The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversation with Claire Hughes Johnson — Building Great Teams, Managers, and Self-Awareness

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Claire Hughes Johnson, the former COO of Stripe and author of “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building,” joins Scott to discuss team management, the role of DEI, and how to identify top talent. Claire is an all-star operator — follow her on X, @chughesjohnson.  Scott opens by telling us about his new book, The Algebra of Wealth, which is out now!  Algebra of Happiness: what do you want to tell your friends and family? Follow our podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Episode 297. 297 is the country code belonging to Aruba. In 1997 Purell became available for

consumers. True story during the pandemic I was using hand sanitizer at least five times a day but then my dick turned so red that I had to switch back to lotion it's not even that funny go, go! Welcome to the 297th episode of the Prop G Pod.

I'm on Morning Joe in the morning, and I'm telling Purell penis jokes in the late morning. That's right. It's mid-morning Scott. By the way, Joe and Mika, Joe Scarborough is very dreamy. I thought to myself, what if I all of a sudden kind of mid-interview started stroking his hair with my hands? Like, that would definitely, definitely go viral

and sell a lot of books, although I think it would be my last book. I like Mika and Joe in that show. The thing I love about that show, and I think there's a lesson here, I think Morning Joe, Smirconish, and Stephanie Rule, I think a lot of media is trying to, they're there to sort of push you back or they want to go really fast. You're just a prop to get a quick soundbite or whatever. Both those are all three of those shows, Michael, Mika, Joe, and Stephanie. We're all on first name basis, of course. They try and set you up for success. And kind of a, I don't know, a larger learning. I didn't learn until I was much older

that the key or one of the keys to management was not trying to, quote unquote, get people to do your work so you can look good, but how do you set people up for success? How do you make them look good and realize that if you make people look good and you set people up for success? How do you make them look good and realize that if you make people look good and you set them up for success, they're going to want to be around you? And I was thinking that all the producers and all the hosts, I was on with Willie Geist, is that what his name is? Handsome, nice guy. And at the same time, I'd like to have him as a brother-in-law. It just wouldn't be believable that that guy would be my brother, his hair and his good looks and kind of, I don't know, waspy demeanor. I don't know if he's a wasper anyway.

I said, which no one would buy the word brothers, but maybe brother-in-law, who knows? Anyways, in today's episode, we finish off our special three-part series covering the future of work. In last week's episode, we spoke about productivity with Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Here's what he had to say about the disruption of AI on work. This is a big part of my thinking about digital knowledge work is the degree to which the humans have to keep switching our attention back and forth between many different administrative overhead tasks, so emails and chats and meetings and forms. And so I'm interested in what the impact of AI is going to have there, because there is an optimistic scenario in which it could take a significant amount of that off the plate of the average knowledge worker. That would be a huge impact, right? I think we underestimate the degree to which we are reducing the cognitive and productive capacity of knowledge workers by forcing them to be in this continual state of constantly switching our attention back and forth to servicing all these different administrative tasks.

So if you could offload that, that could be a major productivity boon. And I mean productivity in the economic macro sense of just looking at the whole sector itself and dollars produced per worker in the sector. That could be a huge boon. Today, we're covering team management, the role of DEI, and how to identify top talent with Claire Hughes-Johnson, a corporate officer and advisor at Stripe and author of Scaling People, Tactics for Management and Company Building. We'll get to that after our break, But first, what's happening? The dog is barking in the greatest city in the world. That's right. He's going to have to relieve himself on the hard concrete of Gotham. By the way, greatest city in the world. Anything you hear about New York that's not nice right now, it's not true. It's shed its skin. New restaurants. Soho is on

fire. That's where I live. I don't like to go to Midtown. Actually, I don't like to go anywhere I can't walk. But it is absolutely wonderful here. Even in winter. Is this winter? By the way, has anyone heard from spring anywhere? Jesus Christ. When does it get hot on this planet? Bring on the global warming. Daddy is ready. I am ready to go out without my little fur jacket. I'm ready to run around and pant and sweat. The reason I'm in New York is I'm doing a bunch of media. I did. What did I do? I did a bunch of book stuff yesterday, Morning Joe this morning, going to Bill Maher on Friday.

I'm with Stephanie Ruhl tonight. I'm on CNN, you know, smell me. A lot of name dropping going on here. But what is the book about? Why did I write this book, The Algebra of Wealth, A Simple Strategy for Financial Security? One, I have not been financially secure my entire life, and I should have been much earlier given how much money I've made and how hard I've worked. But I made some fairly simple mistakes. And had I just employed a few strategies and had a little bit more discipline, I think I could have ended up

with a much nicer, much less stressful life much earlier in my life. And I could have started focusing on what really matters, and that is relationships. And I'll come back to that. But simply put, the equation is kind of the following. Focus, right? Find your talent, not your passion. Mastery creates passion. Find something that you could be in the top 10% and that has a 90 plus percent employment rate. And that last part is key. There are 180,000 actors in SAG-AFTRA. These are the most talented creatives in the world. And 87% of them don't qualify for health insurance because they make less than $23,000 a year. I don't want to crush your dreams. If you want to be in sports or fashion or art or a DJ, fine. But at a very early age, if you do not receive flashing green lights and you are in the top 0.1%, you're setting yourself up for real economic and emotional distress because these industries have kind of a 90 plus percent unemployment rate. What creates passion is being able to develop a mastery of something such that the economic accoutrements, the goodwill, the camaraderie, the relevance will make you passionate about whatever it is. So your 20s are really about trying to find your talent and then doubling

down and applying some discipline and trying to be the top 10%. If you can be the top 10% in anything, one, by virtue of that, it means you don't hate it, that you at least sort of like it. And once you get great at it, once you develop a sense of ninja-like mastery in anything, the accoutrements of that mastery will make you passionate about whatever it is. That's your 20s. Also in your 20s, develop a bit of a savings muscle. It doesn't have to be a lot of money. And some people never have this connective tissue. They never connect the dots that you want to spend less than you make. And at an early age, you want to lean into your advantage. And your advantage at a young age,

quite frankly, is time. And if you can put $100, $200, $300 a month away, and then at some point in your late 20s, maybe get to $500 or $1,000. Low-cost ETFs, don't think about it. Take all of your time you'd be spending checking your phone to see how Bitcoin's doing or if NVIDIA's up or down. Just double down on your core job to try and get better at it and get more money. And again, see above, establish that mastery and diversify. The number one question I get is, is it too late to buy NVIDIA? The answer is I don't know, but what I can suggest is go into a low-cost index fund. And if it's SPY or if it's an S&P 500 index fund, then $0.33 on your invested dollar will go to the Magnum 7. And if they continue to skyrocket, fine.

If by chance they're overvalued, which you could also make an argument for, and the other 493 stocks have their day in the sun, then 67 cents on your dollar will participate in that. And what I can tell you is that any one stock has like a 50.01% chance of going up that day. But if you had purchased any five stocks in the S&P and held them for at least 10 years, no one has ever lost money. And one of the keys to wealth is not losing money. And that's also key around your sort of emotional and mental wealth. You want to kind of limit, if you can, the downside, because unfortunately, as Kahneman said, the downside hurts more than the upside. So what you really want is a series of consistent, small wins to

the upside. And you can get that by not buying or trying to find a needle in the haystack, but by buying the whole haystack. I didn't learn that early on. And that is I was always doubling down on my company or the thing I thought was going to work. And when it didn't work, it was just incredibly painful and financially devastating. You want to reject or try and understand a flaw in our species. And what is that flaw? Because the majority of our time on this planet, we haven't lived past 35, we have no ability to calibrate time. Specifically, we don't have the ability to recognize how fast time is going to go and how long you're going to be here. A 25-year-old asked a question in one of my book events yesterday. I said, do you realize you're

going to be here for another 80 years? And then someone said, I'm 45. Is it too late? I'm like, well, you're probably going to be here another 50 years. So the power of time and how fast it goes and compound interest is really staggering. And if you think, well, it's too late, you know, it probably isn't. But start now. Start small, keep adding, gamify the savings muscle and realize that no one's as impressed with your shit as you are. And that also recognize that every deep pocketed, talented person running a technology firm is testing a million times a day and being informed by psychological techniques to try and offer you compelling offers that you would be an idiot not to accept. What an upgrade from economy to economy comfort to economy plus to business class at exactly the right moment. It's an investment in you. No, it's not. It's just consumption. Hey, how would you like some flourless chocolate cake added on to your order from Joe and the Juice?

That was presented to me today, and I thought, flourless chocolate cake? You can never go wrong with that. A capitalist economy with this kind of godlike technology is going to find ways to get you to spend all of your current income all the time. So have some forced savings. Max out any investment opportunities of your company where it will take money out of your check before you see it. Round up on acorns. Do anything you can for forced savings and assets that go tax-deferred, whether it's stocks, whether it's real estate, you want to start building an army that goes out and kills and conquers for you and your family in your sleep. And that is capital that you can begin deploying to owning things. And even if it's just a little bit, develop that savings muscle. Realize that having a plan, having some discipline, not responding to the faux praise or your self-imposed belief that if you have a BMW instead of a Hyundai, that that's impressive to people. It really isn't. Don't be that douchebag at the end of the night that orders a bottle of Grey Goose for 450 bucks at a club. Be the guy that has a plan and leaves the club early because you got your shit together and

you're about building a base and deploying that army of capital. And what's the end game? The end game of getting to financial security, and you can do this if you apply focus, stoicism, diversification, and time. The end game is such that you have enough economic security that you can free up and focus on the really important things in life, and that is deep and meaningful relationships. That is the whole shooting match. And unfortunately, it's really important in the United States. I'm not talking about what should be, I'm talking about what is. And that is America is a loving and generous place for wealthy people, and it's a rapacious, violent place for people that don't have money. And America becomes more like itself every day. So here's the bottom line. Find your talent, develop mastery, live below your means, diversify your investments, and recognize that time is going to go really fast. And if you

put a little bit of money away now, in just an instant, it's going to be a lot. So you can focus on the key to happiness in life, and that is your relationship. So here's the good news. I genuinely believe I know how to get you rich. The bad news is the answer is slowly. We'll be right back for our conversation with claire hughes johnson a corporate officer and advisor at stripe and author of scaling people tactics for management and company building claire where does this podcast find you i am just south of Boston. Oh, nice. All right, well, let's bust right into it. You have a set of principles that serves as a foundation, or you believe serves as a foundation for a leader, building self-awareness to build mutual awareness. Say the thing that you think you cannot say, distinguish between management and leadership, and come back to the operating system.

Can you break these down for us? Yeah, I wanted to start my book with principles I've developed over my career as a manager and a leader. And I think people should have their own principles and values, but I think these can serve other people well. So I wanted to start with them. The first one is the most important one. It's the one I probably spend the most time on in conversations I have with others, which is a lot of people think, oh, now I'm leading a team. It's all about the team and the organizational structure. And I would argue, no, it's actually all about you. And what are your default settings? What are your strengths? Unfortunately, blind spots are blind spots because they're blind.

But do you know sort of what you need to complement yourself? You've got to build a team that executes better than the individual parts of the team. And that's going to start with you. And so that's what I'm happy to say more about. But I talk about some exercises to do to understand those default settings. And then what are activities you can do with your team to start to build mutual awareness so that you operate better as a unit. Say the thing you think you cannot say is really a lesson

I've learned that you're not going to move the conversation, the project, the company forward until you're in a position where you can take some risk. And you don't have to say the highly controversial, frictionful thing, but I think it's really about saying, I think there is a problem that is unstated. Maybe that's an interpersonal problem. Maybe is willing to name it. And it's easier to name it if you ask it as a question. But if you cannot get that out on the table, that thing that's in the back of your head, I think you get stuck. And I think people get stuck. And taking some risk with what you voice in terms of your own observations about a situation is critical. Distinguishing between leadership and management is really that I believe those are distinct skill sets. Management is knowable. It's how do I get from point A to point B, organize the people,

the process, the metrics, the goals. And leadership is a little bit more amorphous, but it's really setting a vision and setting the standards, the bar, the system of values, really. And both of those are critical. And what I find is people tend to default to one or the other, sort of naturally. And founders are often in the leadership camp. And I would say COOs, which I've been, are a little bit more in the management camp often. At a certain point in your career, you're going to have to break through learning the other skill set, or you're going to hit a ceiling, in my opinion. And then once you've learned both skill sets, you've got to know which one am I playing right now in the room, because you may be thinking you're doing a management thing and you're really setting a leadership standard and you better call

it out that way so that people know how to follow. And the last one about the operating system is just as complexity levels rise, whether it's in your organization, in your life, I find that it, this is how Google uses OKRs, but if you have a common way of setting goals, if you have a common way of setting metrics of declaring this is what this job to be done is, you can then context switch across a lot of your work, your business, if you've developed an operating system where you can drop in and out of it as a leader and an individual. But really, I think this applies at any level of a company. People tend to relish the chaos of young companies, and I'm not one of them. I'm more relished like, how do we structure this so we can move faster? I actually think good systems

can create velocity. Is that what you mean by the operating system? Yeah, the operating system is a way of getting things done. And you mentioned a few times in your book that you think that self-awareness is the number one skill that you look for in people, but you say it's actually not present, or that you think it's present in about 10 to 15 percent of people are actually self-aware. Why do you think that is, and what does it look like, or what does a lack of self-awareness look like? I actually think a lot of people, once they learn the skill of observing themselves and getting feedback, can get more self-aware. So maybe they start out on a low level, as we all do in our careers, right? We sort of think, I don't know if you're familiar with the David Foster

Wallace Kenyan commencement speech, This is Water, which is really about empathy and awareness, but it's really based on this joke of there's these two young fish swimming in this fishbowl, and an older fish swims by and says, hey boys, how's the water? And they're like, what? You know, they don't know they're swimming in the water. They're like, that's all they know. And when we're early in our career, all we know is how the world, we're like the star of our own show, right? And we think it's all about us. And I think what wisdom is, I mean, for those of us who've been around a little longer is realizing, oh, I'm in this water and I'm in, you know, there are other people here and I might not be the star

of the show. And I think for most people, I would actually argue you can close that gap, which is my sort of perception of me, like people holding up a mirror and saying, here's how I experienced you in a meeting, when you're giving a speech, when you're showing up at the dinner table. I can close that gap once I have some frameworks for understanding myself, which we can talk about. Then there are people, and this is where I think we're talking about the 10 to 15 percent, who have a lot of trouble closing that gap. Maybe they're quite defensive when they get feedback, which can be challenging because that means it's hard for them to listen. They're having a sort of flight or fight response to feedback, which is normal. We're animals. It feels like a threat. Or they really

just think, you know, I am this much more capable of this thing than I actually am. And how would you know? I mean, the things I argue is one, I think those people who have that gap are often frustrated in the workplace. At the end of the day, they're angry. They're exhausted. They don't feel like their manager listens to them or their teammates. Their energy is taxed by being in a system that they don't feel understood in. I think that often those people get a bunch of feedback that they don't agree with, right? So, like, look for those signs. Are you frustrated? Are you angry? Are you getting feedback you don't agree with? You might have a gap. You might not. And again, it's not that I'm judging you as a person. I don't know what's going on inside your head and your body. But the

perception of you is a problem that you might need to work on. And then if I can get people over that hump, then I think you can get a conversation going. And I find often those folks might be at the wrong job, Scott. Like they're just pushing a rock up a hill. And how do you get someone you trust that you can talk to about that? Yeah, I want to talk a little bit where you just said sometimes people are in the wrong job. I've been the CEO and founder of several small and then eventually when they become sort of medium-sized companies, I kick myself upstairs or out of the company. And I've always thought that firing has been underrated. And what do I mean by that? That is, I found that the majority of the rhetoric

put out in the public sphere is very much that if a person isn't performing, it's the organization's fault, or you need a better job description, or there's something wrong with the culture. And I always found that sometimes good people just aren't working out. And especially in a small or medium-sized company, it's better to move fast. I'd just love to hear your perspective on when it's time to let people go. I've been asked this question, like, what's your biggest change in your opinion, maybe, in your career, over your life? Like, people always say, like, what's your biggest change in your opinion, maybe in your career over your life? Like people always say, like, what have you changed your mind about? I think that's probably the one that I've come over to your side, Scott. Let's just say that. I would say early in my management career, I had a lot of belief that really good management and coaching

could change the trajectory of an individual who's in a situation that's not working. And I still believe in good management of coaching. I really do. And I think that if you think about like a normal curve, right, the people in the middle of that curve, you can move them. And ideally, you're moving them up to the higher performance. I think the challenge is that if you're talking about someone on the bottom tail tail and maybe the bottom sort of 30% performance, I think there's something probably systemic basically in their skill set, in the role, perhaps in the environment, in the job to be done that's not working. And it is a much better service, I agree with you, to have, I don't know if I start with, I'm firing you, but I'm going to have a very this is what I mean about say the thing you think you cannot say. I'm going to have a very direct conversation, which is like, I am worried this is not working out for you. And we should be working like talking about a different path. Sometimes the different path could be another another role in the same organization, you know, in the same organization. But sometimes, you know, they need to leave and it's better for

them. What do you think of the analogy of, I've always thought it's a little bit management is a little bit like parenting in the sense that we overestimate the impact we can have as a manager. As a parent, we like to think that we're engineers, whereas we're really just shepherds. We can take a good sheep and point it in the right direction and turn it into a high-performing sheep. We can take a meddling sheep and maybe take it to a good sheep. But the sheep comes to you. You don't get to decide what the sheep is. The difference between employees and kids is you can't fire your kids. At least I haven't figured out a way to fire my kids. I almost now almost never hire on interview. I find that interviewing is almost worthless. And I think part of that must be because I lack the skills to discern if someone's going to be a high performer or low performer based on an interview. What are your thoughts on interviewing? And do you have any hacks or subtle cues that you look for in terms of the interview or someone's background that are either green flags or red flags?

I mean, I think first of all, there's some research, which I think from parenting that I think applies, and I'm with you. I think a lot of it is nature, not nurture. But there are a couple of things. One, you can really influence your kid's friend group, the environment they're in, the school, the environment, and that matters. And the other is you can teach them basic manners. Like you can say, hey, there's rules in the system and you're going to follow these rules of being like a civil human. And so I try to rely on that. And I think that's true. That translates, which is, okay, what's the team environment this person is in, which is a lot more of the manager's job than people realize? Is it a high performing team because you're going to perform better in a high performing team, right? And also how you teach is not telling people what to do. It's just like parenting. Your kids look at what

you do, not what you say. And that's true of teams. So are you setting an example? Are you setting a high bar? But the question is really about interviewing and hiring. And I couldn't, you know, like, it's always interesting to me when companies get to some scale where they're sort of outsourcing a lot of the hiring process to, I mean, I believe me, love recruiters and the recruiting function is critical. But one, you got to build it really thoughtfully. And two, you can't have people abdicating responsibility for the hiring process because that is everything and it is very fallible. And so what are some tips? Well, the first one is I think there's more science in hiring than art. Like people think it's an art. Like, do you have a good talent rate? R is this

question you hear. And I don't really, I mean, I think there are some people who have better instinct stuff for 30 minutes with someone than others. But for me, it's about being really clear about what am I interviewing for? I have a rubric of things I'm testing, and I'm using the same test across ideally 10s and 20s of candidates. Like if it's a higher volume role, I can get really good at hiring for that role over some amount of time of testing the same questions. Maybe we give at Stripe, we've often used, you know, please fill out like this sort of worksheet, a homework assignment, or sometimes we do a roundtable workshop session with them for certain roles. But one, use the pattern. Pattern match and data is your friend. What is an excellent answer to this question? I have a

few questions I ask almost every candidate. I know what good is when I see it. The other is what we've already talked about, which is I really test for curiosity and learning. You know, you say to someone, tell me about a project you were involved in that failed, right? And does that person show agency? Do they say, oh yeah, here was the project, here was the role I played, and here's what I learned about what I could have done differently, versus the person who shows up and says, that was a terrible project, the scope was wrong, and this teammate of mine didn't pull their weight, right? Like, you're immediately, I'm like, there's a red flag. No agency, don't believe they can affect the outcome, I'm not really interested in working with them. The person who's oriented toward learning, toward getting better, is the person you want to hire.

The other thing is in referencing. Some people think references are just like, well, they're referenced, so they're going to say good things. But, you know, human beings don't like to, most of them, don't like to lie. So you have to ask, like, really specific questions. Like, is this person in the top 10% of anyone you've ever worked with? Because is the person a good worker is what you're trying to get at. So I ran a services firm, a high growth digital benchmarking firm called L2. And we grew it to about,

I guess about 150 people and then we sold it. And we were very data driven and we're constantly benchmarking other people's data and then selling it back to them with insights. So we used to track a lot of our own data. And I'll say a few politically, I don't want to say politically incorrect because it makes it sound like you're trying to be bold, but it's just observations that I think people... You're going to say the thing you think you cannot say. Scott, is that what's going on? There you go. That's it. This is the hard conversation,

Claire. So what I generally found in management was that 10% of the employees added 120% of the value, and your job was to make sure the other 90% didn't screw up the company too badly. And that the 10% that really drove value, you overcompensate, and their job is to manage. And you'd like to think, well, we're only going to hire A players. It's impossible to scale a company with just A players, because true A players want a lot of equity, want to start their own businesses. And there's just not enough to go around to overcompensate the A players. And there just aren't that many of them. So you end up with a lot of really solid Bs who are great and important. But it's really, you know, I've always felt in every company I can identify the

half dozen or dozen people that are the whole shooting match. And we would try and figure out what are the atmospherics or the characteristics of those people. And so we tracked pretty closely who were, quote unquote, the 10%, the drivers of the organization's success. And we found three attributes. And none of them we could write down because they would come back to haunt us. First, women. Our company was very young, and we found that, generally speaking, and I think there's now research that I hadn't discovered, that young women's prefrontal cortex matures earlier. I felt like I had five or six 24 or 26-year-old women who could be the next junior senator from Pennsylvania. And while we had some very good young men, they were just, quite frankly, a little dopier, had a more difficult time reading the room.

That's not to say they don't grow into great managers, but generally speaking, our outstanding performers were predominantly women too. They had played competitive sports, oftentimes individual, diving, gymnastics. And also third, and this was really disappointing, they came from elite universities, that the screening and the rigor to get into an elite university actually paid off. So if someone was a female gymnast at Yale, it was just an automatic hire. And all three of those things feel wrong. Your thoughts? I don't think they feel wrong. I think the thing going on in the

back of my head as you list those off is, what if I were going to abstract up what's really going on with those three categories? On the gender one, yeah, there's some evidence that women have like even 12% more prefrontal cortex, which generally means they're a bit sort of higher executive function and better at context switching. And I think it depends on the work, right? Like, I would argue, as I've said before, like, you want a mutually beneficial team that has diversity of work style. Let me just press pause there, and I think you're saying this. Diversity of what? Diversity of thought, of income, of visible characteristics gender or race or religion. Like, I don't, I mean, I care about that kind of diversity, but I'm specifically talking about the best people I ever hired on my direct team were often the people who kind of irritated me in the interview.

They were so different from me. I would ask them a question and they'd be like, well, let me think about that. You know, I'm more of a go, go, go. Let's get to the interview. They were so different from me. I would ask them a question and they'd be like, well, let me think about that. You know, I'm more of a go, go, go, let's get to the answer. And they're like these thoughtful, very analytical, actually slow to decide people, but they would be the brake on my accelerator in the team which I needed. They would say, really, do we want to make that decision right now? Are you sure? Right? And like, think about that being around you. And so I think one is, do you have a diversity of skill set? Again, though, it depends on your business model. It depends on what the project to be done is, right, for the business. But I think the competitive individual, the individual

at the elite university, I mean, it's interesting you say that because there's been more I've heard from leaders today, especially of larger companies, that they'd rather hire the top of the class from a good state school than the top of the class from an elite, quote unquote, elite university. And I think that, again, if we abstract up a level, that's really about people who aren't afraid to work hard, who are resilient, who are going for it. By the way, those competitors, they're going for it at a young age. They're like, I'd like to win, right? I'd like to organize my time to win. And I think that often top talent has a lot of internal motivation. I mean, almost always, or else they're maybe just like flat out freaking brilliant at the thing you're trying to build, right? They're either just like

geniuses at this thing, or they are incredibly oriented towards success. And I think you can test for that. And I agree with your point, though, by the way, it's very like hiring all A players, I think, would be difficult to execute. But also, I mean, you know the story of, I think it was the 88, you know, Olympic team. We could put professional athletes in the Olympic first time. We put all these all-stars on the floor from the U.S. and they lost. I think they lost to like some tiny country because like a bunch of all-stars can be not a great team because the team is a portfolio of talent that needs to execute on different levels. What is scale? I talk, my book's called Scaling People. What is it? It is

repeatedly delivering excellent work with different people involved. And a lot of the people who do that are the carriers of the system. They're not just the stars dropping in and out. You talk about teams should be a balance of introverts and extroverts. And there's a lot of research showing that extroverts get promoted at a greater rate, that the person who speaks the most in meetings, regardless of what they're saying, tends to get more recognition, more compensation. What advice do you have? I've always said I'm paid to be an extrovert, but I'm actually an introvert. And that's why I got out of the services business. It was just exhausting for me. People take energy from me. I don't get energy from them. What would have been the right role out of the gates if you felt like you had contribution, but you were just naturally

an introvert? Is it to push the limits or the boundaries of your comfort level and be more extroverted? Or is it to find a specific type of role? And what is that role that plays to the more introverted characteristics? Yeah, I mean, I think that is, I have actually thought about this, especially as I think about my own, you talk a lot about your kids, but like, you know, you see in your kids, one of my kids is an introvert. What's an extrovert? Yeah, mine too.

Yeah. I think the answer is both and I'll explain it, but here's the good news for introverts, which is a lot of earlier career roles are a lot of individual work that you should be getting done with your own thoughts and your own self. Like I'm going to go build, you know, a model or I'm a, I'm a young engineer before AI has done all the coding, and I got to figure out how to build this software program, whatever. I think to celebrate that early career stuff involves some introverted work. However, to your point, in order to start to show up as someone who has more to offer than your individual work,

you are going to have to push your boundaries on saying the thing you think you cannot say. Speaking up in a meeting, asking a question. I mean, I do think introverts tend to be deeply thoughtful. And the thing they just have to work on is share the thought with someone who's not just yourself. And you got to start working on that early because you are not going to be noticed just for building an excellent model or software program or whatever. You're going to be noticed for saying, hey, I think the model is actually wrong because these wrong assumptions, right? Say it. You got to bring it up. What, in terms of self-awareness, under the age of 30, are there, if you're coaching your kids when they're in the workplace and they're just getting started, maybe they have three or five years at a company.

If they say, mom, you're supposedly a pro at this, help me figure out what I'm good at, what I'm bad at, and what I should be thinking about moving forward. Are there a series of questions you would ask them to help them identify the type of role or type of career that they would excel in? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of work style assessments. You've probably taken some of them like MBTI, Myers-Briggs, or there's DISC. There's this insights discovery one I like. There's the Gallup Strength Finder. That's actually a pretty good one for younger people. But I think that the answer is, one, I already gave you, which is like, are you more sort of task or people-oriented? Maybe I didn't. And then are you more introverted

or extroverted? And sort of start to get them plotting on what do you enjoy doing? I remember actually when I was a young person, I had this idea that I was going to go to law school. I actually applied to law school and got in three years in a row and didn't go. But so note to self, you know, maybe I didn't want to go. But my mom kept saying to me, are you sure? Because you really don't love being in the details. And I was like, what? And she was trying to tell me the thing you as a parent see, right? Which is like, I see how you operate. And she also was a college professor. So she saw me do my schoolwork and she's like, you're very good at the big picture, the system, you know, but do you really want to read contracts and argue about three words in a sentence? No. And so how do you help your kid

understand, this is what I mean by being in the water, when they're in flow? And what does that look like, right, for them? And I think that the series of questions really have to do with what gives you energy, what takes your energy away, how often do you see yourself working with other people to build something versus working on your own? I mean, you're trying to get them to see the type of work. And I don't think it's a particular job. I think it's, I mean, you're trying to get them to see the type of work. And I don't think it's a particular job. I think it's, I mean, you know the Scott. When I think about job to be done, it's really like, what am I doing all day?

Am I reading documents? Am I writing? Am I speaking? And then helping your kids see where they are the most, where they gravitate toward naturally. And then how do they build some additional skills that become a job? But I don't think it's that hard because they've been, if they've been in an educational environment and they've done group work, they can start to see. It's when you do group work that you really notice, oh, I'm really different.

Like that other person shows up and tries to like tell us what to do. And I'm the one doing it, right? Okay, so notice that. We'll be right back. You're a senior level person at high growth, high profile companies. You're on boards of the same type of company. What are your thoughts on DEI in the corporation? The role it serves, its evolving role, does it serve a role? What are your thoughts? So one, the words diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, justice, like we've got a lot of different acronyms that different companies have around this programming have become tricky because they are sort of more, they've lost some meaning because we label them.

We put them as labels on people's jobs or on programs. When, in fact, I would just, as any person who works in a tech company, I would say, let's go back to first principles about, like, these words and what they actually mean. And here's what I would say. I have already said to you, I believe having a diverse team is critical to success. In fact, and here's the thing that needs to go with it, that team needs to be run well, managed, and led well, and that is inclusion. How do you, Claire, measure diversity? I mean, first of all, I think it's difficult to measure some of the things I've already named to you, which is sort of brain

science characteristics, individual preferences around extroversion or introversion. But I do think diversity of experiences, whether that is your race, your gender, your religion, your political position, by the way, like which often gets, you know, are you conservative? Are you more liberal? Often that gets left off. Some of those measures you can observe and we can rotate toward those, sometimes overly so. Some of those measures are self-reported. In some countries, you can't ask questions about some of those measures. What I'm looking for, and here's one thing that I will add in, which is I do believe, and there's research for this. So there's some interesting research on this, which is one, a homogeneous team, so a team that is similar to one another, will actually immediately, when formed,

perform faster and better. Because what they have is this thing called the common information effect, which is they can finish, they've shared experiences. We both were in the same rowing team in, you know, whatever, in our college. But that team, over time, will not have outsized performance. They will have speedy, fine performance. A diverse team, when run with inclusive practices, meaning I value your difference, I am listening to you as you tell me, hey, Claire, you're making a decision too quickly, or you didn't think about this. If I'm run with inclusive, those teams can have 3 to 5x the performance.

Amy Edmondson, who did the psych safety concept, and she's a professor at Harvard, she was involved in a study of intensive care units, which I think is really interesting. Because ICUs are basically run similarly in hospitals around the country. And they're really obviously teams that are 24-hour care for people who are intensively recovering from a surgery, very ill. And those teams, when run inclusively, so same combination of people, doctors, anesthesiologists, RNs, PAs, you name it, have 18% fewer deaths, Scott. A team where the doctor's like, I'm listening to what the nurse's opinion is on this patient. Or I'm someone who's like, I think this medication dosage is wrong and willing to speak up. Those teams have, you know, fewer people are dying.

Like, that's, I mean, neither you nor I works in that kind of environment. But I think what inclusion and belonging is about is really excellent management. And that's what I care about. And I think the problem is we're building these programs. I'm like, you know, no, just build better manager development and training and have leaders who get that you can get outsized business results. It's about business results if you, in fact, have more diverse, inclusive teams. The things you cited, and I want to realize this is a hot issue, and I think everyone chooses, from a common sense standpoint, chooses their words correctly when they're talking about this, or chooses their words carefully. But the things you talked about, adversity of background, different approach to problems, the issues they face, political affiliation, where they were raised, quite frankly, none of those are visible characteristics. And to date, DEI has been based a lot on visible characteristics, your ethnicity. So my question is, do you think DEI should move away from visible characteristics?

Look, I think that's part of someone's lived experience. I think as you've heard, there's, I think the people who really do this work well immediately go to, and by the way, it's not just your visible characteristic, but also your socioeconomic background, for example, that really matters. So the people who get it get that it's more that you're not one thing. I mean, I find that frustrating if you're like, well, you're a woman in business. Why do people get frustrated? I get invited to speak at events because we need a woman. That's not who I am and why you should invite me, right? That is a characteristic I have. And I don't think anybody likes to be

treated as one characteristic of themselves. And so should we move away from it? We should add to it and we should not get overly rotated toward that being the whole ballgame. I think the problem, again, is what you and I just talked about, which is how do you measure? How do you self-identify? And then I also want to step back and say something which I've talked about not as much as I'd like to, which is when you're thinking of being a leader of anything, a team, an organization, your job is actually to build a collective culture, right? It is not to rotate toward, oh, yes, I want a diverse team with a lot of different characteristics, some of which are visible, some of which aren't.

But what I'm really trying to do is build a shared vision and a shared set of goals and a belief in one another that we will be better together to achieve those things. And I think we get too rotated toward difference lately. Difference, you know, and I want to identify as this and I'm identifying as that. Like identity politics, right? I'm like so not interested in that. I'm interested in collective and community cultural fabric that leads to better results. And if you spend too much time on individual differences, you don't get there. Let me put forward a thesis and you can, you know, validate nullify or say, I don't know.

I think in five to 10 years, there will be no DEI positions and the DEI departments at universities and corporations will be disassembled and go away. Your thoughts? I think if you think of it as a development area, right? Which is like, I walk into an environment, I'm going to use an example. There's a guy I'm on a board with, we're on the board of a school, and he was a football recruit from a very white middle-class town in, I think, kind of northwestern Massachusetts. And he showed up at a school that was very diverse in terms of mostly

more wealthier kids, but socioeconomically diverse, but also racially diverse. And he was like, Claire, my mind was blown. He was like, I was this high school kid who didn't know what end was up in this environment, because I grew up in this incredibly homogenous environment, and I was all about my sport. And he said, and to this day, I am a different person because of that experience I had living and being in classrooms with these kids who were so different from me. And I'm a better, he's a CFO of a major company today. And when I talked to him about that, he's like, I had a learning curve of how to operate

in an environment like that. And I believe there is a development area for people, which is, how do I, to your point, listen, have empathy, have understanding that I am different. This is not, we don't all have the same water. And so will they be called DEI departments? I'm not going to weigh in on that. But is it important, especially as you're trying to form a company, a school, a community, to get everybody on some level. You need a shared vocabulary for operating. And I do think there are roles to play in universities or companies, which is let's help get to a shared vocabulary and a development stage where we are not, well, we one, recognize we all have biases. Our brains take shortcuts.

And two, how do we have a skill set that allows us to operate as one unit? So as we wrap up here, Claire, we usually finish with a similar question, and that is, what would the advice to your 25-year-old self be? And it can be both professional and personal advice. I mean, I'm not someone who looks back and sort of regrets things, but I would say, one, I wish I'd done a stint living abroad at some point earlier in my life. So that's one regret I have. And I made up for it sort of professionally by traveling a lot for business, but it's not the same. And two, I would actually celebrate my younger self. I took a lot of risks professionally.

I did not go do the regular expected job coming out of my university. I moved to California without a job and got a job at Google. I think I recognized my risk profile, right? Like you think about it, you're young. I was very fortunate. I did not have a lot of debt coming out of school, which by the way is really fortunate. That was a very lovely grandfather who helped pay for college, right? My parents were teachers. I didn't, but I recognized I don't have a lot of overhead. I don't have a lot of possessions. I could take some risks when I was in my 20s and I took them. And that's what I would tell people, like, don't run like a lemming over the cliff at the jobs that everyone is running for.

Do the thing that you think is interesting that, by the way, is going to go somewhere in the macro. Don't just, you know, I didn't become a writer, which I thought about. I just didn't think it was going to be that successful and high impact a career. And I was probably, especially for myself, but I really looked for, I had a software is eating the world realization at the end of my twenties. And I went and got in the mix and I would say, have those realizations and act on it. I love that. The basis of strategy is trying to do things that other people can't do or that are hard and young people have advantages they don't even realize. And in your case, you realized, I don't have dogs, I don't

have kids, I don't have debt. Why wouldn't I move and try something? The real insight is kind of obvious or hides in plain sight. Claire Hughes Johnson is a corporate officer and advisor at Stripe. She previously served as the company's chief operating officer from 2014 to 2021. Prior to Stripe, Claire spent 10 years at Google leading business teams, including overseeing aspects of Gmail, Google Apps, and consumer operations, as well as serving as vice president of AdWords, Google Offers, and Google's self-driving car project. Claire is also the author of Scaling People, Tactics for Management and Company Building. She joins us from her home just south of Boston. Claire, thanks very much for your

time and congratulations on all your success. Thanks, Scott. I enjoyed it. Have a great rest of your day. Odds of happiness. My father is having trouble speaking, and I don't think it's going to get any better. I don't know if it's dementia. Whenever I ask for a diagnosis from his doctors, they basically look at me and say, the diagnosis is 93, and he's about to be 94. But he's having problems now even forming sentences or communicating. And that happens to all of us. For some of us, it happens slowly. For some of us, it happens because we die and obviously can't communicate any longer. And for some of us, it's sort of just a slow hill down and we have trouble communicating. I have a close friend

whose mother is in pretty late stages of dementia and she can't communicate in a coherent way. And it got me thinking, there's this wonderful line I love from, I think his name's Ed O'Neill, who plays Jay in Modern Family. I think Modern Family is just a very moving program and wonderful writers. These are very talented, deep feeling people, whoever writes that show. And he's talking about kids and he pauses and he's talking about kids, and he pauses, and he says, you never know when is the last time you pick up your kids, and it just rattled me. I thought, God, I'd give anything to know. When was the last time I got to pick up my boys, and even better yet, to know that it's a year away, and a year you're no longer going to pick up your boys, and it got me thinking about my dad,

and at some point, you're not going to be able to communicate to other people. And it's going to be too late to communicate anything you want to say, your emotions, to tell them you love them, to tell them you admire them, to get something off your chest, to tell them something about your youth that you always wanted to tell your friends or your kids and you were afraid to tell them, whatever it might be, that moment will come. And it'll come sooner than you think. And I like to think, I like to go through this exercise of, okay, I can't communicate any longer. I can't tell people how I feel. I can't express myself. And then I'm given a grand bargain. I'm given a chance to go back for 30 days and I can communicate whatever I want to whoever I want. What would I say? What would I say?

I don't think that's a bad idea to put yourself in that place. Imagine that sooner rather than later and the pace of time will make it sooner rather than later. You will not be able to communicate what you think, how you feel to others. So you're back. You got a short amount of time. What do you want to tell other people? This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer,

and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop2Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show. Come on, baby. Come to daddy. Come to daddy.