a16z Podcast - Rebel Talent

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

When we think about rebellious behavior in the context of organizations and companies, we tend to think of rebels as trouble-makers, rabble-rousers; in other words, people who make decisions and processes more difficult because they may not follow the established rules or norms. But rebel behavior can also be incredibly positive and constructive—in keeping us from stagnation, encouraging growth and learning, increasing curiosity and creativity.In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino, a social scientist who studies organizations, breaks down with a16z's Hanne Tidnam what makes rebels different in how they tend to see and do things—whether that’s cooking, flying planes, or holding board meetings—and what we can all learn from “rebel talent” to make our organizations more productive and innovative.

Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah. This episode is all about rebel behavior with author and Harvard business professor Francesca Gino, who wrote the definitive book on rebel talent based on studies of why leaders and employees make the decisions they do at work. Not all rebels are troublemakers and rabble rousers. Rebels often change the world and the workplace for the better, pushing organizations towards creativity and innovation and out of stagnation with their unconventional outlooks. We start with what rebels and rebellious behavior in this context really means to the values and characteristics these types of leaders tend to have and stories of how rebels can create constructive and positive change. So in your previous work, you had focused on rule breaking, but in the negative sense, what caused you to shift towards the positive aspect of rebellious behavior? What I wanted to do is shift our thinking when it comes to rebels. I had spent so many hours in organizations where the rebels are thought of as the troublemakers,

the outcasts, people who break the rules just for the sake of breaking rules without too much thoughts. Sometimes they're even called the jerks or the people who slow you down in decision making processes. I really wanted to shift that thinking and say rebels are in fact not people who break rules just for the sake of breaking rules, but there are people who break rules that hold them and others back in a way that is positive and constructive for the organization. In your definition, rebel is positive. someone who understands those rules and chooses to push past them in creative ways. That's exactly right.

So I've been spending quite a bit of time in all sorts of organizations and I was researching different leaders, spending time with them, looking at what was unique about their ruleworking that was creating positive change for their organizations or society more broadly. I'll give you a concrete example of this story that really brought it together for me. I was taking a stroll in a bookstore in Cambridge where I live, and I saw a book and the title caught my attention. The title was Never Trust a Skin Italian Chef. And I'm Italian. It was born in Italy.

And so I started flipping through the pages. And there were these beautiful pictures of dishes that I grew up with. But they actually looked nothing like the dishes I grew up with. And this was the story of a chef. His name is Massimo Boutura, who created a. a restaurant where he decided to reinvent traditional Italian dishes. If you know anything about Italians, two things are true. First, we have a lot of rules when it comes to cooking,

from the type of sauce that goes with a specific type of pasta to how is it that you make these dishes. And also, we cherish our old ways. We're talking about recipes that have been passed on for centuries. It studies the tradition really well, but then he broke away from them and he came up with something that was very innovative.

And so it really triggered this question of how is it that he did that? Why is it that he was able to be successful? So is it because the output was better? What was it that made his rule-breaking positive? He was raising questions about rules, processes, tradition that exist and that most of us take for granted.

But he was showing curiosity in a way that allowed him to bring out his creativity in a context that had not seen a lot of creativity for a long time. So you're breaking rules in a context where people have not shown curiosity. They've taken things for granted. But in the breaking of the rules, you end up with innovative solutions to problems that, again, you've taken for granted of not questioned in the past.

So it's a way out of stagnation, essentially. Exactly. And it's also a way out of routines. or processes that we just accept for the way they are rather than approach with curiosity. What is the line? I mean, should we all be exhibiting that kind of rebellious, you know, sort of tendencies all the time?

Or are there certain conditions under which it's appropriate and when it's not? And when is that rebel behavior really the most productive? And when is it just leading you into chaos? That's a really good question to ask. One of the things that I've noticed is the distinctions between, values and behavior. So rebel leaders are very, very clear on the values. The aerial investment

of what the rule picked up was importance of having a good reputation. The fact that we're always keeping our clients in our mind and we want to make sure that all our communications are clear. Once the value is really clear, you can allow more flexibility on the behaviors that are going to get you there. And so when people are clear on the commitment that they've made to the leader and to the organizations, I think that they do have better judgments about how to get there, but the values should not be questioned or touched. And so for many of these businesses, integrity or being respectful or doing the right thing is an important value to sustain.

And the other thing that is interesting is that in businesses where rebelliousness is encouraged, people feel trusted for what they do. with that, it seems that they also have a better judgment in terms of deciding, is this a time where I should show curiosity, ask questions, or just get the work done? So by very nature of having your kind of rebellious instincts allowed, you develop better judgment about where and when is appropriate to use them. Exactly. Some people find it paradoxical because you would expect that if we allow other people to have more control or autonomy, we're going to end up with pure chaos. That's not the case. Let's circle back and talk about how you actually define different qualities of rebellious

behavior. You kind of break it down into the core elements of rebel behavior. I identify these characteristics. And if you think about each one of them, engaging and using that characteristic means fighting against something. So the five categories are novelty, curiosity, perspective, diversity and authenticity. And let me define each of them quickly. Novelty is this desire to go for what's unfamiliar and uncomfortable rather than stick into our tendencies to go to the familiar and comfortable. And rebels enjoy that precisely because it's something new and uncomfortable. That's exactly right. Rebels have this incredible desire to do something that is going to challenge

them. That's not our human tendency. Our human tendency is to go with the comfortable, the familiar. And so the rebels fight against that tendency and that common behavior and they do something different. Curiosity is all about asking questions and showing that sense of wonder that we used to have when we were little kids in situations where most other people would just go with what is already there, whether it's a process, a tradition, a routine, whatever that is, they say to the status quo rather than asking questions and moving us forward.

If you look at the data on how we grew up, as it turns out, we're born with a lot of curiosity. And then curiosity, the data says, peaks at the age four and five. And then unfortunately declines from there. So young. So young. So I have a three-year-old

and it's constant questioning, constant asking from, why is it that we need to dress when we leave the house to why is it that we need to pay for stuff? Why is it that we live on earth? This sense of wonder in approaching the world. We tend to lose that as we grow up. I was very much interested in what organizations can do to retain curiosity alive.

So we had about 350 people or sorts of job measure their level of curiosity. Then we sort of let them do their job as they were starting in their new ventures. We went back to them six to eight months later. And what we saw was when we measure curiosity again is that curiosity had dropped across the board by at least 20%. And that's a signal that often we enter jobs

that rather than keeping our curiosity alive, they kill our curiosity. And that's disappointing, sad, and I see a real opportunity there. Exactly, it's a real loss. And so why does that happen and why is it that organizations that are not doing that? What it is that they do to, in fact, keep curiosity

alive. And how is it different from novelty, actually? Because they kind of seem like two sides of the same coin to me. Curiosity is almost the hunger for the novelty. Yeah. So they're definitely related. So in a sense, curiosity could be a precursor, if you will, to novelty. Novelty, I see it as more as stretching yourself and making sure that you put yourself in situations where there are challenges. For example, a business, I don't think most of us, would expect any novelty whatsoever. It's a fast food chain in the middle of Tenancy in West Virginia. They have about 30 stores.

Their name is Pall Soudan Service. If you look at any measure of performance, revenue per square, you name it. They beat the competition by far. And we're talking about big brands like McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger Kings. So they're doing incredibly well. So if at a place like McDonald's, you get an hour, two hours of training per station. At Palsadden Service, you get 130. 35 hours of training per station.

Wow. So they make people feel like expert in what they do, thinking that that is going to give them some free space in their mind to innovate or think creative about how to improve on their jobs. But what's interesting is that I was in the stores, so these are big blue boxes with fries and hot dog on their roofs. The work at rush hours is pretty impressive. Every worker is working really fast,

and you would think that the job that you're doing becomes monotonous. It becomes a routine. And the general managers at each of the stores have thought about that. And so they give people the way in which they can experience novelty on a day-to-day basis. Every worker moves according to a shift from station to station throughout the day. But they actually learn about the order that they're going to follow for a specific day when they show up for work. They don't know it. It's a surprise.

It's unpredictable. And what is interesting is that that's just a small way in which I challenge you for novelty. So that's, I think, a clear example. where novelty is at stake rather than curiosity per se. Yes, interesting. Perspective is about fighting that tendency that we all have to come to situations or problems with only one view. So chef Massimo Boutura owns this restaurant called Osteria Francesca.

And it's a three Michelin-Star restaurant. Once a week, he asked one person on his staff to cook the staff meal. And his stuff is very diverse, so people from Mexico, Canada, United States, Japan, Italy. And so what is trying to accomplish with what seems to be a very simple ask or move is to show that the same ingredients is used very differently across all sorts of recipes because of the culture people grew up in. And so it's just a small way to inject that view that the world is bigger

or that a certain situation is bigger than just our own perspective. And that is worth looking and coming into situations. situations from multiple angles or with multiple views. Diversity is about not accepting social roles that are often passed upon us. So having stereotypical views or using bias in situations where instead we should come to appreciate differences. One of the things that rebels do when it comes to diversity is really looking at it as an opportunity to explore and leverage difference. And finally, we have authenticity. Authenticity is all

about being able to bring our voice into the conversation, our contributions forward, not being afraid of expressing our views, preferences, and thoughts. And so there we're fighting the tendency that is so powerful and strong of conforming to others. So think about last time you were in a meeting, everybody else was thinking that X was the right course of action. and you were the person who disagreed and you had the courage and willingness to speak about your views. And so you showed authenticity

by bringing your contributions forward. All of these in some ways, I think we were saying a moment ago, are kind of about fighting stagnation or the comfort of thinking you know. You talk about surgeons, you know, who are deep experts in their field, being less willing to be open to new information by virtue almost of their expertise

than younger, less experienced people. What's the relationship between the sort of like, I'm becoming an expert because I've learned so much and that frees me up to innovate more versus I settle into my expertise and become more shut down to sort of new perspective, new experience? Yeah, you could imagine a situation where you become an expert, but you completely have zero curiosity. What that means is that you use your experience to say, I have all the answer. And instead, effective rebels are people who accumulate their experience, but they still approach the world, thinking that their perspective might be not necessarily the right perspective to use to look at the problem.

I got very fascinated by this idea that it. experience could lead to trouble. We collected this quite incredible data set where basically we were looking at the behavior of surgeons in open-hand surgeries, what kind of technology they were using. And we exploited the fact that the food and drug administration back in 2006 put out an announcement that said, basically, the technology that you're using is not good for the patients. And we were able to see whether the surgeons changed their behavior, now knowing that what they were doing before was not good for their patients. And what we found is that the more experience the surgeon had,

the less likely they were to change their behavior. And so that's a situation where experience is used as a sign of confidence that you have the right answer. And instead, rebel leaders, or rebels more generally, use their experience, but always approach the world with the curiosity that allows you to say, what could be different here, or what could they still learn? So it's the combination of all these different factors.

It's not just ticking a box. It strikes me that all of these rebels that you described had a clear understanding of the rules before they decide to break them, right? There is an enormous amount of assimilating of knowledge coupled with this kind of willingness to re-examine, to not have that turn into stagnation. You said, wisdom means rejecting the feeling of knowing.

I thought that was so interesting that there's something in and of itself about knowing that almost stops, you know, the accumulation of more knowledge. It's having more knowledge, but we did also more humility. So you know, you realize that the more you know is not that the more you know is the more you know, the more you know, the more that is something left to discover and acquire. One person that really brought this home is Captain Sallisselenberger. He's the person who was back on a cold evening in 2009 ditched a plane in the Atson River. You have a person who had 208 seconds.

So that's the time he had from when he discovered that there was no thrust in the engine at the time at the time in the plane in the Atson River. So very little time. And yet he considers all sorts of options. What we know from psychologists is that most of us under such pressure and such level of anxiety and stress would narrow our thinking, narrow our perspective. He didn't. He kept asking what it is that I could do.

And so I reached out to him. I was totally fascinated by reading the report. And one of the things that I discovered is that by the time the accident happened, he had a ton of experience, over 30,000 hours of flying experience. He served in the military, so you knew how to fly all sorts of planes. He has served as a volunteer in previous accidents to study what went wrong. So he had a lot of knowledge about what can actually go wrong on a plane. And yet, every time he walked into the cockpit, he would ask himself, what it is that could be different here?

He forced himself to come at it from a different angle every time. So that became habit. Yes. And it's him having experience plus that intellectual humility that allows you to say, but what could or what's less? to learn. You talk specifically about vulnerability, being willing to open yourself up and what that communicates to others. It's not just a kind of building of trust. It's actually doing something else as well. Can you talk a little bit about what that does, that vulnerability? Yeah. So part of being authentic is being willing to make yourself vulnerable. And there is the story that is sharing

the book about a coach called Maurice Secheeks. We'll go back to April 2003, where prior to the game starting, a girl went up in the middle of the arena to sing the national anthem. And so imagine 20,000 fans ready to watch the game, millions of viewers from home, and is there listening to the girl singing as everybody else? And by the time the second sentence in the song arrived, the girl can't remember the words. And what you see in the video clip of this moment is that the coach went to her, put an arm around her, and helped her sing.

When I read this story in your book, I have to say I welled up a little bit. It was very, very moving. Yeah, very, very moving. But what is interesting is that if you actually listen to the clip of the moment, his voice sucks. I'm sorry, there is no better way of this Grammy. And so it's a great example of a person who put himself. out there without too much thinking and really showing everybody, millions of viewers, thousands of fans, that voice is clearly not one of its strengths.

And what is beautiful about the moment is exactly what you said. Unless you have no heart, you actually feel moved and you feel a great sense of respect for the coach. And it's a great example of how often our ideas about what it is that is going to buy us respect from others or influence. We think that we need to show our perfect. self to others. And that's not true. Making ourselves vulnerable by this respect. That's so interesting. It's the willingness of people of leaders to show that they have weaknesses to talk

about their failures or to talk about situations in which they didn't do the right thing. We have this sense, again, of showing ourselves as the perfect individual to others. And it's actually something that becomes stronger when we become leaders. Because we feel as if now we're in a position where we're leading the course for others and is really the wrong idea since it's when we open up, talk about potential failures, bad decisions that people really relate to us and they look at us and say, you are actually a human being. And there is a way I can trust you, respect you for what you're doing and also for the mistakes you've made. It seems that so much of this requires a level of self-reflection. To me, that was almost

one of the missing categories here or maybe underlying all. of those categories is like the ability to kind of know yourself and to be always trying to notice your own patterns and your tendencies and then kind of push them in one direction or another. Can you talk a little bit about how these rebels tend to handle the sort of self-knowledge part? If you put authenticity and perspective together, those two capture this idea of stopping, reflecting, being aware of your own self and how you interact with others, one of the things that makes us feel authentic is knowing where the energy comes from in what you do. And playing to our strength is something that we don't put time in our calendar for. So some of the

interventions that we've done in organizational context is give people that time for reflection. Oh, interesting. So we did a big study in India where at the time of of welcoming people to the organizations, we ask a group of them to reflect on what their strength does, what is unique about them, and how they could bring those out in the work that they do. And this is people going to work in a call center, where you expect the job to be screwed.

And it's focused on the positive, the strengths, the not that I need to do better at this. That's right. And what we saw was increased performance, increased job satisfaction, increase engagement, and better retention rate. And sometimes it's not you reflecting on your strength is actually us going out to people and asking them for stories of you at your best.

It's so powerful when you feed those stories back to you because you see that you're making contributions that you have no clue of and you start creating your own profiles of who you see yourself to be as a person. And it is sort of like the hardest thing that we as human beings can possibly do, right? All of life is training us deeper into our own little tributaries and you're accumulating knowledge that makes you you, but it becomes hard to shift out of that. What are some of the other ways in which either on an organizational level or on a personal level that you can encourage the resistance to stagnation, basically? There is a technique that is used in

brainstorming sessions. The entire technique really is built on something that is very core to improve comedy, which is the idea of the yes and. So every time we have a discussion, every time we have a meeting, every time we talk about decisions, the idea is that I come into it with my perspective, but with also the willingness to accept the view of others. So let's imagine you're working on a scene and I come in and say, oh, this is a really yummy apple. And you come in after me and say, no, this is a small melon. Maybe you got a laughter from the people in the audience, but you just killed a scene. And what improv is all about is accepting whatever ideas is put on the table and then

adding to it, building onto it. So plusing is exactly built around the same ideas of I accept the idea. I might disagree with it, but I'm going to take that for granted and then build on it. And so if you think about how we interact with one another or how we get to do our work with others, often plusing is not what we do. So you see like a perspective in people who say, who shut down ideas that others have suggested. Or even just debating them is not plusing. That's not like staying where you are and kind of pulling it apart.

That's exactly right. Well, that reminds us of is to show perspective, to show curiosity, to come to the table, eager to learn from others. I've been in way too many meetings as an observer where what you see is people just bringing in their own views, their own decisions, or as you're talking, I'm already formulating my answer without really paying attention to you. And so this idea of showing up with curiosity, with perspective, with your eyes open to learn is a good principle that drives a lot of rebelliousness, organizations that really embrace these ideas. It's interesting because it almost sounds like you're describing being present.

And it's difficult to do. And sometimes you fight against your own beliefs. Like one of the things that I've done is to be more reflective about my own approach to work, my own leadership, if you were, but also my behavior back at home. So I have three small children. And if you were at my house, usually around 6 a.m., when people are starting to wake up, as I'm making my coffee, usually two of my children, if not three, are running around the kitchen, opening cabinets. And I used to stop that behavior because I thought that it would end up in chaos, that they would never get to work. And after actually learning more from these rebels, I joined in their explorations and asked them questions. And I have to tell you that I've

not arrived delayed at work because I allowed those explorations to happen. And I think I can think of one where my third is a year and a half found the salt and she was shaking the salt like a priest in the kitchen. And so there was salt on the floor, but the entertainment value of that was bigger than the cleaning up of the mess. That's so interesting because I'm also remembering and thinking of all of our mornings and thinking of how much there is kind of pressing down on you to shut all those things down because then none of us will ever get to school on time. You do have to reevaluate and then notice those sort of like pre-programmed responses and then choose to swim upstream from them. And I really liked in the section where you talked about

changing your own behavior, but also that your own behavior towards others as part of your own expectations actually changes things. So the first one seems kind of obvious, right? But the second one that you actually are setting change in motion just by changing your expectations because of what it does to your own behavior is really interesting. Yeah, I was talking about some work done on the pygmalium effect. And what this research shows is that our expectation actually leads us to pay a different amount of attention to the people that we code to be good workers versus bad workers or lazy people versus contributors. And our expectations also lead them to behave differently.

Because if we have higher expectations, people actually rise up to the challenge and in fact become the productive people we expect them to be. But how are those signals being transmitted? Because you think you're keeping it to yourself. And we don't. So imagine the situations where you're the teacher. And I come and tell you, this is students in your class from the test that we ran are going to be having the greatest growth potential and these other students are average. And so what the studies showed is two things.

First, that the students, you randomly were chosen to be the good students, were students that ended up performing better at the end of the semester, but also that your behavior towards them changed. Where is it that you spend most of your attention? Who did you give the benefit of the doubt to? And so you're reinforcing their ability to actually rise up to the challenge. And that is not different in more context. As leaders, if I start off by saying that you're, okay, maybe an average person working in my business versus I know that you have these talents, I'm much more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt,

to be there giving you constructive feedback when you need it, to help you out when you face challenges. And so you, in fact, end up being in the category of the greatest performers. That reminds me of where you talk about what it means to hide certain feelings, right? That when someone hides their feelings, those who interact with him experience a rise in their blood pressure. Not only is the cost of that kind of lack of authenticity on you, but there's also just a simple cost to just the hiding of them. Is that right? Exactly.

It comes back to a very simple notion, which is we seem to have misplaced, mistaken predictions about what is going to generate the best interactions with others, whether I work or in life more generally. So with authenticity, often we think, well, we don't want to show ourselves to others, let's cover up. A lot of research shows that not only, as you said, we feel bad about it because in authenticity doesn't feel good. He creates a lot of discomfort. in fact, people associate it in a lot of cases as feeling tainted because they're covering up

and being deceitful, but it's also picked up by others. Okay, so almost by definition of what you're talking about being rebellious has this kind of idea of conflict at heart behind it, right? That you don't, that you're not afraid of conflict or that you introduce conflict. Can you talk about a little bit how rebels tend to handle conflict or created around them and how the people around them respond to it. You're going to end up with more conflict because people are coming in

and willing to state their contributions or bring their ideas forward and then they're going to debate them. But the characteristics that is really important there is the fact that we are disagreeing but again from a point of acceptance of each other's view. So the conversation doesn't become one where I need basically to prove that I'm right.

It's coming in thinking, I need to come to a good decisions, and I'm going to be willing to stay open-minded and receptive to what other people are actually saying. Sounds like a good marriage. That does sound like it. And it's so, I think, easy to say, but difficult to do. This Chicago-based money management firm, the leaders themselves call out the lack of conflict in given situation. So, for example, there is one known phrase at the company. One of the leaders there, Melody Obson, who is the president, who stand up and say, it's time to make the donuts.

And it's this reminder of an old ad dunkin donuts where you see Fred the Baker, wake up in the morning, go to work to make the donuts. The day after, you would do the same thing. The day after, you would do the same thing. And so it's reminding people that it's very easy to just go with the flow. and have no conflict, no disagreement about anything. And so she snaps people out of that mode and remind them of the importance

of actually pushing each other's and challenge each other's point of view. So her point is essentially we're making donuts right now. Exactly. Okay, for all the people building companies as you're building a culture in a new company, wanting to, yes, encourage kind of free thinking and encourage creativity, but like we need things to be smooth on some level.

So how do you balance the, those two things when you're building something from the very beginning. So to me, it goes back to this idea of values and you want people really committed to the values, but then how they get there or how is it that they embrace the value, it's okay for people to have different ways of doing just that. If you look at what we know in terms of level of engagement in the workforce, the data is saddening. It's really upsetting in a sense because most to workplaces have two-third of their people being disengaged. And so what I saw in these rebels is this full engagement with life, whether it's life

at work, life at home, and they seem to be making most out of it. We are much more engaged in the work that we do. We are more productive. We end up having more creative or innovative ideas. And so if anything, the question is, why not? we should definitely make sure that there is more rebelliousness in our life. That's very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us on the A16D podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.