218: Ashley Goodall — Nine Big Lies About Work

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Well, have you ever thought you were doing it all wrong? It could be. It could well be that we're all doing it all wrong an awful lot of the time. It turns out there are nine big lies about work. And this show with Ashley Goodall, expert author all around rock star in the world of what it takes to get right, get the Best out of People will really help you see through some of the failures of the conventional wisdom around getting the best out of people and being effective, powerful at work. Hi there, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach, host of the show. Our show is all about how to scale and grow your business no matter what the economy is doing, no matter what industry you're in or what part of the world you're in operate in. You can also find hundreds of other episodes on leadership and scaling at our website scalingcoach.com and we've got downloads of all the tools we talk about in the show notes there and we'll even send you a copy of the free international bestselling book Scaling up right there@scalingcoach.com Listen in now to our conversation with Ashley Goodall about all about the nine lies about work. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today, Ashley Goodall. He's Senior Vice President Methods and Intelligence at Cisco. It sounds like a lot but it's a big concept. But that's the whole data and information side behind the people and there's about 76,000 people who work for Cisco worldwide. So you can imagine there's a lot. Ashley's a noted author, speaker all around interesting guy and I'm excited to have you on the show today. His book here, nine Lies About Work with Marcus Buckingham is right gonna be a favorite topic in the inquiry. And of course, in this time, we won't go into all the nine lies, but welcome to the show, Ashley.

Bill, thank you for having me. It's lovely to spend a little while chatting about all of this good stuff.

And you said you're in Montclair, New Jersey.

That's right. That's right. In all of New Jersey.

I'm in Montclair, Oakland, outside of San Francisco.

Oh, you live in the place that comes up when I Google the place where I live. That's interesting because your Montclair sort of is Google bombing my Montclair. I think.

It'S a little overcast where I am today, which is that typical summer pattern in San Francisco Central Bay Area, where we get the fog almost every day and then it burns off and we get a little sunshine.

Well, and we're in our July pattern, which is humid in the day and then a thunderstorm in the evening.

We all have a little bit of.

Natural, little bit of that going on.

Air conditioning. Yeah. And it's a very New Jersey accent you have there.

Yeah, born and raised, clearly. I grew up in the uk in case.

On the shore. Right.

In case. That's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Asbury Park. No, not so much, no. But I've been in the US for gosh, doing math in head. 23 years, 22 and a half years, something like that.

Nice, nice. That's a little less than I've lived in this house. So tell folks a little bit more about your background, kind of how you got. I mean, you have a background in music and conducting and I mean that there's a lot of. Weave it together for us a little bit.

Yeah. So I suppose the first thing to say is that I did not spend my formative years dreaming that one day I would be an SVP of methods and intelligence. Because that wasn't a thing. And even if it had been a thing, it wouldn't have been a thing I knew anything about age, whatever. So I was a music geek growing up. Loved classical music. Still do. I'm. I'm weirdly tone deaf when it comes to non classical music, much to the annoyance of many of my friends and family. But get me in classical music and I'm transported. And so growing up, I thought I was going to. That's what I was going to do. Because, you know, the things that we love in our youth are very often the things we imagine ourselves doing for the rest of our lives. And so I thought I'd be a pianist. And then I discovered that there was a thing that made an even more glorious noise than a piano, which was a symphony orchestra. And if you got to sit in the middle of one, I was a viola player. And you and the violas are right in the middle of the orchestra, physically, you, you feel the music as well as you hear it. It's an amazing, amazing, amazing experience. And then I, then I, you know, after a while doing that, I was like, look, there's the guy at the front who's waving his arms around. That looks interesting. Maybe I haven't got that. So I got into conducting.

You know, that's a really interesting thing. Just about a career arc that looks interesting. Maybe I'll have a go at that. I think there's a thread of that from some of the most interesting careers is that following that muse.

And I think what that means, you know, we ran a big study of careers last year at Cisco, and we found out there's a lot of adjacencies. So the point I'd make that actually maybe is transportable for the listeners here is I had to be sitting in the orchestra to see the guy waving his arms. You have to be close to go. Maybe I'll give that a go. And so sometimes careers are, you know, they're lily pads and you only jump to the next one over and the next one over and the next one over. You never traverse the whole pond in, in one enormous leap. But anyway, so I was looking at, I got into conducting a little bit. I, I. When I was doing my undergrad, I conducted a couple of the student symphony orchestras where I was. And I thought that would be the career. I thought, okay, we're off to the races. Applied for postgraduate conducting courses and failed to get in. Now they were, you know, I sort of reassure my ego by saying, well, they were very, very competitive. And I got down to the last six when they had two places, and that happened twice. And so I was close, but, you know, closest close is not. Yes. And so I had to figure out something else to do. I followed music over to the States. I got a job in New York designing the acoustics for symphony halls and opera houses. And that was, I don't know, you see these patterns always in hindsight, never in foresight, but that was the combination of the sort of artistic side and the scientific side, because there's a lot of science in physics, in architecture that go into creating a musical space that sounds a particular way when you play in it. So I did that for three or four years and then decided I wanted to do something different. And this was one where there wasn't the next lily pad. This was not a case of, oh, look, I'll give that a go. This was a case of I want to get into large companies. The firm I joined in New York was a very small company. I've always been fascinated by the large company experience. And so to transition, I went and did an mba. And while I was doing the mba, I discovered that there was a thing called leadership, which was a discipline. And there was a thing called hr, which was a discipline, neither of which I'd known very much about, particularly the HR stuff. And so when I finished my mba, I went to Deloitte. I was a human capital consultant. So learning how big companies do these sorts of things, learning what they're trying to solve for, learning, learning how they go about creating better leaders, better teams. Along the way there, I ran into a thing that Deloitte used to do sort of to me every year, which was to rate my performance on a scale of 1 through 5. And I never liked it when they did that to me, and I liked it even less when they forced me to do it to other people.

I'm already hearing several of the nine lines.

Yeah, there we go. And so I made such a, I, I don't know, I'm, I, I, I'm a, I think I'm a proud curmudgeon a lot of the time. And I made a fuss about you and yeah, and I complained and I sulked and I complained and I was all Eeyore ish. And they essentially got so annoyed with me, they said, look, you can either shut up or fix it. So we've, we've put you in charge of figuring out how to do this whole thing differently, how to rate and evaluate people, how to help people's performance improve. You're in charge of all of that. Take a year and figure out what we should do instead. And I had at that point already met Marcus, who's my co author on the book that we're talking about today, and he and I began to work together on a different way of doing performance management that turned into a ratingless approach, approach that Deloitte implemented globally in the end and got me into this business of thinking about performance, thinking about data inside an organization, because there's a big data component to all of this. And thinking about how do you. Thinking of researching, of course, how do you help somebody grow and prosper? About this time, I ran into Fran Katsudas, who's the chief people officer at Cisco. And she said, look, we. We're also thinking about how do you live in a world without performance ratings? Would you like to advise us on that? Advising turned into my ultimately moving over to Cisco and continuing the thought, really. And the thought on performance management always took us in the direction of team. Because if you understand performance in an organization, you realize that it is significantly dependent on the group of people around you. It's not an individual sport doing what you do. It's you plus a bunch of interactions with a bunch of people around you who are all different from you, who all have different backgrounds, who all have different ideas, who all have different thoughts about where do we go next? And if we get that team right, everyone in it is lifted up. And if we get the team wrong, everyone in it is repulsed and forced away. And what Fran and I set out to do at Cisco was to keep going into the world of team and think about team performance. But then team leadership and then team engagement and then team learning, and then how do you give each team reliable data on itself in real time? And that's. That's really what I've been doing in the last four or five years and still am.

You know, it's funny, as you share that, like, a very vivid image comes to mind. And I've never played in a group before. I studied different instruments as a kid and that was that. I later became a dj. But I love the symphony also, and I love to sit in the audience and listen. I particularly love the Russian composers and. And there's something. I often fall asleep because I find it so awesome most of the work. But there's a thing in the beginning where everybody's tuning and it sounds disconnected and disorganized, and they're all getting ready. And you hear individuals, and then the conductor raises his hands, the baton, and they commence, and you hear it all line up. And you can hear, if you're listening carefully, moments where it sort of goes in and out, but for the most part, with a decent symphony and a decent orchestra and a decent conductor, you don't catch that. But what you hear is it working together. And I think when we're running companies, especially as they start to grow, which is, of course, our topic and what our audience is interested in is how do you keep it all sounding beautiful, Performing well together over time, which is, I think, what's brilliant about this.

Well, and the metaphor. The metaphor is very rich because you're right, the tuning up is like, that's performance as an individual, if you like that's. That there's no synchronicity in any of that. But then you go, all right, so when everybody starts playing together, what's actually going on? And the first thing is that you see is that, well, everyone's got a set of instructions in front of them because everybody. Each musician has a score, but yet the score isn't the music. The music is what happens when you play the score together in a particular way. So there's a. It's more than the instruction set that we're looking at here.

Yeah, there's a kind of feeling and connection.

There's a kind of feeling, and there's the fact that we're doing it in real time together. But then the next interesting thing is that the conductor has his back to the audience. Now, if you, you know, if you translate to a business context, if you like, the audience are the consumers of this piece of music. The conductor isn't. Who's. The leader isn't facing the consumer. He's facing the team. The conductor is serving the team, and the team is then serving the audience. So it helps, I think, locate the sequence, if you like. If you're a leader in an organization, you're trying to help your team serve your customer. If you just serve your customer by yourself and your team is excluded from that, there's only. You can't scale very much because there's only one of you. And then the other thing you see is, of course, the product of all of this is sound, is noise, is music, and the conductor isn't making any. And you. So. So then you go, okay, well, what's. What is the point of this person with his back to the consumer not making the product? Why do you need that? And of course, the answer is you need that in a. In a simplistic way to go from the noise of tuning up to the noise of the music where it all happens together. But perhaps in a slightly more precise way, you need that because there's an important role in human endeavor to the person who makes space for other people to do what they do. And so there's this idea of leadership as space making for others that I think is super, super powerful and gets us out of. The leader has to be a sort of superhero, and the leader has to have every trait that we could possibly imagine an ideal human to have. And instead it makes it a little more humble but very, very specific and actually very challenging. Your job as a leader is to help others do what they do with a degree of synchronicity. So that Everything comes together. That's a good challenge to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Well, we're starting to lean into the next thing. But I want to underscore something for our scaling leaders right now, because if you think about the symphony, the conductor there is cueing people with motions and eye contact and things like that, calling forth, emphasizing, helping to keep them together and creating that space. But it's not really needed in a jazz trio. Right? And when you start your company and you've got three guys with an idea or guys and gals, and you're working on something together, and even you get a little bit above that, you still like. A five piece rock band doesn't need a conductor. I mentioned jazz because there's kind of a theme in the background and then in many cases there's room to sort of riff. But they still stay in sync listening to each other. But as the size of the group grows and suddenly you've got an orchestra, you really need a conductor.

Well, I mean, you're exactly right. When I was doing my job designing concert halls, I got to spend a couple of days on stage with the Philadelphia Orchestra, figuring out the spacing of the platform in the concert hall that we were designing for them. And it was back when Wolfgang Svalish was the conductor of the, of the orchestra down in Philadelphia. And we were always trying to get everybody closer together on the stage. And we were trying to get to the point where you would, you were very, very close, but you had just enough room to play your instrument. And the musicians would sometimes want to spread out a little bit more. And then we'd wait for a break and we'd sneak all the chairs a little closer together. And of course, what we were trying to do was to make a symphony orchestra feel like a jazz trio. We were trying to decrease the distances because you're exactly right. The reason at some point you need a conductor or you need, in the world of work, a leader, or you need a leader of leaders, is that one side can't hear the other side. And if you want to act in real time and have some degree of synchronicity, you have to have some, some mechanism that people can sort of follow a cue and understand, okay, this is my space to do this thing. And while I'm doing my thing over here, you're going to do your thing over here. It's a lovely metaphor because as an organization grows, the distance between its component parts grow. And that's why you need somebody not to say, interestingly, do this now but to say, go do your thing now. You interpret now. I'm not going to tell you how to interpret, but I'm going to tell you that if you interpret now and these people over here interpret now, then it'll happen at the same time, and then it'll be in synchronicity.

So this business of creating space for and listening, I was taught early on, and I practice imperfectly, to listen for the greatness, the God, the beauty, the future self, the thing yearning inside someone, that thing that makes them beautiful, to really listen. And by listen, I mean elicit, look for, pull, call for, like, encourage in every way, whether completely silently or overtly, but leave room for all of the noise, the whininess, the humanity, all the rest of that stuff at the same time. And that, I think is one of the most powerful things that I've ever heard, is to allow for that, to forgive all that nonsense, and to keep pulling for what's magnificent in someone. And I hear that in both the conductor and in the nine lies that you're talking about.

There'S a theme of that that runs very powerfully through the entire book. And what it boils down to, I think, is whether we're at work or whether we're, you know, in symphony orchestras or whether we're doing anything else, we're a bunch of humans. That's all you get here. And what do we. What do we know about humans? We know that none of us is perfect, and we know that we're all different. Too much of the world of work finds that difference to be annoying and inconvenient and tries to remove it, tries to even things out, tries to measure people against a standard set of skills or competencies or what have you, tries to give people feedback on where they don't measure up to the standard, tries to say our culture is uniform, tries to say we will tell you what to do by cascading goals, tries to say we will sort you into categories of the awesome people and the not awesome people. There's so much that large organizations do that indicates really, really clearly that they are uncomfortable with human difference, which is to say they are uncomfortable with humans. Because the essence of being human is to be different from the next human over. The best organizations, and particularly the best teams, have figured out what you were talking about, that actually, if you want to help humans to prosper, if you want to make space for people to grow, to flourish, to perform, to share, then you have to get your head around the fact that human individuality, human uniqueness, human Diversity is a feature, not a bug. And it's actually the most important feature of all and basically the only feature we get here. And that does mean, yeah, you forgive some of the other stuff, you forgive some of the noise, because you're always looking for what's the spark, what's the spike, what's the magic? What is it that happens most naturally, most easily, most fluently, most beautifully when you do you. And how can I help you? Do you. The book is, if you like, an anthem to that approach refracted across different things that we tend to run into in the world of work. And of course, in that it's an anthem for humanity and a more human way of treating one another, which sounds very grand and overreaching, but I don't want to apologize for that.

Well, look, I think many of our leaders and listeners find frustrating the human interaction. They're like, my business would be easy except for the people. And they have an area of product, performance, service, whatever, that they are interested in and have built and that kind of thing. And then there's all the human beings around it. And when they're in their own head, obsessed with their own things and moving towards that, the people around them and their bizarre and unpredictable, irrational actions can be confounding.

Yeah.

From the perspective of what do I want and what am I trying to get done? But when you stop, then change that, there's something that shifts, which I think is what you're speaking to.

Yeah. We have to mute our own egos a little bit. We sort of have to turn down the voice that, by the way, is a voice that we all actually have pretty well saying, look, I'm not weird. It's the other people. The truth is, we're all weird, I don't think. I'm not weird to me, because I spend every waking moment of my life with me. So I've become used to me. But I'm weird to everybody else. And I hate to break this to you, Bill, but so are you. You have to love the weirdness. You have to love the weirdness and you have to explore the weirdness and you have to listen for the weirdness, and then you have to find what is magic in the weirdness. If that's something that doesn't appeal to you, if that sounds like not a lot of fun or difficult to do or draining, then I would say just don't be a leader, because that's the job of leading. If you're not interested in that, then for goodness sake, don't be A leader. Because you will disappoint people and you will let people down.

Isn't it funny that you say that? Because today, around the world, in a global sense, in a social scale, I mean, at first I come to mind. Oh, I live in San Francisco. We know a lot about weirdness. And I'm right next door to Berkeley, which celebrates weirdness in a particular way every year, year with a parade about how weird you could be and that kind of thing. But after a while, a tie dye shirt becomes a kind of a sameness. And yet you look around the world and you see a lot of leaders attempting to stamp out difference. Like, wait a minute, we can't have these immigrant groups come in and we can't have new foods appearing in different languages and things like that. People trying to stamp out the weirdness. Let's all look the same. And I remember when it was, however it was, which is always not how it was. But it's interesting that you say that, that's. But I think you're speaking to great leadership versus any other kind of leader or authoritarian dominance kind of thing.

I mean, what motivates a lot of this is fear. The reason that we would seek to remove weirdness or diversity or difference is that at some level we can't deal. And whether that's at a national level or an organization level or a team level, whatever scale you're thinking about, when you see someone in a position of authority trying to stamp out human uniqueness, what you see is what you're looking at is a person who's afraid. In the world of companies, the fear is the fear of failure, which is not an unreasonable fear, if you like. The irony is that in trying to create uniformity, you actually increase the risk of failure because you are lessening the chances of human contribution to the thing we're all trying to get done together. If you are leading a small team and you ask everybody to have the same set of skills and you deafen yourself to what each of them uniquely has to offer, the chance of that team delivering for you, for the organization, goes down and it goes down measurably. This is not a philosophy. This is a set of research findings that have been pretty durable for more or less a quarter of a century. The best teams figure out how to harness the uniqueness, the weirdness, the strengths of each person on those teams and fuse them into something so that a team can do together what none of its constituents could do by themselves. But if you start with fear of failure, then you very quickly tend to do a lot of things that actually increase the chance of failure. That's a great paradox. I think at the heart of all of that, this.

Say that again, last sentence. That's a great paradox, the fear of failure. That if you.

If you act from a fear of failure, you. You paradoxically increase the risk of failure, the chance of failure, because you are muting human individuality. And human individuality, if you can express it and make it useful, increases the chance of success.

I remember years ago, my flight instructor said, don't fixate on that thing you're trying to avoid or you'll fly right into it. Fixate on the green field that you're trying to do your practice emergency landing in.

And it's the same idea. It's why the car pulled over on the shoulder of the highway with the flashing lights, gets driven into. Because we're drawn to. We move to the focus of our own attention. And folks will say, well, look, you're not telling me surely that I should not worry about failure in a leadership position. To which the answer is, of course you shouldn't. But don't think that when you've finished worrying about failure, your job is done. When you've done worrying about failure, your job is 5% done, 10% done. If you want success, that's a whole different muscle. That's a whole different set of moves. That's a whole different focus for your attention. And we don't talk about that enough, I don't think.

Well, I hear you. Moving from lie number four. The best people are well rounded and focusing on the unique individuals and what makes them unique into the notion that the best companies cascade or the lie that the best companies cascade goals. And instead focusing on what do people really want and what inspires them and what.

And what has the most meaning. Now, it's a little bit of a tricky word. At work, we talk about meaning a lot. We talk about meaningfulness. You know, Steve Jobs used to talk memorably. His phrase was making a dent in the universe.

Yes.

The sense in which we're talking about it is allowing people space to come up with their own ways to move us in a direction we've all agreed to go in.

Yeah.

There's an element of direction to this as well. It's not merely or it's different from a sort of aspirational value in the world thing. The meaning of an organization, the meaning of a team has to be inextricably entwined with the work of that team and the work of that organization. When we look at companies that cascade goals. What they have essentially done is to say, we're afraid that people will do the wrong stuff unless we tell them what to do. And they have a big, long system of telling people what to do. It's a goal cascade, and everybody gets their goals handed down to them. But those goals, it turns out when you look at the research, don't change the way anyone does their work. And people sort of engage with the goal setting until it goes away, and then they go back to what they were going to do anyway. So as a system of space making for performance, back to the orchestra metaphor, telling people what to do just doesn't work because it doesn't affect how they choose to spend their time. What does affect how people choose to spend their time is a really clear sense of what we're all trying to achieve here. What hill are we trying to take? Where are we going together? What is the up direction for us? What is the down direction for us? And with a frame of that. And that is what the conductor is doing at the front of the orchestra. The conductor is saying, here we are passionate, Here we are quiet. Here we are fast, Here we are slow, Here we are vigorous, here we are restrained. So that everyone else can go, all right, if at this moment in time, passionate is what we are, I can give you me being passionate in terms of the score in front of me. I can play my instrument in a passionate way right now. And lo and behold, the whole thing is passionate. If reserved, I can do it in a reserved way, but it's not telling. You're never telling people how to hold the instrument, how to articulate the notes, how to. You're leaving the. What does that look like for you? Entirely to them in the moment. So, again, it's interesting to play all of this out through this lens of the symphony orchestra and the conductor, because I think it gives you a very interesting guide of when have I overreached? And once you've got down off the podium, walked into the orchestra, taken a violin out of somebody's hands, and gone play it like this, you've overreached. But when you say play it. So I feel like this, oh, my goodness me, you're now. You're now leading. So I feel like, what are we trying to do together? What's the outcome we want? What. What do we value as an organization? What is our vector? What is our momentum? That's what we can cascade. And that allows people to offer up their own contributions intelligently and emergently. That's how you get performance at scale.

It's interesting when we work with teams to declare a bhag, we work very hard to declare a bhag that is not unique to the ownership of the company, even the company itself. We look for a BHAG that is more universally appealing, that speaks more to the impact of the work expressed and specific. Like the mountain that we're going to conquer together, that even somebody passing by the company could before them winning.

Would.

Want that versus we want to get to $500 million or we want to hit a billion or that kind of thing. It's that thing realized in the world. And then when we create a vivid vision, it's usually led or articulated by the primary leader, the owner of the business. But then we're inviting the rest of the team to find their place in it. What's your expression? What's your thing? And even when we get down to all those cascading goals that you point out can get in the, especially if they're dictated that each person is invited to create, what's your 90 day plan? What are you going to do and how are you going to change things? And we're looking more at the little changes and the self invented, self created thing rather than the mandated. This is what I need from you this quarter.

Yeah. And the truth of the matter is that the only good goal is a goal that we set for ourselves voluntarily. And to the extent that we are saying, oh, we've had a little bit of think over here and your goal needs to be this right now, we're not going to get authentic contribution to that goal. We're going to get as much or as little compliance as I think I can get away with. We're not going to unlock anything spontaneous, emergent. So if it helps people to set goals for themselves voluntarily, then that's great. Marcus and I had a goal a couple of years ago to write a book and that looked like a goal. You know, it was probably, I don't know whether it was smart, I don't know whether it was, you know, specific and measurable and time bound and all the other things, but it was pretty clear, write a book by the time that the book deadline has arrived. And it was helpful to us, but we got to set it for ourselves now. It was helpful because it helped us focus our energies on something. It was a, it was a lens, if you like, and, and so that's a good thing. But had somebody else called us up and said, I've set a goal for you of write a book, we would have gone, hang on a second. No, we weren't planning on doing that. We weren't thinking about that. I don't. We do better. Better. What? Who gave you the right.

Right? Yeah.

And you stepped up to it. You created, and it changes everything. So these sorts of subtleties, we can stumble past them without noticing and we go, look, if goals are about my expressing my meaning, I'll tell you now to set a goal that expresses your meaning. But in doing that, I break everything. What I should be able to say is, look, here's what we're trying to do together. If it's helpful for you to chunk that out, if your sort of human responds to a particular set of milestones or objectives and you want to write those down for yourself, brilliant, go for it. If it would help us to talk about those, brilliant, go for it. If, however, you're sort of human would feel constrained by that or narrowed, then you don't have to just make sure that you're doing everything that you can do that you can think of to move us where we want to go. And if the where we want to go doesn't work for your sort of human, then you need to be somewhere else. Because you only get one lap of the track in life. And to the extent possible, we shouldn't be using our scarce time here moving to things that don't fascinate us or lift us up.

I think that goes your lie. Number one. People care which company they work for. And I hear you speaking of that, but I remember in the aftermath of. Of 2001, I had just taken over as new CEO of a company that I hadn't been a founder of, and I was trying to get my arms around a new industry that I wasn't familiar with. And everything was different for me. And I started to fail. And in the moment of, closest moment of failure, I went to the team and said, I'm failing, were here's the situation and all that. And I declared this massive breakdown. I was deeply humbled, but I also committed myself to leading through to the resolution. And I invited them all to join me in this, what at the time felt like an epic struggle and really was like a deeply personal struggle that felt like my house and family were on the line. And everyone said yes, and everyone stayed and everyone did beautiful things. And yet many of those people didn't have any particular passion around the company or the industry except in that moment. So for like two years, that team executed beautifully, joined the challenge until the challenge was licked and then after that particular challenge was licked, a number of people left because they were just there out of accident and convenience and whatever. And the thing that they inspired them, which was really hard work, it was a deep challenge, but they worked together beautifully. They were really inspired. They loved being part of that team. And then they went on to different things in their lives.

I think we overestimate. I mean, firstly, another one of the themes in this book is that we have really bad theories of other people, we humans. And one of those, one of those theories is, well, the other people are somewhat simplistic compared to me. This is me speaking the theory. Those other people, they're a little bit simplistic and gosh, they really need a big banner of meaning. They need a T shirt, they need a thing to align to because otherwise they won't, I don't know, they, they won't feel good, they won't do good things. So we have to give them a slogan and we have to give them a mission statement and we have to have pretty words written on slides. And of course when we look at ourselves and ask ourselves the same thing, we go look, it kind of helps. But really I'm here to do interesting work with people whose company I enjoy. That always trumps the big corporate things. Your story is a beautiful story about what actually really matters most in our lives. And it's obviously not just true at work. What we want to do most of all is offer our contribution to and in the company of people who matter to us. And you give us a chance to do that and the rest. Okay. Some people will say I want to be in this industry or this industry or this industry. Some people will say there's a particular product that really fires me up. But when you look at the data overall and you start measuring inside any given company, what you'll find is that the local human trumps massively and consistently the distant corporate. And that's a beautiful lesson for all of us. It would teach us to spend a little less time thinking about which place should I work in the most broad abstract sense, and a lot more time trying to figure out which team am I going to be on and what will that feel like?

Yeah, and those connected experiences of individual teams over time create that arc of your career. But it's not necessary to be a strictly planned out progression, either as a, as a contributor or as an ultimate leader or even the CEO of a particular business.

No. And again, I think we over rotate a little bit on the power of planning. To be honest. It seems again from the research that we've done at Cisco, particularly into careers, and from some of the research we looked at in the book, that a much more useful skill is to be aware of the world around us at any moment and aware of our capacity to respond to that and intelligent in our response to that. And it almost goes back to the lily pads. And what's the next step in a career? That's a really useful question. What's your next step? Whereas what's your plan for the next five years of your career? Immediately rings a little bit hollow, a little bit aspirational and a little bit irrelevant. So the local contingent, responsive, intelligent, tends to win out, I think.

Yeah, it's interesting. So we have this long term vision, a BHAG, a 10 year thing or longer, and then we have a vivid vision that's maybe more three to five years. And then we might have some loose notions of how. But who could predict? You could predict. And there were certainly lots of people who said we'd face a global pandemic and it was inevitable and that kind of thing. And yet the majority of the Fortune 500 had no insurance provision or contingency for dealing with it.

And it reminds us once again, I mean, organizations love all these bumper stickers. All the things that you just listed, Bill, are sort of organizational bumper stickers. And if a company were a car, my God, the back of the thing is festooned with logos and phrases and acronyms. But actually the people driving in the car don't really care very much about all of that stuff. They care about who's here with me and are we doing good stuff together and does this matter to me right now? That's where people want to live and that's where people thrive.

Which is why I think it's so helpful to be inspired by some future vision and yet be taking action and working together within those small teams. Right? Your lie number two. The best plan wins, I think is what you're speaking to. And there's lots of good quotes like no plan survives contact with the enemy or Mike Tyson's everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face.

But again, it's sort of, which is not to say, by the way, that there is no place for plans in the world.

Right.

Sometimes it's useful to go, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to do this. But again, if out of fear of failure, all we do is invest more and more energy in more and more complicated and long winded planning processes. We're cloistering ourselves from the real world. And so the question is always, how can we get real time intelligence to people on the front lines? So that rather than telling them what to do, which we can't do at scale and at speed and responsibly enough, we are giving them the tools to figure out for themselves what to do. That's the. And again, it's another shift away from the center as the most important entity and towards the edge, the team, the local, as the most important entity. And then to think, okay, well, the role of the center, if you like, the role of any sort of leader or leadership team, is to say, am I building an ecosystem where, where the teams can thrive? Am I building an ecosystem that supplies them with information, that supplies them with resources where they need it, that understands what they need at this moment in time so that they can decide what to do, but doesn't overreach, doesn't jump into the orchestra and play the violin? Simply says, how do I make space again for you to perform? It's the same theme over and over again.

You know, it's interesting though, there is a baseline, right? You wouldn't put me in your violin section?

Well, maybe not very long. I don't know.

I don't have any skill at all. I quit after a month or so of trying to learn the violin as a kid. Yeah, but there's table stakes, right?

Of course there's table stakes. But here's the question. Would you volunteer to be in the violin section?

No.

So why do I need to worry about table stakes to a certain, you know, I'm not being glib here, but again, because fear of failure, we go, oh my God, there's table stakes. What if people put themselves in jobs that they are manifestly unqualified to do? I think that's a tiny worry in the world. That's a tiny worry. Much bigger worry. What if people really want to succeed at this job and we haven't given them the support they need to succeed? That's a much greater problem.

Yeah, bigger problem. I do remember, I remember once hiring for a kind of a clerical administrative service job in one of our teams years ago. And we had a parade of people come through and we had decided that we needed to introduce practical testing for all of our roles, whether it be a VP or whatever. And so we had done this and we had these people coming through and we gave this particular practical test where you're supposed to go do something with Excel and a worksheet. And this woman took the thing and she walked away and went over to the testing stage. She comes back a few minutes later and she's like, she's on the edge of tears. And she's like, I'm not going to lie. I can't. I don't know how to use Excel. And it's funny because it was a particularly human moment. And up until that point in every part of the application process, the job getting listed that as one of the skills. And she had on her resume listed Microsoft Office because that's what she felt she needed to do and so on. But she might have had, well, undoubtedly she had other interesting skills, but was trying to fit into something else and gonna go through and just gonna hope it worked out when she actually got the job. And I have seen that and I have stepped up to sometimes things and I was like, oh my God, what did I do?

And we all, you know, we all maybe have a couple of those moments in our lives, which means it's less likely, I suppose, that we're gonna do that again.

Right.

But again, from a, from an organizational perspective, there is, there is the world of difference between somebody who can use Excel and somebody who can use Excel to do the right analysis of the right numbers, of the right fundamental question using the right data. I mean, it's, it goes, it goes a lot beyond the baseline. And you want that second person. It's best to choose somebody who's really geeked about the job at hand. And those people aren't massively hard to spot. Most of the time. We have a little habit of going, okay, the folks who are most fired up about the work are the people who need the least attention from us as leaders. And we should devote all our attention to the people who don't seem to be as fired up or don't seem to be contributing as much. But of course, if you are trying to grow the capability of an organization or a team or what you, where you want to start is with the people who are most fired up because they're the ones who are going to grow most rapidly and, and contribute most scalably, if you like. Yeah, the, the, you know, maybe the, the last, the last thing we, we, we might touch on here from the book is, is this idea that excellence is where we are most finished and failure is where we should pay most attention. If you actually look at the real world, you need to invert those two. You say excellence is where we are most productively unfinished. Failure is where we need to mitigate as quickly as possible or get out of the way. But if you want excellence, you've got to learn to build on good, not invert the bad, if you like. And that should inform how we lead our teams, how we structure our organizations, what we look for, how we invite people to come and participate in whatever endeavor that we've set ourselves out towards.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Lean into the passion, lean into the engagement. Focus on where that excitement is, what makes people beautiful, and stop trying to fix people or force people into doing things.

Yeah, no one really wants to be fixed that much. If you've ever tried it, you'll know we want to be helped.

Trying to fix you forever.

Yeah, we, you know, we want to be helped. We want, sometimes helped is, oh my God, look, you, you know you screwed that thing on the wrong way around. Let me show you the right way that that goes. But that's there is, there is an there is an ocean of help beyond the simple sort of operating manual of the world. And the ocean is who are you? What? What what lights you up? What do you run towards? What puts a smile on your face? When are you in flow? When do you have easy clarity about what lies ahead of you? If you want to help somebody, help them understand those things about themselves.

Well, that's a great place to end it. The book is nine lies about work. Ashley Goodall ashleygoodall.com We'll put of course, the links in the show notes ashleygoodall.com, nine lies about work. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ashley.

Thanks for having me.

All right, if you find the show helpful, please share it with somebody else right now. So we spread the good word about Ashley's work and and all things to do with Scaling Up. You can subscribe to get them every week. Like subscribe give us a review. All that helps us out and ultimately helps you and the people in your world. You can drop us a note with an email to info scalingcoach.com I want to give special thanks to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework and the original Rockefeller Habits. Our show is produced by Lucy Summers, the audio is edited by Albert Burge at podflam Productions and the show notes were written by Kudena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. Thanks again everyone for listening. Keep Scaling Up. Foreign.

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