Start With A Win - How to Lead From Anywhere with David Burkus

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

This episode of Start With A Win features David Burkus, a keynote speaker, organizational psychologist, and one of the world’s leading business thinkers. And his forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach innovation, collaboration, and productivity. His most recent work, Leading From Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams, has helped leaders learn how to best adapt to the new world of remote work.Adam and David begin the conversation by reflecting on the events of the last 18 months when COVID-19 sent nearly 50 percent of the American workforce to work from home. David talks about studying organizations that employed alternative workplace practices prior to the pandemic and how he predicts that those practices may now become less of an anomaly and more of the norm. And with that shift, leaders have to start learning now how best to manage remote teams and become intentional about fostering connection, productivity and good communication.David believes that the extremes of making policy decisions around remote work for the organization as a whole—or having no structure around it at all—could both be disastrous for all involved. Instead, organizations should provide guidance but let decisions be made for what that looks like on a team level.Adam and David also discuss the importance of company culture and how that spans far beyond pizza parties and team outings. It spans from core values of the organization to guidelines for communications to how you maintain a sense of connection in a remote environment, which takes intentionality. If you’re not intentional about your culture, it falls apart. Organizations that are renowned for their culture have been very intentional about building culture.They wrap up the conversation by discussing “The Great Resignation” and why so many companies have experienced larger than normal numbers of employees leaving their positions and how best to handle these transitions as leaders.Episode Links:https://davidburkus.comhttps://www.amazon.com/Leading-Anywhere-Essential-Managing-Remote/dp/0358533279https://twitter.com/davidburkus?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthorhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/https://www.ted.com/speakers/david_burkusOrder your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.startwithawin.com/bookConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from Denver, Colorado, home of Remax World Headquarters, it's Adam Conto, CEO of Remax with Start With a Win. Was that like the air robot dance? Yeah, it was like the air robot slash shoulder popping. Like, you know, if I was an MMA, I could be like knocking fools out my shoulders. Whoa. With the robot moves in the ring crazy as an avid mma devotee i can tell you that has only ever happened once in the case okay i don't know that you would be the one that would be able to

pull that one off okay all right all right i got it. This is his dream, David. I mean, it's, you know, let's, I mean, Mark is, he's got that on his dream board to do the robot and the MMA ring. Yeah, that's right. And knock somebody out with my shoulder. So, all right. So, Mark, we're going to dive into this. Oh, we got, we got my buddy David on the podcast today, which is great. Well, can I introduce him? Please do. Tell the world who he is and why they should continue to listen to this podcast. This is an exciting show because, I mean, we're going to have a lot of fun talking.

We've got David Berkus on today, keynote speaker, organizational psychologist, really one of the world's leading business thinkers. That right there says a lot. David's forward-thinking ideas and best-selling books are changing how companies approach innovation, collaboration, and productivity. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in all the big media outlets like Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USA Today. I mean, if you can think of it, he's probably been on there. And David is also a former associate professor of leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University. So David's actually been ranked as one of the world's top

business thought leaders by Thinker 50. So David, glad to have you on the show. Great to see you today. Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. You know, you're about to say, if you can think of it, I've been on it. I have not been on start with a win. So we're, we're checking that box today. There you go. I'm, you know, and I'm glad we are. It's, you know, I try to rank myself up there with the wall street journal and the Harvard business review and things like that. Right. Well, honestly, these days, I mean, we live, we live in a world where Joe Rogan has a higher followership than any of those publications. So, you know, you're probably not that far off. Yeah. I think people are switching over to, you know, what's Joe saying

about the country or the president or what? I mean, I guess whether or not you want to know what he says or some people, but yeah, that guy's got some huge influence. Huge. But it shows you the media changes too, right? Like people want to know what Adam has to say too. So that's why we're here. Well, thank you, David. That's very kind of you to say.

So, hey, let's dig into things here. I think it's safe to say that over the past, call it year and a half or so, things have been changing a little bit, right? With work, working remotely, hybrid structure, things like that. All that's kind of a new workplace norm. And being the organizational psychologist that you are, I mean, there's a lot going on in your world that you are consulting a lot of businesses on. So how do you think this workplace structure will continue to

evolve? Yeah. A year and a half seems fair, right? I stopped counting, to be honest with you, right? It was 15 days to slow the spread, then 30, then 60. We got to 365. I was like, I'm done. I'm not counting anymore. But you're right. We're probably there. You know, the interesting thing, so I come at this, I've been studying organizations that run things a little bit differently, teams and whole companies that are fully distributed or just have alternative workplace practices. Before the pandemic, my primary thing that I tried to do was sort out, were these fads or did these represent kind of the future of work and where we're headed? And when you look at remote work specifically, it was sort of always a two steps forward, one step back relationship between work and remote

work. You would see a company announce it, then you'd see a different one scale back, right? So there was always this. We had maybe in the United States, maybe about six to 10% of the workforce saying they've worked primarily remotely. And then of course, on March 15th, give or take a day, it switched to, the best estimates I saw were close to 45% of the American workforce working remotely. So basically everyone other than essential workers. It wasn't a big transition for me. I'm coming at you from the room. I've been working from home for the last decade, right? So, but when I had to figure out how to do that with kids, that was a big transition. But for a lot of people, I mean, this was brand new and we had some growing pains.

We had some, so a whole lot of burnout, but gradually people started to rebuild a work schedule and a life that really worked for them. And I think that's where we are now. You're seeing a lot of people report. They don't want to come back to the office or they don't want to come back to the office all of the time. And right now is actually a really bad time to be looking for data on this because you have uncertainty around whether or not your kids are going to be in school. You have uncertainty around the Delta variant, you know,

whether you got vaccinated or not. You're like, what does that mean for the next couple of months in the return to the office? So I actually have been going back to some of the data pre-pandemic. And the one I find most interesting is there was a Gallup State of the Workplace survey in February 2020. So COVID was around, but it wasn't really in the United States. And what they found was that the most engaged employees reported being out of the office two to three days per week. So if I had to make a guess, like when life settles down, when we're not doing this out of fear of a virus, when our kids are back in school, if we have school-age kids, I would guess that's where most workplaces are going to go to. A level of flexibility proven by the pandemic that we can sustain, but a level of flexibility that allows for maybe two to three days a week. Now, personally, I think that means

that everybody should be learning the lessons of managing a remote team now because your team is going to be always semi-remote. But I know there's a lot of people who are going to try and skew that number and try and get everybody, the Jamie Diamonds of the world, who are going to try and get everybody back to five hours or five days a week, eight hours a day. And I have really bad news for them based on the data that we're seeing. That's not a good, that's not going to work all that well. We already see, I mean, remember, top talent needs companies less than companies need top talent. And we're already seeing the ones that want flexibility and don't have it making that migration. So that would be where I would like the peg that I would hang my hat on, two to three days per week flexibility,

which means most teams are going to be acting remote to at least some of their team members much more often than before the pandemic. Some great points there. I want to unpack a little bit of that. You talked about, you know, a lot of people want that flexibility. We've essentially achieved that in our workforce. We have 600, somewhere between 600 and 700 employees amongst all of our different companies around North America. And that's essentially what we heard from those employees was, you know what, I want to go to the office a few days a week, but I want to pick how that fits in my life. You know, be it with, you know, you mentioned having kids. I just, my kids are all off at college. So I'm sitting here going,

this is so nice and quiet. But you know is people are dealing with the comings and goings of, oh, we're locked down this week. Or it's a stay-at-home week because our children have a headache or they don't feel good. Now you just can't boot them out the door and say, suck it up and go to school. I mean, you're kind of socially obligated to keep them home if they don't feel well now. So, um, let's be fair. You were always were before, but you're right. There were a lot of those parents who didn't do it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, the kids running around with the, you know, the nose dripping and they're coughing and hacking and you can tell that they're like 112 degrees, you know, just things like that. But that's the way we grew up is your parents were like, if you can walk, you can go to school. So, you know, it was that way.

But now everybody's different. Everybody's, I mean, we're, and we have to have this obligation. You know, I don't want my kids killing the teacher with COVID or something like that. You mentioned the supervisor in this whole situation, because this is like the ultimate flexibility. No supervisor wants to wake up in the morning and have their employees start going, hey, I can't come in today because you've got like your life starts falling apart as a supervisor. How do I run this business? So you've got these, these organizational challenges because of the, not just having remote employees, but having, you know, this unknown factor of, are they going to be remote? Are they not going to be remote?

If they're at the office, should I be at the office or how should all this stuff work? How do leaders improve themselves, you know, to obviously build this trust, have the transparency with their employees, have the communication with their employees, which thank God that's coming back. But, you know, how do we deal with that as leaders? Yeah. So a couple of things to think about first, right, which is on the policy level, this is where I think pushing the decision around how flexible down to the team level is probably the best. Right. If you just say, OK, our our our remote work, our flexible work policy is you can spend two days working remotely per week. You tell your boss what they are. That's a recipe for disaster. Right. At the same level, just letting people say, hey, you decide what we have no percentage of time.

Right. Because what you end up with is either one of two things. You'll either end up with all of the middle managers and senior leaders being at the office all of the time, which sends the message that if you want to be promoted, you're at the office all of the time. And two years from now, we're right back to where we were, right? Or you take it really, really seriously, but there's no communication. I think the best thing to do is from a corporate level, set some guide rails based on our surveys, based on what we think is appropriate. Here's like the guide rails, no more than three days a week or no more than two days a week. But on a team level, you should decide because some teams are going to want to do, okay, let's do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or let's do Monday through Wednesday, Thursday,

Fridays work from home, or let's do hours, right? Some teams are going to want to say, let's come to the office from 10 to 2, but then we don't care if you stay later or show up earlier. We just know if we need to call a meeting, we do it from 10 to 2. That tends to work way better on the team level for most organizations than it does organization-wide, right? So that's number one. I think we're doing a great job. A lot of organizations, large and small, are doing a great job surveying their people and listening to their people. But a top-down decision after you get all that data is probably not going to work. Right now, from what we've heard, I think pushing it down to that team level, teaching them how to do that is the best thing. And then the other element as an individual team leader, how do you do that? You mentioned how do you build trust,

communication, et cetera. This is where culture really comes into play. And I think the thing that's been vividly apparent over the last 18 months has been that if you're not intentional about your culture, it breaks apart. For most organizations, culture is like, oh, it's the way we do things around here. And it was just totally accidental, right? But I've actually never worked with an organization, never studied an organization or written about an organization that is renowned for their great culture, where it wasn't an intentional decision. In fact, most of them have the same elements. They use different terms and different core values, but they have those sort of same fundamental elements. And that's where it's going to take. So culture means everything large and small from what are our core values, et cetera, to what are the guidelines for our communication

that are going to determine how do we communicate? We're in the office, out of the office, et cetera. And how do we keep that sense of connection, especially if we're allowing flexibility between how much time people are remote. If we end up leading a team where some people are at the office all of the time and some people are barely there, then being intentional about making touch points for both scenarios is going to matter. We can't just go back to a world where you rely on, oh, our in-person interactions, the cake in the break room every birthday is our company culture. We can't rely on that. I mean, it didn't work before, but it definitely doesn't work now. Yeah, that's, I mean, some great points there. And I mean, speaking of culture, I was consulting for an organization recently and I asked him, I said, so what do your employee surveys say? And what is the sentiment

you're hearing from your employees? And they kind of looked at me like I was crazy, like, what? You did a survey during COVID with your employees? Yeah. I mean, we do a lot of surveys with our employees. We do at least one a year, and we also do pulse surveys, and we want to figure things out. And then we also communicate back what those results are, and we're transparent about those. But I mean, the reality is a lot of people kind of hide from that and they have to guess what that culture is in their organization. What advice do you have for organizations to stop guessing and really know what that looks like? Yeah. So, so do the surveys first of all, right. And more importantly, you said something I really want to give you like a virtual high

five for, which is we share the results of them, right? Because nothing's worse than doing this. Like it's better. I honestly believe it's better to not do the surveys than it is to take one and then not share any of what you learned with your people. Because the message you're sending is like, yeah, we didn't actually care, right? It's just that it's like the results from Qualtrics are on a file and someone at HR's computer and that's all we're ever going to see. You have to share the results. So I would put it this way. So I did a deep dive early on as the pandemic started, went back to a lot of the researchers that I've worked with or talked to who study remote work, went back to a lot of the companies I profiled. And I really kind of identified, I tried to come up with like a common terminology, right, because everybody uses different terms.

And I'm fine with that. Use whatever terms resonate with your people. But fundamentally, remote and hybrid teams that have strong company cultures are marked by really three things. They're marked by a sense of shared understanding, shared identity and psychological safety. I'll give you like the two sentence definition of each.

But shared understanding is how much people on a team understand roles and responsibilities, knowledge, skills, so the clarity piece, but also the soft stuff. They know what a request for help from other members of the team looks like and what is just a venting session, right? They know how to give feedback in a way that's productive and tasks focused and not have it be personal because they know that of the other people on the team, right? In a remote situation, they know each other's calendars, right? They know when people are working, when there's Zoom schooling, when they're doing whatever, right? I mean, it boggles my mind how many teams are working 18 months later in a pandemic and there is no like shared

calendar, not to the level that you should be able to claim a meeting time, but you just need to know when your people are actually responsive and when they're not responsive. Otherwise, you might end up getting fed up because you sent an email and got no response four hours later. In reality, you sent it during their block of non-responsive time. So that's shared understanding. Shared identity is how much I feel like I'd actually draw my identity from the team, feel like a member of the team. I'm really worried about this in 2021 and beyond because I is, I think there's a tenant, there's going to be a tendency to have kind of the co-locateds, the people who come back

to the office a lot, feel like one team and the remoters, the hybrid feel sort of like outsiders. So how do we bring people back in to make sure everybody feels like a member of the team? Everybody knows they're making a contribution, et cetera. Um, and then psychological safety actually has nothing to do with remote specifically. That's a fundamental element of any thriving team is do people feel safe to take risks, to express themselves, most importantly, to speak up. This is maybe specific to remote because it's a whole lot harder to speak up and disagree with your team when there's emails, reply alls flying and everybody's got consensus and you're the one person that's like, well, hang on, this might not actually be a good idea.

Right. And history, at least in organizations, business history is full of examples like that. There's one person who saw things differently, didn't feel free to speak up. And we ended up launching the space shuttle, even though the O-rings don't perform under 32 degrees. Right. We end up with all sorts. So we want to be cultivating that and make sure that we're really conscious as leaders,

especially when we're doing virtual meetings or in asynchronous communication, that we're actively calling out for people who disagree with us, because those are not mediums compared to in-person meetings or being able to pull somebody to the side in the hallway. These are not mediums that facilitate dissent to the level that they should. So we want to make sure that we're actively calling for that so people feel safe to actually express themselves. Great points. Thanks, David. I want to change channels a little bit here to a big challenge we're all facing. I mean, obviously that last one was a big challenge, but this is one that we all recognize this because no matter where you go, this is impacting you in some way, shape, or form. And that is this period of overwhelming

amount of people, the overwhelming amount of people who are quitting their jobs, like the great resignation is what it's kind of called right now. You know, you go to a restaurant or, you know, I was talking to a guy who builds homes today and he's like, oh my gosh, people just quit left and right. And I spend more time hiring than I do actually building homes now, things of that nature. I mean, what's going on here and what can organizations do to combat this as opposed to just sitting back and, you know, watching their organization implode because they have nobody to work in it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so this one really depends on this, some local circumstances, but also the organization, right? I mean, fundamentally, I think there's three things

that are really driving this, right? One is that a lot of organizations still haven't adapted to pay levels in an environment. I'll just say it in an environment where unemployment benefits are massively, you know, inflated, right? And we do see that difference. That data is sort of undeniable. That doesn't mean that's not your option, but it is there. The bigger things, though, is that I think part of the great resignation, and we see this from the survey data, is that it's a pent-up series of resignations. In other words, the pandemic started, and we laid off 20% to 30% of the work.

You remember the unemployment just skyrocketed. Right. So if you were lucky enough to still have a job, you hung on to it long after you burned out, long after you decided you wanted to take a different approach, do something totally different with your life. You hung on because a paycheck was a paycheck during a pandemic, right? And now, I mean, I know Delta variant kind of threw a wrench in these works, but now it feels like we're headed where future months of the economy, future year of the economy is gonna be better than what we just experienced. So it's a lot safer to take that risk, actually make that leap, start looking for other work. And so really there's kind of that backlog

of natural turnover that wasn't happening for like 18 months, it is now. And then the last thing is really a lot of people rethinking their lives, whether that's how much flexibility they want in the job compared to what their company is offering. We talked about that earlier. Or whether people just really want to do sort of more meaningful work. I do this. I wear this. For those of you watching on YouTube, and you should, I try and wear this shirt often to remind leaders. People don't work for you. They work for themselves. They work for their own sense of purpose.

People work with you, they work alongside you toward goals, but they don't work for you. They can leave anytime they want. And what a lot of people are finding is that, okay, now's also a good time to go, you know what, I want more meaningful work. I've been treading water on this for a while. The COVID pandemic,

maybe it made me realize my own sense of mortality. Maybe it made me appreciate the friends and family that are around with me. But for some reason, I want some more meaning, some more purpose that I'm getting from the job now. So that's really what's driving it. What can you do about that? Well, it depends on which of those ones is really what your organization is facing.

I think the first thing, I don't know what step two is for a lot of organizations. Step one is listening. We already talked about the surveys. We already talked about listening to the people who are coming back, listening to the people who are leaving, trying to figure out sort of why. And then I think it's never a bad time to re-energize people with the conversations about the purpose, the importance of the work that we do, who's helped by the work that we do, et cetera. And now's a great time to set in place those flexibility pieces. What is our flexible work or remote work policy

going to be moving forward based on the input of the people that we presumably want to keep because they're going to be the ones whose voices matter the most? It sounds like you're talking about leadership here. Yeah, right? Jeez, shocking. It's like it almost all comes down to that. It's weird. Yeah, we're not managing a job. we're leading people. And I mean, leaders listen and they care and there's trust and respect and communication and clarity and things like that. I mean, it's just crazy. But speaking of leadership, David, your most recent book, Leading From Anywhere, The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams. Sounds like a need for leadership right there. So, you know,

tell us about this, what, you know, a flyover, a couple of key points that are in there that people can look forward to when they pick up the book. Yeah. So this one was really designed to be that sort of survival guide for the last 18 months and also, you know, the next 18 to two years to, to be honest, the future of work, which is working from anywhere. That's why leaders are going to have to lead from anywhere. It's structured as kind of a choose your own dilemma book. Right. So there's everything in there from how do you hire and onboard people to how do you run the actual virtual meetings, what the saying goodbye look like, et cetera. So there's all sorts of stuff we could get into in that.

I'll boil it down to one just for those of you that are like me, riddled with ADHD, we get super bored. And that one is that we saw the primary difference between leaders and managers, I think over the last 18 months is that managers had in their mind that presence equaled productivity. For lack of a better option, I can see you, therefore I know you're working. And that was destroyed, right? When the great work from home experiment, the leaders who led from a place of productivity is separate from presence, I trust you to do your work. And I see my job as figuring out what things are blocking you from making progress in the tasks that you've been assigned. And my job is to help you remove them. They honestly manage this transition pretty well. It's the ones that really struggle with that.

My job is to monitor the work that you're doing to make sure that you're doing what we assign to you. And the easiest way to do that is to make sure you're here all of the time. Those are the ones pushing for, you know, let's jump on Zoom right at 8 a.m. and let's circle back at 4 p.m. and check in with each other or send me an email every day or let's install spy software on your computer so that I can see, you know, what you're doing and whatever. Presence never actually, well, I guess in a factory situation, you could probably rely on presence equaling productivity, but it never really did. And if you're still operating from that mindset, to be honest with

you, this book has nothing to help you, right? But if you recognize that it doesn't, right? And that you need to trust your people to do their work and that your job is to support them, then there's a lot in there that we could go into about how you run those meetings, how you actually bring people on board, how you structure their communication, because your job, especially in a remote work environment, is to figure out what's blocking your people from doing their best work and work to remove it for them so that you're helping them do their work, right? That's the second part of the piece. They don't work with you. People work or people don't work for you. They work with you. Your job is to make sure they do their best work ever. Great points. Thank you. For all of our listeners, if you haven't checked it out, check it out. Leading from

Anywhere, The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams. Pretty relevant right now and will be into the future, obviously. So I encourage you to look that up. David, I have a question that we ask all of our guests on the show, and I'm sure you have a great answer to this. How do you start your day with a win? Yeah. So today was actually the first day of how we start our day with a win? Yeah, so today was actually the first day of how we start our day with a win in my house for 50% of the time. So we have a morning PT session for me and my boys whenever it's a school day, right?

My boys wake up way too early and I don't want them to bug me. So we let them have iPads in the morning, which some people say you're not supposed to, but their iPads automatically lock at a time and they don't unlock until they're dressed, have eaten breakfast, and they do their 10, 20, 30, which is 10 pushups, 20 sit-ups, 30 air squats every single morning. And we do it for that exact reason. We do it to start with a little micro win. Yeah, it gets the blood pumping, you

get a little bit of exercise, et cetera, but it's much more about like, boom, checked that off, right? I don't really like making my bed. So I never really agreed with Admiral William McRaven and that whole thing, but I'll do 10, 20, 30, pretty much any day to know, boom, I've checked it off. And if nothing else happens today, I got a little mini win right there. I love it.

I'm a big fan of the exercise first thing in the morning. I do make my bed by the way, David. But so, and yeah, David Berkus, author, speaker, influencer, thought leader. I mean, just organizational expert. Thank you for being on Start With A Win. We appreciate all that you do to help our workplaces be a better place for all. Everyone, thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And thank you for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question or tell us your Start With A Win story, give us a call, leave us a message at 888-581-4430. So go to startwithawin.com and, you know, until next time, start with a win.