Simon Sinek on Empowering Today's Teams | Full Conversation

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am super excited for a conversation we're about to have with Simon Sinek. My name, if you haven't met, is Alan Richardson and I have the pleasure of leading the Talent Strategy and Services Solutions team here at rbc. And we're very pleased to welcome all of you, our participants and alumni of our Women in Leadership and IGNITE programs. You're such important talent leaders of our firm and we're really excited to have this conversation with Simon and learn so much from one of the visionaries of leadership today. Simon, welcome. You probably don't need too much of an intro, but for those that may not have googled you, Simon is an author of multiple best selling books, starting with the first, which is Start with why, and a famous TED talk that really kicked off a revolution in leadership that is built on Simon's unshakable optimism in the future through a number of books. One that my team read called the Infinite Game. And if you have the pleasure of picking up one of those books, that's the one I would suggest. Personally, I thought it was a great view of how leaders and business need to change for the future. It's such a pleasure to have you, Simon. Thank you so much for joining and welcome.

Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

So, Simon, I think we'll start where you started and talk about finding your why. And you know, leaders today.

It's a crazy world. It's a VUCA world. It's a world that is uncertain and hard to deal with and challenging. And leaders, I think, struggle more than ever to identify why am I here? Why am I leading? Why is our organization doing what we do? And if you could take us through your journey and sort of how you see that playing out today for leaders in the world, I think that would be a great place to start.

So absolutely, I'll share, I think, one perspective that I think is very, very helpful.

When Covid showed up and we all went into lockdown, I was paying attention to how leaders were reacting and what I saw was quite fascinating, which is the number of leaders who in these extremely difficult times, lean back into their own humanity. In other words, they picked up the telephone, they called their team members one by one and they said, how are you? And where there were effective or ineffective leaders prior to Covid. This is how most people reacted. And by the way, that's just called good leadership. And it doesn't require stress or a pandemic to be concerned with somebody else's. Well, Being, and I, I said this all through the pandemic, which is, I hope this lasts. Because like I said, it doesn't matter if it's good times or hard times, that is being concerned with how, how someone leads. And I think that's sort of the big change that's been happening in leadership for the past sort of 20 or 30 years, which has became so obsessed with short termism. We became so obsessed with annual numbers and quarterly numbers, and we started to excessively use the lives of human beings to manage quarterly and annual results.

The use of mass layoffs, for example, to meet arbitrary targets at the end of the year didn't exist prior to the 1980s. It just didn't exist in the way it does. And now I think we're starting to see the results. We're starting to see pushback, we're starting to see cynicism about capitalism, we're starting to see reduction in, in loyalty and for good reason. And so now I think the pendulum is swinging the other way. And I think the good news is that good leadership is the solution to so many of the challenges we're facing in business today.

That's fantastic. And so as leaders are searching for that, and from the basis of a human centric style of leadership and thinking about trust as that currency that you need to build, what are you seeing great leaders do? The reach out, I think, is an important first step, but what are they doing to build that trust and to sort of expand the relationship they have with their employees?

So there's an irony to all of this, which is a lot of us already know how to do this stuff. Have you ever been on a date? Have you ever made a friend? We know how to build trust. Our survival depends on these social skills. And for some reason, when we get to work, those skills seem to go out the window. And so there's massive opportunity for companies to start teaching human skills. I hate the term soft skills. You know, hard skills are the skills we need to do our job and human skills the skills we need to be better humans. And what you need is a balance of both of those skills. You know, hard and soft are opposite. We don't want skills that work against each other. And so human skills include things like how to have a difficult conversation, how to have an effective confrontation, how to give and receive feedback, how to listen actively, how to demonstrate empathy. And believe it or not, these skills are difficult and we have to learn them. And when somebody joins our company, we give them tons of training how to do their job, whatever Their job is we train them. Some people get advanced degrees in how to do their jobs.

Why?

So they'll be good at their job. But then we put people in leadership positions and give them little to no training on how to lead. We don't teach them human skills. And leadership is a human job. You're no longer doing the job. You're now leading other people who do the job you used to do. There's a big difference between a salesperson and a sales manager, for example. They're completely different skill sets. So I think there's a massive opportunity to start teaching human skills, and that's what makes the difference.

It feels like sometimes we kind of expect people, to your point, to bring that with them and don't necessarily focus on that in our training efforts. I think the other result I see is you see too many player coaches. So it's leaders who are still doing and not actually focusing their attention and efforts on leadership. Absolutely. And so as you, RBC really is focused very much on our clients and putting our clients first on our communities and supporting our communities as financial institutions play such an important role there, which we believe brings purpose to what we do. But I think then it's finding. And what are you seeing in terms of how people are connecting their teams to that purpose in challenging times when there's so many different pressures? To your point, we still have quarterly goals and measures, as do any large organization, but how are they then connecting that to. And from my standpoint, I'm thinking about the why as opposed to the how, which I see a lot of leaders focusing how first and why third, maybe talk a little bit about why you put the why first.

I mean, you said it. You said it right there and then. Which is. The hierarchy matters. You know, I've never met a CEO who doesn't think their people are important. The problem is where in the hierarchy. You know, I've been to so many corporate presentations, And I've watched CEOs present, you know, our priorities. And number one is growth. Number two is. Is shareholder value. Number three is our customer. Number four is our employees. There we are. We care about people. They're right there, number four on the list.

And the problem is that's a hierarchy, which means, are you willing to sacrifice your people in order to hit a number? That's what that list says, and that's what that list communicates to the people who work inside an organization. And so the organizations that tend to outperform their competitors over time, what you'll see is that people come first and that we would rather sacrifice short term gains to protect our people than sacrifice our people to protect short term gains. Because to have a round of mass layoffs to protect a short term number produces such long term ripples of damage to trust that you've spent so long building that it takes an extremely long time to rebuild that trust, much longer than it would take to rebuild the numbers. And so I always pay attention to that hierarchy. You're 100% right. The order matters in terms of starting with why the order matters for a slightly different reason, which is the reason of biology, which is this is what I learned when I talked about why, how and what. It's not my opinion that those levels overlap with the biology of human decision making. So when you start with how or what, you're actually engaging the neocortex, which is the rational language center of our brains, but not responsible for feelings or behavior. When you start with why, you're engaging the limbic brain, which is responsible for feelings and behavior. So that limbic brain is responsible for getting stuff done. So when people feel connected to the organization, when they feel connected to the mission, they're more likely going to make decisions that will advance that mission and the organization itself.

And I think that also speaks to, you know, leadership comes in a few different forms. You can lead through your hierarchy. I'm your boss, you know, you got to do this. You can lead to rational logic, hey, I have a good argument. You can do it or you can lead through that emotional connection. And I think what you're saying is you got to get to that emotional connection first, and then the rational and the hierarchy can come afterwards. But make sure there's that trust connection. I think that's so important.

And so.

As you look towards the future now we're hitting tough economic times, and to your point, leaders are going to have to make choices and prioritization decisions. And as you clearly put employees first in your hierarchy, it feels like, how do you encourage leaders to think through what do I do to make my employees both successful and perform and hold them accountable for performance, but on the same time have that human centric, empathetic feel? I think sometimes people feel it's either one or the other. It's not both.

Yeah, no, of course they can coexist, but it, you know, it's the art of leadership. There is science of leadership, but this is the art of leadership, which is, it's not always clear. You know, you go too far in the direction of performance, performance, performance. You build an organization Filled with mercenaries that will stab each other in the back to hit numbers and hit personal.

Rewards if you slide them too far the other direction. You know, you have a hippie commune where everybody loves each other but no work gets done and there's no accountability. And this is the hard part about leadership, which is.

It'S like marriage, it's like friendship, it's like children, which is you'll never be on the path. You're constantly blocking and tackling and trying to make it work. But what makes it work over the course of time is that strong foundation of trust that when you screw up or get it wrong or you're grumpy or you're tired, that people are patient with you. And it's just viewing people as human beings and bringing empathy to work. Now usually when I talk about these themes, you know, people find them uncomfortable. Now I know this is women in leadership that we're talking to and I will say that women understand my work better than men. You know, I talk about the stuff and women tend to go, yeah. And men tend to say, do you have any case studies? You know, and so when I talk about bringing empathy to work, there's nothing, there's nothing mushy or weak about this. I'll give you a simple example.

Here's a fairly normal scenario. You know, a manager walks into one of their reports office and says, hey, I've noticed your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. If you don't pick up your numbers in the fourth quarter, I don't know what's going to happen. Right? That's a fairly common scenario. Here is that same scenario with empathy injected. Hey, I noticed your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. Are you okay? I'm worried about you. What's going on? That's empathy injected into leadership where you actually concerned about the person rather than missing the number. And what you'll find is people will open up, ask for help, tell you what the challenges are. Maybe they have struggles at home, maybe they've been put in a position where they don't actually have the training to do the job. There's a wealth of things that we can support and help. And by the way, when we do that, not only does it build trust, but it actually helps the performance because we can help. We know what the root of the problem is. And so we need more of that at work in order to produce high performing teams. You know, when I talk about High performing teams and I've looked at some of the most, the highest performing teams, you know, in the world. What you'll find is deep, deep, deep levels of trust, love and camaraderie.

That's fantastic. Start there and then work on the rest. But we have to have that base first before we begin.

This is making me think performance short term versus long term, and I'm going to butcher it. So maybe I'll ask you to define. When you talk about a finite game versus an infinite game, you are talking a bit about that short versus long term. Maybe you can explain for us the concept of the infinite game in the business concept and an example of how we could think about that in our world and how we could approach banking, which is an infinite game, from that standpoint.

Absolutely. So in the mid-1980s, a philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James Karst defined these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and an agreed upon objective. Football, baseball. If there's a winner, necessarily, there have to be losers. And there's always a beginning, a middle and an end. That's very important. A new business pitch, for example, right. There's going to be a beginning, a middle and end. There's going to be a winner and a loser. That's a finite game. Then you have infinite games. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players, which means you don't necessarily know who all the players are. And new players can join the game whenever they want. The rules are changeable, which means every player can play however they want. And the objective is to perpetuate the game, to stay in the game as long as possible. So we are players in infinite games every day of our lives, whether we know it or not. There's no such thing as winning global politics. No one will ever win career or education or health. And definitely there's no such thing as winning business. Nobody's declared the winner of business ever. You know, when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything. But if we listen to the language of too many of our leaders, it becomes abundantly clear that they don't actually know the game they're playing in. They talk obsessively about being number one or being the best or beating their competition. Based on what? Based upon what agreed upon metrics, time frame or objectives. And this is a problem because when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game, we play to win. In a game that has no finish line. There are some very predictable and consistent outcomes. The big ones are the decline of trust, the decline of cooperation and the decline of innovation. And so the more short term we think and the more we think about business as a game, when we treat the financial year as the end of the game, which it's not, the more damage we do to the long term prospects of the organization.

That's fantastic. And certainly from the standpoint of banking, we're always making investments in loans that have a long term nature to them. So it's not like I can sell a product and walk away from it. I'm stuck with that on my books for years. In the case of mortgages, Decades. Right. So that's absolutely important.

As we think about that competitiveness and we look to drive performance and we're especially based in Canada and in the United States, but we do play in the global sphere. What do you think we need to be mindful of as we sort of trend through the next few years? And I think we've touched on a few of those topics. But as you're looking at leaderships and you're thinking of great teams and what they're doing right now to prepare for five or 10 years out, what are they talking about? What are they thinking about?

Well, I'm going to sound like a broken record, which is the great competitive advantage that a lot of companies are missing is the quality of the culture and the quality of your long term strategy.

Right.

When companies articulate finite goals as their long term strategy to be number one or hit certain goals in five years, that's a finite goal. That's not what that is. And by the way, just to go off on a slight tangent, finite infinite games are not mutually exclusive. You can have finite games within the infinite game, but the infinite game is the context within which those finite games exist. So to have a long term vision that is not about some goal, we confuse goals with long term vision. Long term vision is how we imagine the world and how we're going to use our companies to contribute to the building of that world. In other words, you say you're customer focused, then you can't have your long term vision be about you because then you're not customer focused. If you're customer focused and you have a long term vision of the kinds of lives you want your customers and clients to live, of how you want the community and society to look like, and you will use your business to, to advance towards that vision. And the goals you set are the markers that demonstrate metrics, proof that you're moving closer and Closer towards that. Think of it like running a marathon. Like, you can't run a marathon without mile markers. Like, the metrics are good, but they are an indication of progress, of speed and distance, towards something even bigger and grander.

It strikes me that that's probably why a lot of us and a lot of companies, a lot of politicians and organizations generally are struggling with the climate story, because there's not an end to the climate story. It's not like we're going to solve climate by 20, 20, 30. It will be a forever fight that we need to be constantly involved in. And I guess creating that mindset in how we're approaching it and telling our story that way becomes much more powerful. What do you see? You know, you talk about unshakable optimism. If there's a time to be shaken, though, it feels like now is that time. How are you feeling generally? And I'll step outside of RBC and banking, but how are you feeling generally about the track that the world is on? And are you still calling yourself an unshakeable optimist as you look at the world around you today?

The simple answer is, yes, I am still an unshakeable optimist. I think people confuse optimism and blind positivity. Optimism is not naive. It is very realistic. Blind positivity, positivity. You know, a lot of leaders think that they have to be positive for their teams to be positive. No matter how bad things get, everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's good. And that actually backfires because when we're struggling, when we're in periods of high stress and we see our boss apparently think everything's fine, it actually can make us feel worse. Because there must be something wrong with me if I'm so doomsday and they're so light.

That's not helpful. Optimism is nothing like that. Optimism is the undying belief that the future is bright and it allows for dark reality. So, for example, I can say to my team, hey, listen, this is a dark tunnel that we're in. I don't know how long we're going to be in this tunnel. It's going to suck for a while. But there's one thing I know is that there's a light at the end of this tunnel, and if we work together, we will get through this and come out of this stronger than we went in. That's what optimism sounds like.

That's great. And it makes me think of Alan Mulally, who would always say, the moment that I stop hearing things from My employees through the newspaper, but they come to me. I know I'm having the right dialogue with them about where we're actually at. And yes, he's a very optimistic guy like you are, but he fundamentally felt that they had to be having very real conversations. Speaking of real conversations. So both of these programs I mentioned are for colleagues from diverse backgrounds and folks that we really believe face challenges above the average in the workplace today. And there's a lot, I think, going on in the world today, again, cause for optimism, cause for reality checks of where we're at and where we're headed.

From your standpoint of, as you see leaders of all walks from all different sort of frames and backgrounds and perspectives be successful, what are the things that you find most common, no matter where you come from, that anybody can. Can lean into as sort of building their success in their career over the time they're growing their leadership career for individuals. For individuals, yeah. Thinking of the groups.

Yeah. Yeah. So leadership is a journey. There's no such thing as perfect leader. There's also no such thing as an expert in leadership. I am not an expert in leadership. I'm a student of leadership. I may be a more advanced student than some, but I'm a student nonetheless. And there's always more to learn, just like there's no such thing as the perfect parent.

Right.

It doesn't exist. And every day we think we've screwed up our kids forever. Right? It's a constant journey of.

Sorry, everyone, I think we just lost Simon. Oh, Simon, sir, we lost you for about 10 seconds there. I think you're back. Can you just start?

Okay, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So they say to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer.

So.

Live television. That's right, absolutely. So leadership is a journey. And there's no such thing as an expert leader, just like there's no such thing as an expert parent. And I think of myself as a student of leadership, not an expert. Don't trust anybody who says they're an expert in the subject, because they're not. And if you're going to go on this journey, you have to have a student's mindset. So you have to be always curious that there's more to learn. You have to read books, you have to have talks, you have to talk to other friends. Just like as parents, we talk to other parents, we talk to our parents, we read books, we read articles constantly. Constantly, constantly. And so some of the great leaders I've met, they're wonderful. They're incredible. They could tell me that they're an expert in leadership, because all I want to do is learn from them. All they want to do when we go out for dinner is talk about leadership. Like, they have insatiable curiosity for the subject that they love. And so this is how it works, which is if we. We have to be on a leadership journey. And I'll add one more thing, which is leadership is really, really, really difficult. And I would never advise anybody going on a leadership journey by themselves. Just like you would never do anything difficult by yourself. You go scuba diving, you go to war, you always have a buddy. Well, make sure you have a leadership buddy to go on your journey with, where you can constantly compare notes.

That's right. And someone to check you. And certainly we also love coaches. And having a coach who can sort of mentor you, I think it's something that we are slowly absorbing from the sports world is how do you actually create coaching more ingrained in the journey that leaders need to take is absolutely critical.

You mentioned parents, and I'm gonna go back to your runaway millennial video for a second, if I may. And you pointed out, then, the dangers of social media. This was 2017. You pointed out the dangers of a culture where everyone is actually looking on their phone. We then went into the pandemic, and multitasking became simple. It was actually kind of easy, though. I'm told I'm not necessarily the best at hiding when I'm multitasking. But.

I see a pretty significant shift to multitasking as we've come back from. From sort of a remote world. And I'm interested to sort of, as you think about it, six years later, are you more panicked or more worried about the impact of sort of a multitasking world, or do you think it's something that we are getting a handle on, or is it less of a concern today?

There is no data to show that human beings are capable of multitasking.

You can do one thing well, two things mediocre, and three things are more badly. And if you've ever been having a conversation with somebody and they pick up their phone and look down and you think that they're listening to you. It's never happened in the history of humankind. So there is no such thing as multitasking. Right. We can stack things. And I think one of the things that we've done is we've. And I have this conversation with young people just because they're adept at their phones and they're adept at social media. They have the false Belief that they can multitask. Talk to any boss and talk to any college professor about the quality of writing and the quality of work, and you'll see that it's declined because it's right a little bit, check my phone, Write a little bit, check my phone. And you'll see that they might write great sentences or great paragraphs, except those paragraphs are not connected to each other. So there's no such thing as multitasking. So let's just forget that. What the pandemic has done.

To your point, other people are just better at faking it than you are.

What the pandemic has done, unfortunately, has made us very comfortable working from home and.

Especially young people. But for a lot of us, we think that we've won the lottery, that this is the world's greatest way to work, where I can have total freedom and make a living and be a part of a team, but for the fact that we're not members of teams. You know, Isaac Stern said the famous violinist said trust. He said music happens between the notes. Well, trust happens, happens between the meetings, right? It's the walking into the meeting and the chit chat. And it's the walking out of the meeting where we're continuing the chit chat. It's the bumping into somebody in the hallway and being like, oh, I meant to tell you, it's grabbing somebody and saying, hey, you want to get a cup of coffee? And it's all these seemingly innocuous little interactions that by themselves do nothing, but.

In concert, they actually build human relationship. And the problem with online is all of those in betweens are gone. All we have is the meeting. That's it. That's all we've got. And so it's extremely difficult to build trust online. You actually have to do more work. It's, you know, like any company that it's just doing it the same and just having the meetings. No, you have to really do more work and artificially create social interaction. And even then, and I've had a virtual company for over 10 years, even then, we still have business trips where we visit each other and we still have off sites where we come together as an entire team because we know that nothing replaces, nothing replaces good, old fashioned human interaction. And by the way, you cannot do brainstorming or have great creativity online. It just doesn't exist. You can do it. You can do it in person very easily because we interrupt each other and it's, you know, whereas online is very, very formal. Like, everybody's on mute. Nobody Wants to speak. You know, it's not interruptive and chaotic, which is what you need for brainstorming. So we can live in a hybrid world where both exist. But I think for too many, they believe the future of work is online and it'll be to the detriment of the company. But worse, it'll be to the detriment of the mental health of the person who never interacts with people.

Right, that's well said and certainly something that I think our CEO Dave MacKay would agree with you firmly on. And we are certainly on that journey sort of learning to work in a hybrid world, which, as you said, is not as easy as working in a purely in person world where those collisions happen naturally. It's much more structured and you have to be very thoughtful about how you manage it as you think of. Sorry, go.

Yeah, I was going to add one more thought, but yes, please, really quickly. I'm fully aware and I recognize that the old working world where everybody came to work all the time, favored the extroverts. I get that the introverts sometimes struggled, but when we went to a fully remote world, which the introverts loved, now the extroverts were struggling because they need that human interaction. Right. And so there's always going to be a loser in these scenarios if we choose one or and if we truly love our teams. The correct answer is I will sacrifice some of the time so that the people I work with can thrive the way that they thrive. So as an introvert, I accept that I sometimes have to come to work. And as an extrovert, I accept that sometimes I have to be separated because it helps my colleagues. And the point is, we're making it an act of service. We're making flexible work and figuring out how work works for each other. Where I think too much of the conversation has been about me and how I like to work. And that's. You're not the only person on the team. And so there is no perfect work scenario. I get that. And the question is, I'm willing to sacrifice some so that others may thrive.

I think that's great. And it's that sense of how do we. The importance of team, especially in today's world. We don't all have the answers. We don't all have. No one person is the heroic leader who's got everything today. Not that that was ever true, but as a result, understanding how you bring the best out of your team and if anything, that management of your team has gotten harder because you're. You're actually adding dimensions that we didn't have to think about before.

That's absolutely right. So then as you think about a leader with all these pressures and they are trying to get the performance out of their team, be balanced with empathy.

And we've heard this, this is leading to burnout at a pretty big scale. And you see it in different ways. I think often senior leaders show burnout very differently because they're such a hard driving person. They're just not willing to give up. But are you seeing this as a potential sort of as a risk that we are dealing with as organizations? And what are you seeing on the, you know, how do you address burnout and how are you, how do you suggest we go about sort of thinking about that from a leadership standpoint?

So the simple answer is yes.

And what I think is so funny is the language. I mean we've heard the language of quiet quitting. Well, quiet quitting is what people in positions of leadership say that people who are more junior are doing. But when we talk about our quiet quitting, we talk about finding work life balance, right? So everybody's a quiet quitter and everybody's looking for work life balance. It all depends on which perspective you're looking from. So there's a few things that help reduce burnout. And, and that one is the, the biggest one is the, is, is the trust that someone has my back, right. And, and this is, I think one of the things we didn't expect when we had remote work, which is that that burnout was going to happen a lot higher because I'm working all the time now and the barriers are breaking down as to when, when I stop working, when I'm not working. We don't have that work life separation that, that the separation of church and state as clearly anymore. Like the boundaries are very difficult. And then when we talk about people establishing boundaries, you know, sometimes they can come across as aggressive. Like that's crossing my boundary and missing the fact that we're a team here. And these boundaries are difficult and fuzzy.

And so one of the biggest helpers of to reduce burnout is one. Relationships, relationships, relationships. Make sure you have somebody who you can go to and say, I'm struggling, having a hard day, I'm fed up, I'm mad, I hate this. Screw this job. Venting. Venting is healthy. And we don't really get to vent much when we're in a fully online way because we, we, you know, we, we, especially during the pandemic we saw this, which is we used to Go to work, then go meet our friends for drinks or dinner after work and vent. Very healthy, Right? Then what happened when we went into the pandemic, which is we go to work and then that's it. Nothing. Nothing. No way to get the stress out. So that's number one, please. Relationships, relationships, relationships. The other one is learning how to prioritize me time. And it's more simple than you think. We often put things in our calendars that though we put them in our calendar, they're not fixed. For example, you want to go work out and you put in your calendar from 3 to 4pm I'm going to work out. And then somebody says, hey, can you meet at 3, 4pm and the first thing you do is cut it out.

Right?

So what I do is I actually put an hour a week, you know, I'll put an.

It's called creative time or me time. And I treat it like it's a meeting, right? So when somebody says to me, can you meet at, you know, 2 to 3 on Thursday? And I look at my calendar and it says creative time, I say, sorry, I have a conflict. Can I meet you on, on Friday in the morning? Now, of course there are always sometimes emergencies that those, those spaces get filled. But I've become very protective of these little recharge moments where I will not put any meetings in there and I can choose to do with those creative spaces what I want. I can do creative work or sometimes I can catch up on things that I'm struggling to catch up on. The point is I get to dictate what happens in that time. And the most important thing is to be super protective of them. You don't need a lot of them, but you do need them.

Yeah. And that speaks to a broader point and it goes back to the earlier discussion. Time management seems to be a bit of a lost skill. We've packed our days full and we're not leaving Flex for how do we spend our time on those longer term things? How do we spend our times on creative or on ourselves? And it's just booked. And that was also, I think, something that happened in the pandemic, as you said, where we just crammed our day full of meetings because that's all we really had time for. And how are you thinking? What would be your suggestions more broadly around the time management? If there's anything else there, but just in terms of how critical that is, because I'm seeing that as an element of what's driving some of the swirl and ambiguity is truthfully at its root, time management.

Yeah. So again, I'm a slave to my calendar as well. So instead of trying to escape my calendar, I built in the gaps in the calendar. So I'm still a slave to the calendar. I look forward to these little gaps that are there. And very, very protective. So that's number one.

I think the other thing when it comes to time management is defining workdays. The workday has become fuzzy because we used to have a commute. And the commute in, you would sort of prepare for work, listen to the news, whatever it was, have your coffee, and then the commute out, the commute home is sort of recharged and sort of like just sort of, whether you had a drive or you're on a train or whatever it was, you got a moment to yourself to sort of to relax until you got home. And now we go immediately from one thing to the next. So I actually really like the idea of defining the workday. Now, of course, it's going to be imperfect, just like real work. Sometimes you work late, sometimes you have to come in early. Totally, totally fine. But for ourselves to define the workday, that it's not amorphous, I think, is an important thing. The good thing about work and problems is they'll still be there tomorrow once you close your computer.

That's right. I was actually dreading my commute when I started to come back to the office. I ended up loving it because it was exactly that. I was like, I get to read, listen to music, no one's bugging me, there's no kids. It was great.

I think the commute is the great uncelebrated buffer between work and home.

Yeah, that's fantastic. We've gone through a lot of topics very quickly. We are so far off our script. It's wonderful. And we still have a few more minutes, but I'd love to turn the conversation to you, Simon, and sort of, what do you. If you have a few minutes, what are you thinking about right now? What are you exploring in your research? You call yourself an eternal student of leadership. What are you learning about right now? What is on your mind?

There's a few things, frankly. One of them is this concept of power. You know, the simple utterance of the word makes some people sort of glow with desire and other people afraid of it and some people thinking it evil and some people thinking it good. And look at so many of the challenges we are facing politically, internationally, even inside our own companies. It seems to be a lot of power struggle. It also raises the Question of external power versus internal power, power that comes from numbers versus versus feeling powerless yourself, or feeling that you're subjected or have somebody else has power over you and how we have unhealthy reactions to those feelings. And so it become very, very interesting what it means to manage power and balance power in a modern day and age, given all the factors that we've talked about some of already. So I become very, very interested in that.

That's fascinating. And I think power is. You sort of mentioned it, the control. Right. And that was something that we saw in the pandemic was the loss of control was a lot of what drove people's anxiety because they could not. They didn't feel they were in control anymore. And again, as you think about where we are in the world we're in, that sense of control is often something that we miss and makes us feel powerless. And so are you looking at that in terms of how people and leaders specifically build control, you know, over themselves through their organizations? Is that something that would be part of that?

Absolutely. Like, if you have power, if you have positions of power, how do you manage that responsibly? I'll give you one little statistic that I stumbled upon which will make perfect sense when I say it. But especially as a bank, you realize the power you have to help people feel powerful rather than powerless, which is this little statistic that a disproportionately high number of the January 6th invaders in the Capitol in Washington, D.C. a disproportionately high number of them either were struggling with or have struggled with significant financial stress, including personal bankruptcy or significant credit card debt, way, way higher than the national average. So if you think about that.

Somebody who feels power less because they're drowning in debt or unable to take control of their financial future, what does that do to somebody's mindset when they feel that way? And I think that's an amazing opportunity that a bank can recognize that somebody who's struggling feels powerless. And how do we help them feel powerful? Simply by getting them on a track where they can see that there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Yeah. I spent nearly a decade as a consultant and externally looking at a bank. You see the loans and the deposits, and it seems very transactional. But coming into the bank, you realize, to your point, the influence you have over a society and community by being the lifeblood, by generating capital and deploying capital. And I think it is a great responsibility that we do feel. Absolutely. But then to your point, seeing that for Its very specific consequences, like you suggest on. On the January 6th, I think is always important for us to have.

Part of our sort of in our thinking. But as you go with that, it is. How do we as a bank take where is the right points for us to take a stand on that and how do we effect change through that is really important for us to consider. That's fantastic. Sorry, go ahead.

And it goes to what you were about being customer focused.

Right.

It doesn't mean you have to be a charity, but how we talk to people, you know, just the simple way how we. How we treat people. You know, I've written about this woman named Christina Harbridge who had a collections agency, and she outperformed by multiples.

Other collections agencies in her category. Well, I guess they're all in the same category, but outperformed other collections agencies not because of her mean tactics, but because she treated people with respect. Instead of calling people up and threatening them that they owe money, she called them up and said, hey, I know you're struggling. Can we work this out together? Like, there's certain things that we. I have to do, but, like, let me work with you. And the minute somebody just felt like they were being treated like a human being and somebody on the other side of the phone understood that they don't want to be in debt, they don't want to not pay their bills, they're struggling. And just that somebody understood that they were struggling. They were able to get way more people into payment plans that worked, even though they were the exact same payment plans that a threatening methodology was attempting to deploy.

Like I said, she outperformed, and people said thank you at the ends of the calls. So it's not necessarily what we have to do, but it's how we go about doing it and having that customer focus that can have profound impact on someone's life.

That's fantastic.

The money that we need to collect.

Yeah. You can still be profitable and drive performance, but do it in a human way, Right?

Absolutely.

Which seems to be the theme of this call. That's fantastic. I think we probably have just one or two more questions here, Simon. So thank you so much for your time.

As we think about the trends that are happening, and you sort of spoke to this in terms of the January 6 group, but certainly labor unions are far more active. We've seen the strikes with the auto workers. You know, as you look forward in the economy and as the economy sort of stutters as we go forward, you know, leaders, I think, are going to have to make hard choices. And you've spoken before about the long and the short term.

What is your encouragement? What would you say to RBC in terms of your encouragement from how we need to hold ourselves to thinking about that long term and what are the things you would ask us to think through as we go forward through the next couple of years?

This is the value of the infinite game. This is summarized. This is the purpose of the infinite game, which is you don't have competitors in your industry that you need to beat. It's a false narrative. This is the magical thing about business. It's an infinite game. And, and multiple companies selling about the same product, about the same price, about the same quality can both be wildly successful at the same time. And to view the other players in your category, to view the other players in your industry as worthy rivals, that some of them do one or many things better than you and you can learn from them, but the only true competitor is yourself. How do you do better than yourselves? How do you make your leaders better this year than they were last year? How do you make your customer service better this year than you were than they were last year? How do you make your innovation and your online tools better this year than they were last year? And learn from everybody else but compete against yourself first. And this is the single best long term strategy that you can ever deploy and you will find yourself way more innovative because you're not trying to me too or catch up with whatever everybody else is doing. You're thinking for yourselves. And I'll give you one example to drive home the point which is Microsoft versus Apple. Steve Ballmer, when he was the CEO of Microsoft, was hell bent on beating Apple and their ipod and he was going to come up with his own product and he was going to outperform and beat Apple, literally. He talked about it obsessively.

Right.

Except Apple was ignoring Microsoft and they were trying to compete against themselves. So at some point it's true, Microsoft's product, Microsoft's MP3 player, the Zune, actually did get better than the ipod. Except about a year or two later Apple introduced the iPhone that rendered both the ipod and the Zune at completely obsolete. Microsoft was competing against Apple. Apple was competing against itself. Apple was the innovative company.

Yeah. And that's the infinite game. Exactly. Long term. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. It's been a true pleasure getting the chance to chat to you, Simon. And.

Parting shot. What's the the title of your next book? Is it going to be all about Power? And is that what it's going to focus on.

Oh, you've been colluding with my publisher, I see.

We'll see, we'll see. We'll see where it goes. But I can guarantee you it'll be something forward thinking and optimistic.

Thank you so much. Simon. It was a pleasure chatting to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us. Team, thank you for joining us today. It was great. I hope you enjoyed listening to Simon. So many great lessons for us as we think about our journey as leaders, which is never truly done. So hopefully this spurs you onto the next leg. Thank you for joining. Have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Simon.