LOVE your job!

They happened to have a coffee bar in the lobby of the Four Seasons in Vegas. And so one afternoon I went and bought myself a cup of coffee. And the barista working that day was a kid named Noah. Noah was funny and charming and engaging. And I spent far too long buying a cup of coffee because I just so enjoyed talking to Noah. So, as is my nature, I asked Noah, do you like your job? And without skipping a beat, Noah said, I love my job. Now, in my line of work, that's significant. Like is rational. I like the people, I like the work. You know, I get paid well. I like my job. Love is emotional. It's a higher order connection. Right? Like, do you love your wife? I like her a lot. Right. Clearly. It's clearly a different standard. Right? So when Noah said, I love my job, my ears perked up. This kid has an emotional connection to his work. So immediately I followed up and said, tell me specifically what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me, you love your job. And again, without skipping a beat, Noah said, throughout the day, managers will walk past me and ask me how I'm doing. Ask me if there's anything that I need to do my job better. Not just my manager, any manager. And then he said, I also work at another hotel. And there the managers walk past us and catch us when we do something wrong. There, the managers are always trying to drive performance and make sure we hit our numbers. He said, there, I'd like to keep my head below the radar, get through the day and just collect my paycheck. Only at the Four Seasons do I feel I can be myself. Now, this is the exact same human being working at two different companies, and yet our experience of him will be profoundly different. Not because of him, but because of the leadership environment in which he works. You know, I get this question all the time. You know, Simon, how do we get the most out of our people? People are not a towel that you wring them out to see how much you can get out of them. You know, it's.

That's a good one, man.

It's a flawed question. The question is, how do we create an environment in which our people can work at their natural best? And that is the art of leadership. It's creating environment in which relationships can thrive, in which trust can thrive. And we all know what it feels like to be on a trusting team, right? It means that we feel psychologically safe enough to raise our hand and say, I made a mistake or I need help or I'm having trouble at home. And it's affecting my work, or I'm scared, or I don't know what to do without any fear of humiliation or retribution, but rather to say these things with the absolute confidence that someone on our team will rush to support us. Unfortunately, we also all know what it feels like not to work on a trusting team, where admitting any of those things could hurt your chances of promotion, could hurt your chances of you could be humiliated. And so when we work on teams where leadership is creating an environment where trust is at a premium, we force our people to come to work and lie, hide and fake, where they're pretending that they've made no mistakes, they're lying, hiding and faking. And eventually things will crack and things will eventually break. And when you talk about reinvention and you talk about innovation and you talk about challenging the status quo or whatever it is, necessarily there's risk, and necessarily there are mistakes and necessarily there's stupid ideas. And you have to create an environment which that's good. The alternative is everybody playing it safe, which is not the way that leads to vast or significant improvement.