The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 614: David Yeager PhD - The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach To Leading The Next Generation (Author of 10 to 25)

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you're a leader, you're not just trying to walk around and be Gandhi and help everybody else. I wanted to make the case that when you are that kind of great coach, life-changer kind of person, that you gets a lot out of it too. 10 to 25, the science of motivating young people. Can you get into the Brentle nagging study and what the issue is and what we can do instead? Spoiler is that 0% of kids are sitting there thinking, you know what, mom, you help. They don't make a young person choose between a good behavior or their reputation. They make the good behavior consistent with a positive reputation.

Starting point is 00:00:35 They can change the world. They're the R&D engine of our society and our culture. Can you go more into the mentor's dilemma? It's very hard to simultaneously criticize somebody's performance or work and motivate them. Care is this key part of growth. Young people need to realize that because of the stereotype, your competitive advantage is just being super-duper reliable. If that's all you do, you're the top 1% of people in your generation.

Starting point is 00:01:00 This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit Insightglobal.com slash learning leader today to learn more. That's Insightglobal.com slash learning leader. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of. of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off. Right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Text Hawk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader. Dr. David Yeager is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. Texas and the co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research conducted with Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth on short but powerful interventions that influence behaviors such as motivation, engagement, stress, and more. He earned his PhD at Stanford, his undergrad at Notre Dame, and is the author of a great

Starting point is 00:02:56 new book called 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People, A Good, A Good groundbreaking approach to leading the next generation and making your own life easier. During this conversation, we discussed why Jack Welch's rank and yank leadership style was bad for the long-term success of his company, how to have deeper and more substantive conversations with your children, how to become a better mentor and mentee, and David describes Satta Nadella's model, coach, care philosophy at Microsoft and why. why it's so effective. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with David Yeager.

Starting point is 00:03:42 To get us started, I wanted to go a bit personal, but it also flows really well with your material. And that is the Pete and Leona story. Can you talk to me more about who they are, what they have to do with high expectations and how they've impacted your life? Yeah. So as I was writing this book, the main idea. idea is, or one of them was, who are these people just change your life? You know, they walk in your life at some point. They make some decision or have some conversation and your life's

Starting point is 00:04:14 never been the same. And surprisingly large amounts of adults talk about a high school football coach, a baseball coach, or, you know, like Michael Lewis has a whole book about this idea. Coach Fitz. It's called Coach. Or your theater coach, drama, band orchestra. And they're always like somebody who was really tough on you when you were trying to be a slacker, but made it clear that they love you and care about you. But they never let their love and care for you. It would be a reason to lower their standards for what they expect. And, you know, that's almost just a trote phenomenon. You see it all the time in movies or whatever. But psychologically, that's interesting. Like, why does that happen? And so I wanted to write the book about at some level, those people come to

Starting point is 00:04:58 a book like this wanting to help themselves in some way, right? If you're a leader, you're not just trying to walk around and be Gandhi and help everybody else. I mean, it's great to be, you know, a great pro-social, self-sacrificial leader, but that's not what everyone wants to do. So I wanted to make the case that when you are that great coach, life-changer kind of person, that you get a lot out of it too. And for years, I was thinking about this, not knowing if I was going to write the book, but this was a big problem. And then I went to my grandfather's funeral and is in Lufkin, Texas. So East Texas is a, if you've seen the movie Bernie by Jack Black, it's that takes place life, life behind the pine curtain, it's called. And very kind of

Starting point is 00:05:38 community oriented traditional values. And my grandpa's funeral, he had run an air conditioning company for like 40 years, 50 years. And a woman came up to me and she said, you know, because of your grandpa, I, I never graduated from high school, but, because of him, I got my first job. And by the time I retired, I was running his business. And I had sent my two sons to college. One is now a doctor. One is now a lawyer. And we live on a beach in North Carolina. And I won the grandma lottery. And I just want you to know that he changed my life. And I just saw all these employees who came up and told me that stuff. And I didn't know my grandpa. I just knew he smoked cigars and had a wood shop. I didn't know anything, you know, about him.

Starting point is 00:06:23 and as a professional life. And I just started thinking about it. And that reminded me of a story of his mom in the 1930s. So his name is Pete Sunders. And in 1936, he graduated from high school and he was 16 years old. No, 1938, 16 years old and went to Rice University, which is the only private school in that part of Texas. And so he drove from Conroe to downtown Houston and went to Rice. and he had always been the smartest and had straight A's and started bombing all of his classes. And at some point in the late fall, he piled into his old Ford car and drove back to Conroe to the farm where he was raised and thinking his mom was going to take pity on him as a 16-year-old who had D's and F's at Rice. And he got there really late one night and went to bed before his mom woke up. And his mom was sick and dying.

Starting point is 00:07:17 She had this lung disease. and she woke up the next morning hoping that his mom would say, you know what, Pete, you're like, you're right. This is so hard. Just don't go back. Stay home on the farm or whatever. And instead, she just kicked him in the pants. She was like, what are you talking about? Like, you're plenty smart. You just got to figure out how to learn in college. Get out of here. And she made him drive back to college without letting him do his laundry. And we all laughed about that. Her name was Leona. And she was a real hard ass. But what we never really focused. on was the fact that she called her best friend in Houston and was like, can Pete just live

Starting point is 00:07:54 with you? And can you help him figure out how to get organized and like how to eat and do his laundry and all these other things? And at some level, she knew she was dying. And in fact, she did die within a year. And so she was this combo of very tough and very supportive at a turning point in his life when he was a 16 year old thinking life was too hard, I'm going to quit. And that decision to not be a pushover and say move home, but also not to send him back without support, allowed him to go to Rice. He graduated with an engineering degree, immediately enlisted in World War II after Pearl Harbor. By age 22 or 23, he was running an entire fleet of B-29s on the island in the Pacific where the Anola Gay and all the other, the B-29s that dropped the bomb in Japan took off from.

Starting point is 00:08:42 So it was a very important station. And then went on back to go to Lufkin and started this business that put air conditioning all over East Texas, where it's very hot and sweaty, and then change the lives of all these employees over the next 50 years. And so what I want to say is like, look, a lot of us want to be successful. We want to be great at our jobs. We want to be recognized for it. But at some level, we also want to have the kind of funeral where people show up and tell story after story about how you change their lives while you are being successful.

Starting point is 00:09:14 And that's, to me, with that combination of high school. standards and high supports does. Yes, you're more effective. But you also leave a legacy of these people whose lives you've changed. And I just had to start the book that way because that's really what I want to tap into is that the deeper motivation for significance that I think we all have. High standard, high support. The book is an interesting title 10 to 25, the science of motivating young people. And so I initially saw it like, wait, what? I need this, right? Both for my own children, but also I think so many of the people in my orbit, whether they're hiring young people out of college, whether they have their own kids, all of the above, that this is such a

Starting point is 00:09:57 critical thing to get good at yet probably, especially parenting, the hardest thing that we do. And so let's, let's zoom out for a bit, David. And you've talked about, you've touched on this briefly, but if you had to high level say, this is, these are a few of the things that I learn. to say the best way to motivate somebody in the 10 to 25 age range. Yeah. So we certainly do it wrong a lot. I mean, I hear all kinds of complaints from managers, for instance, who can't get young employees to be independent, proactive.

Starting point is 00:10:36 I hear from parents. Like, I can't get my kid to launch or I can't get them to try hard in school. Coaches. They're like, I got this kid. It's all the talent in the world, but I can't get them motivated to work hard. So it's clearly a source of frustration. And it's so frustrating, in fact, that a lot of people think there's nothing I can do, that this is just a bad age. We have to wait it out.

Starting point is 00:11:00 Or there's a tiny subset of good young people, and all the rest of them are garbage. And the whole task is to find the good ones. That's another attitude. And I started from a different premise. I was like, all right, well, who are the adults who get it right? and don't have this problem of, you know, lazy, short-sighted, selfish, entitled young people who can't do anything right. And if I could find these exemplars, I would figure out what they're doing, and then maybe I could do it too. Because, you know, I'm a parent and a coach, and I manage a large team.

Starting point is 00:11:35 And this is stuff I wanted to know the answer to also. What I found is that the great leaders and mentors of young people don't start from a position of what I call neurobiological incompetence. They don't say teenagers' brains are just idiotic and dumb, and we can't trust them. Instead, they have this belief that if you can find the right trigger for motivation, then young people are capable of kind of amazing stuff. They can change the world. They're the R&D engine of our society and our culture. And then so they just spend a long time figuring out what it is young people care about.

Starting point is 00:12:09 But it's not at a superficial level. They're not saying, like, let's turn math class into TikTok or let's, you know, make our football. ball practice be World of Warcraft or whatever. It's more the deeper motives of meaning and significance and what I call status and respect in the book. And there's a lot of, there's a lot more to it. But the basic idea is the, if you look at the best high school physics teacher, the best manager at Microsoft, the best shooting coach in the NBA, they are all appealing to a young person's drive for a kind of status and respect in the eyes of people whose opinions they carry. about. And they don't make a young person choose between a good behavior or their reputation.

Starting point is 00:12:52 They make the good behavior consistent with a positive reputation. And again, in the eyes of someone whose opinions they care about. Gotcha. Okay. Let's dig into some of the parts of the book that I found really interesting. So how about the parental nagging study? And I'll tee one up and you can take it wherever you want. But Kevin's mom nagging him to take his medication or research shows that nagging triggers the emotional part of a teen's brain shutting down their ability to think logically. All of us parents here, we've all nagged for sure. Some of us have done it within the last hour. And it makes sense, though, right? Your child doesn't do what they're supposed to do. Their rooms am mess. They didn't do their homework. Whatever. There's plenty of reasons and we nag.

Starting point is 00:13:37 So can you get into the parental nagging study? What the issue is and what we can do instead that will hopefully create better outcomes, both for our relationships with our kids as well as than what they go on to do in the world. Yeah. So this is a beautiful study run by Jennifer Silk and Ron Dahl and their collaborators. These are all neuroscientists. And it's a very simple idea. What happens in the teenage brain when your parent is nagging you? And this was a study of daughters and teenage daughters and their moms, but it could have been dads and sons. And so they bring the daughters in and they're in the fMRI machine so there's a huge magnet whirring around their head detecting blood flow in their brains and then before they start any other tasks they listen on audio to a pre-recorded

Starting point is 00:14:27 segment of their mom completing the sentence what bothers me about you is and so it's like bothers me about you is it you know you get in these fights with your peers or with your with your siblings i tell you to bring your shoes down you won't do it you never clean your room yada yada yada and And so what does it look like in the brain? Spoiler is that zero percent of kids are sitting there thinking, you know what, mom, you have a point. This is a great feedback. I'm really glad we had this chat. I've got a list of things to fix now. So I'll get back to you and thanks again. So like that never happened. Instead, what you see is a dramatic increase in anger regions of the brain and a dramatic decrease in the prefrontal cortex. So this is the region related to planning,

Starting point is 00:15:12 goal setting, really basically, are they thinking about how to change their behavior in light of the feedback? And then you also see a decrease in the TPJ, the temporal parietal junction, which is the social cognitive network of the brain. So this is the kind of mind reading functions. And that's important because a lot of times adults talking to young people are implying that certain behaviors needs to change. So like when I was a parent of really young, like a five-year-old, my ADHD son would play with Legos in the middle of the room. And it'd be a huge mess. And I would say, don't you want to pick up those Legos? And he would say, no, I don't want to pick up these Legos. Because the literal answer is no. So I had to learn to be explicit. And kids are like that,

Starting point is 00:15:58 too, even when they're teenagers, that we say one thing and they hear another. And then there's a fight over the misinterpretation. So we're never going to avoid that conflict if we're communicating in a way that's shutting down the very regions of the brain that would best help them to listen to what we're asking them to do. And what works better instead, interestingly, is relatively subtle shifts in language that it can influence whether a young person feels a sense of respect or alternatively feels deeply disrespected. And we did an experiment to follow up on the nagging study where we asked kids to take their medicine as a very unpleasant medicine that had plausible health benefits, but they didn't like. And we either asked them respectfully. So we'd say things like, look,

Starting point is 00:16:49 you're a smart kid. I think you can understand the real reason for this. I'm going to explain it to you, I'd really like you to consider taking this medicine. Even if it's unpleasant, that's you doing your part to help this scientific experiment and also other people's health. And so it's a very noble thing to do. Thank you for considering this request. So it implies the young person has competence, agency, you know, it views them as a person. The disrespectful condition was, I'm going to tell you why this is important. You need to listen to me right now. You should do this based on my expertise. If it's unpleasant, just ignore that.

Starting point is 00:17:24 Who cares? Do what I say. And then thank you in advance for your compliance. So that's the disrespectful condition. And what we find is that young people were about twice as likely to take the medicine if they were asked respectfully, even though the health benefits were the same in the two conditions. Really? So I'm a little surprised by that because it feels like those are opposite ends of the

Starting point is 00:17:49 spectrum and maybe something more towards the middle would be better because I'll give you, for example, Dave, and this is a very small sample size, but I want, I speak at high schools every once in a while. It's not my favorite thing to do because I don't know if I'm that good at it. But anyway, we'll talk to teachers. And I'm like, hey, what have you noticed is the biggest changes in kids in high school today versus maybe 10 years ago or 20 years ago, whatever? And inevitably, a few teachers will say, kids use to be. be fearful of their parents. In today's kids, almost none of them are scared of their parents anymore.

Starting point is 00:18:27 And I think that's a very bad thing, teachers saying. I think it's a bad thing that kids are no longer scared of their parents. And I was like, oh, okay, didn't think of that, but these are what teachers are saying to me. What do you think when you hear that? I mean, that's super interesting. I've heard that too. part of me is like I remember being as a kid hearing about the you know Christian virtues and fear of God was one of them I was like really fear of God like that's interesting so let's be

Starting point is 00:18:55 afraid but I get it it's like there are consequences in the world and part of what it means to be a good person is that you are afraid of doing something wrong or bad because it's going to harm yourself or others and having a healthy fear of negative consequences is part of what it means to be mature. And so of being afraid of your parents is one version of growing up with a fear of negative consequences that causes you to make wiser, healthier choices, or more moral choices. What I found is that the kind of adult who makes that their number one issue is they have a style of leadership that I call an enforcer mindset, where their goal is to enforce. laws and rules and kind of prepare you for a harsh reality.

Starting point is 00:19:52 Like there's an unforgiving world out there that's going to gobble you up. And you need to be afraid right now of me, the leader, so that way you're prepared to not be harmed by that. And or you are a problem that is, that's about to get out of control. And if you're not afraid right now of consequences, then you're going to harm others and you're going to make the world a worse place. And so adults feel like it's their responsibility, either for the well-being of the kid to enforce these rules

Starting point is 00:20:22 or for the well-being of our community and our society to be an enforcer. And I get that. Like, I don't think that's necessarily a bad instinct. The problem is you end up focusing on just enforcing but not supporting people to actually live up to a high standard. And a lot of times young people have reasons for potentially unwise choice that makes sense from their perspective. It just doesn't make sense from the perspective of the adults. And when your main job is to make them so afraid of disappointing or

Starting point is 00:20:56 being threatened by the adults that they comply no matter what, then you never get curious about the reasons that make sense from their perspective. So for instance, in the book, there's a lot examples of this in the book, but one is a story I tell about a mom who had a kid who went out at a party and drink too much. And then came home and the kid's drunk and the mom and dad have to confront the kid. Now, in the old world, the idea is if you were afraid of your parents, you would never cause a problem because you're afraid of the consequences of violating a house rule. Now, do I really think that no kids snuck out to drink in the 1950s in the glory days when everyone is afraid of their parents getting whipped by a belt? No, of course not. Like I talked to

Starting point is 00:21:42 baby boomers are like, oh yeah, we snuck out to drink all the time. So the idea that like back in the old days, we were afraid of our parents and now they're not, I think is a little overblown. And Dan Gilbert, a famous social psychologist at Harvard, talks about what he calls the illusion of moral decline, which is this idea that every generation thinks the next generation is less moral than them. And that's been true for 80 years. So when the baby boomers, right now, the one's complaining when they were teenagers, while their parents were like, they look at these long-haired hippies listening to the Beatles and smoking dope and all these other things they're doing, right? So again, I think a lot of that's overblown. But still, the kid comes

Starting point is 00:22:23 home to the house. Mom's, you know, upset. And with the first time through, they take the fear approach. It's like, we're going to yell and tell, blame and shame, grounded, punished. You need to fear violating the rules of the house and fear my wrath, basically, as a parent. And what did that kid do? The kid got really, really good at hiding drinking. That's what happened. And then the kid went to college, drank too much and failed out and moved back home and doesn't have a job. And I actually talked to this person recently and on my book door. So that's a real person. This is Kate, right? A mom of two who lives in Chicago, right? Yeah, it's a student. He was a sophomore. You're right. He came home one night, drunk and stoned. And she responded with a combination of yelling and

Starting point is 00:23:07 prosecuting. And you write, she instigated an interrogation instead of a two. way conversation. Yeah. Okay. So go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. And then, but she had two sons.

Starting point is 00:23:19 And so the next son two years later did the same thing. And then they were like, we've, they're like licking their chops. They're ready for this. This is, they've been prepared. And the second time through, they let the kid sleep it off. They talk in the morning. And they figure out like what, why was the kid so motivated to break the house rules and get really drunk at the party? and rather than prosecute, they were just genuinely curious.

Starting point is 00:23:46 And it turns out that the kid normally would sneak out like just two shelters in his pockets. But then this time had a bunch of friends who wanted him to bring drinks. And so he brought a whole backpack full. And then he ended up splitting it with like two friends. And so he drank way too much. And that was useful information because the reason why he brought extra and drank too much was because he was a social kid who was trying to be a good,

Starting point is 00:24:11 friend to his friends. Now, that's maybe not the best way to be a good friend. But from his perspective, he was trying to be social. And it turns out that another time, there was a time where he went to a party and a girl was suicidal. And he talked her out of committing suicide. And so his parents started from the perspective of, you know, you're a social kid and that's good. That means you care about others. That means you want to belong. And that means you're part of a community. And so the motivation behind binge drinking this night is not evil. But it was, it was dumb choice that can never happen again in our house. But like, it mattered to them why he was getting it wrong. And they didn't punish in the sense of grounded. Instead, his quote punishment was any time before he went out,

Starting point is 00:24:58 he had to talk through a very detailed plan for like 45 minutes with his parents about what he was going to do with the party and how he's going to get home. and whether he was going to drink and who is he going to say this or that to. And his parents were relentless in forcing him to make a plan. And he wished he was grounded because it's like getting a 16 year old boy to talk about feelings for that long. It's really hard. And he then turns out became the most sensible moderate drinker in his high school and then went to college and had no issues and was more mature than a lot of adults in terms of alcohol. And that was really the goal. The goal was to launch a young person into the world where they can be independent and make wise choices

Starting point is 00:25:42 that are healthy for them and the community. And the fear approach wasn't the solution, but the collaborative troubleshooting approach was. So, because I think this is going to be hard for a lot of parents. It was hard for me as I was reading this because envisioning this exact thing, if it happened in our home, I would probably respond the same way Kate did the first time, right? Now, and I completely understand why she did, and most parents probably do as well. You're telling me the research shows, the evidence suggests we need to let them sleep it off, wake up, and get curious, ask questions. Is that, like, roleplay this with me.

Starting point is 00:26:28 Is that what you do? Like, is this what you'll do if this happens in your house? Is that the right approach? We're choosing this example because you wrote about it, but there are others. of young people making poor choices, but that's what you're saying is what specifically we should do. I think the idea is

Starting point is 00:26:44 anytime somebody screws up, whether it's an employee or a child or player, they had a reason why that choice made sense from their perspective. And the main thing you want them to do is to have, in a similar scenario in the future, reach a different conclusion. Right.

Starting point is 00:27:03 So their flow of logic, led to, in this case, I'm going to drink too much, right? Or I don't know, I have like a four-year-old. And sometimes they'll just pile a chair on top of a chair and then stand on top of it to get like a cookie or something like that. And you walk in the room and you're interesting to say, get down. And I forget which parenting expert I heard this from, but what I do now is I say, what's your plan?

Starting point is 00:27:30 And they haven't really thought it through. And like, what's your plan if it gets unbalanced? and it starts falling, you know, and like, is there another way to get this thing that you want? And it turns out that like a few questions cause them to own the thinking. And then you want them to not, the next time you're taking a nap or whatever, you want them to not be styling, stacking chairs on top of chairs and about to fall over and crack their head open, right? You don't want them to only fear making the bad choice when you're there to yell and punish. And the similar thing is true for a player in a sport. You don't want them to lay in fear of being yelled at and then only make the right play when the coach is monitoring and yelling.

Starting point is 00:28:13 You want them to know how to make the right play because they're playing the game in their heads. And they're playing in soccer player playing three passes ahead. Similarly, in this case of the kid coming home drunk, you know, like if parents tend to make it about themselves. Why does my kid think I'm the kind of parent who has such weak enforcement of the rules that they can blatantly violate my rules and then throw it in my face? Like that's a story parents tell themselves in their heads. They make it about us. But that's not what they're thinking about. They're thinking like two friends who I really want to impress wanted me to bring some extra hard seltzers.

Starting point is 00:28:53 And they're going to like me and invite me to stuff. And this might be an epic night. Who knows what will happen? that it might be a night that's so fun that we remember it 20 years from now at our high school reunion. And if I miss out on that, just because my parents said so, because I'm worried about yelling. Like, my parents yell at me all the time. Why am I worried about them yelling at me one more time? You know?

Starting point is 00:29:15 And so, like, the calculation makes total sense from a kid's perspective. What you want is for them to be making an entirely different calculation besides the fear of punishment. You want it to be like, what is my goal for my life and my future? and the kind of person I am. And that has to be in their minds when we're not there telling them what to do. And as far as I know, there's no other way to do it than to force them to actually have that conversation with themselves and think carefully about it in debrief after a poor decision, but also in anticipation of future scenarios. Okay. I've tried to implement some of this stuff. And let's say this is real life. You are getting curious. Your voice is composed. You're

Starting point is 00:29:58 not raising it at all. I think about this before some of these conversations. You never raise it no matter what. You're asking questions and you're getting nothing. You know, one word at best. Sometimes just like, I don't know. You know, like you get some of that. You just keep going. You just keep hammer. I mean, what do you do when you're getting nothing? You're getting no response. You're getting a shrugging shoulders, that type of thing. How do you get to the point where you can actually have a real conversation instead of just a one person or a mom and a dad asking questions and not getting much in response. Yeah. I mean, it depends on the scenario. And there's some subtlety to the questions that are asked. You know, you could ask a bunch of questions and come across like a prosecutor.

Starting point is 00:30:45 Yes. And then like they're not into that, you know. Yes. On a recent vacation, my son didn't want to go to ski school. And I'm like, in my mind, I'm thinking like an enforcer. I'm like, we paid so much money to come on this vacation and it costs so much to send you. And you live a privileged life. Do you know how many kids never get to ski, let alone don't have private. It's not private, but it's three or four kids semi-private lessons on this gorgeous mountain. And you're trying to complain about that. And like I was offended that it's a, it's disrespectful of the amount of money I spent on it and disrespectful of the plan I have for this vacation where we don't have that many days where I could ski with my wife and stuff like that. So that's my internal narrative. But the alternative is

Starting point is 00:31:32 maybe he has some reason for being reluctant for going and he's just masking that real reason by saying I don't want to go. And so I was like, look, skiing is objectively awesome and fun. So it's baffling to me why you don't want to go. But I don't want to be frustrated. I want to be honest and actually care about your perspective. And it's not about me. So, Can you please just explain why from your perspective? It's making sense for you to say no to go to this because I'm not going to give up on this. I have to understand because the alternative is I force you to go, but I would really like to understand. So I'm not being a pushover there, right?

Starting point is 00:32:11 You still can be demanding, but you are curious. And it turns out that especially once his meds wear off in the afternoon, he does stuff that's a little annoying, other kids make fun of him. And he has Tourette's. and his sense of humor doesn't land with other kids' age. It comes across as a little immature. And so he doesn't want to go be made fun of by strangers who are the cool kids at a ski school. And that's a reasonable thing. You know, like I would maybe not want to go.

Starting point is 00:32:41 And I would never have known that if not for him. But then I'm like, now we can troubleshoot. Now it's like, all right, well, number one, these people are making so much money on this. This counselor has to be on top of it. So they need to know what's going to happen later on in the day. And they need to be proactive. And if they don't, you know, the teacher's going to be in trouble. So it's not on you.

Starting point is 00:33:01 And so we can have a whole plan about going. And then we can have a compromise that if someone makes funny, I won't make you go the next day. And so, you know, then he was like, all right, fine, I'll go. And that's an example where, like, you could get a, you could win the fight as an enforcer in the short term. But then you're dumber about how to help your kids. And again, the same thing is going to be true for employees and coaches and teachers.

Starting point is 00:33:29 If you're a physics teacher, it matters why the kid got the force or momentum problem wrong. If it's just a calculation error, that's carelessness of the last step. But it means they got 95% of it right. A lot of times, though, kids just misread the word problem. And so everything after they wrote the words down into numbers, they got right. They did the calculations right. but they rushed when they read the word problem or they weren't an English speaker and they didn't understand the logic of the word problem. And so those are two, if I'm a teacher, if I'm trying to

Starting point is 00:33:59 fix that problem, those are very different assignments I would give. One would be helping you read the question. The other is just making you pay attention on your calculations. And I could just yell at you. I could say, we've already covered this 30 times. I gave you 20 worksheets like you weren't paying attention. You were goofing off talking to your girlfriend. You don't care about school. And you need to learn how to be a grownup. And about 50% of American public school teachers, that's what they say to kids when they make a mistake. Right. They turn it into a character lesson and just never works.

Starting point is 00:34:31 It's way better to be like, all right, well, what was the source of the problem? Okay. What were you thinking there? All right. What would happen if you change that? Then the kid owns the thinking. They can actually fix it. And then they're going to not make the same mistake later.

Starting point is 00:34:42 I was curious reading about Steph Okamoto at, I don't know if that's you pronounce her name at Service Now and the Mentors Dilemma. Can you go more into the Mentors Dilemma? as well as the mentor mindset and maybe even share the story of Steph Okomoto at Service Now? Yeah, so the mentor's dilemma coined by Jeff Cohen

Starting point is 00:34:59 is a Stanford professor, a mentor of mine. I want to give him credit in his dissertation almost 25 years ago. And it's this idea that it's very hard to simultaneously criticize

Starting point is 00:35:10 somebody's performance or work and motivate them. And a good example is at Microsoft when they would do performance evaluations, you would list what people get right and what they get wrong. And in the

Starting point is 00:35:26 Steve Balmer era in the early 2000s, those performance reviews would go into a system called Stack Ranking, which is an old Jack Welsh GE system. And in your stack, everyone would be ranked. And if you're in the top, let's say 5%, you get a huge incentive. If you're the bottom, you know, 5 or 15%, you're either fired or threatened to be fired. If you're in the middle, you're treated like your media. mediocre and not given a great incentive. And so that's a tough setting to get critical feedback in because if you're told and you're on that bottom 15%, like you don't want to hear that, right? And it's a very evaluative setting, but Steph had to do this every, I don't know, six months or so.

Starting point is 00:36:09 And she had to figure out how to have that conversation. And the conventional way is to either just be brutal, right? And you know, you're a 15 percentile person. So, you're done. Or if you care about them, withhold the feedback. Everything's going great. You know, I believe in you. You can turn it around. And neither there's a good because the brutal version crushes motivation.

Starting point is 00:36:34 And then the withholding feedback version, what I call it, protector mindset, ends up coming back to bite them because at some point, they're ranked and their incentives and their bonuses are tied to this performance evaluation. And so her employees would get basically threatened. to be fired or get low incentives if she withheld the feedback. So she had to learn to be honest and direct while also being supportive. And that's what I call the mentor mindset. And that's what solves the mentor's dilemma. And it's this idea that you're going to be honest about someone's limitations or flaws, but you're going to surround them with support so that they can meet

Starting point is 00:37:13 those high expectations. And an example is she would talk to a person and say, all right, what can we do now so that by the next evaluation, you're an overperformer who has high promotional velocity. And they would troubleshoot. They'd be like, all right, do you want to do this cross-team project? And the employee would be like, yeah, I want to go talk to engineering. I want to build a data dashboard or whatever. And then stuff would be like, all right, well, the engineers are very selfish with their engineering time. They're not going to let someone from HR do that. So why don't I go talk to your engineering manager and make sure that you can get that time from the engineers. So Steph would go run interference at the other division. And then,

Starting point is 00:37:48 her direct report could then go recruit the resources she needed to create this above and beyond overperforming cross-team collaboration. And then they'd be back on track with high promotional velocity. But Steph never did the work for them. So it's not mentor minds, it doesn't mean I'm going to baby you. And it also doesn't mean necessarily I'm telling you what to do. It's I'm helping you earn a reputation as being high status and prestigious through hard stuff that. no one else can do, but I'm going to run interference and unblock you and provide support so that way you can meet that high standard. Okay.

Starting point is 00:38:25 That makes a lot of sense. I also read about Sata Nadella and how he shifted Microsoft and this thing about theory X and theory Y. What changes that he make for the better when he took over at Microsoft? Yeah. So when Satya took over at Microsoft, Steve Balmer was the CEO and obviously Balmer is a brilliant person, you know, lots of visionary things. But the company culture was embedded in this old idea of theory X, McGregor calls it, to go back to the 1950s, that really kind of Jack Welsh

Starting point is 00:39:02 was the, at GE, was the embodiment of. And it's this idea of when companies are bloated, you fire tons of people and you have performance evaluations every three months or six months or 12 months to fire the worst people, cut the fat. And, you know, that did temporarily boost GE stock price, but also shipped lots of jobs overseas and eventually dismantled the company in a lot of ways. But when Bomber took over, that was the dominant idea for large companies at least.

Starting point is 00:39:33 And so that was his approach. And then Nadella realized that approach caused people to fear innovation. And that's because innovation comes with mistakes. And you take a bunch of bets and some don't work out. And you can't have to, you can't fear your job because you were on a project for six months at some advanced tech at the frontiers of the field. And you didn't have product market fit because you were too early. And you then didn't contribute any to sales in your division.

Starting point is 00:40:04 And now you're the bottom 5%. Like that's a dumb way to run a tech company because then you do safe things and you're behind everybody. And you would only create a new product once your competitors had already created it. And so that bomber mentality is why we have the Zoom and Bing and other failed products from, although Bing's making it comeback, but the certainly a lot of products where by the time Satya took over, one product at Apple, right, the iPhone, made more money than all of Microsoft. And so Nadella said we need to shift from a culture of know-at-alls to a culture of learn-at-alls. And other people contributed. Kathleen Hogan is a well-known HR person. and Steph Akamoto eventually worked on Under Hogan on that team. And they got rid of Stack ranking.

Starting point is 00:40:52 They still have very tough performance reviews, but they call them a connect. And it's a time to connect with your manager about your successes, your growth areas, etc. And it's more of a conversation about your growth and development. Again, still demanding, still outcome focused, still high stakes, but it's formative. It's designed to help you improve as an employee. and they adopted a slogan model coach care. And so you model the great performance you want. You coach people to do it.

Starting point is 00:41:21 And you care about the people you're coaching. Now, the care part was controversial initially. People like, that sounds like a bunch of self-esteem feelings nonsense. Like it doesn't belong in a top technology company. But the new philosophy under Nadella and Hogan and others was, look, if we're going to ask you to go above and beyond and surpass any benchmark that's ever been had before,

Starting point is 00:41:43 for and therefore make us be the most valuable company in the world, that's going to take personal sacrifice. That's going to take you thinking above and beyond what your manager is telling you to do. You're going to need to be proactive and at the frontiers of your abilities, and that's going to be exhausting. If at the end of the day, you think your manager does not care whether you live or die, it's very hard to believe that that employee is going to go above and beyond and innovate and change the field. So care is this like key part of growth. It's not just we're sending you a card or whatever. It's like I care about you so much that I want you to become a top performer with high proportional velocity who then gets incentives for having grown our company. That's how much I care. And I care about

Starting point is 00:42:29 you too much to have low expectations for you is another way to say it. And that version of care is easy to get behind even if your instinct is to be more of an enforcer. What I found from the care perspective of actually doing this leading teams is there's like multiple versions of coaching. There's the coaching in the moment where maybe they said something or did something that wasn't right for whatever reason.

Starting point is 00:42:55 And you talk through and figure out how to fix that specific thing moving forward to get better, right? Coaching in the moment. And then the care element, and I think there's a version of care there for sure because you're trying to help them get better. But then there's this coaching for long-term development.

Starting point is 00:43:11 where I think the leader needs to genuinely care and understand the long-term goals of each person that works for them and finds a way to help them get there. And that usually includes them leaving your team. And I said to the leaders that I eventually led, let's be known as a place where people go to get promoted. And yes, that means they're going to leave us. Because I had a mid-level manager job, they're going to leave us, whether it's our company or they're going to go to another company. But isn't that an amazing thing to be known for? And yes, it hurts like crazy in this short term when a stud leaves. But it's an awesome feeling and it's a great reputation and it becomes a place where everybody wants to work, especially top

Starting point is 00:43:59 performers that are ambitious. And it's a longer game play. But I think that is, that is a certainly something to strive for. And it doesn't happen if you don't genuinely care for people, but doing that, I think is the right way to build a team that sustains excellence over time. What do you think? Totally. I mean, there's a great example of staff mentoring someone named Saloni Shaw, and she did that data dashboard project I described. And she was always a top performer in that case.

Starting point is 00:44:33 But because she went above and beyond and got promoted early, and a lot of Steph's people get promoted early because she subtly gets them to do the job at the next level of either individual performance or management before they know it. And so she'll have these conversations three to six months before they thought they were going to get promoted and be like, look at this checklist. You're already one level up. So we're going to promote you early. And so that's just constantly happening on Steph's teams. So then the best people want to work on Steph's teams and they want to go above and beyond, and no one complains if Steph says, hey, your normal 40-hour-a-week job's going to keep you bored. Let's do this other thing. That's awesome. They don't view Steph as a taskmaster

Starting point is 00:45:20 who's exploiting them. They're like, they want to have that promotional velocity. Anyway, Saloni was stolen away by an educational platform company because of that cross-project, cross-team project she did. But then a couple years later, she came back, and now she's the chief of staff for Kathleen Hogan. So she's basically running all of HR Microsoft as a 29-year-old. And so sometimes when your studs get stolen, they feel that sense of loyalty. And they're like, you know, the best I ever felt was when I was doing super hard work that was acknowledged. Like it wasn't hard work that people were like, well, of course you did. We paid you. It's like hard work where they're like, that was impressive. And that was awesome.

Starting point is 00:46:02 And Steph makes sure that her reports do the presentation to the senior VPs. Steph won't present on her direct reports work because A, she wants them to take it seriously enough that their reputation is on the line. But B, she wants them to get the credit. And some managers think Steph's crazy for giving the credit to her direct reports. But that's not her philosophy. And then you find that area under the curve over a long career. You have overperformers who are also deeply loyal, both to you

Starting point is 00:46:32 and to the company. And so it's like a Pete and Leona story. With Seth retires, it's going to be like Pete's funeral. People are going to come out of the woodworks and talk about the lives that she changed, for sure. So cool. Before we run, David, I'm curious, let's say you're meeting and you regularly do this, I'm sure, with somebody who's a recent college graduate who is ambitious, they care about themselves and others, and they want to leave a positive dent in the world. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them. Yeah, I, well, I mean, as a professor, I do this, you know, every day. I write four letters of recommendation a year.

Starting point is 00:47:13 I mean, the most common thing I say is, like, don't, don't accept the kind of received wisdom of certain paths. Like, usually the highest achieving kids are also the ones who like following the rules the most. Like, that's how they got A's was listening to the teachers and turning their homework in on time. And so they're like, I need this class. this degree, this graduate school, and then I have this kind of path. And I'm always like, yeah,

Starting point is 00:47:37 you know, a lot of stuff's nonsense. You don't have to do that. So that's kind of one thing I always say. But the other thing is, you know, there's this complaint from employers that this new generation doesn't want to work, that there will be a job posting. There's 200 applicants. One person gets the job. And the second they get the job, they ask for vacation time to go to Aruba or they want to go work remotely from Alaska. And the employer is like, what the hell? Like, you just got this job. And I've heard this story so many times. And, you know, I think the conventional advice is to tell young people to basically pretend like they don't want that stuff until you've been promoted a few times. Like don't, don't show your short-sighted self until you're 29 or 33 or something like

Starting point is 00:48:23 that. And like, I get that. But to be honest, like, I mean, if you or I were offered a job right now and we knew you could work remotely from a vacation on Alaska for months, we would have totally done that. That would have been amazing. Like, I did, like, it's incredible to be young right now. So they're not crazy for asking to do this stuff, especially not when most CEOs, the minute the pandemic hit, went to like Costa Rica or Arizona or Tahoe and they ran their companies out of like a ski hut. And like, of course they want to do that because that's the goal. So I don't think they're entitled necessarily for asking for that kind of flexibility. They just realize that it's a possibility. At the same time, I think young people need to realize

Starting point is 00:49:06 that because of the stereotype, your competitive advantage is just being super duper reliable. like if you show up and do what you said in advance and then you ask for clarification at the right time and then ask for more work if that's all you do you're the top 1% of people in your generation right now and you know fair or not that is what the millennials want to hire and so i i think like you know you're not being exploited necessarily for a lot of these things but you you can if you are reliable and proactive and follow through, then you're rewarded. And then you get all kinds of flexibility because you're so good that your employer will not want to lose you. Like, I have people where I'm like, I don't want to lose you.

Starting point is 00:50:00 And so like, tell me what you need. I will give it to you because you're so great and I can count on you. Add surplus value. Whatever they're paying, you find a way to add. 5x more than that of value to your company. And you could do whatever you want. If that's what you do, show up, be consistent, be reliable, ask for more work, add surplus value.

Starting point is 00:50:24 You can do whatever you want. They'll beg to keep you, right? And I think that's how you earn it, right? That's how you earn. And that goes for anybody, by the way. Regardless of age, that goes for anybody. I think if we're regularly, I try to do this with every client. How can I add surplus value for whatever they're giving me, they should get a much greater

Starting point is 00:50:42 return on that investment. And if I consistently do that, my business is great. And if I don't, I'm out of business. And that's kind of the mentality. I think anybody approaches their career that way, especially if you're starting out new, you're going to be, you're going to set yourself up for a lot of good stuff. David, this is awesome. Book is called 10 to 25, the science of motivating young people, a groundbreaking approach to leading the next generation and making your own life easier. Extremely well written. Great stories. The science. and the practical application. Perfect, dude. So huge props on that. Thank you for writing it. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Yeah, totally. And I'll say

Starting point is 00:51:23 that what I'm probably most interested in now is working with teams, like sports teams and businesses on both product features that are building on the insights of my book and HR approaches and management approaches. And so if there are anybody who reads the book, you're like, we got to we're training 900 retail employees a year. We got to do that differently. We have a drive-through. We want to make it 10% faster and make a million dollars more per branch at Arby's or whatever it is.

Starting point is 00:51:53 I'm super interested in those puzzles. And the more I work on it, the more I'll have to share when I come back and tell you success stories. I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you, man. I look forward to the next one. All right.

Starting point is 00:52:03 Thanks, Ryan. See you. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com, and let me know what you learned from this great conversation with David Yeager. A few takeaways from my notes. Satina Della's model, coach, care philosophy at Microsoft. This is the opposite of what Jack Welch did at GE in his rank and yank style.

Starting point is 00:52:32 That rank and yank style in the stack ranking methodology limited innovation and stopped people from taking any type of risk for fear of being fired. We want to model the right behavior, coach others, and ensure they know we care for them, so they feel the support they need to take risk, sometimes fail, get back up, and work to innovate. Then it's life slash career advice. Don't accept some perceived path. Be reliable. Show up. Do the work and ask for more work.

Starting point is 00:53:05 Add surplus value. Whatever you're being paid, find a way to deliver 10x the value. of what they are paying you. If you do that, your employer will beg you to stay, give you a raise, and look for ways to promote you, add surplus value. And then the parental nagging study. One particular interesting point in the book is about nagging and the common tactic adults use to get people to, quote, pay attention.

Starting point is 00:53:34 Research shows that nagging triggers the emotional part of a teen's brain, shutting down their ability to think logically. They're not ignoring you on purpose. They're simply wired to tune out. A better way, speak calmly and neutrally to engage the part of their brain that handles planning and decision making. This opens the door to a real conversation. And yes, I know that is easier said than done. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two.

Starting point is 00:54:04 Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with David Yeager. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. because you continue to do that, and you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you subscribe to the show, and you're rated hopefully five stars and write a thoughtful review. And by doing all of that,

Starting point is 00:54:21 you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 614: David Yeager PhD - The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach To Leading The Next Generation (Author of 10 to 25)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.