How to Be a Better Human - How to thrive in remote work (with David Burkus)

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Water coolers, office bagels, frigid spaces with fluorescent lighting. Today's episode is all about work. It’s how we pay the bills, but it’s also how many of us derive purpose, meaning and structure from our days. Whether you're unemployed, salaried, or your own boss, the world of work is changing. David Burkus sees this as an opportunity to think consciously about what to change when it comes to how, where, and when we work. David is an author, podcaster and associate professor of management at Oral Roberts University. His latest book, Leading From Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams, tackles the key challenges of this new era of remote work. Burkus is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Inc. magazine. His work has been featured in Fast Company, the Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and "CBS This Morning." He's also the host of the award-winning podcast Radio Free Leader. David challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management. David lives in Tulsa with his wife and their two boys. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode of How to Be a Better Human is all about work. It's how we pay the bills, but also how many of us derive purpose and meaning from our days. It's also where we meet friends and have snacks and little office jokes and joys and frustrations. Except when it's not. When you're working from home and you're isolated and your water cooler conversations are just talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror. Or maybe you're unemployed or you're a freelancer or maybe you're your own boss and you're not quite sure that the boss

has any clue what is going on. There is a lot of work to be done on work. And this time of uncertainty and transition, it's also an opportunity where we're all being forced to think really consciously about what to change when it comes to how, where, and when we work moving forward. That is true no matter what you do, if you're looking to improve your current work circumstances or even just looking for any work right now. And a lot of the discussions about the future of work,

a lot of those conversations can start to feel kind of abstract and heady and philosophical. Well, in today's episode, we're going to do our best to avoid that. Author and organizational psychologist David Berkus is joining me, and we're going to focus on what you, what you, an actual human being who has to make money somehow, can do. And we're going to talk about clear steps that you can take to shape the future of your own work. That is on today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. But first, an ad.

Would it even be a podcast if we didn't have one? And we are back with David Berkus. My name is David Berkus. I'm an organizational psychologist and author of four and a half books about people, teams, and really how to make the experience of work a little bit better. I see that you actually have your newest book is all about remote work, which truly could not be more relevant. Yeah, well, I would be lying if I said that it was just this happy coincidence that I had a book on remote teams when the world ended, but it was actually more a response to uh to that situation i was already

working on a lot of projects around teams and how do we get them to work a bit better how do we get them to feel a little more cadence and to click a little bit better and then obviously the virtual world came into that and so the whole project kind of pivoted in order to meet the needs of the of the moment and truthfully what i think will probably be to some extent the future of work you don't send people in the united states to work from home and then you just call them all back. We're going to be in a hybrid workplace for a long time, if not permanently. And so we really need to master this.

How do we actually get teams from anywhere to work better together? Well, so I'm actually really curious about that. And I know I don't want you to spoil too much from the book. Obviously, we want people to read your book, too. But what are some of the best practices for working from home? How do you make it work? Because I know so many of us, myself included, it can be a real challenge. Yeah. So the big thing that that I see when a lot of teams go to virtual is we lose a lot of the stuff we didn't know we needed. In other words, we lose the things that we use to judge

cadence. We use the little chit-chat conversations before the meeting starts or the ability to just walk down to the cubicle or the really long row of desks if you're in one of those dreadful open offices and have that little conversation with people. We lose that to some extent and we lose the little moments saying hi to each other at the beginning and end of the day. And those not only are good for building a sense of bonds, they also actually help us understand the context and the work preferences of everyone. And so when you send everyone home to work from home, everyone's working in a different environment. Figuring out what you're going to do with your own life is hard enough. Figuring out how you're going to balance all the different demands between work and home or do you work from home or do you

live at work? Figuring even that question out is a difficult one. And in the process, people have found different answers for different people. And so one of the first things that I encourage a lot of teams to do is get a sense of shared understanding, get a sense of knowing the context that everyone's working in, the new schedule that they've adopted in order to make this work, because not everybody's going to do the eight to five thing like at the office. And then also their work preferences. How do they prefer to receive feedback or project updates? How do they prefer to give requests for help when they need something?

That was actually one of the number one things I see is teams that go virtual just start overloading the manager because that's the only person you know how to interact with when you need to ask for help. Instead of just looking up and asking, you know, in the cubicle across from you, which we did in person. It seems like a lot of people struggle to do that part. And so building that sense of shared understanding, that cadence, and a lot of teams actually go formal with this and create a team working agreement, a document that actually says, here are what we're going to talk about via email. Here are

our rules for running our Zoom meetings or our WebEx meetings. Here are how we prefer to give feedback and actually put it in a document that everybody can see as sort of the, I sometimes call it the declaration of interdependence, right? If we're going to work together and we're going to work together in this remote environment, here is how we've decided as a team, we're going to work best. You used to be able to rely on physical cues for that. And now you've got to be a lot more deliberate. So if you're someone who's not the boss, how do you what actions can you take? I mean, I love the Declaration of Interdependence, but I assume you don't just like get a bunch of your colleagues together and send it to them and say, like, listen, King George, follow my rules or you're out. Right. Exactly. The first step is to find some tea. No, I'm totally kidding.

I think one of the things you can do that wouldn't lead to a team working agreement, but would lead to that cadence is invite your co-workers into what some companies call FICA, which is the Swedish word for to have coffee, right? We have to use three words for what they can do as one. But it's much more a ritual of connection, whether that's with colleagues, with friends, with family members. It's a ritual of taking time over coffee, which is great. Anything caffeinated is great for this. But it's a ritual of reconnecting over coffee, which is great. Anything caffeinated is great for

this, but it's a ritual of reconnecting with that person. And we lose that. For most of us, if we work on a virtual team, the only time we see all of our colleagues, all of our teammates are pixels on a giant screen that really looks like something out of the intro to the Muppet Show, right? Or the intro to the Brady Bunch. And that's not the best for building that bond. So just inviting people, hey, on Thursday afternoon, would you love to jump on Zoom and just chat? Let's just have a coffee break together. Or sometimes if you want to feel more productive, I actually, when I was writing this new book, had a team of people that I would do what I called work sprints with. And so we signed into Zoom, we said hi to each other,

and then we just started working. And around the 30 minute mark, we'd need a little break. We'd have some chit chat and we go back to work. And we do that two or three times. And it was really productive, but it was the small little chit chats that we got back that helped us not only socialize a bit more, but also understand each other and how each other works best. So either of those things you can do, whether you're the boss or not, you can invite your current teammates, your current colleagues into that to have a little bit more one-on-one connection. You know, it's so interesting. So I, for the last eight years, I've been kind of doing a lot more of the like freelance working from home life as a comedian and a writer. And before that, I was a fifth grade teacher. And so I went from this incredibly structured environment where it was

like every minute was planned out and I couldn't even go to the bathroom in an unplanned way. I had to ask someone to cover for me to then having this time where it's like completely wide open, open space. And I found that a lot of people think that would be easier. Or I think before this year, a lot of people thought that would be easier, but I found that it was really challenging. I really had to, to bring some of the regimentation of that like school teacher day into my life as a as a writer to make it so that I actually accomplished anything or so that I just didn't kind of spiral out of control. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. So my wife is an ER physician, right? So she's been on the front lines of kind of all of this stuff. And you can't really do

that one from home, right? Someone someone needs a chest tube. You can't do that over Zoom. But the it's the same deal. The idea that I have to be there at a set period of time. And then the thing that I actually, she envies my flexibility, but the thing I envy about her is that when she walks out of the hospital, she's done, right? The commute. I think a lot of us underestimated how powerful a ritual the commute is, right? Just the idea that I'm moving from the place where I do the rest of my life to the place where I do my work. And I'm mentally flipping a switch as I do that. And then I'm moving back. Now, I've actually been funny

ranting about this for a while because I used to joke that if you bring your cell phone, if you have a work cell phone, you bring your work home with you every single night, which is something that used to be frowned upon and is now bragged about. And that's a huge problem. The bigger problem happens when you live at work, when you don't have that ability to create those boundaries. So the regimen not only provides some level of structure like you were talking about, but I think the ability to create that endpoint at the end of the day and have a ritual that signals to your mind, it's time to do other things, was a huge benefit that a lot of us got stolen from us nine months ago when we started this experiment.

Yeah, I, you know, I never thought of a commute that way. It's such an it's I think it's exactly right. It's so interesting. So do you then for yourself, do you create some sort of like virtual version of that where you're like, and now I'm like putting on my I'm at home clothes. I can imagine maybe some people like change out of their like work clothes to their home clothes. And that's even though they've been at home the whole time or something like that. Oh, yeah. No, I totally have work pajamas and real pajamas. No, I'm kidding. You know, for me, I'm lucky. I'm really blessed. And I get that I my commute is

about 10 steps down the stairs. So I work out of an office that we built in the basement of the house. The other thing that I do is actually I commute my devices, if you will. Interesting. So I have a cell phone that has my email and the social media apps and stuff like that that I use as an author. And then I have an iPad that has Netflix and Amazon video and newspaper apps and the personal Facebook account that I hope no one ever finds because it's just being my college buddies goofing off that one. And that's it.

And I actually when I walk up the stairs, the last thing I do at the top of the stairs is there's a charging station and I switch devices and the phone goes in there and the iPad comes out. And then I am a bad sleep hygiene person. I do have the iPad next to me before I go to bed, but I feel like that's still better than the phone because the phone is where all the email and the interrupters would come from. And it's not a lot of friction, but it's enough friction on most days to kind of have that mental flip. So that's what I do. And I'm lucky in that regard. I recognize that a lot

of people don't. And that's why that shared understanding piece on a team is so important because for some people work from home for me, nothing about my life changed other than there weren't conferences to go attend, right? Everything else about my work life was the same from the same basement, et cetera. Other people bought a folding screen at home Depot and stretched it across a corner in their dining room. And that's been their office for 10 months as a team. I want to know the people that are working out of that context and the people who are working out of a better one, because it'll help me understand my expectations for them, their performance, their responsiveness and all of those other things. I really want to understand that context because not everyone's lucky enough to have been able to build that. And everyone, whatever your situation was, everybody built those work life boundaries differently. And we need to understand each other's boundaries. So we know when are people in work mode and when are they not? I don't think most people are going back to, I mean, if you ask most people, would you go back to the office five days a week for eight hours a day? Most people

will say, no, not everyone. You know, there's some people that are like, I please, I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old. I would love to go back to the office once we can get childcare or something like that. But most people, I think, found the time to build a better version of their work and life. And I don't see them willingly going back to that. So I think not only from a safety perspective, we'll return to the office, be a hybrid thing. I think most people are going to want to think that way. We're talking about sort of the 3-2-2 workplace. We're three days on, two days virtual, two days remote. For other people, it might be even less. And when you look at the engagement data of employee engagement surveys

from places like Gallup, the three two week, that's actually the one that engages people the most. Even BC, even before COVID, that was the one that engages the most. So I think we're going to see a lot more people in that environment permanently. And I'm all for it, actually. I love the idea that commutes don't become a drudgery because you're going to see your friends, your teammates, the people you don't see every day. So it's not routine anymore, right? It's not like the office or office space. It's something that you went in there for a specific meeting, a gathering, something that was fun. And now you're going back home to do work. I think that actually makes the experience of going to the

office more enjoyable too. Lots of companies keep talking about a return to normal, but is normal really something we want to go back to? So far, we've heard a lot of ways from Dave that we can learn from the not normal, from the dramatic shifts of this past year and keep the elements that actually help us to improve work conditions. So how do companies not just mindlessly return to broken systems? And instead, how can they turn towards change and accept new ideas that challenge old norms?

It turns out that a lot of even great ideas get rejected. Here is Dave talking about why that is in a talk from 2013. So why do great ideas get rejected? Well, for an idea to be great, for it to be innovative, for it to be creative, it has to satisfy two qualities. It has to be new and it has to be useful. And it turns out we have a terrible time reconciling these two things. When an idea is new, it's unknown. It threatens the status quo of the old, and it's the old that we use to judge whether or not something's useful. So when we attempt to judge a new idea based on the paradigm of the old idea, we end up not seeing the potential in the new idea. So we have a difficult time

reconciling the new and the useful, but we need to reconcile the new and the useful. We live in a world marked by uncertainty. We face complex challenges that need new and innovative solutions. We have conversations going on across the globe about creative and innovative ideas. In education, we want to know how do we keep schools from killing the creativity of our students? How do we raise up a generation of more innovative students? In business, we ask the exact same questions. We ask, how can we make our team create innovative

ideas that build a sustainable competitive advantage? But perhaps, perhaps we don't need more great ideas. Perhaps we just need to get better at recognizing the great ideas that are being presented to us. When we come back from this short break, Dave is going to tell us how companies and employees can embrace change, what to do if you're worried about your personal job security or professional growth, and so much more. Stick with us. And we are back. I know that you've written a lot about this and talked a lot about this in your work of that you think people and organizations need to kind of run towards change and embrace change. And we are in a serious, profound change at this moment. And you've talked a lot about this already in this interview. But I wonder, what are the

biggest areas of change that you think business leaders and employees should be paying attention to right now? So obviously, what your employees are going to want in terms of work-life integration is a huge one that's going to help you attract and retain talent. But something I was pointing out a number of years ago that I think has become more true is that a lot of savvy organizations found that the best way they could leverage their people's full knowledge, skills, and abilities was not to rely on the traditional sort of org chart, meaning the building block of an org chart is usually the job or the person, the title, the box is always a person that we need filled. And in reality, a lot of work now is done on a

project by project basis, even if you're an employee, right? So, you know, for your life, project by project and my life, project by project doesn't, that's what we've been doing for a number of years. But more and more organizations are thinking that way. And when you do that, you define team a little bit differently because the team are the people that are working on that project, not necessarily the people that all have the same boss, which is the way we used to think about team forever. So that shift was already underway. In fact, this is the case with most things about COVID in relation to work and a lot of other stuff. All it was was an accelerant towards a lot of trends that were already underway. In fact, this is the case with most things about COVID in relation to work

and a lot of other stuff. All it was was an accelerant towards a lot of trends that were already happening. So the shift from defining our organization, our org chart as a person, or the building block of it being a person versus being a project has already changed. The interesting thing now is there's no reason that those teams that we assemble on a per project basis have to be co-located. They can be from all over the world. So we're going to see a pretty big rise in that. And we're going to see a pretty big rise in teams being some employees, some contractors, some consultants, kind of a mix of people who actually have various different employment relationships with that actual organization all working together. And again, in your life and in

my work life, this isn't anything new, but this is new for a lot of people whose only definition of team was always the other six people that answer to my boss. So yeah, that's why I've started to use the term work from anywhere, not work from home or work from the office. I think that's where we're headed,

whether that's 3-2-2 or whether that's, hey, it's 3.30 and you got everything done, so it's totally acceptable to cut out. I mean, it does come with drawbacks, but for the most part, that flexibility piece, that ability to build a life that works better for you is a huge benefit. And again, a lot of implications here, not only for how we ask people to be at the office, what temperature we keep the office, but even things like our vacation policies. Do you even have people clock in and clock out and pay attention? A lot of managers,

especially those sort of micromanagers we all love to hate, a lot of them defined presence as productivity and moving to a world where everyone has to focus on objectives instead of on where you just hear from eight to five, like your writer's room example. That's going to be a big mental shift for a lot of people. And I'm not necessarily looking forward to helping everybody through that shift, but I'm looking forward to what's on the other end of that, which is a workplace that has more of those benefits.

So kind of in a different direction, but something else that I know you have thought about and written about, this is a year and we continue to be in an economic situation where so many people are losing their jobs. And, you know, a lot of us now are very aware that even if we haven't lost work, that we're at risk of losing work, that it's much more present than it used to be. So what are some important steps that people should take if they have lost their job? I think one of the big things here is thinking about the existing network that you have and how in this move to project to project work, to work from anywhere, how you have a lot

more opportunities than you think, right? I mean, the big thing for a lot of people, especially mid-career people and dual income households, mobility is a big issue, right? So I might have been laid off from a job in Cleveland and now I can't leave because my wife still has a great job or because we have this mortgage and it would take forever to sell the house and I need money now, et cetera. And so when you tell somebody like that, oh, well, you lost your job. The first step is to start networking, building connections, et cetera. A lot of people still think, well, I need to do it in my city. Well, no, you don't, right? Because we're moving to this environment where more and more of these jobs are going to be worked from

anywhere. So it's a whole lot broader reach than I think most people do. You can think back to former colleagues that might have moved on and seek to reconnect with them. You can look at all of those different opportunities. But that's the first thing that I would do is sort of draw that list of people you need to be reconnecting with. And candidly, this is something I encourage people to do before you run into these scenarios, to build a system where you're regularly reaching back out to what in the research literature are called your weak ties or your dormant ties, so that when you need something from them or when they need something from you, it's just another in a series of conversations that you have on a semi-regular basis. But that's sort of like the

best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. Second best time is today. We need work now. So I think that's the best way to find those opportunities. The other thing I would tell you is we're moving to that world, like I described, where not everybody's going to be an employee. So one of the things we might want to think about is could I stitch together two or three different contract jobs that meet that full-time thing? And obviously there's a million caveats here around insurance and all sorts of other stuff. But if it's something that's open to you, maybe you don't need that job. Maybe you can work out of your basement like me or like you and stitching together multiple different projects. But either of those opportunities start with your network, your existing connections, people that you worked with, people that you knew

that maybe you've been discounting them because they're somewhere else. It doesn't matter anymore. We're in that work from anywhere world. So it's about your weak and dormant ties from anywhere. How can remote employees advocate better for themselves, whether it's like communicating things that you're struggling with or trying to get better compensation or even just like celebrating big achievements? How do you do that in a remote environment where it's sometimes hard to kind of feel like things are being witnessed, whether they're good or bad?

Yeah, I mean, you do to some extent have to toot your own horn a bit more, but I feel like that's been true in an office life as well. The big thing I encourage both team leaders and then individuals on a team to do is to keep a folder, like a little subfolder in your inbox. And you can call it win or you can call it stories.

You can call it whatever you want. But when those good moments come in, capture them and collect them, drag them into that folder, right? Because believe it or not, you probably get a bit more praise and a bit more examples of you doing a good job than you remember.

It's just, you read them, you type back and go, oh, thank you so much. And then you delete them, right? And whether you're trying to build a case for why you need to raise or advocate for a new project or even just kind of you're feeling bummed at the end of a Friday and you just need something to scroll back through and remember that people like your work and think you're important, having those already captured in the moment can be huge. So that would be my first big piece of advice. The second piece of advice would be to, in the short term, try and increase the frequency you're talking to your

direct supervisor. You can scale it back down later, but I think most of us relied on little casual serendipitous conversations to do a lot of the feedback, a lot of the, hey boss, remember I'm looking for this or what developmental opportunities do you have for this? Because this is my career path. Like a lot of what we would in HR terminology, call a check-in or a feedback session, et cetera, happen accidentally. And that doesn't happen anymore. And so taking the time to schedule those little chats or finding a rhythm to have those in email, I think we need to crank up the frequency on that in the short term. And then gradually you can dial it back to figure out something that works for you. But everybody on the team, if you're listening to this and you're in leadership, everybody

on your team is going to have a different frequency of that. So it can't just be I check in with everyone once a week. Some people want twice. Some people only need biweekly, which actually means twice and every other week, which is probably impossible to know. We need feedback on what biweekly means. Exactly. Exactly.

But anyway, you need to kind of develop that rhythm and you need to do that individually if your boss isn't doing that, if your manager's not doing that. And the only way you know is by turning up the frequency first and then scaling back as you can. So those would be my two big things, right?

Find a way to capture the wins you're having now because they will be useful to you for a long time. And then find a way to increase the number of times you're having synchronous face-to-digital face. That's actually optional. It could be audio too. But real-time conversations with your immediate supervisor, find a way to have them a bit more often because when we all went virtual, you probably lost 50 or more percent of the interactions you had with your direct supervisor because they were accidental or organic or serendipitous. And we need to build that time back. Yeah, I think I think building

that time back and thinking consciously about how to do that is it's such good advice because just, you know, the other day I was in a Zoom meeting with someone and a person who they had invited to a future Zoom meeting. I guess it was the same Zoom room, but that person showed up a little early. And so there was a person, a third person got into our Zoom and I was like, I haven't run into anyone in months. This is unbelievable, an unexpected run in. But that used to be such a normal thing that you would be leaving an office and someone else would come in and you'd get to chat a little bit. And so thinking about how you can create those kinds of moments with your bosses or with coworkers, it just feels so natural, even though it feels a little forced to have to make them happen.

Yeah. I mean, one of the, you bring up a great tactic that one of the most common themes I saw from really savvy remote leaders was that idea. They would either open the all hands meeting, the zoom call five or 10 minutes early, and just everybody knew they were there or they would leave it open. Since you've had that experience of working remote for a really long time. And I'm thinking about how you said before, like, you know, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. What are the things that we should be doing now? Regular people who are thinking that at some point they're going to go back to a hybrid

or to an in-person office. What should we be doing now to make sure that that transition is successful or that we're successful in the future, knowing that we do have this moment of pre-planning or we have a little bit of advance notice at this moment? So I would say there's probably two things you need to do because there's the political aspect of negotiating for more time away from the office. If you feel like they're going to want to go back to the Monday through Friday, nine to five. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're in charge of an office like that, don't ask that because it's not gonna go well.

If you try and get people to all come back to 40 hours a week in the same place with the same crappy lighting, it's not gonna go well. But the thing that we probably need to be doing now is like I said, documenting those wins, documenting the examples of the way that the environment you have built for yourself now works better than what they're asking you to go back to and then

negotiate from there into how many days that is. On the flip side of that, the thing that you really probably need to be doing now if working from home or working from really anywhere is going to be a part of your future is figuring out where you are most productive. I mean, for right now, because of a global pandemic, work from anywhere means work from home. And that's what a lot of people have been referring to it as. But it could also mean that I need to get a membership at a co-working space or that I need to get the staff at the library to really know and love me because I'm going to be there every Tuesday afternoon. of behavior. Now's the time to be testing that and figuring it out so that when we move back to what is probably going to be a hybrid, it still feels like you're just as productive in either environment. And that'll help you make the case for why you need to be in both environments. A lot of people feel like one of the hardest things to accomplish remotely is creativity and those kind of creative collaborative projects. I wonder if you

agree with that or disagree with that. I do actually, I agree with it. I think there's two reasons for that. One is a technological issue. It still amazes me how easily we can have video calls with people all over the world at a moment's notice. What goes on in a brainstorming session in an office? We're not there yet technologically. But the other reason I think it's difficult is that a lot of people, especially in a corporate world, but really any large organization, equate creativity and problem solving with just that part, right? Like just the brainstorming coming up with ideas. So we go, oh, we've got a problem. Well, let's all meet at noon to talk about it. Somebody grabs a whiteboard marker and suddenly we're throwing solutions

up there. And that's what we, we never actually took the time to diagnose the problem, right. To understand the constraints of the problem and who's affected and all of those sort of things that happen before we generate ideas. And then, and then our method for testing and selecting ideas is usually like talking about it until there's consensus around one, circling it and trying it. Right. But if we could get to the point where, you know, for a team that's working virtually, problem solving or creativity is not really one meeting. It's probably two or three, right? Because it's a meeting to discuss the problem. There's going to be different people on that meeting, a meeting to generate solutions and a meeting then to make a decision. And each of those are very different meetings. Zoom fatigue

is a real thing. So we don't want to try and cram all of those into like a day long session. And the attendee list is probably going to change. So if we do that, we can get back to a little bit more of what could happen in a co-located environment. But really, that's the biggest thing I would say, whether you're co-located or whether you're fully virtual, is there's a whole process to it. It's not just about the one meeting where we try and be creative. And if you catch that, you there's a whole process to it. It's not just about the one meeting where we try and be creative.

And if you catch that, you'll do a whole lot better. I do think, you know, five or 10 years from now, there'll be technologies that make the magic of a brainstorming or an ideation session a little bit easier virtual. But in the meantime, follow the process and you'll still be better off. And what's one way that you personally right now

are working on being a better human? I'm really trying to listen more, especially in virtual conversations. I think we're pretty similar. I'm very extroverted. I'm very loud. You can probably tell that just from listening to this. And a lot of the cues that I would rely on in an in-person world, I've noticed in the last nine months, I'm not as good at noticing on a Zoom call. Some of that's technological. Some of that is that feeling like the camera goes on, you got the mic in your face and you feel like you're supposed to perform, right? And so I've been trying to do that less. I've been trying to, I keep myself on mute even when I'm not supposed

to, just so that if I accidentally talk over someone, they don't notice. I'm trying to do little things like that because people are so fascinating. And that's what I'm lucky enough to get to do as a writer, is write the stories of other people and how they do their best work, but also how that can help you. And if you talk too much, you don't get to listen and realize how fascinating they truly are and learn those stories. So that's the thing I've been deliberately working on in a virtual context, especially. Well, David Berkus, thank you so much. This was amazing. This was a great conversation.

Oh, thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human. That is our show for today. Thank you to our guest, David Berkus. I am your host, Chris Duffy. This show was produced by Abimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo,

Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and Karen Newman at TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions. We will be back next week as we keep trying to figure out how to be a better human. See you then. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA.