The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Brené with Scott Sonenshein on Why We’ll Never Be the Same Again (and Why It’s Time to Talk About It)

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

I’m talking with Scott Sonenshein, a researcher, organizational psychologist, and New York Times bestselling author, about the pandemic, the racial reckoning, and work — specifically, what it means for people going to the office for the first time, or staying hybrid, or working from home. We will never be the same again after what we’ve experienced over the past couple of years, and it’s time we talk about how we’re going to rebuild moving forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone, I'm Brne Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. I don't even know what that's code for, but I have one of the most important conversations that we've ever had on Dare to Lead for you today. And it is about work, and it's about the pandemic and the racial reckoning, and what does it mean for people going to the office for the first time, or returning to work, or staying hybrid, or or working from home, and how we will never be the same again after what we've experienced over the last couple of years,

and what that means for all of us. In fact, this is, I believe, such a moment. I remember Priya Parker once called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink how we do things. This is such a moment in my experience that I'm actually putting this podcast on both unlocking us and Dare to Lead. this week. We have different audiences for these podcasts, which is interesting and makes sense.

But I want everyone to at least be thinking and talking about this. If it's debate or discourse, if you agree, if you don't agree, this is a conversation we need to be having right now as we decide how we're going to rebuild moving forward. I'm having this conversation with a good friend of mine, Scott Sun and Shine, who is a researcher, an organizational psychologist, and someone whose opinion I really respect. I'm so glad you're here for this conversation. Hey, and look, if you have the opportunity to ask folks to listen and then have a meeting around this, a team meeting, I think it would be really incredible. We'll be back in a minute. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit about Scott. Scott Sunshine is a New York Times bestselling author, organizational psychologists, and chaired professor of management at Rice University. He has spent the last two decades researching, teaching, and writing on leadership, strategic change, and resourcefulness. His award-winning research has helped people at all stages of their careers find joy, boost productivity, and achieve personal and professional change. He is written for the New York Times, Time Magazine,

Fast Company and Harvard Business Review, and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has got a PhD in organizational behavior from the University of Michigan, and Masters in Philosophy from Cambridge, and a bachelor's from UVA. And he's a friend, he's someone I respect and trust. He's one of my walking buddies. Let's jump in. Hi, Scott. Hi, Renee.

So good to see you. How are you? Tell me how you've been. good. It's been, of course, a challenging couple of years for so many people, everything that's been going on, not just health-wise with the pandemic, but just what it is to even be someone who works in these times, not being able to see colleagues, not being able to have personal connection with people. Hopefully, we're over the hump right now, but several times COVID has come back and said it's not done with us. So hopefully, hopefully soon, though. Well, I have to say that

I am so looking forward to this conversation. For those of you listening, my only agenda for this podcast episode is a deep and authentic conversation with Scott about what's going on. We have a last several Dare to Lead podcasts. We've shared research from Charlie and Don Sewell, the Culture X research around the Great Resignation, how toxic culture is a big driver of that. We've shared some thoughts about the attributes of toxic culture. And I have to say, Scott, I've been inside organizations working right now as people are again attempting to physically gather in the office. Or some people for the first time, it's not a return. It's a first time for many people. In fact, we're coming back Monday. So today's Thursday. We're recording this on Thursday.

We're coming back Monday. First time in two years. Several employees we've never met in person. people are struggling. People are struggling. And the early research on hybrid is getting dicier by the day. They're saying that, I don't know, people don't love it. I was thinking about Joy at Work

that you co-authored with Marie Kondo. They don't even know what to do with their stuff. They're at home some days. Start with the 20,000-foot view of what you think we've been through in terms of work and where we are now, given pandemic, ongoing racial reckoning, what you're thinking? Yeah, wow, what that question, because so much has happened.

He'll me. Help me. In the last two years and started March 2020 when people who were used to jobs with very clear boundaries, I'm going to go to the office from nine to five. I'm going to have my commute. I know who I'm going to see. I know what I'm going to do. have been facing two major problems and challenges during the pandemic. One is a lack of control. We feel like we have no control. We don't know what to do. We don't have a sense of what psychologists

would call efficacy and we're really lost. And then the second problem has been a lack of certainty. We're just facing massive amounts of uncertainty. We don't know what the world is going to look like. Now we've got, of course, geopolitical issues going on in Europe just to add to what the last two years have been like. And that's really unnerving for people. It's extremely distracting. Now, what we do know, though, is that before the pandemic, workers have shown that they're incredibly resilient. And there's been a class of employees who have tried the hybrid work.

And we've been able to learn from them over the past couple of decades about what works and what doesn't work. And some of these lessons will hopefully inform what unfolds during the pandemic. But I think to step back and where the really situation is, this conversation is to recognize that we can't just return back to how things were. I think people are forever changed. I think conversations about mental well-being have taken on much greater salience for people, and that's a really wonderful thing. You might not be aware, but about two-thirds of American workers are physically ill from workplace stress. I'm not saying mentally ill,

physically ill, dealing with these type of elements. So there's a big problem out there, and those have only been compounded through the pandemic. And it starts with what role can organizations play in helping people feel greater control, not just in their work, but also in their lives. God, I'm so glad I'm talking to you. Let me just take a deep breath and tell you how much I appreciate you situating the conversation, giving context, naming this lack of control, lack of certainty. And I got to say the fact that we are resilient and there's evidence of our resilience over time. So helpful. So can I pull apart what you just said and get granular in terms of asking you some questions? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Our team, and we're 30 people. So I can only imagine

you get back 100,000 people are trying to navigate this in large organizations. A lot of people are anxious about Monday here. What have we learned about hybrid work and the effectiveness of it? What have we learned in terms of what to do and what not to do? So there's certainly a lot of benefits when you disconnect from the office. And we know with hybrid work, when it comes time to doing projects that require creativity and deep thought, being in your house is actually not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing.

I think a lot of companies in the last 15 years or so have experimented with open offices and the idea was this is going to foster great creativity because of collaboration. But it turns out it's actually pretty hard to think when there's a bunch of people making a lot of noise around you. So we move with hybrid work that we have to think about what tasks make sense in what context. And when it comes time to individual tasks that require creativity and deep thought, that's a good place to start with that. Now, on the other hand, work is not just about the individual. It's about groups.

It's about coming up with shared decision making and conversations. And that's something that is incredibly hard to do over Zoom. I think a lot of people thought maybe in the beginning that, well, I kind of know my colleagues. so forming relationships and having deeper connections over Zoom maybe wasn't as difficult because we had spent so much time with them before and then we're just on Zoom for just like I'm remote for a few months. But we've been remote for two years now. And as you mentioned, there's plenty of people that are starting

that have never met any of their colleagues before. Right. Other than through the Zoom screen. And we can't just expect to go back on Monday and pretend like we have really strong and deep connections. I mean, occasionally you might. be able to form some type of forage over Zoom, but it does not replace human connection. In fact, the pre-pandemic research on hybrid work showed that if you were remote more than two and a half

days a week, it had a negative impact on your ability to form connection with people. So I think the first place to start is when we think about hybrid work, we have to match the task at hand with where we're doing the task. So creative work, that's fine in the home. But when it comes time to collaboration and teamwork and fostering relationships, doing it in person is the way to go. No matter how good the technology is right now, it can't replicate the human experience of what it's like to look at someone directly in the eye and get a sense for not just what they're saying, but also what they're feeling. Okay, I'm going to say something that I don't have the words for, and you have this really interesting knack for metabolizing it and coming back with, oh, yes,

what you're referring to is this, and this is what we know about this. So let me try this with you. Individual creative work. I can't write a book or code data in a group setting. So there are some things I know I do better by myself, and I actually do it better at home. This is the thing that I'm having a hard time naming

that is very real, and this is my terrible description of it, but when I say it in organizations, people are like, that's the thing. when we are innovating, iterating, evaluating a mistake, there is a tension that happens between people in person, and it's palpable. And through this tension, that's where goodness and magic emerges. And I have not found a way to replicate that creative, innovative, collaborative

tension through Zoom. I think that's right, and I think it harkens to two types of conflict that teams tend to have. So one is what we would call the good conflict. That's task conflict. This is when we have disagreements about ideas. This is when you see a healthy group really having strong ideas about what we should do and really looking at different possibilities. Then there's the bad conflict.

We call it affective conflict or relationship conflict. This is the conflict about what happened. when it's more about the person and the personality conflict of unfolding. Now, what's really hard about Zoom is that what the research shows is that when you have task conflict, it's actually pretty easy for that task conflict to spill over into relationship conflict. And it's very simple to understand why, right? Look, maybe you don't like me, and that's why you don't like my idea. And that's exactly what's happening here. Yeah. But there's one antidote to that spillover from task conflict to relation

conflict and that's trust. And it is incredibly hard to build trust with a team when you're not in the same room. You put them in the same room and that task conflict can keep going and keep going and coming up with, as you put it, the magic and you don't have the downside of people feeling like they've got hurt feelings because they're not being respected or they're being attacked for who they are and not what they're saying because you've got that trust that you've built up. We've been away for two years. That trust, no matter how strong it was, by not having these day-to-day interactions, these less scripted interactions, even just the simple play that happens in an office environment

undermines trust. And so it's really easy then for an intense Zoom brainstorming session to completely spiral out of control and to say, this isn't about the idea, this isn't about coming up with the best decision. This is because someone in another screen, somewhere else in the world right now, doesn't like me. And that's toxic. Let me just say, preach amen. Oh, my God.

The spillover from task conflict. Is there a better name for it? And I study task conflict? I don't like the name because it's magic. They also call it a cognitive conflict. So if you like that one, better you think of it that one. No, I don't like the word, I know. It's got cognitive versus effective, right?

affect conflict, yeah. So thinking conflict versus emotional conflict is what we're talking about here, right? Can we call the first one creative juice? Yeah, I mean, that's certainly what it does. That's where the magic of teams happen. We know that teams in general can come up with better ideas, but in reality they don't. And they don't because of that relationship conflict.

Yes. Because it's hard to separate ideas from the person for people unless they're high trust teams. And you know, it's so funny, too, that's one of the reasons why I can't wait to get your hot take on this. Scott Sun and Shine, hot take. I need to like a theme song. We need a theme song. But one of the things that I love from Scrum, from the Scrum process, are you familiar with the scrum process? Yes. Okay. So one of the things I love from it is kind of the turn and learn. And often in the scrum process, people use this idea for time estimation. where everyone will write down on a post-it note

what they think the correct timeline is for a project and they'll turn it over. And one of the reasons why the turn and learn is so effective is that it minimizes the halo effect and the bandwagon effect. So the halo effect would be, I'm the founder, right? And so if I go first and I say, I think it should take six months,

then everyone behind me is like, yeah, six months sounds good. Sure, six months. And then bandwagon is kind of jumping on what everyone else thinks. So I'm just laughing about kind of this task conflict versus emotional conflict. Right before we went out, we were talking about a project, and I am notoriously bad at time estimation. I know it's not a good skill for most people, but I'm the worst. I'm the person that, well, Steve will say, hey, looking forward to having everyone over for dinner tonight,

and I'm like, me too, can you run to Home Depot and landscape the front yard real quick? I'd like to put some color in. And he's like, they're going to be here in. like an hour and a half. And I'm like 30 minutes to Home Depot, 30 minutes to plant, 20 minutes, I don't get it. So this last kind of turn-alone we did before we went off, it was a time estimation for a project. And it was like, one, two, three, we flipped our thing. And the operations people who were actually make this happen said 18 months to two years. And other people in the room said somewhere between 12 and 18 months. I said 90 days.

And I remember thinking, I've thought so much about that because the only thing that has come close to happening like this since we've been on Zoom, we couldn't do the turn and learn really because it just didn't work on Zoom. So we just all set it. And then I remember I turned my camera off. And I was like, they don't like me.

They don't believe me. You know, when we were at a table doing it as a process with a focus on the task and there was trust in the room, we kind of laughed about it. And I was like, oh, wow, I can see why I'm such a pain in the ass because 90 days and y'all, you know, and I'm not actually doing it. But do you think when we talk about task versus emotional, when we talk about thinking conflict versus feeling conflict. Do you think Zoom exacerbates

how quickly it spills over to feeling conflict? Absolutely, because not being as rich of a communication medium as in person, it's sometimes hard to translate and really experience what people are feeling. There's stuff you can observe on Zoom and stuff you can see on Zoom, but you just don't get that same feeling of being in person.

And that's what makes Zoom a bit dangerous in that sense. And so what I would love to see when people come back to their room or come back in person is some kind of acculturation process. I don't think you can just suddenly flip a switch and think we're going to bring everyone back and it's going to be like it was in February 2020. It's not. There's a whole process that needs to happen. I think a big part of that really starts with if you think about one of the core tasks of a leader,

it's really essentially about being an information manager. How do you get people to share their unique information? And that's really tough. I mean, if people have been on Zoom for so long, the way that people share information is very different. And so what leaders really need to focus on is how do we create a safe space where people feel comfortable sharing stuff, telling us what they think they know, but they assume everyone else knows.

But chances are that everyone else doesn't know that. And that's one of the big challenges I think that we're going to see as leaders transition back is, how do we get people to stay? engaged and to keep talking. And of course, a big way of doing that is by making ourselves vulnerable, even just doing what you just did, saying, hey, you know, I kind of messed up this time estimate with my team. They don't like me. Not only still, they love you for that exact reason is because you humanize yourself. And it's about making ourselves human as leaders and recognizing that we make mistakes and then kind of owning that culture. I got to just go in a little anecdotal detour here.

Yeah, do it. I was teaching a class. And I had a student in there and she worked in, And the oil industry and energy industry is on one of these offshore oil rigs and trying to talk about the importance of creating a psychologically safe space so people can feel like they can truly be heard. And so she recounts this example about someone had made a major mistake at work. They had damaged some drilling equipment. It was a pretty big flop. And the captain says, look, I really want to know who was the person who did this? Because we want to learn from those mistakes. And people were terrified.

They were fearful. They were like, oh, this is going to go really bad. finally someone is brave enough and they go up to the captain and they say I'm really sorry it was me and here's exactly what happened and the captain looked at this person dead in the eye and said thank you for telling me you're fired and that is the experience of so many people at work right now holy shit can you believe that setup that's a worst story ever it is and what's even worse about it though for ney is

that examples like that happen all of the time where leaders talk about we want to create a safe space. And then the way that they act takes away that safe space. So here's the good news about going to transitioning work from home or even hybrid is we get a reset. So two years is a long time for really more consistent face-to-face interaction. Leaders should really be put on notice and recognize that they have a moment, one of those rare opportunities where to the extent that you can get it, you have almost a do-over. So if you've had a culture that's lacked that psychological safety, and even worse, has praised it. But then in those pivotal moments, has completely undermined it. This is a reset to really show that in these past two years where so much of

the world has changed, where so many people have had pain, that you've learned something and that you're a better person for it, and that you're going to do things differently. And there, for me, is the optimism for returning back to work. I really am just going to have to process everything that you just said from that shitty story. That made me physically wince. Yeah. And I know what happens. I mean, I know this is the work you and I both do.

We know what happens. But I was so primed for an embrace. And then the captain turning toward the team and saying, this is what courage looks like to own our mistakes. to learn from them, to embed the learnings with the team. That's what I was hoping for. Yeah, I mean, he was right with his words, but completely wrong with the actions.

And that really is a lot of leadership mistakes 101 right there, is people know what they should be doing. And they often say what they should be doing. But it's what they do that really matters. You know, it's funny, we're coming back Monday into an all-hands for three days and doing nothing but reconnecting, celebrating each other and trust-building work that is apart from our task work.

We're not moving any task forward for these three days. We're just reconnecting, learning who we are now, learning about meeting our new folks. And it's scary. It's scary for people. For me, it's been hard to be physically around people again. Have you experienced that yet? Yeah, I mean, I think there's the, so much has been ingrained in our minds the last two years that people are dangerous, right? whether you're going to catch from them. And it's going to take time. Again, you just can't go ahead

and give people this freedom and expect that it's just back to February 2020. So there's an acculturation process. Then, of course, there's different personalities there. So as an introvert, part of the beginning of the pandemic, I'm like, this is great. I don't need people. I can just be in my home and that's it. But it turns out introverts really need people too. It's just the type of connection that they need, the type of face-to-face that they need. So I think there needs to be almost like a grace period, a time of intense understanding that people are going through a transition and they might not want to kind of be overstimulated with all of these social activities, this happy hour, that happy hour, let's all get together. People have different needs and we should

be respectful of that. And then there's also the big elephant in the room is that the last time we saw people on a day-to-day basis face-to-face, they might have been in a very different situation. In the pandemic, I think it became much more normative to really truly check in on people, kind of ask about their well-being, not just their physical well-being, but especially their mental well-being. But some of those issues, I mean, many of them are still there. And so I think we need to, just because we're no longer remote, we need to keep up that practice and make sure people are doing okay. And if they're not, the understanding that this is going to take time. But in the long run, this is going to be good because it's going to build the type of trusting relationship that you want

with your employees. And again, that's the optimism here. You get a reset, not just as leaders, but there's organizations. You can do things differently. You can do things better. And that's my big hope. That is my big hope, too. I remember I interviewed Priya Parker, who is an expert on gathering, and she said, wow, I hope people understand we have a possibly once in a lifetime opportunity to change how we come together and be together. And I think that's really powerful. I've been asked a lot, how do you think people are doing in general right now? And my answer right now is emphatically, people are not okay for the most part. I just read an academic article it was a simulation where they studied how many people are affected by a single death. And it was a

kinship modeling. And so they said for every one person, nine people are deeply affected. That was considered spouse, parent, child, and grandparent. And so if we look at a million deaths in the U.S., six million worldwide, people are holding a lot of grief right now. Yeah. And you know what else? There's a grief that people that I'm running into right now that I didn't expect, but I see it. there's also a grief that many people are experiencing that it's not going to be exactly like it was in February of 2020, that something is forever gone. And I have talked to a lot of leaders who said, I'm pissed. I'm angry that we just can't pick up where we left off.

I don't know how and I don't want to change the way I lead. Why can't we just say, and we're back, let's go. Yeah. And it's interesting because I see them almost dealing with the same anger, bargaining, denial, you know, that the world is different. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Starting with everyone has been touched with COVID death and certainly illness. And that's something that we now have in common.

Before, there were so many differences. You had leaders who kind of sometimes like to put themselves unpacked. pedestals and stay disconnected from people. And there's status differences. Yeah. But now COVID is a great equalizer in that sense that everyone has experienced some form of pain related to this pandemic over the past two years. And that's something that I hope brings people together.

And so we can say, I kind of understand what you've been going through because I've had my own COVID moment. And if we can build on that as a way of building deeper connection at work, we have another opportunity, that this is about something that really helps put us on the same ground. We can talk about it and create a space for that. So I think that's one good thing. I think that the grief about I want to go back to February 2020, I would just shake those leaders and say, get a grip, be realistic. The world is always changing. And it's the pandemic. This time, it's the great recession before then. It's the dot-com boom before that. That's what leadership is about. You've got to adapt.

You've got to be resilient. And if you're going to come in and operate your business like it's February 2020, you're going to get crushed. I mean, I have no question about that in my mind. That if you think you're leaving the same workforce that you were in February 2020 with the same mindset and the same mentality and the same desires and the same priorities, you're nuts. I mean, you either got to change or you've got to get out of the way for this one.

I just don't think there's any turning back. And I know that's a really strong statement. No, it's great. It's right. It's true. I love it. Scott, sun and shine. Hot take. Okay, I've got another hot take for you. I want your opinion on this. I read a research article day before yesterday. I think it was Pew that said that the people most happy to go back or most comfortable with going back are white men over 45 who have no primary caregiving demands from parents or children.

And that for many people of color, working from home, was great, better, because they could avoid the emotional exhaustion of code switching, the microaggressions. What would you say to leaders in terms of what we've learned, not only what we've learned in the last two years about structural racism, what we've learned about inequality, what we've learned about inclusivity in the last couple of years, but also the fairly violent backlash to it. What do you say to leaders? I mean, let me just share this one other thing

before your hot take, but I'm looking at this again was from an MIT Sloan Management Review article, Donald Sol, Charles Sol, William Capoli, and Chal Brianti, I think. The Toxic Five attributes that poison corporate culture in the eyes of employees. Number one is disrespectful. number two, non-inclusive.

Yeah. So what would you say to leaders who are coming back and thinking, I don't know how to deal with this? Yeah, I would say, again, where have you been the last two years? George Floyd was murdered a couple of months into the pandemic, and people have had a lot of time to institute changes in policies and practices and think about what leadership looks like. I mean, I think over the last two years, you've seen rightfully so a wellspring of public sentiment really be up in arms and saying, we don't just want you to talk about change. We want to see change. And that's where leaders can play a really big role. And when I mean by play a big role, I don't mean give homage to DENI and belonging initiatives. I mean, actually do something about it. And it means more than just hiring more people of color, although that's certainly a start. I think,

we've got to go much further back into the food chain and think about at the very early onset of what early childhood education looks like and what child care looks like. I signed on to a letter with about 200 other business school professors petitioning Congress to do more with early childhood education and care. And they dropped the ball. They couldn't get that passed. And that was incredibly disappointing because these are problems that we can certainly solve at the leadership level, and we should talk about that soon. But I think we also are naive if we think that it's only going to be leaders that solve it. It is a structural problem that requires policy change, and it requires an all-hands-on-deck movement of people coordinating their efforts. Now, from the leadership vantage point,

being a good leader has always been about bringing in diverse viewpoints. And now what we really need to focus on is ask who really has a seat at the table. Who are we giving opportunities these two. How might we bring in different voices? And by the way, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also the best thing to do in terms of how you manage a company, because we know that oftentimes some of our best ideas, if we think about leadership being about bringing unique information out there, comes from people that are not like us, people who might not have as much experience at us. I mean, that's often an impediment to hiring people of color and saying they don't have the experience. But that's what they do have. What perspective do they bring? What life story do they

bring. How might they enrich our conversations? So we got to solve it from both fronts. We've got to solve it at the very beginning by making sure that we are training and educating and providing support to families of all types to make sure that they can have a career and a family. But at the same time, we need to also work with what we have right now and ask ourselves, how can we bring in these voices for the betterment, not just of our country, but also the betterment of our own companies, because they clearly do make a difference. Again, I need an aim in button. Maybe I need to focus less on the Scott Sun and Shine, like hot dig button and more just an amen button.

All right, here's something that people are talking about a lot that's not, I don't think is going away. I personally love it, but then, you know, I'm the founder of a company, and so I have some liberty here, but employee activism. What are your thoughts on employee? I mean, that's not going away. Yeah, it's not going away. And in fact, we've seen an increasing trend for it. Back when I was an undergraduate studying business ethics and there was this field called, corporate social responsibility, people would laugh at me and they would say,

the only responsibility of a company is to make money. What kind of thing are you studying? Like there's nothing to it. And that's all it is. But what we've seen in the last 15 years, especially, is employees cannot separate who they are as people from who they are at work. And the same values that drive their personal decision making comes into the office. And I think companies that recognize that are beginning. to benefit from that because employees are closer to where changing tastes in society are. So, for example, I think you first saw this with the environmental movement. And you had a lot of employee pressure on large companies like Walmart, for example, to have a much lower carbon

impact. And it absolutely worked. You saw that five years ago when you had these bills in state legislatures about the bathroom bills that were discriminatory against the LBTQ community. And who was leading that movement? I think to a big surprise of economists like Milton Friedman and whole kind of Chicago neoclassical economics goals were it was big business. And they were saying, we're not going to stand for this. And they were able to push back. But what gave them that motive and that sense of we have standing to do this is their employees wanted it. They wanted it. You're saying the same thing now with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Employees want to go to a workplace that is just. They want to go to a workplace that represents their community.

They want to go to a workplace with people who are not just like them. And leaders who understand that sooner are going to be able to build workplaces that not only are more inspiring, but also more productive because we benefit from this diversity. When we take Dare to Lead, it has a very specific purpose. You know, it is a courage building program. It's four skill sets that we really teach. We find that the greatest barrier, when we're, we get into conversations around belonging

and equity and representation and inclusion, the two biggest barriers, interestingly, are emotions. Their grief and shame. What do you think makes employers

so tentative about brand, I mean, brand activism is another, for the first time, I guess maybe in history, you can correct me if I'm wrong. A group of strangers who don't know one another can jump online and do serious damage to the reputation of a brand within minutes around an issue. Yeah.

Right? Absolutely. One of the things that I've noticed is when companies come up with their adjacent Black Lives Matter logo, but they are not operationalizing that. stand into decisions within the company, it backfires. Tell me what you see. Absolutely. Again, if you're not walking the talk and you're saying one thing and doing the other thing, employees see that because they care about these issues and they're watching and they want that consistency. We call it behavioral integrity and organizational psychology and companies that have it

and leaders that have it tend to be much, much higher performers. I think the larger question is when we think about activism and I've just finished some research in this area looking at at what emotions look like in social activism inside and outside of companies. And our view of a social activist is an angry protester. Now, someone holding up a sign. And we looked in this research at environmentalists. We looked at Occupy Wall Street. And we also looked at some protesters around racial justice.

And you think of people as angry. Well, it turns out that anger in most settings, at most times in business organizations, is not a normative emotion. People get very suspicious and very uncomfortable around angry people. But what it turns out is that you can circumvent that emotional process. You don't have to be angry to be an effective activist inside organizations. And when you can kind of channel that emotion, so anger is an activation emotion, you can channel that activation into a more positive emotion.

It helps you see connections and build bridges. and your social activism goes from being ostracized and questioned and quite frankly potentially adversely affecting your career to something that becomes glotted and important part of strategic adaptation. It's about calling attention to new opportunities, about how we can change as an organization to be a better place, to be a stronger culture, to be more attuned to changing market needs. I think it's really naive to think that we're going to operate an organization,

that's divorced of what's happening in society because our employees and our customers are all members of that same society. And unless we become more in sync with those social trends, we get left behind. It might not happen right away. But this is where you see kind of slow deaths of companies that at one time we're really market leaders and really powerful, they just die. They just go away and die. They become less relevant. The brands become less relevant, the morale starts to sap and good people leave. Tell me what your thoughts are. First of all, do you believe in the large swath stereotyping of millennials and Gen Z

and kind of some of the intergenerational studies that we see in organizations right now? Are you a believer that's helpful? I do think that around purpose and meaning, we certainly see higher trends in this generation than in previous generations. That doesn't mean that other things aren't important, but certainly we've seen a much greater uptick of these concerns. I also see it just anecdotally in my students. My students, when I first started teaching at Rice 15 years ago, really didn't care that much about these issues. Now it's on everyone's mind. What do you think about this statement? I read it and I thought it was really interesting. There's two statements I want to check before we go. Your hot take.

I don't know what I mean. I'm a gin. What am I? A gin exer. Gen X, the folks older than us, believe that work is somewhere you go. Millennials in Gen Z believe work is something that you do, and it can be done from anywhere. Does that resonate with you? Yeah, and certainly I think that's only become exacerbated in the past couple of years, that it's the set of actions. This idea of showing up at the same building at the same time, it's just like if you had to kind of start over and invent work, it would be a pretty bizarre place to start. Would it? I think so because what you're doing is taking away flexibility. And that's something that this

generation, millennials especially and Gen Z as well, they want that flexibility because it's a way of feeling in control. And even if you're putting in the same hours, even if you're in the office a lot to give people that sense of control, I mean, it's one of our greatest psychological needs is to feel like we're in control even when we're not actually in control. So I think one of the challenges circling back to thinking about return to office is, you know, people have maybe felt some sense of control over when they log on to Zoom, when they turn their screen on. What might alternative pathways do we give them to feel greater control at work, even though they're now in person? And that could mean empowering them more, giving them more decision-making

authority, recognizing that you don't need to be a micromanager, giving people space. So there's plenty of ways of replicating that same thought, but I think that this idea of work is something you do really harkens back to, and I want to feel in control over what I'm doing. You know, it's interesting that this conversation because one of the things that I hear people talking about right now that I've been thinking a lot about as a decision maker for this company

is are people erroneously using hybrid and flexible synonymously. Because we have hybrid, but we don't have flexibility. We're telling you what days you have to be here. And I'm wondering, going back to the very beginning of our conversation, I can't figure out logistically

if it's going to work. One thing we did say, that's a new, probably a standard style of leadership for us, but new for a lot of people is, I don't know if this is going to work. And we're going to check in with you, and we built this schedule that we're going into next week

based on surveys of employees. And we'll continue asking what's working and we'll continue examining. And I don't have all the answers and we don't have all the answers. So that's a different approach, I think, for a lot of leaders. But how do you think it's going to work

to try to logistically coordinate hybrid around, okay, well, Tuesday's your thinking time so you can be here, but our meeting, you know, how do you think that our meeting time is going to be on Wednesdays? Have you seen anybody doing this well? Yeah, so let me say a couple things to that. First of all, I think the approach would take it. That sounds exactly right. I wish more

leaders would do that and just come off with a stance that says, you know, this is uncharted territory. We're going to have our best answer right now, but it might not be the right answer. That's right. That's how we learn. And that's how we kind of create that safe environment. Now, how do we get all these schedules to line up and have our meetings? That's going to be challenging. And that's why thinking about really making those meetings count is important. I think one of the things the pandemic has taught us is that some meetings can simply be done as emails that when they're informational, we don't necessarily need to be gathering at the same time. What might we do on the video side? If this is just about an update from a leader, does that need to be done in person?

Does everyone need to be there? People might choose to be there, but can we give them that flexibility? And then let's have space, sacred space, where this is a time that we meet. And giving people control doesn't mean giving them complete control, right? We've got to coordinate with other people. So that might mean, look, Monday at, you know, three to five and Wednesday from 11 to two, Friday from 9 to 11, those are our meeting block times. That's when we want in-person meetings. And no matter how much control you have over your schedule, that you don't have control over. And we want you there in-person because we want to benefit from the in-person experience. So I think it's going to really depend on the nature of work and what people are doing.

For some companies, it's going to be we need more in-person time. We need more of those dedicated blocks where we say, we're not giving you that freedom. So we're in a hybrid situation. We're giving you some freedom. You can come in the office more, but you got to come in the office now because we know there's benefits for being in the office. We want you to form those connections. We want everyone there at the same time because we want to continue to build out those connections. We want to have in-person meetings. But does our whole work we need to be like that? Do we all need to be there nine to five every day? I don't think so. I think it's a pretty antiquated place that really harkens back to kind of there's an old psychological theory from Douglas McGregor, Theory X and Theory Y, about, it's fundamentally about

trust. Do managers think that their employees are lazy, are just trying to not do any work? That's Theory X. And when you have Theory X, you want to be keeping a close eye on people. What's the best way to do that? You bring them in the office and you watch them. Theory Y, we trust people. For people, work is not work. It's just like play. People want to embrace responsibility and they want to do their best work. When we do that, unless we have a reason to bring them in the office, and there's plenty of good reasons too, but there's also plenty of time when people want that quiet, independent thinking time, we don't need to watch them because we trust them. I think there's a lot of theory X managers who are still out there. I think it's certainly a

generational thing. Older people tend to be more theory X managers. And they want that return to the office because they fundamentally don't trust their employees. And when they don't trust their employees, unsurprisingly, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their employees don't trust them. They don't feel trusted. And whether they become, they try and skirt responsibility. They don't want to feel like they're being controlled. And they do exactly the thing we're trying to avoid.

So let's again, use this as a reset, put on our theory why hat and say, we're going to trust you. We don't need you around here when there's no business purpose for you being here. And given that control and flexibility and see what happens. I know people I mean God bless I appreciate this conversation so much Last question I'm scared to run it by you

because I had such a visceral reaction to it respond to this statement You ready? Employees are the new consumers So if we think about the balance of control that is happening right now with a great resignation

You think about five million job openings. I mean, historically, in the last 30, 40 years, labor has had very little power, right? So managers are used to being able to dictate what the terms are. As labor unions started to lose some of their power, employees lost their power. And managers can dictate terms. They can create working conditions that are not humane. And that goes not just for kind of factory work or manufacturing work, That goes for people who work in banks, who work 90 hours a week.

Non-profit schools. Yeah, they work themselves into the ground. We know the highest rate of burnout is in nonprofits in education. Because you've got people who so care about the mission, but they work themselves to the ground. So we create these environments that are not suitable to our well-being. But as people started rethinking about their life priorities in the last couple of years, there's a psychology theory called mortality salience. And it's basically when death is really salient.

in the mind, it changes our motivations and how we behave. And everyone has had high mortality salience for a good chunk of the last two years. And what they've been doing is they've been rethinking about what their priorities are. And some of them, many of them have been deciding, my priority is not at an organization that's not humane. My priority is not an organization that exploits me. My priority is not an organization that doesn't recognize my work and appreciate me being there. And as they've done this, companies have realized basically shit, we have a problem. We can't hire the right people. What is it? We're paying them pretty well. We've raised wages, and that's certainly a good thing. But you've got to hold up a mirror and look at yourself and ask

yourself, if you were people you were trying to recruit, would you want to work at this company? Would you want to work for yourself? And I think of a lot of people had that honest conversation with themselves. I mean, truly on this conversation, I think the answer would be no. And again, I think if we can use this pandemic as a reset and recognize we've been selling, if our consumers and our market research showed that people were not happy with our products, people were not happy with our brand, we would make changes. Well, if employees are the new consumers, your market research is not flashing very well right now. Even before the pandemic, we knew that 85% of employees were not engage with their work. I'm sure those numbers have only gone up since then. So look in the mirror

and realize that it's time to make changes or you're going to continue to have many of these issues that you've had in the last year or so. Leave us with the thing that fills you with the most hope when you think about the world of work. So I'm fortunate that I get to teach a wide variety of students. MBAs from all types of backgrounds, professional backgrounds, they're all over the country, all over the world. We have a very diverse population at Rice. And I see the optimism on their faces.

I hear their stories. I hear their sense that they're not settling for just a job. Work is not just about exchanging my effort for your wage. Work is really a tool for social change. Work is a tool for betterment, not just of me as a person, but betterment of my community. And what my biggest hope is, and I think Thomas Coon famously said, you're not going to have a paradigm shift until all the old people die off. My hope is that as new leaders emerge, they're a lot more enlightened.

They're more of those theory-why managers. They're those people that want to create a workplace that is truly inspiring and truly does good. not just says they do good, but does good. And so my great hope is that they end up in charge in the next 10 or 15 years. But even before then, they slowly but systematically begin to dismantle some of the institutions that we've had that treat people unfairly exploit them and think that they're disposable resources. Because that's all we've got. Our entire workforce are the people that we're exploiting.

And until we become more humane, until we become more cognitive, until we become more cognizant that if we piss them off, there's no one behind them. And so I think we're going to start to see some pretty big changes in how work happens, how people operate, and then what impact work has on society. Because if you think about what's happening on the government level, it's really hard to get anything done politically. I mean, we're completely gridlocked. Work is the biggest opportunity for social good if we can just get the right leaders trained the right way in place. I have goosebumps. I do because I taught an MBA course at University of Texas McComb School last fall.

And Barrett was with me. And one day we were walking to the parking garage outside of leaving the business school. And she looked really emotional and almost teary-eyed. And I said, what's wrong? And she said, I'm just so excited that these are the people who my 10-year-old daughter will report to one. day. It's such a great way of putting it because it's true. God, it's true. Yeah. Yeah. Just refusing to compartmentalize values, refusing to compartmentalize purpose. And recognizing the possibility in business. Yeah. Business used to be seen as an obstacle,

but it's really a conduit. And the question is, how are we going to use it? Are we going to use it really narrowly on self-interest and on self-serving, or we're going to use it as a conduit to do good. And those things don't need to be incompatible. People used to think you got your good business and being a good citizen. But what this generation really gets is that you can't separate the two. And it's unless you do both, unless you can do both at the same time, you can't accomplish either on their own. Wow.

And that's what this generation gets. And that's why I'm hopeful. Thank you, Scott. I always learned so much talking to you, and you lead with data and a heart. So I'm grateful for that. Well, thank you. And thank you for everything you're doing to shape these conversations, because now is the moment to really push on this agenda

because we have this great reset and this great opportunity in front of us. So thank you, too. I mean, it's a conversation, right? It is the conversation we should be having right now. You can find more about Scott online at Scott's suddenshine.com. You can just go to the Brunay Brown.com website and look up the episode page. You can find it at both unlocking us and dare to lead. I'm like, I'm saturating the podcast channels with this conversation right now because I just think it's so important.

Scott's books, you can find anywhere that you buy your books. We love the Indies. His book Stretch, Unlock the Power of Less and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagine. Oh, it's had a big impact on our organization. He has a newer book out that's really great, joy at work, organizing your professional life co-written with Marie Kondo, which is Marie Kondo meets Scott Sondenshine. Like, where can you go wrong? I appreciate you being here.

I appreciate you diving into this conversation. Look, if you're on LinkedIn or Instagram, those who are I primarily look at, comments. Let me know what you think. Ask some questions. Maybe we'll have a follow-up. You know, we are the traffic. We are the critical mass. Let's start having the conversation and refuse to not talk about what we need to be talking about. Stay awkward, brave and kind, and I will see you next week. Deer Deer DeLead is produced by Bray Brown, Education and Research Group. Music is by The Sufferers. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Deer to Lead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Viarderide.

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