The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Long-Distance Leader, Second Edition: Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote and Hybrid Leadership (The Long-Distance Worklife Series) by Kevin Eikenberry, Wayne Turmel

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

The Long-Distance Leader, Second Edition: Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote and Hybrid Leadership (The Long-Distance Worklife Series) by Kevin Eikenberry, Wayne Turmel https://amzn.to/3TweCZK The new edition of this internationally acclaimed guide to remote and hybrid leadership comes with an updated and enriched framework for the modern workplace. It introduces new principles and retains proven strategies for effective leadership across distances. When The Long-Distance Leader was first published, it was pre-pandemic and remote work was in its infancy with 30% of managers leading at a distance—now that number is well over 50%. As more organizations adopt a remote workforce, the challenges of leading at a distance become more urgent than ever. The cofounders of the Remote Leadership Institute, Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, show leaders how to guide their teams by recalling the foundational principles of leadership whether their teams are remote, hybrid, co-working, or something entirely new! The authors' "Three-O" Model refocuses leaders to think about outcomes, others, and ourselves—elements of leadership that remain unchanged, whether employees are down the hall or halfway around the world. By pairing it with the Remote Leadership Model, which emphasizes using technology as a tool and not a distraction, leaders can navigate the terrain of managing teams wherever they are. This second edition features updated exercises that ensure projects stay on track, keep productivity and morale high, and build lasting relationships, along with a new chapter on hybrid workplaces.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys having us here with you, as always. The Chris Voss Show is a family show that's been on since, what, 16 years, 2,000 episodes, Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys having us here with you as always. The Chris Voss Show is a family show that's been on since, what, 16 years, 2,000 episodes. Refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives, people. Like, how many shows do we have to do and how many years do we have to be here before you reach out to your friend and guilt and shame them into subscribing to the Chris Voss Show? Do it now or else. Go to GoodReach.com, 4ChessChrisVoss, LinkedIn.com, 4ChessChrisVoss, ChrisVoss1, OnTheTicketyTalkety, and ChrisVossFreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss, chrisvoss1, on the tickety-tockety and chrisvossfacebook.com.

You can see all the groups and pages we have over there. Today, we have an amazing set of authors on the show. They've written a lot of books, so you're going to learn a lot of stuff from them or else. I don't know what that means. It's a callback joke for the show. Their latest book has been updated for the hybrid remote workplace, and they're going to be talking about some of the different ways that you can be a better leader

and deal with some of these new times that we live in, as it were. Their newest updated version of the book, The Long Distance Leader, second edition, revised rules for remarkable remote and hybrid leadership. It's part of the long distance work-life series is coming out September 17th, 2024. You can pre-order it now. Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel are joining us on the show today. We'll be talking about their amazing books. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How are you?

We're fantastic. Or at least I am. I'm ridiculously well. Ridiculously well. I love that. I'm going to walk around and just say i am i'm ridiculously well ridiculously well i love that i'm gonna walk around just say that i'm ridiculously well and people like you gotta embrace the denial brother you gotta embrace the denial so guys give us a dot coms where can people find you on the interwebs each of you to to get to know you better kevin i can vary.com k-e-v-I-N-E-I-K-E-N-B-E-R-R-Y.com. That's our company address. Wayne is on my team.

And you can go to longdistanceworklife.com to get all the books you were just talking about. There you go. And that's also the site for our podcast with the show notes and transcripts and all of that foolishness. And LinkedIn. Give us a plug. What's the name of the podcast? The Long Distance Work Life. The Long Distance Work Life, of course. That's Wayne's and mine is the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

The Remarkable Leadership Podcast. So you guys don't do a podcast together then? We don't. Maybe you should. Do you get along that well no i'm just kidding that's actually that's actually how we met was 21 years ago god help us so you guys do get along about 20 years ago i had a podcast called the cranky middle manager show it was literally one of the first podcasts out there and And Kevin was somebody I just got as a guest and we stayed colleagues and

friends and whatever since then. So you never know what this, you never know what this is going to lead to is the thing. And it's like the old Gillette commercial, Chris, you know, I liked the, I liked the company so much.

I bought it. So after we worked together for a long time and we were collaborating for a bunch of ways. I liked the company so much I bought it. So after we worked together for a long time and we were collaborating for a bunch of ways, then I bought his company. That's awesome. Collaboration made in Wayne with technology. So guys, give us a little bit of your background. Just a quick run on your biographies, if you would. So Wayne's been in this space helping people communicate effectively remotely for a long time, 20 years. And again, that's sort of how we got connected. And among writing a bunch of books and doing a lot of training and consulting and coaching around working and leading at a distance, he's also a novelist.

You know, Kevin's been in the leadership space. He's far more of a grown-up, mature human than me. So he's pushing 30 years in this space and the author of multiple books, most notably Remarkable Leadership. And, you know, at one point I was specializing in remote and virtual communication. Kevin has always been about what we think of as traditional leadership in the workplace. And rather than invent two separate wheels, when remote work became such a hot topic, that's how we came together and merged. Yeah, you guys really predated the whole COVID remote working thing. That's what I was going to say.

It all started. I mean, when we said it started to be a hot topic, but when we first started talking about it, I'd been, I'd already had a remote team for a number of years at that point. It wasn't what it became right. When Corona was no longer a beer,

right? When Corona was no longer a beer. So give us guys, and I'll, I'll let you each throw in here, give us the 30,000 overview of what's in the new, updated, revised, second edition, The Long Distance Leader. Yeah, really, there's two parts that are new.

The first is the technology has clearly changed. The book came out in 2018. Zoom did not exist. It went from what's Zoom to a verb to a syndrome in two years. And is just a focus on hybrid leadership. There was this notion that we return to the office and some people are in and some people are out, but it's kind of back to normal. And the fact of the matter is, if you have a single team member who isn't where everybody else is, you have a remote team and you need to think and act accordingly. And that, I think, Kevin, tell me I'm wrong, are the two biggest changes to the original book. Yeah. So I'll step back and talk about the original. The big idea of the

original book is that doing leadership remotely or at a distance is different, and yet leadership is not completely new. Don't forget everything you already knew, but we have to be intentional and make adjustments to many things along the way. So in the book we talk about rules, and the first rule in edition one and edition two is think leadership first, location second. So don't forget what we already know about leadership, even though we may have to nuance it, adjust it, and change it in many ways along the way. It's definitely a book for its time. You know, I've talked at length on the leadership,

trying to inspire people, motivate people, get people juiced up over Zoom. It's a lot different than being the cheerleader in person. You know, as a CEO and motivator, you know, I'm used to being the cheerleader, going around the office, checking in with people, touching hearts and minds, making sure that they're motivated, you know, giving them the vision and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, it's really hard to do that over Zoom. And especially if you're doing like, I don't know, 10 Zoom calls a day, which some people seem to be doing now there's a lot of burnout

there's a lot of i i think over zoom and and doing remote camera work there's a little bit of a disconnection you know it's it's it's almost kind of acting or something where you know instead of being in person at an event you're it's almost like the movies that everyone's sitting in the audience looking at the screen, and there's a bit of a disconnect there, would you say? There absolutely is, and that's why I've been in this space for so long, because I started doing presentation skills. And about 18 years ago, somebody said, Wayne, this standing in front of the room and talking thing is great, but I don't do that. I don't talk to real people. I am on this new thing called WebEx and nobody was teaching people how to use this medium effectively. You know, there's a difference in projecting through a camera to being in the room with them. And even things like teaching classes

or giving talks or whatever, it's totally different because there's no energy exchange like there is when you're in the room. People are nodding and grinning and giving you the Scooby-Doo face and laughing at your silly jokes. And there's an energy flow

that goes when you're there that doesn't exist. That's absolutely true. So there are things you need to do to adjust and compensate for the new way we communicate. And most of us have never been told that. We've just been told, there's the camera, push play, get yourself off mute and go for it. It's a challenge when you say, do you want to chime in here on that? Yeah. I was thinking about on my podcast several years ago, it was a red letter day when I had Tom Peters on as a guest and Tom was famous for saying, we got to manage by wandering around. And it's exactly what you were saying, Chris, right? Doing that thing by interacting with the folks in real time, walking up and down the hall, checking in, saying hello, all that stuff.

And he said, how do you do this? He says, is it management by frequent flyer mile? I said, no, it's leadership by webcam, which means we do have to use the webcam. And we do have to get others comfortable with it. And it's so funny. In the first edition of the book, 2018, we were like trying to sell people on turning on their cameras. Right. And now a lot of people are turning them back off,

even though the technology is better, the streaming is better and all the other stuff, partly because of the fatigue that you mentioned, Chris, but part of it is because I don't think people realize, really realize the value that we get, the difference between seeing each other, even if it's not across the table versus on the phone, for example, or sending an email or a text. And so the richness that comes in the communication, we have to, as the leader, we have to model that. We have to make sure that our camera is so people can see

our face and no one is on, looks like they're in witness protection, but we need to use it as a way to connect. So we can still use it to connect. It also means, for example, I've got my laptop higher than I would want to have to type. So it's more likely that I will look in that camera lens and yet I can't look at the camera lens and see you. So I have to do that back and forth, but I've got it set up so that I have a better chance of making eye contact with you and still seeing you. I'm going to be less polite about it. One of the reasons that we get Zoom fatigue is because we are doing it wrong. We are trying to replace the in-person experience by constantly being on the camera and looking at each other. And in fact, there are times when the camera at immense value, and there are times when it doesn't. You know, if you used to be able to work on the phone,

there's a pretty good chance that the visual component is not that critical. If we're having a team meeting and it's noon here on the West Coast, nobody wants to see me eat a sandwich. It doesn't matter that my camera's on. If Kevin and I are having a coaching conversation, you want to believe we both want the camera on so that we're getting the eye contact, the body language, and that richness. But we've kind of, especially at the beginning of COVID, we just assumed that we're

going to replace any communication that we had that isn't email with webcams, and it doesn't necessarily work that well. Yeah. The phone got forgot. We forgot that the phone is actually a phone. And there's no doubt that using the phone to have communication is still can be really valuable. Thinking of we both use this word richness. It's one of the things we talk about in the book, Chris. The richest communication is one to one face to face in real time. Everything else.

Everything else drops richness, right? And so sometimes we want as much of that as we can get, a coaching conversation, a one-on-one, a lot of those kinds of things, but we don't always have to have it. And so let's get more clear about when we want to use which tools, including when we use the camera or not. And one of the things about hybrid work, what we call hybrid work, and there's a whole rabbit hole we can go down about whether it really is hybrid work or not. But what we call hybrid work is we're trying to just replicate the old office environment from the before times rather than think about if we're in a company where we have to be in the office three days a week. Why am I on Zoom calls on Friday? Unless it's with a customer, I can't get any work done in the office because there's people there and there's cake in the break room and Kevin's poking

his head like a meerkat over the cubicle to talk to me. And so that's when that work should be done there. It's not just what work gets done where, but when that makes hybrid work, hybrid work. And so if you're doing the same work that you were doing at home in the office, you're probably not being left alone to do it. And it's kind of a distraction. And then when you get home, when you should, or to another location, when you should be able to put your head down and concentrate and work when your body clock tells you, no, you're on Zoom calls all day. That is a scheduling problem. That is a strategy problem. That's not a Zoom problem. Yeah. The big picture, the big picture challenge is people say, if I worked at home and when I was working at home, I had my headphones on and I was working, and I came to the office, put my headphones on and working, why should I come to the office? You're right. You shouldn't. The work should be different on the days we're in the office than the days that we're not. We have a client who uses this phrase, although it's getting misused at the client, but I love the phrase, presence with a purpose.

Like when we're together, let's do the things that add more value when we're together. So you guys talk in the book about a concept you guys call the 3-0 model that refocuses leaders to think about outcomes. Tell us about what that means. This is Kevin's baby. This is how we think about leadership. Leadership is about reaching valuable outcomes with and through others and who we are. The third O, ourselves, makes a difference. Like how we lead, how we show up, the way we lead, whether it's virtually or in person, makes a difference, right? And so the three O's are outcomes, Chris, that people have had sort of societally around the return to work and all that stuff is really a tension between the outcomes and what others want. And so rather than

treating it like a tension, we should think about how we do that together to actually get better outcomes with and through others. And if we do it that way, we're really getting at the essence of leadership. Wayne, do you want to chime in on that? I just think that's the thing, right? Is when we talk about could people work remotely? Should they come into the office? What do we do about that? Everything starts with the outcomes you want.

What do you need to do to get the work done? What is the work? Who does what with which and to whom? What are the handoffs? Where are the choke points? If you can define that, then you can start to make some very smart decisions about when and where do people work? You were saying you need to come in and see the vision statement and the CEO can walk around and give everybody that. The big thing about why did we have to all return to the office was they said, it's the culture, right? We got to create the culture. We have to maintain the

culture. Your company has a culture. The question is, is it the one that you want it to have? Definitely. And what we've done, there's another model in the book, also three points. Kevin likes alliteration. So these are the three C's. But when people say, how do I define our culture? The cutesy HR response is always culture is this is how we do it here. But can you define the it? What is it that you do? If you look at your company, the first thing you look at is communicating. How do we communicate? How do we want to communicate? What tools are we going to use? What style of communication? Do we have a lot of meetings? Do we have asynchronous? The second one is the same as outcomes. That's collaboration. How does work get done? Who does the handoffs? When does stuff get done so that we're cranking

out great work for the customer? And then the third thing is cohesion, where you decide, how do we want to interact with each other? What kind of place do we want to be? Do we want to be highly competitive? Do we want to be collegial? Is fun at a premium? Are we allowed to have a good time? Or are we super serious? These are all decisions that get made that make up the kind of company that you have. Do companies or leaders need to sit down and have like a Zoom meeting strategy or remote working strategy, it sounds like? It sounds like your guys' instruction to people is they really need to sit down and rethink probably everything you know jobs job titles job these you know what's effective what's not can this be done remotely but also like principles of of culture on on how a zoom meeting is held when to know that it's time to throw in the towel on a meeting. You know, one of the things I do like about Zoom meetings is, and maybe I do this because

I'm a bit of a comedian and I work the audience or when you're a speaker, as you guys know, you work the audience. And so when you see people that are tuned out or you're not connecting with, it kind of, it can kind of get to you. You kind of start focusing on that person. And sometimes that's, that's kind of a, if you really study body language too, you can watch people and how they're responding to whatever vision you're selling or pitching or whatever you're trying to get everybody motivated to do.

And so I do like that from Zoom because you can be like, hey, Bob up there, he looks like he's a little disconnected and he's not really focused. Or people will do things with their faces that give away, you know, maybe, maybe talking about something and they look, they're just looking painful. Oh my God, this sounds like a real, you know, not into this. It's funny that you say that Chris, because earlier today I was leading a session for a client and there was about 200 people on a team's call, but it's the same thing, right? And I asked, I said, hey, I got a free gift for if a few people will get on their camera. So I've got some visual feedback, right? Because there's 200 of them. I don't need a 200 person Brady Bunch screen, but I do need

a little bit of feedback. So a few people were willing to come on and then I get that feedback, a little bit of that energy Wayne was talking about. And I get some of that, Chris, that you're talking about. But again, back to your earlier point, do we need to,

do we need to rethink some of this stuff? I think the keyword I would use, and we talk about in the book is the word intention. Like things that we used to do because that's how we've always done them. Or it's just what happens now must be done with more intention. Apparently I'm the rules guy today. I don't know when that happened because that's not the dynamic in our lives. That's not the real life thing.

Apparently, I'm the rules guy. We are at a stage where so much has changed. And if you don't have conversations about what tools do we use when, what are the rules for responding to an email? When do you send a text? When do you send an email? When do you get on a call? It's all over the place. And a lot of it is left to kind of habit. And we're in a situation where it's generational, for example. My 31-year-old daughter is still trying to learn that telephones transmit voice, right? She will send a text for the most important thing.

Dad wants to have a conversation, an actual honest-to-goodness conversation. We have all of these tools at our disposal. And if we aren't conscious and intentional, there's that word again, about what tools do we use when it's really easy to make bad decisions. Give you an example. Worst one I can think of. My wife was once fired by instant messenger. Yeah. By instant message. She was fired by instant messenger. I wish I was kidding about that.

Wow. Now I think most sentient human beings would have your response and go, Oh my gosh, that's awful. But from this manager's standpoint, there was no drama. She was unemployed at the end of the call. Now it says everything about the culture, and do you really want to work at a place that would do that?

Yeah. But here's an easier example. It's 4 o'clock on a Thursday afternoon. Kevin has to give Wayne some feedback, but you know what? I'm going to send him an email and talk to him in the morning. Mm-hmm. But he's, you know what, I'm going to send him an email and talk to him in the morning. Now, that's maybe not the optimum way to do it. But gosh, it's easy to do because of the technology.

Unless you're conscious of when do you use what tool for which. We have a model that we use called richness versus scope. Not our model, full disclosure. But when you are having these decisions, if you don't have a discussion about it and agree as a team, when do we use our status updates on teams so that I'm not waiting for a response that's not coming? When do I send an IM versus an email? What are the rules around? Do we have to have the cameras on? Yeah. If everybody's making that call on their own, a lot of little tensions can build up to big

problems. If you're never on camera, my level of trust with you may not be what it is with somebody else. trust with you may not be what it is with somebody else do you ever recommend holding company meetings where no one's where people aren't on camera that seems i don't know it's kind of like putting a bag over your head in a in life person there are organizations that that you know they don't they may say we prefer that you do, but not everyone does. And that would not be our recommendation. And it depends on the meeting. It does depend on a lot of things.

But if you ask the simple question about a team meeting, then I would say generally speaking, we ought to have our cameras on for a variety of reasons, most of which we've already talked about. But it depends on how many people are in the group. If you have 200 people, you're not going to see everybody anyway. You can only see so many faces on the screen at a time. And it sucks up bandwidth and everybody sits around looking at everybody else,

petting the cat and eating sandwiches instead of paying attention. You know, on a webinar, you want the speaker to be on camera. You want anybody who's speaking, if their voice goes live, their camera comes on, that's good meeting management. But does everybody have to be on the camera all the time? In that situation, probably not. Yeah. Yeah.

It can make all the difference in the world, really, when it comes down to all of it. What are some other aspects of the book maybe we haven't talked about that we need to tease out? I think one of the things that we need to talk, Wayne hinted at it a little bit ago. In fact, I was with a client in person earlier this week, and we were talking about coaching and feedback. And so we were talking about how do you do coaching when your folks are remote? And I think that I'll just say that most of the things that you might, if you're a skilled coach already, then you're most of the way there. But I think we have to think a lot more about timing and location. And are we able to be focused let's be honest you chris we

were talking this before we went live like when we're when we're at our desk rather than being in a in a room with someone else there's all these other distractions right you got other monitors you got other kinds of stuff you got the cat you know all that stuff so like we just have to when we're having important meetings when we're having important meetings, when we're having meetings where we really need to be connecting with people, we've got to get really disciplined about making sure that we're focused, that we're really present with that other person. And if we're not doing that, they're going to, they're going to be able to tell, right? They're going to be able to tell. Our example as a leader matters a lot. And just because they can't see us doesn't mean we're not, our example isn't being noticed. Yeah.

It can make all the difference in the world. And an example of, on the feedback thing is if we're together in the office and Kevin sees me walking across the room, his eyes pick me up, his brain goes, Wayne, what do I need to say to him? Oh, I need to give him X feedback, or I need to do something. And we get that. We don't get that feedback, that instantaneous unconscious feedback, when we're on Teams or Slack or whatever. And so every communication is intentional. And the way that we do that, if I'm walking across the office and Kevin gives me, you know, a finger in the air and waves, I go into receiving information mode. Okay. I get a different finger.

Different finger. Yes. Different with the finger. If I'm, if I'm heads down working and I get a ping on Teams that says, have you got a minute? There are no scarier words in the English language than, hey, have you got a minute? Even though it's a completely innocent question, it's a perfectly legitimate request for information, my brain immediately goes to, what did I do now? Why am I in trouble? I really don't have a minute, but it's Kevin. So I can't tell him that I'm busy. There's, there's drama before we even get to exchanging whatever the feedback is.

And I mean, imagine some of that drama in your head can interfere with, with, I don't know, with, with everything, with the reality of what, you know, he may just be coming over to give a pat on the back and say, hey, good job. Or you want to go to a coffee or something, you know, things like that. Yeah, exactly right. But there's so much white space to fill when we work remotely or we work somewhere differently than the person we're talking to that we, it's really easy to make assumptions about what's in that white space.

I mean, if Kevin and I have a great relationship, if he pings me and says, hey, have you got a second? I'll either say, yeah, sure. What is it? Or not really. Can we talk in 10 minutes when I finish what I'm doing? And that's great, right? If he's suspicious that I'm not working and he pings me and says, have you got a second? And I say, not really. Can we talk later? And he's already concerned that I'm not doing what I'm doing or I'm answering this message in the checkout line at target. That's a different dynamic.

Hey, let me ask you this. What are your guys' thoughts on these monitoring softwares and like on tiktok i don't you know i don't imbibe in any of it but on tiktok i'll see people have these scammy things that these like motors that move your mouse and crap because i guess their software that people install from companies now that can monitor if you're really doing your work if you're really your desk a certain amount of're really at your desk a certain amount of hours. What are you guys' thoughts on some of this monitoring, remote monitoring, I guess you'd maybe call it, sort of software and applications? You know, it kind of infers some stuff we really don't fucking trust you. No, it doesn't just kind of infer that.

It absolutely infers that. I'll say a couple things. Number one is when the pandemic started and we started, because the first version of this book was already out, so people were calling us and leaders were saying, how am I supposed to know if they're working? I'm like, you didn't know if they were working before. They said, I could see them.

I said, unless you're looking over their shoulder at the monitor, you have no idea what they were doing. The problem with all of that crap is that it's focused on the wrong thing. It's focused on activity rather than accomplishment. If people are getting their deliverables delivered on time at the right quality, if they're meeting their KPIs, if they're meeting your expectations, it doesn't matter. Yes, it absolutely sends the wrong message. And I don't care how you try to justify it to yourself as a leadership team that it's not sending that message. You're wrong. Just stop the madness. And some of this depends on whether you've asked the questions we talked

about earlier. What is the work that we do? Is it mandatory that everybody clock in and clock out at the same time? Do we all have to be online at the same time for work to get done? And my guess is probably not. For the first time in human history, 70% of white-collar work is done in writing text email whatever we're not blue collar anymore that we we still are blue collar but you know it's not it's an industrial economy is i guess what i'm trying to say exactly so how critical is it now i'm in the three hour time zone difference from kevin he doesn't check that because my body clock has me up with the birds,

right? My day usually starts at six, six 30 in the morning, but when I'm functional and caffeinated, I send Kevin a note and say, Hey, I'm around. Right. And if I leave, I put a note up, you know, says, Hey, I'm out for the next hour or whatever it is. Kevin doesn't clock me. He doesn't make me log in and log out. You know, we're on different time zones and I do a different kind of work. So that's what's important. Now, if my work isn't getting done, right, that's a problem so that's going back to focus on outcomes or accomplishment rather than

activity and all of the crap is all about are they there are they active which is different than are they accomplishing anything right you know it's funny when covid first hit and it was senior leaders because we asked for the book. We asked managers, do you worry about whether or not your people are working? And most of them said, no, my people are working. Work's getting done. That's not a problem. It was the senior leaders that were all freaked out.

And then what happened at the beginning of COVID wasn't that people were working. They were working too much. Yeah. Because they didn't have a commute. They didn't have a, this is when you clock in, this is when you clock out. When you're at work, you work your tail off. And when you're not at work, nobody cares. From the moment we got out of bed in the morning, we were checking our phone and answering email and the boss would send an email at 10 o'clock at night and god help me if i don't answer it right away it's like when the wife you're gonna answer right away and so what happened was when we'd say to people what are

you doing with the extra hour hour and a half a day of your life that you're not spending in the car the answer was working which was not what anybody expected the answer to be. We got about six different answers to that question, Chris. The average commute in the U.S. prior to the pandemic was 27 minutes each way. So we would ask people, as Wayne just said, what do you do in that hour? And if we're playing Family Feud, the number one answer was work. It was over 50%. Oh, wow. The other answers were exercise spending

time with my family hobby sleep and personal development oh what are your thoughts on this you know i'm i've been an entrepreneur and like i said i've been working from home since 2004 and i i don't work like a straight out of our shift like I would if I was in the office even in my own office I kind of I kind of piecemeal it and kind of work when I want I mean last night I was up till 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. or something I think 4 I think 4 a.m. I was up to because I was working on a big marketing project and I was wide awake and feeling really you know perfectly caffeinated and I was kind of a big marketing project and I was wide awake and feeling really, you know,

perfectly caffeinated. And I was kind of in the moment too, where I'm like, Hey, this idea is really good. And so I was really just really excited to do it. People are like, what are you doing up at four in the morning? Are you doing meth? What are you doing? No, I was just really, I was just really into this idea. And, and, but you know, it was a work I had to do to put all together and my thoughts on it. So I was up until four in the morning. And some of that work was stuff I'd been thinking about all day while I was doing other stuff, having fun, playing with my dogs, maybe shopping, eating out. And it's kind of weird where there's not really an eight-hour period anymore. People piecemeal, or at least I do, they piecemeal through their life.

You know, sometimes, sometimes it's one of those things where you're like, I screw around all day watching video games and YouTube videos and TikTok and I better scramble and do that work. You know, there is some of that, but it's also, we are learning how the brain works. The brain doesn't start working at 9am and at 4.30 it needs a break. We can only work in kind of white hot spurts. If you look at the Pomodoro method or all kinds of methods of productivity, what you realize is you can focus for a very limited period of time and you can crank a lot of workout in that time, but then your brain needs a rest. Now, if you're at home, that's when the dishwasher gets unloaded, the dog gets walked, you know, I catch SportsCenter at noon, whatever it is, but work gets done because our brain doesn't just crank for eight hours at a row. And when we have the flexibility

of remote work or not being tied to a piece of real estate, we can work when our brain works. I'm a morning person. I am useless at three in the afternoon. Duly noted. So Chris, I would just say that I think that, you know. That sounds like a confirmation. Your example is people for a long time have said, oh yeah, he's an entrepreneur. It's his own business. That has made sense. I believe the future of work into the future will be more flexible like that. Even in a corporate role, we'll eventually get to flexibility, not just of where we work and how we work, but when we work. I believe that's where

we're headed and organizations that can support that, I think we'll be at a competitive advantage. Let me ask you this. Go ahead. Just to bounce off what kevin said it's going to be different for every person in every organization you know the big thing is now the four-day work week i would go insane with a four-day work week i am really good with six four-hour days i can crank stuff out and i don't need to hold days with absolutely nothing if I'm not draining myself the rest of the week. When do we do our best work and can we get the results as a result is what should be driving this. Definitely, definitely. Let me ask you this, you know, part of it is,

as I'm thinking about what we're talking about here, one of the things that are about this is there's a lot of distractions at home. So a kid spills something, right? Or a kid needs some food. Obviously, we know that people are working at home. Their families are there. Their dogs are there or whatever their family members sort of thing is. And there's interruptions that can happen when you're at home that don't happen when you're at the office and so i think i mean do we

need to be sensitive to those things and also when we look at how much trying to measure how much people are working you know realizing that look maybe it's a measurement of did they get the job done today or is it like a time burner so like those people that have the you know the mouse things the monitoring and all that kind of thing they're looking for hardcore time but once again you know one thing i've noticed like we do a lot of linkedin marketing we have for a decade and a half or something and one thing we always notice was people tend to be working really hard on Monday. And they don't respond to emails much.

They don't respond to marketing much. They're pretty much head down on Monday. Probably catching up on all the email fires from over the weekend. But Tuesday, they start reading emails. And they start being involved in different things online and different things like that. Friday, and this has been a thing for however long I know how long i've been on linkedin but friday is goof off day like they're just they're just fucking around on friday pretty much and most of my employees my office pretty much always were you know friday was always kind of a it was questionable you know

i hear people say we don't we don't need a four-day work week i'm like i don't know i'm pretty sure people are don't need that fridayday work week. I'm like, I don't know. I'm pretty sure people don't need that Friday from my experience. You know, we have casual Friday now. We've kind of just admitted we're phoning it in on Friday. That's part of the thing, and this goes back to what you're saying about working from home, right, is it's maximum flexibility. We treat remote work in the U.S. for the most part like it's binary. You're in the office or you're working from home, home is not always a great place to get work done, either. There are third places there are,

I mean, I can't get work done in a coffee shop, my brain doesn't work that way. I have the attention span of an Irish setter. But there have been times when I need a co-working space for a couple of hours to get something done. Right? I'm hosting a webinar and there's stuff going on at the house. I need a quiet place to do that, but I don't want to schlep all the way to the office to make that happen. We have to be flexible about where that's happening. In the rest of the world, working from home isn't an option. There's been more of a return to office because there's no such thing as a spare room in a Tokyo apartment. Yeah, that's very true. As we round out, we want to get to discussion of what services you guys provide on your guys' website and coaching, whatever you guys do.

Anything more in the book we want to tease out before we go? I'll just say one more thing. It goes back to communication in general, which is such a big part of everything we've talked about. And that is that when you're leading or when you're on a team at a distance, if you're leading a team at a distance, we've talked about the walking around, the intermittent, the spontaneous, all those conversations. There's less of those. So the point that it's worth mentioning is that since we have less total number of interactions with others, every one we have takes greater meaning. Like if you're a baseball fan and you watch the season and it's September and someone gets a hit, it doesn't move their batting average very much. But it's the fourth game of the playoffs. One hit makes a big difference in their batting average. And so the

point is that every interaction actually takes greater weight because there's fewer of them overall, which means that we've got to be really careful to truly try to be on our A game as much as we can. We're not going to be perfect. We're humans. But if we keep that in mind, it takes us back to that word intention, Chris. And speaking of intentionality, I think I said before, kind of under my breath that a lot of what we call hybrid work isn't really, and it's not. What it is is a hostage negotiation, right? How much can we make them come back to the office before they quit? How much can I whine about going to the office before they quit how much can i whine about going to the office before they fire me okay come in three days a week and we'll just take it from there that might be a decent compromise it's probably not a strategy though you haven't

thought it out past the immediate can we make it work stage when you get intentional when you start analyzing what work gets done where, and all the handoffs and the moving pieces and where time comes in, now it's a strategy and now it's truly hybrid work. Yeah. It's an interesting dynamic that we live in. So tell us about services people might find at your guys' website that they can reach out to you, things you might offer, consulting, speaking, et cetera, et cetera. Sure. And it is most of the things on that list, Chris. So we deliver virtual training and coaching around all of the kinds of things we've been talking about today, both for leaders and for teammates and for teams. But we have a whole range of services, both e-learning,

in-person, and virtual delivery for sort of all manner of leadership, not simply the remote component. I co-wrote a book called From Bud to Boss. So we do a tremendous amount of work with new and frontline leaders around the world. And we've got all sorts of materials, training, consulting to help people with organizational culture, organizational change, leadership development. Wayne? It's his group, what he said. Okay.

So I just wasn't sure if you had anything separate that you do or whatever. You know, it's funny. There are kind of three components, three and a half, to the Kevin Eikenberry group. There's the piece that Kevin was leading, everything based on kind of remarkable leadership. And it's kind of morphed into manager to leader kind of thinking. There's Bud DeBoss, which is new and first line supervisor. And there's what I brought in with the Remote Leadership Institute, which is remote. And they're all kind of morphing together, but they all share a DNA.

So really, we can look at the leaders in your organization and adapt the learning to where they are. Guys, it's been very insightful to learn more about what you guys do and how you do it on the show. Give us your dot-coms as we go out and final pitch outs. KevinEikenberry.com, remote leadership, no, remote work life. Did I get that right? Long distance work life, Kevin. Longdistanceworklife.com, KevinEikenberry.com, and remarkablepodcast.com.

Guys, I knew we'd figure it out eventually. We just had to go through the motions there. Thank you very much, guys, for coming to the show. It's very insightful. People should check out your other books. How many books do you have? You've got a lot of books over there. We've written three together. I guess this would be number four, the second edition.

Beyond that, I've written or co-authored or contributed to about another 15 or so others. Wayne's written a bunch of novels and some others in the leadership space as well. We should have you on for your novels. We have a lot of novelists on the show from Penguin Random House, Simon Schuster, all the big names. Oh, yeah. They won't have nothing to do with me. But, yeah, I've got six novels out there working on seven. It's what keeps me sane.

Everyone has to have balance i've often writing business books i've often thought about doing novels too because i'm like i need to escape it's funny i'd written 10 books and then i got this bug that said i'd never be a real writer until i wrote a novel which is technically Did you just shame us? I did. I totally shamed you. It hasn't worked, Chris. I'm never a real writer unless I write a novel. Questioning my choices in life at this point.

I didn't know my, I'm just going to throw my book in the garbage. Where's my book? That is the path to wisdom is questioning your choices, my friend. Even if you throw yours in the garbage, my copy's over here on the show. They're Saturday morning all the time. So guys, thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it.

It was a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chatschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chatschrisvoss, chrisvoss1 on the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. Bye-bye. Boy, I said bye.