EntreLeadership - #385: Rediscovering the Joy of Work with Bruce Daisley

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Here’s a shocking statistic for you: The average person spends 90,000 hours of their lifetime at work.1 Even more surprising? Only 13% of people report being emotionally invested in their work,2 and if you ask former Twitter vice president Bruce Daisley, we can (and must) do better than that. Join us as the bestselling author shares his findings on what drives happiness at work and why it affects everything from our productivity and collaboration to our bottom line.   entreleadership.com/podcast Bruce Daisley's website Eat Sleep Work Repeat by Bruce Daisley #375: Operating with Mission Focus with Evan Hafer The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan 10 Days of Intentionality Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   As an Amazon Associate EntreLeadership earns from qualifying purchases.   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Work is this really fascinating thing because it's something that almost all Americans do every single weekday. We spend a lot of time at work. And for some people, it's incredibly healthy, rich, life-giving, and robust. But then there's a whole other group of people, sometimes in the same industries, sometimes in the same job, that view work as unhealthy, stressful, draining, demeaning, and frustrating. From the organizing network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast where we help business leaders, grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Alex Judd, and today we get to talk with Bruce Daisley.

Bruce is someone that has spent a large part of his career really trying to understand and examine what it takes to create a life-giving, rich, robust work environment. This is something that he really started to learn whenever he served as the European Vice President for Twitter, but then dove even deeper into as he wrote the book and hosted the podcast called eat, sleep, work, repeat. But all of this focus on creating and perpetuating effective work environments all started with one very simple curiosity. Yeah, first and foremost, I started off probably in a job that I'd always dreamed of,

you know, sort of I was honored to have set up the London Twitter office from a handful of people. and it was a combination of intense startup mentality and then working at tech firm that I thought that was the holy grail. And I think, you know, from my perspective, I found myself developing a curiosity that I wanted to understand why sometimes we have a magic in our work teams and why sometimes that magic's absent. It's a bit like if you went to a party every day,

you know, if all of us lived, maybe it's a Beverly Hills, lifestyle. But if we were all going to a party every day, very quickly, you'd start thinking, okay, this good parties and bad parties, this good energy and bad energy. And I guess to some extent, I wanted to understand that energy that sometimes we find ourselves enveloped in incredible, positive, effervescent energy. I wanted to know how I could bring some of that to my own workplace. So, I mean, I'll be candid with you. I started from a bad place. The party had died. The party, guests were leaving the party. And so, you know, we had one year where around 40% of the London team left. And it's an incredible feeling when that amount of people

leave a team because, you know, every Thursday is leaving drinks and you just constantly feel like you're waiting for the next person to tell you they're going. And at that stage, I just felt like, okay, I need to take remedial action. Now, I know. I need to do something to bring the life back to this organization. And so I think from my perspective, I set about trying to do that. The challenge I found is that a lot of the books you buy on these things will talk in big, lofty terms, they'll say, oh, you need to bring purpose back. And I found myself on a Wednesday morning sitting at my desk thinking, okay, if I want to bring purpose back, what are the specific actions I need to take now? I almost wanted the manner of

a cookbook. I wanted something that was, rather than telling me what to do, I wanted to know how to do it. So I think all of my stuff really has been a layperson's take to trying to understand what psychology, neuroscience, all manner of other social sciences are telling us about how to make work better. And that's what I love about your perspective and what I've seen from your talks and also in your book is you came at this content from a matter of, it sounds like necessity. Like you were a consumer of this content. It sounds like because you were putting it into action. Is that right? Very much so. You know, I wanted to start making changes. I'll give you a perspective. A lot of us, probably, you know, if we'd looked at the word of the year in 2019,

there were so many articles about burnout last year. And it was really interesting. You'd broadly don't get that volume of writing and commentary on something, everything from, you know, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, like, you know, but also women's mags, you know, it was everywhere in fitness magazines. It was everywhere. And so I was really interested, right, okay, one of the reasons why so many of my team are quitting, it seems to be that burnout is contributing. I wanted to know, right, specifically, if that's the one thing I'm going to tackle, what could I do? And sometimes there's just not an easy answer to those things. And I found that, because I was the audience that I was the audience that I was thinking about.

I wanted to try to solve for some of these, some of these things that maybe get written about as trends, but aren't written about as a way to try and solve them. And so I set about thinking, okay, so if I was someone running a team of two to 100 people, what are the things that I could do that would make work better for my team? And I think specifically, my view was,

what are the ways that we can make our workplace is more productive? Happier, yes, but productive specifically, largely because I think to some extent, happiness follows when a workplace is productive. You don't necessarily need to be fizzing with euphoria. I'm not seeking to make happiness in that sense, that, you know, we're gifting people, cupcakes and smoothies to try and put them into a delirious state of overstimulated. joy, but rather more, I wanted to make sure that they felt like their jobs were rewarding, their jobs were satisfying, they were getting things done. And there's no shortage of evidence

for those things. Quite often when you delve into the research of this field, some of the things that come out are remarkably obvious. One of the ones, there's a huge piece of research looking into what makes a good day at work done by a wonderful psychologist called Teresa Amarble. and she found that a good day at work is when we make progress in something meaningful. I mean, it's almost so silly, so it's almost so self-evident that if you told your mum the discovery, she'd say, well, of course. But it actually gives us a really interesting insight, because if a good day at work is making progress in something meaningful,

and so often we find ourselves in a situation where all we've done all day is answer emails, All we've done all day is sit in meetings. And we go home at the end of the day and we think, I haven't even done those well. You know, I wasn't really paying attention in those meetings. I didn't get to the end of my inbox. And so if that's how I'm being judged, I didn't do it very well. And it's helpful. Her insight that a good day at work is when we make progress in something is helpful

because then you think, okay, what are the barriers to me making progress? what are the barriers to me actually getting things done at work? And it's a really powerful provocation for you to think about what do we need to change about our jobs. That's pretty fascinating too because I think culturally we can look at that topic of stress and burnout and just say, okay, well, the answer is I need more sleep or I need to spend some time on Netflix or I just need to go home and just veg out, right? just not think about work. And it sounds like the solution to burnout that you're providing is not necessarily Netflix. It's just a different type of work. Is that right? Well, to some extent, it's about there is a degree of switching off from work. So one of the challenges we've got in the last

15, 20 years, the average working day has gone up by two hours a day. And it's gone up in the most almost benign way, when we took emails onto our mobile phones, it genuinely felt like it was helping because we were immediately able to swipe away a couple of emails while we were in the elevator, to just respond to an email quickly while we're in the lunch queue, we're able to try and deal with some of our responsibilities away from our desk. And it was genuinely liberating. The challenge, though, is that we now find ourselves in a situation where work, expanded to fill that gap. And so the average American worker is now working two hours more than than we were 15 years ago. In fact, one of the biggest piece of research suggests that if your

employees want you to stay connected to your devices, which I think is all of us, we're making ourselves available to work for around 70 hours a week. So it's mental availability. And it's no wonder then, as a result, we find ourselves getting to Friday evening. exhausted, spent, or we find ourselves getting to the holiday season thinking, wow, I just feel like I've just got no more energy left in the tank. And I was really interested in thinking about that. So I guess there's other examples of how we see modeled to us that the people around us are infinite and have no limit to their resources. Elon Musk was asked about his own working practices. And he says he likes to put in 100 hours a week of work.

And for him, he was asked what advice he would give to other people. He said, working less than 80 hours a week, he considers barely showing up. And there's two elements to that. The first thing is, when we model that behavior, it suggests that if you don't see people at their desks or if people don't reply to your emails immediately, they're not working as hard as Elon. And it almost suggests that maybe they're not as deserving. But the most important thing, so I think, firstly, it's really bad role modelling.

But the second thing is when we've looked into researchers who've tried to understand how that would work, and let's use a metaphor, if we were looking at the Olympic Games and an athlete won a gold medal, it would be of immediate interest to everyone, to competitors, to people coming through the ranks, they would want to know what was the training regime that led to this success. And when we look at people who work 100 hours a week, back to our modern workplace metaphor, when people work 100 hours a week, they generally show less creativity, less imagination, they're less collaborative with their teammates, they tend to build less bonds with customers. Working 100 hours a week just isn't the secret for success.

It wouldn't get you onto the podium at the Olympic Games. And so I think the critical thing for me was thinking, okay, So there's all this misdirection. There's all these people like Elon Musk telling us we must do this and must do this. And I was thinking, okay, from the perspective of someone running a team, I want to avoid the misdirection, I want to know the facts. What are the truths? What truly will help us be more productive, more collaborative, more creative?

And often the evidence was quite different to what these leaders might tell us. And I think that lays the foundation so well. As I was kind of thinking about how I'd love to structure this conversation, I thought it would be perfect to kind of lay out the background and the context of how you're coming at this research and at this information. And then I'd love just to know some of your superlatives on what you learned and what was kind of some of the most surprising, some of the most helpful, some of the most disturbing things that you've learned because you're the expert on all of this stuff. And then I'd love for us to kind of discuss how these findings and what you've learned can apply to the small business. I think the critical thing for me was first and foremost, was understanding the dynamics of how humans engage and interact with each other. It's very easy for us to be thinking maybe the future of work is that we all work remotely and that we all work from our little log cabin somewhere and it seems like a wonderful balanced lifestyle. And what you discover is when people work remotely and when teams work remotely, they often report, firstly, that their experiences don't

necessarily match the way that it's advertised in the brochure. So let me give you an example. People who work remotely generally report higher stress levels than people who work co-located. That's interesting. Why would they be more stressed? Well, it generally is because we take a lot of our social signals about belongingness from the people around us. So when we're with a colleague and our colleague smiles at us near the elevator or they give us a nod when we're walking to our desk. Those things just give us very gentle, almost imperceptible senses of belonging, senses of being part of something. And when we move someone to working remotely, we remove all those cues to the extent that when you ask people who work remotely, their experience of work, they say, I feel more

productive, but I feel that my boss doesn't really value me and my colleagues. colleagues don't like me. And that's, firstly, it gives you an indication of what we lose when we don't have those little nod, smiles, laughs. And so as a result, you start thinking, okay, I wonder what impacts that will have on the work. In fact, when you can go further, there's some wonderful work out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. And they looked into almost like the secret life of the office. Imagine if we, like a game of the Sims that you might see children. children playing and you can watch people interacting in an office. Imagine right, the Sims, but it's your workplace. Here's what they, here's what they noticed. They noticed that when

people are worked remotely, they communicate with each other and with everyone in the office. They communicate about a fifth as much as they do in the office. Now, the interesting thing is that if you work on the basis, and there's an assumption here, but I don't think it's a crazy assumption. If you work on the basis that each time that you and I, if we're working on a project together, each time you and I communicate, it gradually, maybe by a tiny increment, makes the work better. Because I will say to you, I'm thinking of starting with this and you go, no, no, no, no, that definitely not at the start. We'll build into that. Okay. And the proposal for the client or the document becomes better by the sense of collaboration, by the sense of us working together on

something. And if you lose four-fifths of those little interactions, then the work isn't as, it doesn't have as much contribution going into it. And so that's one of the challenges. Now, that's not to say that you can't get around those things, but you need to be really clear. So if you're a leader and you're thinking, okay, I've taken advantage of the technology available to us now. We're all going to work remotely. So what do I need to do to make sure that, number one, my team gets on with each other. Number two, that they don't feel anxious about my contribution towards them. Well, you can adapt to all of those things. But I think starting with the evidence, starting with the learning of others really helps. So you'll say, okay, here's what we're going to do. Everyone will work

remotely, but we're going to get together in person every month, three months, every six months, whatever it is. And when we get together, there's going to be no PowerPoint for the first four hours. It's all about the team re-energizing each other. Really important because then what happens is you build trust, you build team coherence. And what you often discover is you discover that when you look into the evidence of how the office works, generally it's the little bits that you can't necessarily measure. The team talking about what they watched on Netflix last night.

The team talking about something amusing that happened in their street. It's those things that tend to build to bond a team. And we often lose them when we're only doing quick Zoom calls and dial-ins on Google Hangouts. So I think that for me is a really important lesson. It sort of gives us understanding the way that humans do get so much of our energy from each other is a really important part of understanding how we can build better and stronger teams. That's fascinating. One of the things that we teach here, whenever we're talking about leadership and whenever we're talking about developing leaders is kind of the stair step model of leadership, we say is rapport, credibility, trust, influence. And you can't have influence unless you have trust, credibility, and rapport in that order. But then we also say, like, rapport is around things that don't feel like they have anything to do with work, right? To your point, it's what show or are you watching right now? Or how about the weather or talking about the game that was last night?

And it's all those things that a lot of times, it sounds like what you're saying, gets subtracted from remote work. And then we find ourselves starting with credibility, but lacking that rapport. Is that kind of what you're laying out for us? Absolutely. It seems completely aligned with what you're teaching there. Absolutely. And you'll know well that sometimes you might find yourself meeting, you know, you go on an evening go out and you've never met the person who he's the extra person, you know, double dates or whatever. And you realize I've got nothing in common with this person until you have a moment where there's a rapport payoff, where actually by exploring each other, by understanding each other, you've actually realized

that you've got some connection. But you often can't shortchange that. You can't skip that process. And I think it's a really critical reminder with all of us at work. We need to be thinking about how can we build that rapport with all of our team members? Because at a time when things are stressful, or at a time when they need to know they can trust us, you can't necessarily build those things in a high anxiety moment. You need to build them when the stakes are lower. It sounds like very adjacent to your own discoveries. Well, I'd love to know what are some practical steps a leader can take to make sure they are creating an environment where that rapport naturally occurs between team members? Because we know that the leader can't be the bottleneck, right? They can't just

have the rapport with every single individual team member. And then it's like they're the only person that actually has that level of rapport. They've got to create the culture where that occurs naturally. So what are some things a leader can do to make sure that that is occurring within their organization, Bruce? Very much so. I was really fascinating. with this. And let me sort of come at it from a slightly different standpoint. In my own research, in my own investigations, one of the things I was most fascinated to explore and I kind of left it to the last topic that I was going to explore was the importance of laughter. And I tell you why I was cautious is because I remember having a boss, you know, were shaped by our parents and our bosses

and all these people who go before us. But I remember having a boss who said to me, you know, it's really important that right now you're not seen laughing. He said, we're having a bad time of things. Now's not the time to be seen laughing. And it was this really indelible image in my head, because I thought, okay, so laughter is, I guess what we earn when times are good, but we're not allowed it when times are bad. It's sort of like chocolate from the Easter bunny, sort of like, or gifts from Santa. It felt like something that was a reward rather than something you're entitled to. And so I was fascinated. And so I was fascinated with that. And then I started to look into the research for laughter. And what you discovered with laughter is that the world's leading expert on laughter passed away just at the end of

2019, wonderful guy, a guy called Robert Provine. And the reason why I say he's the world leading expert on laughter, he said, there's a strange situation where there's around 75 to 100,000 scientific papers on anxiety and depression. And when he come to the field of laughter, he said there's around 125. So it's like it's regarded by the whole of psychology as a trivial subject matter. And he spent his life studying it. And he said, what he discovered with laughter is that laughter is this magical thing that connect to human beings. He described it as laughter. We need to think about laughter like birdsong for humans. Birds sing to connect with other birds. They do it to signal to other birds to connect with other birds. Laughter does exactly the same function.

for humans. Now, that was really fascinating. In addition, he said that laughter, the reason why firefighters will tell you that they laugh a lot. The reason why combat soldiers will tell you that they laugh a lot is because laughter is incredibly powerful at resetting our resilience, at reforging our stress levels. It's really interesting. So for me, you're starting to get some pointers here. Laughter seems to be incredibly powerful at building team affinity. Seems to be incredibly powerful for resetting our stress levels. And so as a result of that, you know, my old boss telling me

now is not the time to be caught laughing was probably giving me just about the diametrically opposite advice he should have been giving. But then if Robert Provine is telling us that laughter is so important, what can any of us do? And he said, you'll be surprised.

He said, number one, he said, you need to create a climate that feels laughter ready. Do you have time in your weekly team meeting where everyone knows that this is the moment that Jack will tell us a funny story about what happened, that Sarah will tell us about her terrible client call, but what happened on it.

Do you take a moment to celebrate those things? It might be on people's birthdays or when people leave the team. You do these wonderful eulogies to great beloved team members that actually show you that we value you and it's never shameful to leave. what you celebrate can be an important part of marking your culture.

And he said any organisation can bring laughter to their culture. They just need to demonstrate that laughter matters to them. I thought it was a really important thing for him to say. So for me, I set about thinking, what are the easiest ways for me as a boss to bring laughter to my team? We made a point of we had a Friday afternoon meeting that we insured always had. Friday afternoon is a strange time of the week. It's very much transitioned to the weekend. So we made sure that it felt light.

It felt that it had some warmth. So we made sure that we invited different voices up to share laughter. And I think celebration and laughter can be incredibly powerful signals to the people you work with about what's acceptable around here and what gets valued. And also the sort of organization you're trying to build. Oh, man, that's so good. First of all, that boss that you had that said, laughter is not allowed. Sounds like a villain from a Disney movie or something. It's just like,

oh my gosh, my worst nightmare. But I couldn't help but think we visited, our team visited an organization not too far from where we work not long ago. And it was a coffee company. And I mean, the people there, they were just hilarious. Oh my gosh. I just spent so much time laughing and they spent so much time laughing at each other. And one of the things that is kind of part of their culture is they mess with each other a lot. Like they are super sarcastic with each other and they play practical jokes on each other. And I asked him, I was like, where does that come from? And they said, well, that is our CEO to a T. And it's exactly what you're saying. It's like the CEO set the standard that we value laughter here and this is like we're not going to take ourselves too seriously.

And as a result, even though he wasn't there, that was embedded into the culture. And boy, it seemed to be having a positive effect on their workplace. And as a customer, it had a positive effect on me. So I think that's what you're talking about, though, is just don't diminish the value of those things that don't necessarily feel productive, but are contributing factors to productivity. Very much so. In fact, there's a wonderful researcher out of Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, and she called Sigal Barside.

And she wanted to study this because one of the things that often gets thrown at teams like that is that are people so busy having fun and being frivolous that customers get ignored that standards drop and so she wanted to understand that you know you've described you've evoked the scene of this coffee business where you know it sounds incredible fun and actually being a customer there could be helpful but how about the people who need to clean the washrooms or the does that whole culture of being playful and silly have an impact and so to Gal Bar-Sides, she said, she looked into this, she called it companion at love. She said, when people feel an affinity, a bond, a connection with the people around them, generally the

evidence suggests they strive to do a better job because they don't want to let their colleagues down. So you might witness this with a basketball team that seems to be goofing around and laughing and killing themselves laughing. You can pretty much guarantee that that doesn't mean that when it comes to their competitive edge, they're not desperate to win. In fact, more than anything, they want to strive to win for each other as much as for themselves. So I think what we've been able to learn is that these things quite often are fascinating to observe as anecdote, but when we want to explore whether they have an impact as evidence with data, in fact, there's often some wonderful examples on it. So, you know, I think that companion at love,

the idea that you strive to do a better job for your colleagues. And, you know, that laughter then just becomes this magnetic thing that for you, anytime you think of that organization, you think, wow, what a place. What a place. You think great people there. You probably buy association. I think the boss must have been great. It's just a really wholesome way to change the way that customers perceive an organization.

This is something that I constantly need to be reminded of is that leadership is results. relationships, and it's that relational side that I think we can overlook because we're so focused on results, but it's ultimately the greatest contributing factor towards sustainable results is the fact that I have relationships with these people. I'd love to know, Bruce, is there a specific finding in all of your research and everything that you've learned about the workplace? Is there a specific finding that you're most passionate about? Well, I'll give you a couple. Number one thing that I was keen to do was give very simple advice. So, you know, quite often, if you are in the midst of Burnett, then what you end up thinking is no one can help me, no one can make

this better. And often what you can very simply do is take small personal actions that improve the experience of work for you. So, so that might be getting up and going for a walking meeting. I love the evidence behind walking meetings. Walking meetings tend to be very good for divergent thinking. So that means they're very good for creative thought. And so, you know, if you're stuck in the office and, you know, you've got 30 minutes on the calendar with a colleague suggesting that why don't we take it as a walking meeting and depending whether maybe you can't leave the building, but you take a couple of laps of the floor that you're on or you can leave the building and there's a bit of outdoor space, whatever it is, finding a way to stretch your legs seems to re-energize us.

My favorite example of that is that the only person in history who's ever, turned witness against the New York Mafia, was a New York Mafia who was testified in court and he was asked when Mafia tended to do meetings. He said, we never talk in a club, we're never talk in a car, we never talk in a hotel room, we're never talking in a bar. And he said, basically, we always talk when we're walking. The way I see is that this is the seal of approval. If you're worried that someone is going to hear, your 2021 marketing plan, take it untrust that the Afias thinks there's no safer way to talk about it than talking when you're walking. So things like that for me are really helpful because then someone might be sitting there going,

okay, maybe it's my partner who's exhausted. Maybe it's my friend, son, brother. What can anyone do? And you quickly sit there and you say, okay, I could turn notifications off on my phone. And actually that seems to be a really powerful way to feel less overwhelmed. There's always an email waiting for us. You don't need to be reminded. There's an email waiting for you.

walking meetings, getting a good night's sleep, and immediately you've made three interventions that normally by the end of a week people say, yeah, you know what? I feel a bit more like me again. And I think so that was the really critical thing for me, understanding that. Probably at a bigger level, anyone who's listening who maybe runs a team and he's thinking, how can I bring some of the best culture from the best organizations or from maybe the best places they've ever worked? And it seems that the secret source of great workplaces is something called psychological safety. And I suspect you've heard of this, Alex, but the psychological safety is where we feel no burden about speaking candidly about our thoughts, our concerns, our anxieties. And there's just some wonderful research

showing the best performing teams. The story I loved was about a study into when open heart surgery was first pioneered in the most recent form. So you might think, what has that got to do? But in fact, what happened was the old version of open heart surgery, and we're going back 15 years. So it's long enough now that we can see studies on this. The Ope version was sort of almost quite grotesque in the sense that your rib cage was literally opened to get access to your heart. The new method, sorry to be so graphic.

You saw my face. I was like, oh my gosh, this is, holy cow. The new method was a very small. incision between your ribs, but most of the work was done by inserting a stent in your leg. Immensely complicated. It was actually pioneered by a team, and hospitals were told that it would probably take them six to eight operations before they felt competent at it. Here's what happened, though. There was two very different approaches by different groups of surgeons. Some surgeons said, okay, well, I feel like I've got no idea here. So if I've got no idea, you've got no idea. You've got no

idea. So let's make sure after every time we do one of these operations, we gather together and we discuss how we felt, what happened, what we could do better next time. There was a second group of surgeons who quite often the world of hospitals is quite hierarchical. This second group of surgeons, the surgeon is the rock star. And so the surgeon would say, well, look, here's what we're doing, here's my approach, here's how we're going to go. In fact, the challenge of the new method was that only the surgeon could see what was going on because the field of vision was so small. So the best group of the first set of surgeons would say, well, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put a camera on so you can all see what I'm seeing. The second group didn't feel the need to do that because the

surgeon himself felt like he could see. And so it became this fascinating case study. And this was psychological safety in practice because the best group of surgeons would say each time, anyone worried about things and, you know, or anyone feel like there's a question we haven't answered? Here's what happened. The second group, so the Master of the Universe surgeon who had all the answers, quite often, across multiple examples like that, they got to about five, six, seven operations and they said, you know, this is just too complicated. We're not going to continue with this. They abandoned the procedure. The other group, the ones who were the sort of servant leader, the psychologically safe environment, they started requesting for the more difficult patients off the list.

They said, okay, we feel like we've mastered this. This is quite fun. We're witnessing the transformation of patients' lives before our eyes. Could we take a look at that person who's got complications? Could we take a? And before your very eyes, you witness these two things. So we hear about psychological safety. And the challenge for me is that, you know, I would hear about psychological safety and then go back to work and think, okay, how do I make it 5% more psychologically safe today? I have no idea. Is everyone feeling safe? No one was giving me an answer. But through these examples, you see, okay, that's what this looks like. It looks like someone who models that it's okay to ask questions. It looks like you model that it's okay for people to be uncertain, scared, concerned. And I think

that for me was so helpful. So as I set about changing this 40% employee turnover and we started making these changes and these specific actions, I was so thrilled because by the end of 12, 18 months doing these things, we'd got to a stage where we had about one or two percent of the team left that year and it just felt like a much better equilibrium. People were saying to me how, you know, they were sort of kind of glad they went through the day. dark times, but they were so glad it was back to being positive and energizing. So for me, it was a delight witnessing not only the work of the experts, but watching how it actually played out in the real lives of the people who work with me. Absolutely. I want to park on that

topic for just a little bit because it sounds like it's obviously very important for every organization regardless of size or industry. So that idea of psychological safety, what are the words or phrases that team members will use if this exists? Like, you know, you wouldn't go to a team and say like, oh, what do you think about your workplace? They're not going to say, well, I feel very psychologically safe, right? They're not going to say that. So what would they say about their workplace that would help you key in on saying, like, oh, there's psychological safety in that organization? Yeah, I think critical things probably people will talk about trust, about teamwork, about collaboration.

they'll talk about sort of a connection between each other. Quite often the opposite are where you might go to a company's glass door and you read and it says it's quite political or there's a lot of backbiting or it's very internally competitive. And so you're trying to look for a sense of where an organisation feels like everyone is united in collective identity really, trying to achieve things together. So I think they're the critical things. The critical thing about psychological safety is that it's one of the most elusive factors in modern work. I was just about to say that

because you even said everyone feels. And the fact that it's a feeling is part of what, I mean, that's so tough because I think I've been on teams before where there is not a toxic culture in the organization, right? We've all seen those teams or maybe even been a part of those teams where it's like there's gossip,

there's backbite, and it's just like everyone can say, like, that place is a mess, right? And none of us want to be a part of that. But then there's also this slight difference. And I think, like you said, it's an elusive difference between the good organizations where it's like, well, everything's good. Like, we're not gossiping about each other. I like them as people.

And the great organizations where it's like, I feel great about this. I feel like I belong. I feel like I'm heard. I feel like I'm known. I feel like we're working together. I feel like there's this extra level of energy when we're all in the room together. And I don't know that I could identify the difference between those good and those greats. Do you have thoughts there, Bruce?

Yeah, I think you hit on a really critical thing. It's one of the reasons why I think sometimes hearing other people describe how they got to this situation can be so helpful. I recount a story. I chatted to a member of the elite military over in the UK. So the equivalent of Navy Seals in the UK. And he described to me how he set about with his team doing these, he called them hot debriefs where every day they would talk about the mission they were on. And he would often discuss so he would say what he'd observed.

And then he would go into what he did wrong. And he said, effectively, that's been systematized into the approach of the British elite military because they know that by modelling mistakes, you're getting closer to trying to create this sense where it's not a blame culture, it's not a sense where someone making mistakes is wrong. Or I also gave an example of there was a big sporting event that I go into the details of,

probably too complex for me to go into it now, but how the team there were really insistent on trying to ensure that everyone felt that they had a voice. And I think it's sometimes through A series of these examples, the surge and the elite military, the sports, that you start thinking, OK, I get it. It's a genuine absence of politics. It's a genuine absence of agenda.

Because quite often we can feel like overtly there's an absence of agenda, but scratch beneath the surface and there's a whole load of positioning and infighting. I think, you know, it's the reason why these wonderful, incredible cultures. are so elusive because you can't just magic them out of the box. Sometimes they need to be tuned and developed and adapted. And over time, everyone in the team will adapt and grow themselves. So a team that, like great sports teams, but a team that's great now might not be perfect in three years' time.

And I think that's one of the challenges, is trying to make sure that you continually adapting, open and attuned to the signals, to try and ensure that your team is developing. and the culture of your teams are growing alongside you. I was talking to a business owner the other day, and she had a question about the meetings that she was running, and she said that it felt a lot of times like everyone just agreed with her,

and that there wasn't really a ton of fruitful or productive discussion, like what she wanted, right? And she basically, kind of her question was, there's no way they all agree with me on everything I'm saying. It's just there's something in the way. the room that they don't feel okay saying it. And she said, I've even told them, like, it's okay to disagree with me. Like, it's okay to speak your mind. And, like, let's have some discussion. But she said, I don't know how to make these meetings more fruitful and more engaging and more rich. And it sounds like what she's trying to create is that level of psychological

safety where people feel like they can bring their full self into the meeting. What would your advice be for her, Bruce? Yeah. Well, I've witnessed similar things to that. And so, quite often trying to present challenges as problems that we're solving together, trying to maybe throw far more things to the team saying, look, you know, I'd like us to come up with some suggestions together. And then one of the things that you can do is you can do a pre-mortem. So we're all familiar with post-mortem. Something's gone wrong.

We all stand around pointing fingers at the carcass saying what went wrong. This is similar, but you do it before things have gone wrong. So you say, okay, if this were to go wrong, what do we think would be the cause of it going wrong? And it just invites the team to demonstrate their critical thinking, invites the team to sit there and give a contribution of what they think could be wrong with the plan. So it could well be that if everyone's agreeing with her, she says, okay, so we're going to sit here this week and we're going to talk about what could go wrong with this. Now, that could be an interesting way for them to feel like they're challenging the idea without necessarily challenging her. I chatted to a guy who won the leading architects in the world.

And he said quite often what they do in architecture, one of the reasons why they create these big models of the structures they're building is that it no longer appears to be someone's idea. It's no longer Biaka's idea. It's now this model. This bit won't work. This bit won't work. And he said it depersonalizing.

the feedback. It stops it being about you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me and starts becoming objectively about the structure in front of us. So I think trying a few different systems there, trying to think about are the different ways that we can bring things to bear? One of the approaches that Amazon hit upon is they realize that most meetings had become about performance and about either agreeing with the boss. So they introduced something. Jeff Bezos was credited with this himself. But they introduced silent meetings. So the way that this would work is that you would, whoever's proposing something that's happening would prepare a document about four to six pages. So relatively long, but you have to prepare a document with all of the evidence in it. Document, not PowerPoint.

He says that what happens with PowerPoint is people become performative, they stand at the front of the room, in their sort of best outfit, and it becomes a show. He says that isn't in service of goods, you're making. So it's a document. They all read it in silence. Now, if you want to try this out, let me tell you, the first time you do it, it will be so deeply uncomfortable. Sitting in silence with colleagues, it takes you back to like the exam hall, you feel, you're waiting for someone's hand to go up to request more papers. It feels deeply uncomfortable. However, what happens is you read the document in silence and what it produces, it makes you think. of thoughtful questions. It makes you actually consider the idea in front of you. You tend to

find yourself thinking, okay, if that was to happen, what will happen on this? And normally the document will answer those things if it's a good document, but often it won't. And so it could be a good way for her to think about, okay, she's got a team that tend to agree with her, asking them questions or giving them things in different structures where they're going to be forced to do some of thinking themselves, to ask some of the questions themselves. Maybe what she could do, she could give them the document and she can say, okay, we're all going to have questions. I'm going to go around the room and, you know, I'm going to ask you to take it in turns to ask what your questions are. Forces them to demonstrate the thinking that's going on and help her make the decision-making

process better. So, look, I don't ever think there's a silver bullet for these things, but I think trying to find different tactics. Effectively, what you're trying to do across all of those things is demonstrate to the team, I really value it when you apply your problem solving skills to the problem that we're all facing here, rather than just agree with everything I'm saying. Man, that's so good. We do mastermind calls here at Entree leadership, and so we'll have six to ten business owners on the call. And one of the things that I learned pretty early on is that with those business owners, and I've learned this about just groups in general, is if you ask a broad question, expect to get a very broad answer.

And so if you ask, how's business? Almost always everyone's going to say, well, it's good, right? Or, oh, it's fine. But if you ask, what is the biggest blocker that's getting in the way of your business being where it needs to be over the course of the next 90 days, everyone has an answer like that. And that was something that I realized, it's like, man, the more specific my questions are as a coach, the more specific their answers are going to be. And I bet you it's in that realm of you're giving them the opportunity to not have a, like there's no wrong answer to what's the biggest blocker. But if you answer a broad question with a specific answer, that doesn't feel very safe. That's just what that made me think of. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're exactly right. That specificity, I think, you know, it unlocks far more than we ever can.

normally presume. Is there something in your research or in what you've learned about the workplace, either as it stands today or about what it could be, that stands out as being the most disturbing? I would broadly say that, you know, I find myself quite often at events or talking about things. And because my background is working in tech firms, they often say to me, what technology is the answer? What's the solution? You know, what can we solve? And I'm always cautionary. I say, look, you know, that everything I've seen suggests that technology will look after itself. And we need to be thinking more about the future of work being human shaped. Because the critical thing for all of us is that more than we can even imagine, in the next

five, ten years, artificial intelligence will start doing little parts of our jobs, whether, you know, if our job is to edit photographs, artificial intelligence will edit those photographs. If our job is to prepare proposals or, you know, the legal profession is being decimated by artificial intelligence. No matter what career we're in, computers will start stealing parts of our job. The critical thing is thinking about what computers won't do in the short to medium term. What they won't do is the things that we humans are very good at, taking often an unstructured problem, a unpredictable problem, and trying to bring some imagination, some creativity to it. And so, you know, that's why I say the future of work isn't about technology,

the future of work is about humanity, it's about trying to ensure that we operate humans the best way possible. So I think understanding how people can feel connected to each other, understand how people can feel they've got space to be creative. These are probably the big things that I think, if we're not careful, we'll neglect. What are some rhythms business leaders and business owners

should have in their schedule to make sure that what you're talking about, preserving humanity and magnifying the competitive advantage that humanity provides an organization, what are the rhythms they should introduce to make sure that stays a priority, Bruce? There's an old truism, an old maxim, which is beware the busy manager. And it's because, you know, if you live your life heavily over-scheduled, what you'll generally find is that there's no room for the bits where you surprise yourself, the bits where you come up with something.

You know, people routinely say to me, you know, I have all my best ideas on vacation. And it's an extension of the thing where people used to say, I have my best ideas on the commute to work. I have my best ideas in the bathroom. We often describe that our best ideas come at us when we're in this state of unfocus. Neuroscientists would call it the default mode of the brain. When we're not engaged, actively focused, our brain, we're walking the dog. We're in the line at the store and something will come to us where we go,

you know what I should do on that? I should do this. It's because our brain, when we go into this unfocused, default mode, creative ideas often come. My favorite example of it, I'm just at the moment,

I'm watching the West Wing. I never watched it before. And so start to finish, I'm watching the West Wing. Well, the writer of the West Wing, famous for his sort of zingy, witty dialogue, Aaron Sorkin, he said that he realized

his best ideas were coming. Not when he was frowning into his laptop screen at his desk, but when he was in the shower. He had a shower installed in the corner of his office. He says he has six to eight showers a day. True life. What on earth? I know. Oh my gosh.

But it's because he was doubling down on where those creative ideas were coming from. Exactly that. And I guess, if you were I sitting there and our job is to come up with 50 good ideas a week. And you get to the end of the week and you're like, I've had no good ideas. then you start thinking, okay, when I have good ideas, I need to remember. And you just realize I'm having all my good ideas when I disengage my brain. When I stop being so actively consumed with stimulating myself, we're putting more new ideas in. And that's why a lot of us do get that experience where we say, you know, I had all my ideas on vacation.

Why? Because we've stopped putting stimulus in. And what you discover is that there's a whole load of pinballs firing loose in your brain, ricocheting around, these little ideas, they're just ready to connect with other ideas. And when we allow the thought process to actually develop and nurture these ideas, we tend to find it immensely productive. So I think just taking a lesson from Aaron Sorkin and thinking to yourself, do I have a moment where I'm not busy? Because I know most of us might feel like we want to be hustling all the time.

We want to be trying to be mega productive. There's so many people talking about how you can maximize your productivity. But one of the greatest inspirations that we might be having could be being squeezed out by this desperate desire to be hypercharged and always productive. So I just invite you sometimes to allow a bit of Aaron Sorkin-style thinking to enter into your agenda. I love that. I couldn't help but think about the book. the one thing. Have you read that book, Bruce? No, I haven't. Tell me. Oh, man, it's so good. It's by Gary Keller and

Jay Pappasan. They wrote it, and the whole book is centered around the idea that we should structure our day around our answer to one question. And the one question is, what is the one thing that by doing it today, everything else will either be easier or unnecessary? And then you structured your day around your answer to that one thing. And one of the assertions that they make in the book is that people want crazy results, but they're not willing to take crazy actions, essentially. And it just sounds like Aaron Sorkin, whether he asked that question or not, he kind of defined, well, his one thing is to write a killer screenplay or to write a killer script for the West Wing. And that's his one thing. And the place where that comes from is clearly the shower. So I'm going to

Spend a disproportionate amount of time taking showers. What people would call crazy, I mean, his results are obviously reflective of that. It seems like a lot of times we spend or we gauge what winning looks like with regard to our time based on what other people are doing. But it sounds like the examples you're providing is you need to define what winning looks like and then you need to structure your day around that thing. Very much so. And I think so often we can find ourselves thinking about the. stories that other people tell us rather than the realities. So, you know, of course, no one he's going to say, Elon Musk is not going to say, you know what, guys, I'm hitting up the shower three or four

times a day at the moment. Why? Because it just looks a weird thing to say. So we hear him talk about his 16-hour days. He's talking about working all the time. Why? Because it's sort of the model that we want to hear. And I think exactly in the spirit of Aaron Salkin, find your own rhythm for what works with you is probably one of the most helpful things you can do. And prioritize the outcomes. What Aaron cared about was the desired outcome of a creatively written well done script. And whatever it took to get that outcome, it didn't really matter what people think about it. Oh, man, I love that, Bruce. I'd love to know if you could have a bunch of billboards, hundreds of billboards all over the United States with one message on them based on what you've learned about

the workplace. What would you want to do? those billboards to say. Certainly the importance of laughter and the importance of feeling connected to a teammate. So I think quite often we, we are, some of us find that there's a remote worker that we work with that's just the one, the other one out, the rest of us are all in the office and then these remote Jeff. And remote Jeff, unfortunately, you know, does a good job, but I tell you what, Jeff does things quickly when you ask him, but no one really feels like they know Jeff. And, you know, what I'll be saying is have a laugh with Jeff. Find your way to feel connected to Jeff because I'm certain he will pay that back.

He'll more than pay that back. But finding a way to connect with your colleagues, taking a moment to connect with them on a human level. Here's one of the strange things. Back to that MIT research, they discovered that most discussions in the office start casually. They start socially. But they often bridge into something business-related. So we start talking about the show that we're watching on Netflix. Then we say, oh, yeah, how are you getting on with that project?

And so these things are never superfluous. Having a laugh with your colleagues, perversely, it seems to be one of the most productive things you can do. So good. And I think that feeds into kind of my final question for you, too. What are some direct actions that you hope business owners will take as a result of this conversation today, Bruce? I think focusing more than anything, the time we're in right now is that we're in an interesting challenge where technology has advanced more. than any of us could ever have conceived when we were children, but we're still in the habit of doing a lot of the things in the way that we did them before. We find ourselves having 16 hours

of meetings a week. We find ourselves back-to-back meetings and emails. We find ourselves working in ways that really are about trying to demonstrate that we're busy rather than allowing ourselves to have the autonomy and control. And so what I would say really is that the more that we can learn to give autonomy to the people who work with us, the more that we can allow them to feel like they're in control of their existence. It seems to be that's one of the ways that we can get back to that thing, that thing I talked about. When Theresa Marbley said that what's a good day at work, if people feel like they can make progress in something meaningful, giving them the freedom to do that is one the best ways you can motivate, inspire and make your team far more productive.

Well, I think that's a message everyone needs to hear, Bruce. We're so grateful for your investment into our audience and for the work that you have so clearly done to make this message something that we can all act upon starting right now. So thanks so much for your time. I loved our chat. Thank you so much. I love that conversation with Bruce because it really focuses on the fact that there are simple things that we can all do to create a more effective work environment for ourselves, but also for the people that we lead and invest in every. single day. And one of the things that we know to be true here at Entree leadership is that so much of the way we view our work is impacted by our perspective and our perspective is impacted by our intentionality. Here's the deal, folks. As a leader, the way you view things impacts the way you do things. And this is why we focus a lot on intentionality here in our office and certainly with the business owners and business leaders we work with every single day. That's why we created the free resource

called the 10 Days of Intentionality Checklist. This is going to walk you through some really simple actions you can take over the course of 10 days to become a more intentional person and therefore a more intentional leader. So if you want to take advantage of this free resource, I want you to text the phrase, get intentional to 3344. Again, that's the phrase, get intentional, all one word, no spaces, to 33444 or just click the length that's in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25, Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the length

that's in the show notes. And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like The Ramsey Show. We want you to take control of your life and money once and for all. I'm Dave Ramsey, and along with my co-hosts on The Ramsey Show, we'll give you straight talk on everything from budgets to career to relationships.

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