an ongoing conversation- It should be a series... for a few weeks on this. 38:44 Seriously, because I, we, we've scratched the surface of the stuff that I could talk about- [laughs]... 38:49 as far as there's whole other things about, what does this mean to, to, to cities and regions that now weren't a place where people wanted to move because there wasn't industry or employers there, but there are. 39:02 And so it is gonna be where the immigration of the United States of the last 200 years has been going to where the work is. Yeah. Now it's gonna shift, not for everybody, but for... 39:13 You know, during COVID, we had- Yeah... almost 50% of the US workforce working from home. If even half of those remain in a remote majority mind frame, the changes that has for, for small regions and cities is- Yeah... 39:29 y- is insane. We've talked mostly about the information worker kind of stuff, and you talked about advertising. Mm-hmm. And those companies, like Twitter for example, I think they're 100% remote. 39:39 So there are those companies. There are companies like in the, in the pharmaceutical biotech sphere where 39:46 there are m- there are manufacturing companies where there are certain positions that actually have to be on site to turn dials and do things, and quality. Right. Right. 39:54 But a large percentage of those companies who were 100% on site is now shifting to the remote mode. So there's sort of a hybridization. 40:03 So those clusters of employees, not just in your industry, but in other more traditional manufacturing industries, a lot of positions are gonna spread across the country, right? Mm-hmm. 40:15 Kinda like icing lumps on a cake that's gonna be smoothed out demographically into new regions and new areas, and that's gonna be a whole other round of change for those communities. And- Totally. Totally... 40:26 it's gonna be interesting to watch. And it's a, it's a big, I... What do you call it? The fifth, the fifth generation- Fifth industrial re- The fifth- Yeah, the fifth industrial revolution... yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's... 40:36 Y- you know, we, we, we shifted from being a largely rural, uh, you know, farming-based economy to, 150 years ago, to shifting to more urban and manufacturing and factory work, and then that shifted in the, you know, post-World War II into office work, and suddenly offices were created. 40:58 Yeah. And you're doing that, and then suddenly the offices in the '80s, '90s started to turn into these kind of open spaces that are more creative, and now we're onto this fifth one that I think is a really... 41:11 The, the, the, the decoupling [laughs] of, of your where you want to live and what you want to do, um, is probably the most empowering to the individual change in the workforce ever. Yeah. 41:28 Could be it. Like- Yeah... ever. I think- Like, outside of being independently wealthy. [laughs] Well, listen, Brett, thanks a lot. I really appreciate you coming on with me. And, uh- Yeah, no, it's been great... 41:41 yeah, but I think you might be right. Let's talk offline about the possibility of, uh, taking this further. So, um, thanks again. Appreciate you joining, uh, joining me on Titans of Transition. 41:50 This is gonna become an episode, with your agreement. Um- Yeah... but it, this has been great, but I know you're getting ready to have a, a meeting [laughs] shortly. Yeah. [laughs] Yes. A virtual meeting. 42:01 So I need to let you go, so thanks again. Yeah, this has been great. [upbeat music] Hey, thanks for joining me today on Titans of Transition. I hope you enjoyed the episode. 42:18 Please check the show notes for additional information. Also, please like and subscribe to this channel.
