Episode 205: The Simple Way to Inspire Your Team with Dr. David Burkus

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Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hammer, your host. On today's episode, we have David Burkus. David is a bestselling author of 4 different books on business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards. He's been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USA Today. Look, you name it, he's been on there. I, you know, don't take favorites of the people that I have on the podcast, but this was one of the best conversations I've had. I really enjoyed his energy. And you can definitely see if he said at the end of the podcast, if he was still teaching, I would love to take an Executive MBA course with David. I think you're going to get a ton out of this. We talk about remote work. We talk about how to handle hybrid teams, but we also talk about things around purpose and culture and connecting to a deeper meaning. And ultimately, there, he's got a great— we mentioned it several times in the podcast. He's got a great TED Talk that we'll link in the show notes, and we'll make sure that we link in our email that we send out that you're gonna check out. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with David Burkus.

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David Burkus, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Oh, well, thank you so much for having me.

We are really excited to have you. As I was sharing before we hit record, uh, I came across your book in a Barnes Noble, and I had actually recently heard not long ago one of your TED Talks, and we're going to dive into both of those. But before we get into all of that, we always start with a background and origin story. So why don't you just kind kind of take people back a little bit around along your journey and kind of how you got to where you are today?

Oh man, how far back do you want to go? Right. So what I usually tell people is I've had the same mission for almost the last 2 decades, which is that I'm trying to help people do their best work ever. I'm trying to create more workplaces that don't suck, that are more engaging. I'm trying to help people connect with the meaning behind the work they do. Work is central to our lives. It is something that even, even in situations where people have all of their, you know, monetary expenses covered and what have you, they still engage in these sort of projects, these ways to leave your mark on the world, right, that we call work, right? So work is central to our lives. I think it's too important to have it be terrible, to have it be draining, to have it be this, this horrible experience. So that's where my focus has been. It's been there for, like I said, 20-something years. I actually went to undergrad thinking I was going to be a writer, like fiction, you know, like novelist or serial James Patterson type person. But it was there that I found the people that were doing some of the early science writing in and around social science and really was fascinated by that. I was like, this is every bit as good storytelling, but it actually helps people. And you can actually sort of, you know, tap into some— I mean, obviously a good novel helps people on the beach, right? And a bad one helps them fall asleep. But like these types of books, actually really help people.

Yeah.

So, uh, I went to graduate school for organizational psychology. Uh, I was married— I, well, I still am married, but at the time married to a medical student. So when I got done with my, uh, master's, I got bored, so I just rolled that over into a PhD program, uh, to continue to go on study dates with her basically as she went throughout all medical school. Somewhere along the line it took a really interesting turn because I started adjuncting classes Eventually that turned into an offer to come full-time at a business school here in Tulsa. And so I was a business school professor for basically right up until COVID for almost a decade. But what happened during COVID is essentially a lot of the work that I had done on previous books I'd written while I was at the university, including crazy ideas like people who have to get work done without any office to go to. Suddenly the world really sort of needed that. A lot more people than I had ever worked with before needed that content and needed it right away. So I actually left the university during COVID to kind of devote myself to that. Full-time, right? Working with organizations, working with leaders, whether that be massive organizations or government organizations or small business owners who are like, yeah, we could save a lot of money if we don't go back to an office, right? Or at least downsize our office, etc. So that's been my focus in helping them build their teams no matter where their teams are working. That's been my full-time focus essentially since COVID And it's been a pretty wild ride.

I don't know, I wasn't prepared to ask you this question, but given the the timeline, where were you whenever Tim Ferriss's book, The 4-Hour Workweek, came out? And then what was your thought about that then? I mean, you probably were in the stages of beginning to kind of think through some of those things that he obviously popularized in that book. Yeah.

You know, what's weird is I, even when it came out, had a few mutual— I had started in the writing and putting out content, podcasts and speaking game. And when that book came out, and so we had a couple mutual friends, and the biggest irony is that I don't know that Tim Ferriss has ever worked a 4-hour week in his life, right? Like, the book can definitely teach you how to do that, but even he is like, well, I want to do that so I can work on other things. Like, he's a great example of what I said at the top, right? That people, even if you figure out something where your monetary needs are taken care of via a system, he's still working on all sorts of other projects. Right. So it's a huge irony. I think, so I think it was a pretty solid read. You know, I think the big irony, you know, a lot of us are debating what this kind of future of work arrangement is. And I don't know that anybody submitted let's only work 4 hours a week. It sounds pretty good. But, you know, there's a lot of people working 4-day weeks or the now the 3-2-2 arrangement and hybrid work where you're on site 3 days, you're remote 2 days, et cetera. There's a lot of people playing around with that stuff. And so it might actually— you're making me think it might actually be good to kind of reexamine that because I think at the core of that book is this idea that a lot of things that have been taking a lot of your work hours could be replaced with systems or could be outsourced. And we've never had a better time than sort of coming out of the pandemic where we were forced to systematize stuff, forced to collaborate across time zones and borders and what have you because we weren't in person. We've never had a better time where you could probably put some of those systems into place. Um, really long-winded answer, uh, but no, no, that's great.

That's great. No, it's great perspective for sure. So, um, I'm going to ask this question to begin to get— take us down the path that ultimately I want, I want to share. Your 12-minute TED Talk, we'll put in the show notes for everybody and we'll also put in our email that we send out, um, was phenomenal. But before we get to To that in particular, I want to ask you this broad-based question. I try not to always ask just broad-based questions, but I feel like that this is kind of an exception. And that is, because of COVID it definitely accelerated what maybe was starting down the path for sure. And so now what we see, large corporations all the way down to small companies, 2 to 5, uh, 5 team members, et cetera. Are beginning to try to play around with what you mentioned, which is either remote work, hybrid work, et cetera. And they're just, you know, it's kind of going back and forth. It's almost like I'm seeing the pendulum swinging big time. It was like everything goes remote, had to get it. And then now Elon is the one that's out in front of all of it saying, no, you get your butt back to the office, et cetera. But then other companies and then other ones are settling into, settling into kind of hybrid roles and other ones are saying, no, we've got to have you back in the office, etc. Where are we going with this? What have you found for both big businesses, big, small, medium-sized businesses? What's working? What's not?

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting because it's tempting. I mean, it's not just Elon, right? Every day there's a different corporate leader that's like, forget this, everybody back. I don't know if you saw, I thought this was interesting. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of DC, was reinaugurated last week, and in her speech she talked about how remote work is killing downtown DC and you all need to bring your employees back.

Like, there's—

Wow.

No, it's not.

So to your point, here's what I think is actually happening, okay? And this was my focus. I think this was true before the pandemic, but this was my focus, especially when everybody switched, when it became obvious that the great work from home experiment wasn't gonna be 2 weeks, right? We all thought we were going on a workcation. I remember talking to somebody who worked at a fairly large mortgage company with a very large home office, and her job switched from being the event planner to the office clearer because there were no events. And as soon as it became clear that all, like, the turkey sandwich you left in the fridge for tomorrow is still there, somebody needs to sort through everybody's personal effects, pack up packages, ship them out to people's homes. Like, that became her job for a year. Well, anyway, what I think happened as soon as it became obvious that this was going to last for a while. People needed to switch their, their thinking about culture. That was all the questions I was getting asked. I mean, the first question I was getting asked is, when are we going back? And then when people stopped wanting the answer to that question, that was the new question. What do I do to our culture? You know, there's this myth that just having people in the office creates these serendipitous collisions that create groundbreaking innovations. And that's actually much more myth than it is fact. There's not a lot of evidence for that actually happening. Right? So people started asking questions about culture because, and I think this was true before the pandemic, but it's definitely true now. It turns out for most people's experience of work, the team culture matters more than the organizational culture. Right? And if you're a small business owner, those are kind of redundant. But if you run Tesla, if you run Google, if you run Microsoft, or you run a large, you know, greater than, let's say, 2 dozen employees, you break out into multiple teams. And if you ask the average, you just pull one of those random employees at faceless 1,000-person company and you say, describe your company culture, they don't describe the free food, the perks and benefits of the office, the Hawaiian Shirt Friday. That's an office-based reference for you. They don't describe that. They describe what it's like to work with the 8 to 10 people they work with on a regular basis and that culture. And so my focus really shifted to trying to train a lot of these remote managers who were relying on HR and whoever was in charge of corporate culture company-wide, relying on them to do all of that work. Now they're in charge of shaping the culture of their team, right? And a lot of them are frustrated at that. A lot of them are struggling with that. A lot of them are realizing that when team culture matters more than corporate culture, you can't excuse crappy managers. You can't substitute— you can't assume presence equals productivity, all of this stuff. And so I think there's a lot of people who are in leadership roles who are saying, okay, this isn't working, everybody back. And what they're actually saying is, I don't know how to build a culture in my organization unless people are in person where I can offer them little perks and all of the normal stuff we thought prior to 2020 made for a company's culture, right? And now that we're removing that, and the other thing we're learning is that like those were all actually tricks anyway, like Google's free food and free dry cleaning, whatever. It was all actually a trick to get you to stay at the office longer and work harder anyway.

Sure.

So it makes it matter even more. But there's a lot of leaders that are like, I don't know how to do this, I give up, therefore I'm gonna force everyone back. Now here's the problem. Most people will come back. Most will come back. But the other thing the pandemic taught people is that top talent needs organizations less than organizations need top talent, right? Every company, every business, large or small, needs top, top performing talent in order to to move the goalposts. Or some research suggests that your top performers are 10x more valuable, more productive than your kind of mediocre or lower performers, right? And, and I'm an optimist. I wish everybody could be a high performer, but it's just, it's not true, right? So let's level with that. So those high performers, we know they want flexibility. It's not actually about working from home. It's about the autonomy that comes from deciding where I'm going to do which jobs, right? And they're not going to stand for, hey, everybody back all of the time. So we get these headlines. From all of these, you know, usually CEOs or what have you that are saying everybody back. But most of the leaders I'm working with now are trying to navigate that dance. We want everybody back, but we know people actually want autonomy. So we have to figure out where it's all going to shake out. Now, if I had to bet, I would say it shakes out to people spending about 20 to 40% of their time working somewhere other than the office. That doesn't mean at home, but This idea, and some companies it's gonna be different days, some companies it's gonna be different hours, but this idea that giving people autonomy over their schedule, uh, means you're never gonna see them again, it isn't simply true. Most of the orgs I'm working with, it settles down to about 2 days or so away from the office if you wanna do it that way. Other organizations are doing like core hours where people are in the office from 10 to 2, but we don't care if you stay late or you work early, but it's, seems to be somewhere in that range of 20 to 40% of time of people working somewhere else. I think that's a fair trade-off for giving top performers the autonomy they need. They know what environment is conducive to them doing their best work, and I'm in favor of giving it to them, right?

Absolutely.

And then, and then there's also a lot of variance. You might have your low performers who think they're great at performing from the office that you've got to have that difficult conversation with and go, no, actually, I want you closer to 20% away than 40% away.

One of the biggest things that I heard you just mention there is at the beginning you said leaders have not figured out how to ultimately run an organization in this type of environment. We're basically learning it real time, experimenting, testing, and saying, well, did that work? Did engagement go up? Which is going to lead me to where I'm going to go next, which is like what actually then connects top talent? They have autonomy. Yes, I can work from the coffee shop on these days, and other days I do have meetings in the office. Okay, that makes sense, right? I get that. I appreciate the flexibility. Ability, the autonomy to get to choose. I'm a night owl. I would rather work at 8 PM to midnight. Okay, great. We're going to allow you to do that. But one of the things that really just spoke to me so much is around your TED Talk. And so can you just kind of give people the rough overlay of that? And I'll share kind of some anecdotes about some things that really related to me. And I guess maybe one of the better places to start is just the overall story of KPMG. And their campaign that they had, which was We Shape History. And I tell you, as I was listening to your story on the TED Talk, I thought, oh, well, that's the thing. They totally did that. And that's what changed. And then you go on and tell the story, and I don't want to steal your thunder.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what I love about KPMG's story is it comes in two parts. And the first part is what lots of organizations do and then stop, right? So KPMG, if you don't know, they're a Big Four accounting firm, also consult— when did it happen that all of the accountants are also management consultants? But anyway, they were a Big Four accounting firm. They were actually, in terms of employee experience, the worst one to work for. Their engagement numbers were low. They were not— they were the least ranked on like great places to work lists and all that among the accounting firms. And when that happens, so this goes back to that idea of company culture and senior level attempts to control things, right? The first, the default reaction was, okay, perks, pay increases, right? Let's give them more flexibility. This is all pre-pandemic, by the way. This is like 2014. What can we do, right? What can we do at a senior level to improve it across the whole firm? Those things move the needle a little bit, but it levels off. So then they engage in this, for lack of a better term, corporate propaganda, which is what a lot of organizations do. And they create this internal marketing campaign called the We Shape History campaign. And the way the We Shape History campaign works is the idea was they wanted people who were asked, oh, what do you do for KPMG? They wanted people to answer, we shape history. So they collected all these stories from the company's near 100-year history. And there's some really cool stories, right? Like KPMG was in charge of the logistics of the Lend-Lease Act, which is how the Americans joined with the Allies at first during World War II. They talked about how KPMG certified the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1994, right? For first Black president of— Really, really cool stuff. KPMG was involved in a lot of the recovery and logistics and insurance contracts and all of that sort of stuff with the $8 billion recovery fund after the tragedy of 9/11. Right. So they start putting these together, they make videos, they hang posters, they do all this sort of stuff. And, you know, like any other corporate propaganda campaign, it gets people excited for a little bit. It gets the people who make the campaign internally, they submit to like the marketing award shows and they get their little trophy, right? And everybody's happy for a month or so. What they did next, and it was part of the plan, what they did next I think was really cool and took it to a level that is what makes it actually work. They flipped it and they put it to individual people and individual teams, and they launched this thing they called the 10,000 Stories Challenge, which was, you've heard how we've shaped history in the past, you tell us how you're making a difference right now. I think actually the coolest thing about this is they made an app that was on the company's internal website where you could design your own version of the posters that were doing all the award-winning campaigns that weren't all that effective. So you can make your own. They're usually blue and they say, what do you do at KPMG at the top? And then you put in your answer and they wanted 10,000 stories. They thought they'd run it for 6 months and they'd get a good response would be 10,000 stories. They had 32,000 employees at the time. Within a few months, they got 42,000 stories, which is Again, I'm a B-School professor. So what I love about this is that means some people did the assignment twice. Some people went for extra credit, but 42,000 stories. So they cut it short. And what I think is really cool about it isn't even that. I mean, it's a great response, right? And it shows that power of getting people not to internalize your big vision that you've casted or your propaganda that you're saying about why we matter, but to ask people a specific pointed question about why the work they're doing on a day-to-day basis matters, or what I say in the TED Talk, that the big question is who is served by the work that we do. And this 10,000 Stories challenge actually asked people to engage in that. Remember what I said earlier, by the way, about team culture mattering more than organizational culture? Because the real surprise to me happened months after the campaign was over when they did their next annual engagement survey, because they added a couple questions to it about how that individual person taking that survey responded to all of this sort of stuff. And so they added a question that was, does your manager talk about purpose on a regular basis? And then they could split all of the engagement data between people who are on teams that actually like internalized 10,000 Stories Challenge, actually had the conversation, and people whose manager like sent an email once and like, here's a cool app, check it out if you want to, right? There are massive differences, right? Like a 30-point difference in the, in the people who are on the purpose side saying, I believe the work that I do at KPMG is important. A doubling of the number of people that say, I rarely think about looking for another job, right? It's almost across the board, either 25, 30, or 40% gaps in all of the different metrics of engagement between people whose manager, in other words, whose team is thinking about the work that we do, and people who are on a team that doesn't think about that. That part has nothing to do with corporate. Right? You, you could try and plan everything KPMG did, but you'll probably get the same result, which is the individual managers who internalized it and said, I'm gonna use this tool to engage my team. They saw a massive impact. These people, more of the same. Right?

Mm-hmm.

And so I think the lesson for large organizations, the lesson is train at every level those individual managers to talk about purpose. For a small business owner, the, the lesson is like, don't get so busy in doing everything you're doing to not take the time to share that with your people every once in a while, right? To zoom back out and go, here's who we serve, right? Like, I, you know, I know from doing the research on this podcast, you do a lot of work. I mean, within a lot of the listeners, a lot of your clients are insurance agents, right? Which is funny because we can get so focused on the sales side of it. I closed this idea, I did this much in premium. I mean, there's a, there's a, like, the dream conference to go to for insurance agents is all about how much premium you write. Yeah, and actually, when people call their agent, it's when horrible things in their life happen— house burns down, car crashes, etc. And you get the opportunity to be there for that. How often do you, when it's all over, do you pause and go back to your team and go, you know what, we just managed to make it easier? This person just went through all of this in their life, and because we were there, because we wrote this policy a couple years ago and forgot about it, their life is going a lot smoother now than it would be if we weren't there. Like, you have that opportunity on a regular basis, but we get so focused on the operations of the sales side and all that sort of stuff that we forget to do it.

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I have mentioned on here quite a bit the different titles that a lot of business owners will wear, and it's like, okay, you're CEO, Chief Everything Officer, which means you have to wear the COO hat, CSO, CMO, like, and keep on going if you're a small business owner. And I'd always said CSO, well, refer to Chief Sales Officer. But you actually have talked about like wearing the hat of being the Chief Storytelling Officer, which is basically what you're saying is to, to gather the stories of the people that you've served, the impact that you've been able to make. Not about maybe if in an insurance example, how much money you saved them, like that's not going to get anybody fired up. About that, you know, but down to really, have you curated the stories to be able to share with your team on an ongoing basis? Because all of everybody has them.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And I think, you know, small business owners, for sure, you're Chief Storytelling Officer if you lead people, right? So even if you're in a larger organization, and you're just a mid-level manager or frontline manager, if you lead people, part of your job is Chief Storytelling Officer, right? It's your job to collect those stories. The thing that I tell people, make this a practice. I do this for myself. I used to do it when I was a B-School professor. I taught the class that included like the job interview skills and all that sort of stuff. And so I taught them how to write a proper thank you note and get the stationery to do it, etc. And of course, there's some narcissism there because basically they would practice on me. So at the end of the semester, I would always get all of these thank you notes and I kept them in a box. I still had it somewhere. I kept them all in the same box in my office. This. And whenever you're having like a down day, you just sort of flip through it, you see a student from like 5 or 6 years ago and you're like, I wonder what they're up to now. Like, it's cool to do that. I do the same thing now in email and I encourage every leader of people to do this. Create a folder in your email inbox. I use the joke hashtag winning, right? Because the hashtag will float it to the top if you sort alphabetically, but also it just makes me smile. And anytime you get a story like that, a thank you note from a customer, anytime you close out, you know, a claim with somebody who the fact that you were there protect them, really help them. Anything, even if it's a thank you note from somebody else, right? Just, hey, thanks so much for this. Drag it into that folder because we can listen to me say you need to be Chief Storytelling Officer all the time. When you get to that weekly huddle with your team and you're like, okay, I need to tell them about the work we do is important. If you're drawing a blank, that's gonna be a problem, right? So the trick is to collect those stories on a regular basis so you have them out to share every time you need them, which is pretty much every time your team is together.

Absolutely. You know, one of the stories that I've also heard you share that really resonated with me, and it happens every year. In fact, I think it— I feel like it happens twice a year, but I know it happens every year for sure, but maybe twice. So I went to business school at Auburn, and one of an Auburn kind of mantra is, if you love Auburn, Auburn will love you back. And every year since I graduated, I get the calls from the college callers. And so I know you, you tell this story, right? And so when you told it, I was like, oh my goodness, like, yes, this happens. Well, they changed. They used to be, tell me about you. And I would say, well, you know, I'm a business owner, all these kind of things. And they would, they were asking questions about me and trying to engage me in small talk. And of course, you're, you realize it's college students, so you're being respectful. But sometimes it's like, it's 8:30 at night, you're having dinner with your family. It's like not the best time, right? Well, one of the things that they did is they did switch it and they started to share the stories of the money that was raised. And I'll even go a step further. They would then say, I benefited.

Mm-hmm.

Well, for me, giving the money, I was like, oh, well, heck, now it's a real person instead of me just donating to the Auburn Business School general fund.

Yeah.

Now I'm actually donating to help someone like a David or like a Rachel or whatever that may be. And man, it not only made me start to answer the phone more because I can see the 334 area code and I know it's Auburn calling, but also I gave more money. And, and so when you told that story and I want you to share more context to that, it really did get me bought into the purpose more. So I see it honestly both ways. And then I'm sure it's obviously had a huge impact on how much money they raised.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so the, the, it's one of my favorite studies of all time that Brad is referring to. It was conducted, was conducted by a bunch of different researchers, but the lead author on the study was Adam Grant, who later went on to be sort of mega professor, right? Adam Grant. But he worked, he did his PhD at the University of Michigan. Which is not mentioned in the research article, but it's pretty obvious because you know where he did it. And Michigan, giant state school like anybody else, one of the work-study programs is calling for donations. And if you, if you're like, I've never had that, you probably went to a smaller school. You're really, really lucky. But like, I went to grad school at the University of Oklahoma. So I get these calls once or twice a year, right? And the student doesn't want to be there, right? They drew the short straw of all of the work-study things. They'd rather be like flipping the burgers at the on-campus like McDonald's than doing this, right?

Yeah.

And usually they just read from a script, and the script is always marked in such a way that they can counter your whatever with something else, and they keep making smaller and smaller requests for donations. In the TED Talk, I actually talk about— this is a real thing— I was asked if I would like to donate $20.05 to commemorate my graduation year. Like, they talked me all the way down to $20. And I still said no, by the way. But, but the powerful thing that happened that Adam did is he took half the group and he gave them an intervention. Actually, there were 3 different interventions if you want to get really nerdy on the study. But the most impactful one was they had them to meet— his name was Will— they had to meet Will for 5 minutes during a break one evening. They had to meet Will, who was a benefit of the scholarship program that came out of the general fund from the university. They got to learn that what Will was studying, what his plans were for, and they got to hear Will say, I would never have been able to come to a school as great as U of M if it weren't for what you're all doing, right? That's a powerful answer to the question, who is served by the work that we do, right? And then they did nothing else, no additional training, no like sales training, no, like they didn't play them like the opening scene to Glengarry Glen Ross or anything like that. They just got them back on the phones. And when they followed up a month later, the people that met Will made double the number of calls per hour. They made double— they raised double the amount of money. They're— they're basically every single metric, they dramatically outperformed the people who didn't get to meet the answer to that question, who is served by the work that you do? And it's funny, I was actually just reading this in an article. I don't— I'm actually kind of mad at him that I never knew his story. Roger Martin, who was the dean at the University of Toronto's business school, Rotman, which he was the dean there for like 20 years and turned it into like this sort of backwater business school into the premier business school in Canada. And one of the things he says in this article is that he made a point to turn Rotman into not a place to beg for money, but a place worth donating to. Wow. And that sort of does the exact same thing, right? That is, say, what, what all I did was made sure we had some accomplishments and then made sure people who had the means to donate knew about those accomplishments. So they knew they were giving into them, right? And I would say even, I'll go even further, to school like Auburn, right? It's really easy to look at the sports program and go, well, everybody knows Auburn's accomplishments. Not a lot of people know everything else that's going on on campus because it doesn't get attention, especially the business school, which is actually a great program, right? So you have that level, right? Which is again, this power of sort of not telling stories in a broad scale. Like if, if KPMG had just ended at the We Shape History campaign, it probably wouldn't have made a lasting difference at the firm. Yeah, it would have moved the needle for a couple of months because everybody remembers it and then everything settles back because that's not a who. Like what we want are specific stories about specific people whose life is made better by the work that we do. And unfortunately, a lot of leaders tend to run with this. I need to cast a bold vision. And so we talk about how we're like My dentist likes to talk about how he's disrupting the dental industry. I'm like, dude, you like— no, I don't live in— I'm not in— like, I don't know what the epicenter of dentistry arts is, but it's certainly not where I live, right? And I don't know how many people are kind of paying attention to him. But the other thing that he does that's fantastic is focuses on patient care and then tells his team about those great stories about patient care, etc. Right? Which one do you think has a better impact on his team and on engagement, right? It's not this, we're disrupting the dental arts, like you're cleaning my teeth, you're not doing anything all that crazy. But this one, solving people when they're in some of their most painful problems, etc., that one has a real chance to resonate with the staff.

No, man. Yeah, I just love this so much. I actually sent your TED Talk to my team because I was preparing for this. And I said, hey, everybody, I want you to listen to this. And I want you to give feedback because we've got to start curating some of the stories of the impact that we've been to make, because we do get those text messages, those notes, those emails, those Voxer messages from people saying, like, hey, that was really impactful to me, and what you did has helped me to be able to do XYZ, or whatever that may be. And so it's like, my goodness, what— we've got to be able to tell that story. It's living up here in my head, but man, we really could get bought into because it's bigger than us. Yeah, right. And these are real people with real stories Real people, real stories. I— and one last thing I'll just comment on. Every— I usually check it once a week, maybe twice a week or so. I've been so blessed. I've thanked our listeners so much for how much that the podcast has grown and for you guys to keep— continue to share it. And so when you see those numbers like in the thousands, you realize, wait a minute, there's a person behind there listening to this episode. Like, they have We're in their earbuds right now. And it's— and whenever I remove myself from the numbers of it and say like, no, there's actually human beings listening to this and hopefully that we're serving them, it just changes my perspective of level of preparation, etc., to make it quality.

Yeah, yeah. My, my small trick that I do is when I look at those numbers, because you can— the other thing about numbers is as soon as you see it, you go, great, and you start thinking about the bigger numbers. And so what I do is I go to Google and I type it depending on the number of theaters with or stadiums with or arenas with and then the number and like show me, okay, this, oh, we have, we have 10,000 listeners. Great. That's like, that's actually a small NBA basketball arena, right?

Yes, yes.

That number of people or, oh, we have 3,000 listeners. That's a Broadway theater on any given weekend night. Exactly. All together in the same, same way. But it's again reminding me like it's still a big number, but you have to, you have to visualize like a butt in seat when you think about it that way. And it reminds you that it's important. And I think you could think about that with a small business owner to think about how many customers you have. We tend to think of the customers the moment, but think about your whole portfolio of customers. And then again, it's not a number that we're just trying to improve. How if you got them all together, how many pizzas would you have to buy, how many seats would you need, etc. And unfortunately, especially in small business, it seems like the only time we do that is when someone tells us, hey, we're redoing the website and we need some testimonials instead of like any other time, right? We're like, hey, our Google rating went from 4.9 to 4.7. We need to get a couple more reviews on there. That's the only time we do it. We should be doing it on a regular basis. And by the way, if you're doing it on a regular basis, you'll have the testimonies in the Google reviews too.

That's a good point. Yeah. Oh, we need website reviews. Hold on a second. Let me text a couple of clients and say, hey, can you send me a review? No, no, no. Or testimonial. Yeah. Uh, tell us about the, tell us about the book. Um, you wrote Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams. And so like, was, was that in you before pre-pandemic? Was it accelerated? Tell us, tell us a little bit about kind of that, and then let's get very practical. Pretty much everybody listening to it is thinking about or probably has some sort of hybrid remote team aspect that they're using. And so I want to get down to some things that they can really take away.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So the short answer is no. I actually launched a project around purpose with Audible as an Audible Original on February 28th, 2020. So I thought I was going to spend you know, the next decade of my life talking about what was in that TED Talk. But what I didn't talk about for, in essence, the next 2 years, right? I mean, we still talk about purpose in the context of team culture and all that sort of thing. But what ended up happening was, in 2016, my second book was called Under New Management. And we flirted with all of these different newer management practices, unlimited vacation, what's that about? There are firms that are posting, here's exactly what every job pays, Salary transparency, what's that about? We looked at every single one. There were 10 chapters total, 10 different trends in workplace management, and we tried to make a judge— a judgment based on the data, which one works, which one doesn't. One of the things we came out in favor of was this idea that you don't need people in the office all the time. Heck, some companies don't have a home office, right? That little chapter got a lot of revisiting when all of this started. And in fact, the publisher of that book was like, hey, even I was rereading this chapter I think there's a need here. I think, first of all, I think this thing's gonna go longer than 2 weeks, right? And so like late May was when we started talking about what if we flush that out? What if you go back, do more in-depth interviews with those leaders that were already leading remote companies, go back to the research that now has been another 5 years to be pre-pandemic data, but still updated 5 years fresher. And that turned into a book that came out in January of 2021, which was about— I tried to get it out as fast as possible. I think it was about late fall where people realize this is going to be a long-term thing. And we got it out in January. So not bad. But it was really, truthfully, it was a, it was a, this is what the world needs now from my past body of work and my skill set, etc. And that again, my who flipped into, we're talking about purpose to that struggling manager going, I didn't ask for this. I wanted everybody in the office every day. I wanted to interact with everybody. I'm the big extroverted personality that loves seeing everybody every single day. What do I do? Right? So that was really who that target of the book was for. And the reason it was called Leading from Anywhere is that the big bet that I was making is that we're not all going back to the office, at least not all of us and not all of the time. You're gonna see most, most people are headed back, but they're not headed back 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and they don't want to head back 5 hours a week, 8 hours a day. So we need to learn that kind of skill of remote management. Even if you only use it 20% of your time as a leader, you're never going to not need that skill from now on.

Do you think that— how— what is your thoughts? Is it a, um, this thought just— question just popped in my head. Is it a— is it a— an across-the-board, if you do for one, you have to do for all? Let's say you've got 15 people that work for you. If you're going to allow one person or a couple people autonomy, flexibility, then you've got to be able to offer that to everybody. What are your thoughts on that?

Yes and no. I think— I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all policy that works. There's a lot of orgs I'm working with that are saying, oh, we're going to 3-2-2, everybody needs to be here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or everybody needs to be here Monday through Wednesday or whatever. And I don't know that that's going to work because it's not even varying by your people. It varies by just what their jobs are, right? There are certain people who need to be in a role where they're interacting with people on a regular basis internally, and there are certain people who you could put them alone in a room for 2 days and it would be the most productive 2 days of their— right? So you're gonna need that level of flexibility. So I think there's a variance there. I think everybody gets some, right? But you can have that conversation with individual people on how much is useful for them. I— but I don't— I don't— here's where it's really— this is where the science of management turns into the art of management, right? It's a really delicate balance having this conversation, because what you don't want is you're a low performer, therefore you have to be in the office 4 days, and Sarah is a high performer, therefore she only has to be in the office 2 days. You don't want that. What you want is we gave everybody autonomy over to design their schedule, and I think you designed one for you that doesn't balance your need for autonomy with our need for accountability to the team. So we should have a conversation about how much more in the office you could be for a time, right, as you kind of learn those skills. New people especially, like, I work with a lot of organizations where they say we're going to 3-2-2, and I say that's great, you probably shouldn't let your new time— new people do that. They should probably be in the office 4, right? So there's some variance there. I think you have to give some amount to everybody. You don't have to give equal amounts to everybody. It's going to vary if you're in a larger organization. It's going to vary by work they're being asked to do, right? But then even in one team or in a small business, it's gonna vary by how well people are intrinsically motivated, how well they can work autonomously as themself. You know, there's, there's some people that really do need to be around people to remember to work. They'd end up watching reruns of Friends on Netflix the entire day. And then there's other people that if you left them alone undistracted, it's their best day ever. So in terms of productivity, so this is where it turns into that art of knowing your people So everybody gets some, right? But the rest of it is this balance between that autonomy and accountability.

I did a podcast recording recently. It's going to— at the time of this recording, it will come out in the next couple of weeks. The Bathrobe Theory of Business. There's just not one size fits all. But what you're applying absolutely makes the most sense is to be able to customize based on the role, them as an individual. The work that they do, the team that they're involved with, etc. I think that makes a ton of sense. So I'm curious, as a, as a former professor researcher, what's something that has really got your attention right now? Something that you're really working and exploring, if you're able to share?

Yeah. So I'm actually writing the book I was hoping to write before the world ended and they needed a different one for me. So that whole diatribe on team culture, like I said, I thought— I think it was true before the pandemic. I think it's certainly true for more people now, especially if they're continuing to work remotely or even just, you know, like not seeing— because you're only in the office 2 days a week, you're not seeing the entire company. So the team you interact with on a daily basis matters even more. So I'm putting the finishing touches on a, on a book that is all steeped in that idea of what makes for a great team culture, not a company-wide culture, but on specific teams. What's the difference between a high-performing team and a mediocre or a low-performing team in terms of how they interact to their culture, et cetera, of which that TED Talk that you watched, the pro-social purpose one, this idea of who is served is actually like a pretty significant, it's about a third of the variance between high-performing teams and low-performing teams is kind of explained by that. Do we have that? The nerdy term is superordinate goal and sense of pro-social motivation, right? But I think who is served by the work that we do is easier for people to remember.

So— Oh, way easier. Yeah, no, way easier for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, before we go, let's go into— I got a couple more minutes. We'll go into rapid-fire questions.

Yeah.

So, hey, before we do that, people want to connect with, connect with you on social, find out, find your books. Where would you point them to if they want to learn more about you and your work? Yeah. Okay.

So I'm really, really easy to find. And I'm going to tell you the answer soon. But here's the thing I want to make sure to do. You know, Bradley talked about the size of the audience, etc. And if you've made it this far, we're like 30 minutes in. If you made it this far, you're actually a very special part of that audience of the podcast. You're what I like to call the end of the podcast club, and you are the perfect who for the Club Capital team to keep going, right? So he's probably going to say it once, but he really does mean it, right? If you'd be so kind as a member of the end of the podcast club to leave a review somewhere, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever, or send him an email. If you don't want to have your name public on iTunes, like I get it, send him an email. Just say, hey, I listen to this episode, it was so great, it's helped me this way. Send him that so he's got that who for his own folder. So do that. And then if you want to type davidburkus.com into your search bar, if you want to type David Burkus and leave off the.com, you'll still find me. I have a very weird last name. To my knowledge, there's only one other David Burkus in the world and he's like a 20-something-year-old Hungarian filmmaker. So it's pretty easy to tell which one of us which.

Yeah, you're awesome. That's awesome, man. I can't believe— that's so great. I've never had that done. I'm 200 episodes in, nobody's ever done that. You are the man. You're getting a thank you note from me too, okay? So you can have one in yours. That's awesome. All right, let's go rapid fire questions real quick. All right, last book that you read?

Uh, the last book that I read, let's see, I just finished reading a book called Die with Zero which is about sort of retirement planning, thinking about the end of your life. And essentially the idea is, you know, obviously don't die with exactly zero so you're not in the poorhouse, but you can actually oversave for retirement. And what you're actually doing is depriving yourselves of memories that you could have earlier. So that was a really, really kind of a mind-bending— I grew up in like the Dave Ramsey school of personal finance where you eat rice and beans and you save up as much. And the idea that like actually you can go a little too far on on that and you should be thinking about life enjoyment once you know your bases are covered was a really interesting thing for me, totally unrelated to what I do normally. But it was a real sort of mind bender on that. And then I just started, I'm like 2 pages in to my buddy Dan Martell's book, Buy Back Your Time, which is all about what you can't outsource and what you can, and that you can outsource a lot more than you think. And the benefit of that is your time. The reason I bring that up is they're essentially the same book, right? They're both about this idea. That time is a depleting resource that you really need to take seriously.

Well, Dan's awesome. He is a great SaaS, SaaS guy.

Yeah.

Think about creating a SaaS company. I have not picked up his book yet. I don't know Dan personally at all, but I've been in some circles with him and he's a, he's a really incredible entrepreneur. So I'm going to pick up his book. Okay. Speaking of, so what is a book you recommend other than yours? We love yours. So everybody, please pick up David's books. Yeah, fantastic. I'm going to read Under New Management because honestly, I haven't yet. I love that title. Okay, so it's really good. But what's a book you recommend the most to other small business owners?

Uh, so I'm struggling to think of one specific to small business owners. I'll tell you that. Oh, just because I recommend more— the book I read to most leaders is this this thin little book from Roger Martin called The Opposable Mind. And it's essentially a series of interviews. I already mentioned him once in the podcast, which is funny. It's a series of interviews he did as Dean at Rotman of CEOs and other entrepreneurs and that sort of stuff. And the unifying trend he noticed from breakout businesses was their ability to not have to choose between two equally viable options. We have this, it's like the Stephen Covey idea of not if, if then but actually, or not either or but actually both and, right? It's that, it's the sort of how we do that. How can you be both a low-cost carrier saving people money and also a niche provider to specific types of customers, etc.? It's possible. Not every business does it, but a lot of them do. And so it's a, it's a book about how to have that mindset and how to kind of see how to fit those two seemingly opposable ideas together and how that shapes your positioning as a business.

Business. Do you have a favorite quote?

Uh, the one that popped into my head just as you said— probably have a ton, but, uh, I always find myself quoting this line from W. Edwards Deming. It was an early, early management thinker who said, "In God we trust, all others bring data." That's usually where I— when I get into arguments, usually where I go back when somebody says something and it sounds off to me. I'm like, okay, well, what's your source on that? Like, where's your data on that? Can I see it? And that's, again, that's academic background. I love it.

What's your— other than the obvious things like our cell phone, what's your favorite tech tool or app that you use on a regular basis?

Um, tech tool or app that I use on a regular basis, probably here. You know what, I'll tell you this because we are— we're sort of capturing video. It is my phone, but it's how I use my phone very, very specifically. I leave myself— I make myself, or sometimes use like a designer on Fiverr to make myself a different lock screen message every single year. So like 2 years ago, I stole it from a guy named Visualize Value, and it's a simple cross and it says, hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life. This year it's an S curve. It's a, it's an exponential curve. But the exponential curve spells the phrase just keep showing up, as in if you just keep showing up every day, the rest of it will take care of itself. So it is my phone, but it's how I use my phone. It probably makes my wife mad because I don't have like a picture of her or our kids. On it, but I sort of decide at the beginning of the year what's that message I really need to remind myself on a regular basis. And I put that on my phone and you don't need to get fancy. I actually, the first year I did this, I wrote it on an index card and then I took a picture of what I wrote on the index card and that was the front of my phone for the rest of the year.

Visualize Value is a phenomenal follow on social media. I—

Yeah, that's where I got the hard choices one from.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've purchased some of his. I've got a couple pictures, like actual pictures framed and a couple of lock screens. I've got the kids on there now. But anyway, yeah, Jack Butcher, I think is his name. If I'm—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a good one. That's a good one. See, I like that. That's good. That's good for the listening audience. Okay. You're on a plane, 10 hours. You can sit next to anyone, dead or alive. Who would you choose?

Milton Hershey. Milton Hershey Foods, right? Hershey chocolate bar, etc. What a lot of people don't know about Milton was how much of a He was a social entrepreneur before there was a term for that word. So Milton started Hershey Chocolate Company. It was, we probably, you might know the story, it was his third venture. The other two had failed, etc. But he had had some success with it. And he did two things that I think were really powerful. One, he moved out to the countryside of Lancaster, bought out all this land. It became what is now the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, all of his factory workers there, etc. And then during the Depression, there was a need for work. So he started all of these works projects. He expanded, built out, and then expanded this park called— now that is now Hershey Park, the Hershey amusement park. That was twofold. One, to do the building project, but the other to just to give his employees a place to relax on weekends, etc. He built the Hershey Hotel. The only reason there's a 4-star hotel in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania is that Milton knew he could keep people employed if he did that. He built an opera house, built all of this stuff through the money. The other thing that I think is super cool about Milton, he and his wife couldn't have children. She was barren. And so they adopted 2 kids while she was still alive and then she passed away. And he got this crazy idea after she died that he was going to start— he was going to take on even more orphans. He started a school for orphans. It still exists in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It's called the Milton Hershey School for Orphans, or the Milton Hershey School for short. It's literally across the street. Like, if you, if you go to the headquarters, the corporate offices of Hershey, they're on a hill, and that hill overlooks the school, which you could easily mistake for a 5,000-person college campus. It's that well-funded, etc. And then I think the thing that's cool is it wasn't just funded from the profits, etc. He gave his ownership of the company to a trust that manages the school. So literally, the school owns— they're the majority shareholder to this day— owns Hershey Chocolate, right? And, you know, we talked— we opened this talking about who and that power of who, etc. Every single person who works for Hershey knows who their who is. And it's not people who eat chocolate. That's great, too. But it's the kids that are over there, about 700 to 800 kids every year who never would have had a decent shot at life. They're biological or societal orphans, are educated through that school, get the chance to go to elite graduate schools beyond that, etc. And it's all funded by Hershey Chocolate, right? So sorry, Mars, you don't get my money. My money goes to Hershey School. And I would love the chance to sit down and talk with Milton about, like, first of all, how did you pull that off? Off in an age of like robber barons? How did you pull all that off? And then just other thoughts on how he— because I know those stories, but I don't know what else he thought about how to run, keep a great culture, how to run a great organization, etc. It never got captured. He was, you know, just sort of kept to himself on all that stuff, didn't toot his own horn. So I'd love to know all those insights.

What a great answer. Oh man, you're a good storyteller. I don't know, maybe he takes it— he takes his own advice. I don't know about that.

Oh, I'm confident you weren't expecting that when you heard Milton Hershey, because most people— here's, here's a fun test for you and for everybody listening at home. Go buy a Hershey chocolate bar and flip it over, and on the back you'll hear about the Hershey School, but you never noticed it before. It was always there, but you never noticed it before.

My son loves the actual Hershey's chocolate bars. I'm going to get one today before his basketball practice. He's going to love it. Okay. You don't think I'm best at it, but like, no, I'm actually doing research for the podcast.

Last time.

Yeah.

Okay. Alright, last 3 questions. What do you love to do when you're not working?

So I have 2 kind of athletic hobbies. So for the last 17 years, I've done this really esoteric martial art called Brazilian jiu-jitsu. If you follow the UFC or if you've ever watched MMA at somebody's house, when they're done boxing and they fall over and they start hugging until somebody goes unconscious, that's jiu-jitsu. It's a beautiful art. And then for the last year, because my wife made me get into something lower impact, she made me get into pickleball. And it's a surprisingly fun sport that doesn't require any athleticism at all compared to what I've been doing.

So yeah, that is, that is opposite end of the spectrum.

Total, total opposite sides of the spectrum. Total opposite. Yeah.

I'm curious about this, given, given the book that you wrote. What, what was the— listen, we're— I'm not minimizing, uh, this question to the, uh, effects of COVID-19, the pandemic, okay? So I'm not. But what was the best thing that came out of the pandemic for you personally, um, other than obviously the, the writing in the book and the things that I've brought up? But what, what's something else maybe to meet more meaningful to you that you really learned about yourself, or a good thing that came out of the pandemic?

Yeah, we just kind of slowed down. Uh, so my wife is an ER doctor, right? And so she was on the front lines of all of it. And then— and everything you'd expect about an ER doctor personality, like, gotta go, gotta go, gotta maximize time in terms of productivity. But remembering that time spent with just each other, even if it's nothing, even if all of us are just sitting on a couch nowadays, not watching the same thing but watching our 4 devices and talking to each other every once in like that still counts, or going to take a walk or whatever. So sort of slowing down on that and being okay with days where we went, you know what, I don't think I left the house today except to get the mail. Like, those days are okay. And a lot of achieving people, right, a lot, a lot of high performers—

well, I told you maybe Danny, that was going to be an awesome conversation.

We were kind of that way. Really close.

There's a lot of different things that really stand out to me, right?

That, I mean, there's the big Just one, actually. Yeah, one, there was nothing else to do, so many different bullet points. But two, when you're watching this conversation with David, one that's going to stand out to me is the intentionality of telling stories about connecting with your team to not just a why or a mission statement.

And as important as it is connecting to a vision, the direction the company is going, also really understanding what's That's the best piece of leadership advice I've ever received. That is something every single one of us as a business owner can do.

If you're struggling for what to do, think about what your least favorite boss ever would do in that situation and do the opposite.

You know what?

Gonna do the right thing. We can buy— Charlie Munger in the podcast actually allows me to go, how would Lomberg handle this, right?

Like, how bad my writing is, that, okay, I'm going to do— obviously pick up David's book. That's actually really good advice for church, man. I love that. You're awesome. I would love to take, like, I'd take an executive MBA course if you ever went back to teaching. Okay, great. Connect with him. You did awesome.

Thank you. Thank you. This has been fun. Thanks for having me.

Certainly good having you. Hope to have you back. Thank you to our podcast sponsors that allow us to be able to get great, incredible guests like David on DirectClicks, Club Capital, Coach P Consulting, and Autopilot Recruiting. David, obviously we spent a lot of time talking about the value, the importance of being able to have, you know, top talent. I will refer to it often as an, as an A-player. So top talent, A-player. And so sometimes you've got to go through an ongoing— not sometimes, actually, you got to do it on a regular basis. Of constantly or consistently looking for some of those top talent. And so it's not just enough to do it over whenever we need somebody. And oftentimes if you do need somebody, you're going to make mistakes along the way. Well, that is exactly where Autopilot Recruiting comes in, is that they're going to be recruiting for you on a regular basis. They're going to clean up all of your, you know, the CRM for your, your, your team using CareerPlug. They're going to use that they're going to clean that up and put that into an actual system. We talk about systems and processes a ton on the podcast. We also talk about— he mentioned Dan Martell's book, Buy Back Your Time, which I've not read yet. Um, but I probably need to get Dan on the podcast, as a matter of fact. But whenever you're buying back your time, one of the ways to do that is through the outsourcing of the recruiting. So go to Autopilot Recruiting, let them know that you heard about them on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. We know many of you already use them. So let Alex and the team over there know that you heard about them again on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. And then of course, we have to be able to develop those people. It's not enough to just get A-players and say, good luck, go to town. You want to develop on a regular basis. And if you're an insurance agency owner, you want to know, be inspired, but also you want to get down in the weeds of the word tracks and the specific things that David and his team are using to be able to scale across 3 different agency locations and really kind of get a peek behind the scenes. And that's what you get whenever you join Coach P Consulting. So go to coachpconsulting.com. Let David know that you heard about him on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. And that, um, and with that, he'll give you an entire month off. Also got to manage the financials in the business. Go to Club Capital, book a no-obligation demo with somebody on the sales team and just kind of see if it's going to be the right fit for you. And they'll share with you some some best practices and tips and things you can begin to do. And if you decide to move forward with them, make sure that obviously you tell them that you're a loyal listener to Club Capital Leadership Podcast. And finally, one of our longtime— in fact, our longtime sponsor, DirectClicks. You want to be able to get quality leads. They're going to take the time with you on a regular basis to learn about your business, let you know how well you are doing. With managing, uh, with your account and making sure that your dollars are put to use, that you're absolutely getting the best bang for your buck for every dollar that you spend. You're not just checking the box of spending money, uh, just to spend money on marketing. You're actually getting a return off that. They know the analytics. They work with hundreds of agents at this point. I actually don't even know the full number, but, um, agents at this point that they've got the data, they know what works, and they know the ranges of success that they need to get you in. If your numbers aren't there, they're going to start making some changes along the way real time to be able to help you get in that acceptable range. So you're getting quality leads. Go to directclicksinc.com. All right, everyone, that's a great episode. Thank you. As David shared, thank you for writing a review. I can't believe he did that on there. I'm really grateful.

Grateful for that.

But thank you for your time. Thank you for your attention. I hope you got a good return on it.

All right, lead well.