Why Your Brain Is Breaking Down At Work (And Nobody Is Talking About It)

Bigger avalanche, smaller shovel. So there's, there's more and more and more emotion coming at us and we have fewer of the skills to make it better. It's not about your workload. As soon as people hear that word and start managing their thought load, they create the space to get amazing things done and go home with gas left in the tank.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Unemployable Podcast. I'm Jeff Dudan. If you are known as the Teamwork Doctor, worked with over 26 Fortune 500 companies from Boston to Bangkok, if you are the author of the New York Times bestseller Thought Load, your name can only be Leanne Davey. Welcome, Leanne.

Thanks, Jeff. I'm very glad to be here. And Thought Load is not the New York Times bestseller, it's the one coming out soon. So I love that you just put that into the universe.

Well, you know, chat, chat creates things for us.

Well, no, I think that was just a premonition. I think you're just telling— you're telling the future.

Well, we like— we believe in speaking a powerful future into existence here. How many copies do I have to buy? Make it a year?

Probably way too, way too many.

So I have to— by the time this podcast drops, I have to have bought them because we, we only deal in truth bombs on the Unemployable Podcast. But I'm excited to have you on today. I'm really a fan of your work. Opening question.

Yeah.

How do leaders unknowingly drain their team's energy?

The biggest way is just by diluting them across too many priorities. That's number one, right? They just, they're not clear about what the most important outcome is. They let all these side quests come onto the radar. That's the biggest way. There are lots of others, but if you want the biggest way, diluting people across Slack channels, email messages, 22 hours of meetings a week, we just dilute people to the point of ineffectiveness.

So these are genius attacks. They go to a conference, uh, they come home, they have a strategic plan, but they decide that there's something else that they think is a good idea today. And instead of sitting a minute and putting some analysis on it, they, they swing into action. But isn't action also a hallmark of highly performing teams?

No, I think I— so I love that question and I'm so glad you asked it. So let's talk about 3 things you can pay attention to: action, right, output, and outcomes. If you pay attention to outcome, you know what you're going to get? Busy people. Only if you pay attention to outputs are you going to get productive people. But even that is a huge trap. Productivity is a trap because we can be pumping out so much stuff that's not moving the needle on anything that matters. Only if we pay attention to outcomes are we going to get effective people. So I see so many people who like claim that they're a get shit done kind of person. And I'm like, no, you're just doing a lot of— you're not getting stuff done. You are simply like running around chasing your tail. So I think, uh, I love genius attack. That's fantastic. I love that. And I have been sitting with leaders beside them at a conference when, when the attack has hit and I'm just feeling for their team back home. Out comes the phone, you know, up comes the Slack channel. And off they go and you're like, oh no. So great teams actually don't look as active as some of the poor performing teams. They look intentional.

I have a friend who was having a conversation with somebody who works at Tesla and Elon Musk companies have a certain reputation for urgency. And as a matter of fact, I heard him on a podcast say, well, what's the most important thing for you as a business builder? And he says urgency. So, but to hear this person talk at Tesla, they don't work 100 hours a week. They don't work 80 hours a week. It's not a Jobsian work environment where I guess, you know, signal noise, what's the next most important thing in 18 hours? And then Steve Jobs would run around the building taking everybody off what they were doing and focusing on his priority. Now, you can't really argue with his results, uh, nor can you argue with Elon Musk's results, but to hear this person tell it, they work a normal week. They 40, 50 hours a week. They're given timelines of 3 weeks instead of 3 months where an industry standard would be 3 months and they say you have to get it done in 3 weeks. But the intensity and the urgency for the 40 to 50 hours that they're there is high and they, and it's, they have absolute candor in their environment. Meaning like if something's wrong, there's no sugarcoating. There's no, we'll talk to you about it next week at the meeting. Or, you know, because what are the— here's one—

hold a grudge against you for the next 3 months. Yeah.

Well, here's a tell. Okay. Um, here's an idea and it gets presented and then the person says, well, whose idea was it? So they're looking to create a bias on the value of the idea based on who's the one that came up with the idea, which doesn't, shouldn't make any sense, right? Oh, I'm gonna trust this idea more because it came from Bob than from, it came from Joe because Joe's, you know, Joe has bad ideas. So my question to you is, what's a company that you've worked with where you, you believe they had the right balance between urgency and intentionality? And what was, how were they able to maintain that across a large organization?

Yeah, so I can't name my clients. Obviously, there's confidentiality agreements with all my clients, but, you know, a large online retailer, let's talk about, right?

Okay.

That really—

Is there more than one?

Yes, there are, thankfully. Okay. Um, uh, but that, that really gets it on that. And what they do is they they create urgency, like I assume— I haven't worked with Tesla, but like I assume Tesla does, but it's urgency for the outcome. It's urgency for a very small set of things that will drive that outcome. It's not urgency to be responsive to the things binging in your Slack channel, or it's not urgency for responding to HR on the compliance training, right? So, It's urgency. To me, yes, a great organization has a sense of urgency, although false urgency is a huge problem, not something we want to create. But it's urgency with focus on something deliberate. That's where magic happens. And I think I've seen companies where they get that balance right.

Got it. What's your view on small teams inside of a big organization? And I ask that specifically because we're in the franchise industry. So by nature of what we do, I mean, over the last 3 years, we've basically had 260 startups in 800 markets, you know, operating all across the country, across the US and Canada. We are up there with you and we, you know, but these are small teams anywhere from 3 to 15 people. So what are some of the opportunities that for, for team dynamics that, that you get in a small team? And then have you observed big companies that have a small team dynamic within them and how does that work?

Yeah, so I'm a big fan of small teams. Small teams are better for, so you, you named the new book Thought Load. Thought load is the invisible tax on our performance that comes from all we're expected to pay attention to, all the emotional triggers we face in a given work week, and our depleted energy. All 3 of those things factor in. Small teams are better for thought load. So we are less likely to be spread over a million different priorities when we have a small team that's clear on what we have to do. We also can get to know the humans. If you're on a team of 6 people, you can know them, you can know their kids' names, you can know You know, like what they like is their sandwich, what they drink in their cup, what drives them nuts. And you can get to a level of trust, which speeds all sorts of good things way more easily than if you're trying to work— many, many, many organizations are now doing these cross-functional teams, big matrix structures where you're having to deal with 40 different people in a week. You can't trust them. They don't know you from a load of oats, right? And so, it makes everything harder. So, you know, Small teams are less likely to dilute your attention, less likely to trigger unhealthy emotions or fear, and therefore less likely to drain your energy. So I'm a big fan of smaller teams, but smaller teams have to go with— I have a chapter in the book called Shrink Teams, Strengthen Communities. Because what that means then is we need to know who in this giant franchise network across North America, who else has already been through this thing I haven't been through yet? Who could I call on? Who knows this kind of an account? Who's, right, et cetera, et cetera. So we want to have a really strong community that we can draw on, and we want to strengthen that and build those ties, but we don't want to have to take, you know, 40 people on every quest with us because that's incredibly inefficient for our attention, for our emotions, for trust, and for our energy. So I think those small team environments are really great as long as they get the benefit of a great community they can tap into when they need it.

As AI rolls out across all of the things that we're doing—

the world.

Yeah, the world. Not just, by the way, we're apparently we're going to be building solar farms in space, the universe, and we're going to be doing— yeah, most of the compute is going to be floating around in the ether, in orbit here within a few years. So amazing times we get to live in, isn't it? It is. I mean, I remember that just to talk to my girlfriend in high school, I would have to take the phone cord around out of the kitchen through the living room and then hide in the closet and had a 35-foot phone cord, you know, just to get some privacy. Exactly. And now, you know, it's, it's, um, it's, it's insane what's going on. Yeah, it's insane. But I'm, I'm, I'm enjoying watching it. But yeah, but, but, but as, as much though, is that going to mean that teams are going to be smaller with more creative type people that are going to be more likely to adopt these types of tools in the workplace?

I think we don't know, right? Because we've heard this story many times before, right? You know, when we got automated looms, we weren't going to need as many people in the garment industry. Not true. When we got ATMs, we weren't going to need bank tellers anymore. When we got email, we were only going to have to work 4 hours a week.

Yeah, the post office is still in business somehow.

Exactly. So I haven't seen it. I have read a lot, but I have not seen enough to feel confident in what the impacts are going to be as this all shakes out. They are going to be massive. I feel confident in that. I'm just not yet certain enough about what that picture actually looks like. But, you know, what I do feel very worried about is that those who are most excited about AI are thinking about how it can take some of our workload and not appreciating how right now agentic AI is taking our workload but adding to our thought load in quite a distressing way. So, we can send 5 agents off doing wonderful work for us, but that's causing all sorts of notifications. We need to go back in, we need to alter the query, we need to validate the work that's happening, et cetera, et cetera. We're already seeing signs of the cognitive load of that being very high, AI brain fry happening. We're already seeing some emotional triggering coming from this, the feeling of overwhelm, anxiety, and we know it's burning people out very, very quickly. So, you know, AI might be very exciting in terms of what it can contribute to our workload. It's very alarming in what it's gonna contribute to our thought load, and we haven't solved that yet. We haven't designed it in. We haven't figured out staffing levels or ways to allocate work to factor that in yet. And the other thing that's happening, which is a big team problem, is all of a sudden people feel liberated to kind of do your job for you. So, somebody's sending you a 70-page thing they did on ChatGPT. It's like, "Here, you might find this interesting." And suddenly, you have a 70-page thing to comb through that might have brilliant insights, might just be work slop. And all of a sudden, that's your task. Right? And it also— think about how emotionally triggering that is. As soon as somebody does that, you're like, "What, you think I'm not doing my job? Like, you think I suck? Like, what? Like, why don't you actually just do your job?" Right? It's a very emotional thing. So, we're seeing a lot of that happening on teams right now. We just don't know how AI is going to affect our cognitive demands, our emotional experience of teamwork, but we already have a sense that while it was you know, put out as this thing that was going to save us so much energy. I'm not buying it yet.

I have a couple of types of people that you will find occasioned inside of the workforce, and I'd be interested to get your take on a couple of them as to how the best way to empower, manage, enlighten, inspire these types of people. And the first one is the individual contributor. And my experience has been IT people, right? They— I— so when I was building some of my early companies, I built a relationship with this IT guy and, you know, typical— what is agoraphobic? Okay. Like afraid of fear of the outdoor, like, you know, so—

Fear of anything beyond the basement.

Yeah. Yes, exactly. So I took him out to the Salesforce conference. One time I made him go with me.

That's a really big compliment.

Early on. Yeah. And, and now this was early, like Marc Benioff was, was walking amongst us. There was only 3 or 4,000 people there.

There's like Dreamforce didn't take the entire Bay Area capacity for, yeah.

No, not yet. It was not, you know, now I think last one I went to 250,000 people or some, some ridiculous thing. Right. But no, I mean, he, we, it was, it was incredible. But yeah, he came to me one night knocking on my door and I opened the door and like he was pale white. He, he was soaked through with sweat and he's like, I've, I've gotta go home, you know? And he's just, I can't, I can't be out. I, I, I'm, it's over for me.

And too much.

I don't know that I ever saw him out, uh, again after that. And we're still, we're, we still work together on some things and this has been over 20 years. But, um, you, he, he, you know, he, he, his He liked to work at night. So, during the day, he was less than responsive. How do you— is there a place for individual contributors that are super talented in a way? And then how do you negotiate interaction with a regular, you know, healthy, normally functioning team?

Yeah.

Or do you? I hope there's— Or do you create exceptions?

Yeah, I hope there's room for folks like that. I sure hope so because they have gifts that other people don't have. They have a degree of focus that other people don't have. So, I hope so. And it's really about— you use the keyword negotiate, right? I think what you have to do is talk about how do we come to something that works for all of us, right? And that's also not just you and them as the manager because they have colleagues where it might feel very unfair to the colleagues, or the colleagues then feel like they have to do something like they got to work at night to talk to this person. So it has to work for everybody. But again, I'd be talking about outcomes. Like, what needs to happen? What are you accountable for? What change are we looking for in the world? And if you can focus on that, is the person delivering that? If it's, you got to pass your pen tests on cyber attacks or whatever the outcome is, are they accomplishing that? Great. That's the most important thing. Are they accomplishing it in a way that works with their colleagues and makes them a decent team player? Great. Otherwise, we don't need to fuss over everything being exactly how it is for everybody else. So I'm not a huge fan of driving for complete consistency. You hear people scream, "It's not fair!" I'm like, there's no such thing as fair. I think managers get really wrapped around an axle on trying to be fair. Good people, good managers who want to be fair. I'm like, well, one person's definition of fair is about equal. Another person's definition is about equitable. There's no right answer. There's no answer key on what's fair. So if you get challenged by that person's coworkers about, well, that's not fair. How come they get to work at night? Well, because this is the outcome that's most important to me. This person's really talented, and here's what they're delivering. And for me, it's worth it. With it to have that kind of talent on our team. Are there things that you need from your colleague that you're not getting? Can we talk about how they impact you? I'm happy— that's all negotiable. But getting wrapped up in what's fair or unfair, I think it's a big waste of energy. Think about it. Come up with your own thought process for why you think that's right for the business and for the team and explain that. That's the best you can do.

What about the young superstar that comes into a company and they, they have the disadvantage of youth, but they're smart, they're sharp, they're pro. You can just tell that this person will be a superstar. I mean, I, you know, I'm a big Carol Dweck fan, and so I've found, I've found myself over the years doing things to test for growth mindset. Are people, you know, if you, if you, if you have a training that, you know, if I have a genius attack and I get 15 books and I put them in the back of the room and I have 25 people in the room, you know, who takes a book, who reads it, and then who actually, one person out of 25 will actually apply what they learned. And if I, and if I saw it so clearly that I thought it could help people in their jobs, it's probably something there. But you know, out of that 25 people, 1 or 2, you know, 10 will take the book, 5 will open it, you know, 2 will, you know, use it. And so, and, but the people that self-serve and, and a lot of times, so I've, I mean, I've, I've raised 3 children and I, I've come to understand that, you know, children are just as smart as adults. They're just less experienced. And you know, some of them have really innate talents and, you know, and, and if, and I, and I see that in young employees, but then you've got, then you have legacy people. People that you want at the company, but they might not be as sharp, or they might not, not be as driven, they might not be as fast. Um, how do you—

or certainly not as novel, right? And sometimes we love novelty. We can do a disservice to our senior or long-term employees by being so attracted to the novelty of the new ideas and, and not appreciating that, you know, it's possible that the longer tenure employee doesn't think they're great ideas because they have more context, or they have— so to be a careful. It's like abandoning the wife for the attractive girl walking down the street. Wife knows some things.

That's right. That's right. Yeah, very, very fair point.

But yes, I love the idea of that young person. And so, you know, how do you help them contribute to their team in a way that's less likely to create— I always think about it as this may be exactly, exactly what our organization needs. You know, this is the, the donor organ that we need to breathe new life into us, and then every ounce of the body rejects it.

Right.

So I think of your job as like, how can I help this, this very essential vital organ we need face less rejection? So how do you mentor and coach the person on, you know, how to ask great questions versus coming in with all the answers? How do you coach them on coming to the table with you know, thoughts about what the issues are rather than trying to tell somebody else how to do their job. Like, we can help these people bring their novelty, their new insight to the table in a way that makes it much less likely it's going to get rejected. I think that's really important because sometimes they come in a little, you know, guns a-blazing. Coming a little hot. Coming a little hot. Coming in a little hot. And I would say then, And also being really clear with them, what currencies do they bring with them? Maybe they've learned AI in university. They've got hot new skills. There may be a variety of things they have. But then just asking them, what do you not have? Who's the yin to your yang on this team? Who would be a great person? My very first day of ever working, November 2, 1998, I walked in and joined a team the same day as another woman was joining the team. She was like 25 years older than me. And it was our first day for both of us. And that was 20, whatever, 28 years ago. We're still dear, dear friends. And we became kind of mentors to one another. I knew I had so much to learn from her about how business works and those sorts of things. And she knew that she had so much to learn from me about some of the technical stuff that I was a hotshot on. You know, absolutely amazing 28 years of supporting each other. And I think that's what you want to do is help pair them up, help them realize that they have something wonderful to bring, but how they bring it is going to make a big difference. And then also encouraging them to recognize what can they get from others, what benefits. And that relationship I went on to mirror in the other direction. So there's an incredible author named Steven Shedletsky. He wrote a book called Speak Up Culture. He's an amazing guy. He worked for me when he was a college intern. In the summer after his junior year of college. At the end of the summer, he said, "Will you be my mentor?" I said, "If you'll be mine." And we've called each other mentegés, half protégé, half mentor, ever since 2008. So I think, you know, thinking about those sorts of things that, yep, each of us brings something amazing to the table. But if we think we're the only ones who do, and if we aren't keen to draw out of others their value, we're probably not going to be received as well as we could be. So as a manager trying to facilitate that.

A little bit of humility properly demonstrated probably goes a long way.

And curiosity, just, I'm so interested in what you've seen that, that I haven't, like, right? You know, them wondering like, what was it like before? You know, when I started in an office, we communicated with each other by interoffice memo envelope. Right. And so, you know, just being a little curious about what was different about that, what was better about it? Like, what else did you learn the hard way? You know, those sorts of things. So yeah, humility for sure. Um, with a healthy dose of curiosity goes a long way.

I try to, you know, I try to take the kids seriously except when they ask me what it was like before electricity.

And I just, you know, I don't, I think they're, uh, well, don't you worry, Gen Z, there's lots of things we can make fun of them for too. So, uh, yeah.

Well, so let's talk about that a little bit.

Uh, yeah.

I've, I've experienced some situations where I had acceptable performance, but promotion impatience. I mean, I, you know, I've been here 9 months.

Yeah.

And I— they—

why am I not a vice president?

They asked for a VP role, literally asked for a VP role. Yeah. And I'm like, well, I see what they do. I could do that. And I'm like, well, you know, I mean, probably not, but it's— and then, and then, you know, it's every 3 months on the month and it's like, okay, well, look, we've encouraged our children. We want them to be assertive. We want them to ask for what they get. They've, and they, you know, and, and, and, and I think that's fine. And, you know, if they can't find it here, then they should go find it somewhere else if it's not fast enough for them or, or whatever. But it does seem to be a little bit of a cultural thing for our young people now that they're really, and, and by the way, I have nothing wrong. I think it's fantastic that somebody's that motivated. And they really want to make something of themselves and they really want to grow and they really want to contribute. And, you know, they're, you know, give it a year, give it 2 years, give it, you know, do the job for a little bit. Are you— is that something that you're experienced, you know, that we're— that people are dealing with today?

That's been around for quite a while. Quite a while. So I think that was a millennial thing. So, you know, I used to get asked to give speeches about the generations, and I'm not a big fan of talking about generations because as a psychologist, I know there's much more variance inside a generation than between the generations.

Go to the individual.

Yeah, there, there are some things, right? So I would watch, I'm Gen X and when I joined the corporate world, the company I worked for gave out these little lapel pins that you got an additional diamond in the pin every 5 years. It was pay me for my perseverance. Right? I'm still here 5 years later. That's what we celebrated. And we really did. We celebrated hard. There were people getting 40 years of service. My grandfather worked at a bank and got his 50 years of service gold watch for working in the stationery department, making withdrawal slips. So we celebrated that. And then as a Gen X, I remember coming in and looking at what they were doing, and I was just as impatient. I'm like, I'm doing more than them. Like, they were doing this work wrong. I fixed it. You should pay me for my performance. So instead of pay for perseverance, it was pay for performance. And then when the millennials came around, they were like, forget that. It was a hot job market. And they were like, pay me for my potential. I'm going to be amazing. And if you want me and if you want to keep me, pay me for things I haven't even done yet because I'm going to be I'm going to be amazing. So that's been around for actually quite a long time. And so it's a matter of really helping people understand what are the outcomes that they need to accomplish. It's the same theme, right? Because they can show you, I got a lot of outputs created. Like, well, that's nice. Did those outputs move the needle on the things that you're accountable for? And if so, if they really have moved the needle on that, I'm having the conversation. What is the next thing that I can add? And it's probably not going up a level or that sort of thing, but here, let's add some responsibility. You've shown that you can deliver these kinds of outcomes. And if they haven't, if they've just been on the treadmill of performance, like kids are these days of trying to win the soccer trophy and get to select or get to the traveling city soccer team and get, or just getting into college and just, we've had them on this evaluating their worth and their value in not only in the academic setting, but also in their sports and recreational things. Everything now is about, did you get to the next level? So we've done it to them. So like, I find it really hard to blame folks for that kind of unrelenting timeline because we've imposed that on them. We've taught them if they aren't getting to the next level, if they haven't gone from single A to double A to triple A, then, right? So, I'd be really focused on outcomes. Are they getting them? If they're getting them, they do deserve more opportunity. But at some point they have to realize that while they've been, you know, in school and they've had these natural breaks from, you know, to middle school or high school or college or, you know, all those sorts of things, you got a 40-year career ahead of you. So, you're going to have to change your timelines a little. Take a breath.

Right.

Right.

Absolutely.

It's going to be a long time if you leave a job every 9 months. It's going to be a long career.

Yeah. Yeah. That's— there's definitely a balance.

Yeah, there is absolutely a balance. But lots of empathy for— when I used to give those speeches, particularly with baby boomers in the room, and they would be making jokes about millennials, I'm like, you know, you're the newest you you could ever be. Mr. Rogers, right? You're so special. No one is special like you. I'm like, you know, can you believe these, these, you know, young employees in the office are saying that? And everybody's like, yeah. I'm like, who told them that? And then they're like, uh, us. Like, exactly. Yeah, I don't want to hear it.

Yeah, but that was, we, that was only when you were 9. I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't meant to carry over until your adulthood. We have to be careful.

Yeah, I, I think about that. So this is a dated reference now, but if you think back to the original American Idol, I think that what's happened in the workplace is, is we have a whole generation of workers raised Paula Abdul, and now we have to be Simon Cowell, right? And it's rough, right? They got raised, wow, you're the newest you in the whole world, right? They got the Paula Abdul, and now we're like, I've seen better things at the breakfast bar on a cruise ship, right? So the problem is that what we did as parents, we're paying for as managers.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Exactly. All right.

As the teamwork doctor and as somebody who makes some incredible analysis about cognitive thought load, I have to ask you about mental health. What are you seeing? And is it, is it the way it's always been? Are there, are there different issues or new challenges now, particularly with how isolated maybe people have become with social media, like the whole, the whole dynamic of relationships? Relationship and what people have to do, uh, to get a, to get a boyfriend, to get a girlfriend, um, to get married, to, to meet somebody naturally out in the wild. Um, you know, all of these, all of these dynamics are changing, and I don't think we fully understand, uh, the impact that it's going to have in our interactions. But what are you seeing in the workplace? Are people less tolerant? Are people are people less collaborative or, or not?

Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing all of those things. So there's some data, there's a workforce study that looks at various emotional— emotionality in the workplace, stress in the workplace, those sorts of things. And the data are getting worse and worse every year of more emotional outbursts at work, more anxiety, anger, frustration, despondence coming into the workplace. So 1 in 4 people in your workplace are likely having a significant emotional outburst at work. Emotional reaction on any given day. So that prevalence is going up. But then the other alarming thing that goes with it is that the emotional coping skills are getting worse every year. So the way I talk about it in the book is a bigger avalanche, smaller shovel. So there's, there's more and more and more emotion coming at us and we have fewer of the skills to make it better. And so it's related to all the things you mentioned. So humans are built to be connected for thousands and thousands of years, our advantage as a species was connection and community. And, you know, we were already headed in a dark direction. So there's really interesting research on why birth rates are declining as precipitously as they are. And, you know, the hypothesis for a long time was that—

Well, I know what causes it, so—

Well, yeah, exactly. So that's clearly not happening. But people thought that that was the issue, was that couples were deciding that children were too expensive or too hard, or, you know, all of those sorts of things. And there's some new research coming out that suggests that, like, we're, we're still upstream of that, that people aren't coupling. And you can look at the data from the time since the iPhone came out, and you can see that, first of all, you know, both genders are using that technology a lot, too much, and as a way of isolating, but using it completely differently. So, you know, more men are gaming, more men are using it on, you know, YouTube or going in one direction, whereas more women are using it, you know, looking at Pinterest or Instagram. And so we're apart, but we're apart amusing ourselves with things that we then don't relate to each other. So it's a huge problem. So we've got massive isolation going on and you have that isolation, then you come into the workplace and do you have the social skills to really get to know somebody, learn to trust them, give and take where people have hard days, support and empathize with one another. So we have a lot of things going on at a really macro level in our society that are affecting our ability to be in teams. And if you go back to your question earlier about small teams versus big teams, Used to be we could come to work with 5 people and we could kind of manage knowing where those folks are at. And at least with 5 people on the team, the odds are there's only one of them having a big emotional episode in a day. But if you're on a huge team or you're in a cross-functional group where you're interacting with, you're hitting what's called emotional contagion, which is the spread of somebody's emotion throughout a group of people. You're getting emotional contagion from people all day long. And because we're more isolated, more socially anxious, more awkward. We're just not dealing with it. We're just kind of retreating. So it, there's a very complex and interrelated set of things that are really societal trends, but, but actually having a big impact in the workplace.

And this is anecdotal and I'm sure there's data to it, but early in my career in Gate, in the companies we built and places we worked, I don't remember anybody having having an absolute meltdown, breakdown. And we've had a bunch in the last 5 years. Just, I can't take it. It's too much. I'm, you know, and then you see them going off and doing the same thing somewhere else. It's like, well, these are normal. Like you just, this is a normal job. This is a nor— you might, if now they might have something going on in their personal life, they could, you know. Um, but man. Is, if, you know, and then that we do have incredible team members that are just resilient, old school, get knocked down, dust themselves off, get back up, you know, take it. I mean, there could be some, you know, take some, take some direct feedback, not like it, but, you know, get over it and, and just kind of keep, keep rolling again. And, and I think, you know, any great team is, you know, has the ability to overcome adversity.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, how do we think about that as a team? So understanding it's okay if one of us is really stumbling at the moment. It's, you know, there are military examples. There's lots of different metaphors, sports teams, right? There's lots of team analogies where it's like, yeah, everybody has an off game or somebody's been wounded on the battlefield and we got your back and we're going to make sure, right? One of the problems with really high thought load is it erodes your presence. Like, I am just so busy coping with my stuff that I'm, even if I'm gonna in a meeting with you, I'm probably not all there. And when I am struggling to cope with my own thought load and I can't be present for you, then I'm less likely to have your back. I'm less likely to notice that like something's going on and you need my help or you need me to stand up for you, or you just need a little a little bit of bolstering today or whatever else, right? So one of the things I'm most worried about in how thought load plays out is just that dilution of people's presence. And that's all day at work, but it absolutely comes through at home. You get home and your head is not in the game. Your kids talking to you and you're like, oh, what? What? Sorry, can you repeat that? Because we're just, we're so busy processing both the cognitive and the emotional detritus of our day that we are not present. So we're in no position to have each other's backs and help the folks who might need a little support. And, you know, that's what a great team should be able to do for us is know that I got your back.

Yeah, we all have problems, something.

Yeah.

Sick family member or, uh, hormonal imbalance. Like, we all go through things that make us feel less well. We all go through things that make us feel vulnerable. Not our best self. And you've got to have grace with people.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, really be— and part of that comes down to this concept of servant leadership, is being close and being close enough to them to have enough trust for them to tell you what's going on. So you've got to be in relation, you got to be in human relationship for somebody to say, look— and they have to trust you to know that you're not going to run all over and tell— look, this is what's going— I just got a bad doctor's appointment, and maybe it's going to be fine, but I'm not going to find out for 2 weeks. And quite frankly, it's I can think about.

Okay.

Now you've got, now we can work like I, okay, I'm going to take care of this account. I'm going to do this for you. What do you need from me? Then we can help each other. Yeah. That's, that's what great teams do.

Yeah. So the, the pairing that I talk about in the book is when we can pair vulnerability with accountability, magic happens. So I'm going to share with you that there's something going on for me, bad doctor's appointment. Appointment. Yeah, but I am not going to use that as an excuse to back away from my accountability. I'm going to say, but it is a really important time with this account right now, so like, I get that, I'm on it, I'm gonna find somebody who I can hand this off to. I've reached out to the client to ask for XYZ, right? So when you pair that vulnerability, which enhances connection with accountability, which enhances confidence, it's magic. And so one of the things that leaders can do is go first, right? Model it first. Here's what's going on for me. Here's what I'm wrestling with. Here's what I'm doing to make sure I've processed it. So I, I'm, I, you're going to see in my calendar, I'm going to take a half an hour every morning to get my head in the game. So please don't, you know, I'm going to close my door. And I'm going to ask. And here's the other things I'm doing. I've asked so-and-so to handle this. When you model it first and say, I'm a human, like, I'm going to have times where things are rough, then if you model that with accountability, that doesn't mean I don't have to accomplish what the business needs of me and what the customers need of me, but it means that I can tap into the team Uphold my accountability without necessarily having to be responsible for every piece. Oh, amazing what happens to your relationships when you can put vulnerability and accountability together.

Let's say that somebody is feeling cognitive overthought load and you're feeling burned out and you've, you've got some brain fog. You just feel like you can't get ahead. Your, your to-do list is growing. Your deadlines are approaching. And you, you just feel starting to feel overwhelmed. I imagine in the book, and I'm guessing, yeah, yeah, um, because it's not out yet, but I am— I imagine that there's— that you have some tips to be— do you have 3 to 5 things that you're going to say once if you're feeling overtaxed and you're, and you're, you're short-circuiting, what are some things that you can do to triage that and to give yourself some headspace to start to overcome?

Yeah. Okay. Let's do 3. Uh, 1, get with your boss and talk about outcomes, right? You know, I'm, there's a lot going on for me right now. My thought load's really high. I'm feel myself spinning a little bit. I, I want to reconnect with you and get clear on what's the most important outcome you're counting on me to deliver. The one. So this is something that went wrong in our world for 400 years. The word priority priori, which comes from the Latin, which means first. It didn't have a plural for 400 years. You can only have one first. But at some point in the 20th century, we started talking about priorities and we moved from thinking about it as what comes first to what's important. And all of a sudden we could have 7 important things. I want you to get with your boss and find out what's the outcome that comes first. So that's the first thing to do. Second, I want you to open your calendar and audit it relative to that outcome. Okay, when I look what's in there, what time is serving that outcome? What tasks or activities or outputs are serving that outcome and which are not? And how do you flip things on its head? So instead of putting in all the activities first and hoping a good outcome comes, how do you put in time, your best time, your focus, what I call focus and flow time, the time when you know you're more creative, things come a little more easily, How do you block that to get the most important thing done? That's gonna give you a little bit of momentum. It's gonna have something to show the boss that, oh, this is the headway I made on this. That's gonna be energizing. And I'm gonna give you a third one that's completely counterintuitive and it's my favorite one in the book, a chapter called Do More Nothing. And the idea is—

I like this already.

Yeah. So I'll tell you where it came from. In 2016, I was watching this great Netflix show called Cooked by Michael Pollan. All about like food. It's the most gorgeous 4-part documentary about the different ways that we cook: air, water, fire. And in the one about air, he tells this story. He says, if you ate all the flour and all the water in the world, you would soon starve to death. But if you mix the flour and water together and left them exposed to the air, they'd pick up yeast. You could bake that into bread and you could live indefinitely. And as I'm watching, yeah, I know I'm watching this documentary and I have this epiphany that my life has so much flour and water. Feel like I'm actually, you know, suffocating with how much flour and water I'm getting, but no air. And there is no nourishment coming to my brain. My brain can't make sense of any of it. So back then I created what I call a 2-week cleanse, which was a 2-week period where I'm going to find 5 or 6 hour chunks to do more nothing. No radio, no reading, no podcast, no input, no talking, just my brain exposed to air so it can ferment and rise. And this habit now has become the most energizing thing that I do. And I had to do it last week. I was in Seattle for a keynote keynote. I had a terrible travel night, got to the hotel at like 3 o'clock my time, had to jump up, go give a keynote. And I had so much work to do when I got back to the hotel and the panic and the sense— this is why a sense of urgency is a double-edged sword. I had this sense of urgency. I gotta do this. I gotta record these videos. And if I had done them then, first of all, they would've been terrible, but also I would've felt I'm like, ugh, like this is such a drag. So this beautiful hotel in Seattle had a jacuzzi tub and I'm like, I'm gonna take 30 minutes to do nothing. No input. I had to jump out after 25 minutes because I was so excited about what I was gonna put in this thing I was writing. That is a secret that most of us don't realize. While we're so panicked, feeling so urgent, so urgent that one day recently I fell down the stairs because I was feeling so urgent that I didn't think I could wait to walk down the stairs before putting on my hoodie. That's what our life feels like right now. I can't wait. I only have like 11 stairs, but somehow I couldn't wait 11 stairs before I had to do both at the same time. That's the urgency that's killing us and making us less effective. So when you feel unplug for an hour, get in the garden, you know, tinker. If you're a tinkerer, tinker with something. I like to bake. Bake. Do something in silence with no input. And you will find by the end of that time, your energy is starting to come back up. Totally counterintuitive, but amazing how well it works. So we have a default neural network that goes on in our brains, and only when we turn other stuff off does it come on. That's where all the amazing connections happen. That's where the good stuff happens. If you want to be more energized and more creative and all those things, find a time to do more nothing.

A few comments on what you shared, because I think it's so powerful. You're, you're almost describing meditation.

Yes.

It's, that's a great technique. Many of the most talented people people would attribute all of their success to the fact that they learned to meditate. Before I've, I've been doing more speaking lately, and before I go on stage, I know it's important for me to hide for 10 minutes, just let my chin fall to my chest, and just, I need to walk up there with nothing. I need to be, I need to walk because all I need to know is the first sentence that I'm going to to say. And generally, it'll— just like this last one, you know, I popped up and I'm like, okay, I've got a couple minutes to go, and a whole new just little open— like what I was going to talk about the first 10 minutes, I came up with the question to open with because it just materialized to me. I said, oh, it's—

it was in the air.

It's so obvious to me now. That I just don't need to start with my normal thing. I need to, I need to say this sentence and tell this little story, and that will lead me into the whole thing. And, uh, yeah, it's critically— I found that critically important. And then the first two that you talked about are really about, about focus. And, you know, the older I get in life, the more that I understand that it's, it's my success is going to be more what I take away than what I try to because I have enough.

I love that in the book. That's, yeah, such a smart thing in your book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's, it's, you, you know, we have more than enough things to be successful on, but we just keep heaping the mashed potatoes on the plate and it just gets buried. And so, and then, you know, my favorite Jerry Seinfeld quote, which is not a joke, but he said, the lack of focus will always lead to a lack of greatness.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And there's really interesting research that if you give somebody a problem and tell them to make make it better, almost everyone will do so by adding.

Yes.

And only if you prompt them to say, you know, you could actually make this better by subtracting, do they even attempt it. And then they can find it. But we are, so that the researchers come to the conclusion, we are default wired to believe more is better. And so this do more nothing, this find a subtractive solution, all of those things are very counterintuitive for us as humans. So we have to train ourselves to do them. But wow, do we get incredible results when we do.

I'd like to get your opinion on the subject of cliques. So, if we're working to build small teams, okay, highly accountable, highly engaged, highly empathetic, high-performing teams. When does a team become a clique and when does it need to be broken?

Broken? Yeah, great. So I would say first on the content. So my previous book, The Good Fight, is all about how to use conflict as a force for good in our world. And so it's a click when we stop seeing a lot of productive tension. So when we get to groupthink, when we all now have kind of, we're so aligned that we're not putting tension on one another, that's a click, that's dangerous. That needs some fresh eyes, some new perspectives. I'd be very worried. So there's a content version of it. Then, of course, there's the dynamic version, which is that there becomes so much internal cohesiveness that everybody outside the team starts to be "they," and they start to be resistant to anything from anywhere else, or they stop communicating effectively with anyone else, or any newcomer feels very strong resistance. So I'm thinking about cliques in both the what the how. On the what, it's really about, are we getting sufficient productive conflict going on? And as soon as we aren't, we need to reinforce. And it may be that the same group of humans with the reinforcement about how their roles need to be in tension or how we need to think differently, that they might get there. But if they've gone too far, then you may need to shake up the team. So it could be about the what, but it also could be about the how, that there's, that they become poor listeners to anybody outside the team, that they lose empathy for other folks, that they create that us and them culture. I'm worried about both, both versions.

[Speaker:JEFF DUDAN] Yeah, if the team's accountability slides because they've emboldened each other that they don't have to be accountable to that other group on the other side of the building, that's an indicator, and you start to get different group saying, we're not getting anything back from that group over there.

Yeah. Big red flag.

They become emboldened that, yeah, I had a situation here recently where I had to, and it's happened to me over the time where I just had a very high-performing team. And then we have a set of values, uh, CARES, community, accountability, respect, excellence, and service or servant's heart. And, you know, we, we live and die by them. And, you know, and what I, the first indicator was disrespectful communications coming out, which was then followed with 4 to 6 months later by a lack of accountability and saying, you're going to get it when you get it. And it's impacting the business. And, you know, and at that point, I, you know, if you're offending 2 of our 5, if I haven't been able to fix it in 6 months, then some, then you have to cut it out and get clean margins and start over. And it's, and it's a shame because they're the, you know, for a time there was, it was a high-performing area of our business. and they did a lot and they worked extremely hard. Uh, but then, you know, something happened and it's, it's, um, you know, it was very difficult to— once, once the well gets poisoned, it's, it's—

that's my experience—

difficult to, you know, that's my experience.

It's very, very hard to, uh, to resurrect something that's gone south. Um, so in, in book, You First, I talk about how there are 3 different types of behavior that contribute to team dysfunction. There's wicked behavior, like the nasty behavior. There's wounded behavior, which is playing the victim. And then there's witness behavior, not me, not my problem. Each of the 3 is a huge problem, and any one of the 3 willing to change will change the entire team. But my interesting finding in the, whatever, 13 years since I wrote that book is that it's more the wounded behavior. That is very difficult to fix. Once someone decides they're the victim, that it's everybody else's fault, that's harder to change than wicked behavior. So it's really interesting, but I do find that a team that has decided that everybody else is the losers and whatever else, you know, it's very, very difficult to fix that once that's the story you're telling yourself.

Yeah. Sometimes things run their course. Course too.

Yeah, and you know what, I think we don't talk often enough about how organizations are organic, right? And you know, they don't last forever. I'm not sure they should last forever. Things should run their course. And you know, out of the seeds of one organization grow another. And we do often find a small group of people from one company starts another and good things grow, but they end up in different pockets. Organizations are very human things and the fact that they are therefore very organic and dynamic and have life cycles, that's a good thing. That's okay. So it's okay for something to run its course and for us not to think that that's necessarily a failing.

Yeah. And it's the, I forget what work it was, maybe it was Built to Last, but talking about, you know, when you can see the signs of atrophy in an organization, a 50-year-old organization that's got 100,000 employees, but then you can start to see that it's on the back of the curve and it's like slowly dying.

Yeah.

And are there things that you can do to weed the garden and basically kind of put it back on the front side of the growth curve? And it's very difficult to do in those big organizations. So sometimes, like you said, break them apart, cut the, cut the, cut the sprig and let it, you put it in a new pot and let it, let it go, let it grow, let it grow. Grow over there, and maybe the company or the organization looks slightly different than it did before. But, you know, ultimately, yeah, nothing ever stays the same. And anything left to itself will always go from bad to worse.

Yeah. So I think it's, I think we should think about that more often and think about what the sigmoid curves of our organizations, right? You talk about that in the book, right? Like, what are these? That's how things operate. So why are we fighting that in our organizations and our teams? Let's appreciate it. Obviously we want to run up the curve as long as we can, but you know, we don't want to pretend that we're not, you know, curving off, falling off when, when that starts.

Well, I tell you what, this has been a great conversation. I really, really appreciate this.

Oh, amazing, amazing conversation on really meaty, interesting. I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time. So I'm very grateful for for it, Jeff.

What have we left out?

Oh my goodness.

I mean, I would love for you to share a million things, but well, I tell you, can, can you just go, can you just let the audience, uh, remind them of your books, uh, each of the previous books? I know you've got Thought Load coming out, but, but each of the previous books, because there's so much good stuff.

New York Times bestseller that I'll just mention was called You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done. And that was a book people were like, why did you write a team book called You First. I said, because we don't have enough accountability in our teams. So in your CARES model, right? We do not have enough accountability. Everybody's waiting for their boss to fix their team or waiting for the person who's behaving wickedly to change. But it doesn't matter if you're the wicked, the wounded, or the witness, you changing will change your team. So that's a book about personal accountability in teams. One of the chapters, the last chapter in that book, was about one of the things you have to take responsibility for is embracing productive conflict. And And so, when I went on that book tour back in whatever year, 2013, people were like, "Okay, we need to know more about this conflict thing. That's really hard." And so, then I wrote The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track. So, it was a deep dive into using conflict as a force for good. And then now—

Now, can you tell me before you get off that, one or two tips or tactics if you are conflict avoidant? Conflict avoidant.

Yeah.

Okay. What's a— give me a band-aid.

Hypothetically.

Hypothetically, give me a band-aid out there for somebody that's conflict avoidant that could, that tomorrow could help them wade into a conflict that they know that they need to, but they're reticent to.

The most important thing I find is to separate it from me personally and to understand what my conflict obligation is to my customer, to my organization. So I tell the story of, you know, somehow we have this metaphor that teamwork is supposed to be like rowing. We use pictures of rowers. We talk about we're all in the same boat. We're all pulling in the same direction. We have, we have all this language. That's the worst possible metaphor for teamwork. So I tried to come up with a different metaphor. And basically what I came up with is teamwork is like trying to spread out a plastic tarpaulin over a tent. We're all pulling in different directions, trying to stretch this always too small resource to keep everybody dry in the tent. And that means that I'm not pulling in the same direction as the sales guy if I'm the IT guy or the ops person or the marketing person. I'm pulling in a different direction, but it's my obligation to do that because only if I pull in my direction are we all going to sleep dry in the tent. So when you don't like conflict, getting out out of like, I'm doing this because I'm a bad team player, or I'm just being self-serving, and getting into, no, nobody else is thinking about the same person as I'm thinking about. Nobody else is advocating for them. If I don't pull on this rope, they're, they're gonna get wet tonight. Um, so really dissociating the conflict from you as a person and thinking of it as an obligation of who and what you are in that room to fight for. I find so many people are like, "Oh, well, if it's not about me, like if nobody's fighting for the field staff, if I don't stand up for them, oh, well, I can't let them down." We're much better at not letting other people down than we are about standing up for ourselves. So how you frame it and how you understand conflict is not a sign that you're rocking the boat and doing it wrong because teamwork isn't like rowing. Conflict is It's a sign that you're putting tension on something to make sure that we're coming to the best decision. Everybody's going to sleep dry tonight. So that framing change, which is what The Good Fight is all about, um, is the biggest thing we can do to help people feel more confident and also not even just confident, more like, okay, I can't stay quiet here. Uh, there's people counting on me to raise this issue.

Love it. So we've got Good Fight, we've got You First, and we've got Thought Load. Yeah, all right. You know, you can probably put them all in the basket at the same time, guys, and just, just put them all in there, get your 3-pack, and, uh, and off you go. Well, uh, this has been, uh, Leanne, so great to talk to you. I'd like to throw a curveball at you and then serve you a fastball right down. Are you a Blue Jays fan? Are you a Blue Jays fan?

Of course I'm a Jays fan.

Yep. Okay. All right, well, here we go. Here, uh, curveball ball.

Okay.

Gun to your head, if you had to start a business in the next 30 days, and it can't be something that you're currently doing.

Yeah.

Where do you see the opportunity in the marketplace? Where would you start that business if you absolutely had to?

Well, I guess, I guess it's like being a personal concierge for working moms because this thought load problem is massive. And what I'm seeing is that so many families now The dads are taking on so much more of the workload of the family. It's amazing. You see dads at the grocery store, you see dads at the ballet studio, but they're not taking the thought load. And so, I think I would start a personal concierge to help working families to manage the thought load of trying to cope with work and family life, which is a massive, massive thing to take on in 2024. 6.

Sign me up.

I know. I want that person. I want to hire them for myself.

Yeah. Okay. Fastball right down the middle.

Yep.

If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?

Uh, it's not about your workload. It's about your thought load, right? As soon as people hear that word and start managing their thought load, they create the space to get amazing things done and go home with gas left in the tank. So start managing your thought load is the key.

Leanne, thank you so much. This has been incredible for our listeners today.

Thank you so much, Jeff. I've had such a blast.

Awesome. All right. I'm Jeff Dudan here with Dr. Leanne Davey on The Unemployable Podcast. Thanks for listening.