Episode 25: What Happens When Hierarchies Break with Nir Halevy

We are surrounded by hierarchies, and hierarchies often break in predictable ways. Broken hierarchies have 3 characteristics. They tend to be ultra-competitive, unjust, and unstable.

Today, my guest is Nir Halevy. He is the Jagdeep and Roshni Singh Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. For 2 decades, Nir has studied the forces most of us feel every day but rarely name— how groups cooperate, how they compete, how we handle conflict, and how the hierarchies we work in shape those who thrive and those who may not. He has a new book, Level Up, which claims that hierarchies are not broken by nature. We've just been doing them wrong. We'll get into what that means for anyone who's trying to build a stronger team and stronger organization. Hi, I'm Stuart Papp, founder of DNA8, and welcome to Stand Up to Stand Out, the podcast. Communication has changed my life, and it will absolutely change yours because breakthrough innovating deserves Every episode, we bring you industry insiders, subject matter experts, and you can learn from my decades of experience to get the most practical and tactical advice that you can put to work now. Let's dive into today's show. Welcome to the show, Nir.

Thank you, Stuart. It's great to be here with you.

Yeah, I'm thrilled to get into this. Lots of questions to ask. But Because I am always interested in people's stories, I was hoping to start sort of before all the research and the academia and all the cool things you're doing at Stanford. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about you and some of the experiences that shaped your career path and your research direction.

Definitely. I think we all engage in social comparisons naturally. We want to understand where we stand relative to others, where we fit in. And when I think about growing up, I think about playing basketball. And when I was in 9th grade, I played for a terrible team. There was just 6 of us, and we lost every game in the season. It was a club team. And because of foul trouble, sometimes we would finish a game with just 4 players on the court. So that was an important learning experience. And the summer between 9th grade and 10th grade, I transitioned to a different club basketball team. And that experience was very different. We won all the games that year. But I want to talk about kind of that moment of transitioning. So the first practice in this new basketball team, I show up early. I want to kind of get to know the facilities. I want to meet the people. I want to warm up. And what happens when I show up early is I see this one other player who also showed up early. He has been with the team longer, and he invites me to play one-on-one basketball. And I want to show that I am capable. I also want to be friendly and respectful. And I want to kind of learn more about the team. And so I agree and we play one-on-one. And I later discovered he was the point guard, the starting point guard for the team. And we became great friends and he was a great player. I tried very much to win. It's been 30 years. I think I won. I don't remember. I hope I made a good first impression. And the kind of managing those Motivations simultaneously, right? Kind of made me think about, do I fit in? Where do I stand relative to others? Is he evaluating me? All that was kind of part of our initial interaction there. And so throughout life, I think I've encountered other situations. For example, moving to the US in 2008, again, was an opportunity to kind of see where I fit in, evaluate where I stand relative to other people. And I learned things that I didn't kind of consider before about how cultures, for example, differ in how central hierarchy might be in one culture relative to another culture.

Interesting. Yeah, I can see all the different dynamics at play there. What struck me was you're trying to become friendly, but you were sort of competitive, but you were also cooperating. There seems to be an embedded tension between cooperation and competition. I'm thinking about this because I have 2 kids, they're siblings. Most of the time, every parent says you want them to get along, But there's also natural competition for attention, for resources. Is this just part of the human condition and do we have to thrive in it because we do better as a species when we work together? How do we navigate that tension, or at least in what you've uncovered in some of your research?

It's a great question. And Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate in economics, argues that most of life is mixed motive, meaning most of our interactions offer opportunities for collaboration as well as competition. It's up to us to figure out how to navigate these situations. And when we see opportunities to collaborate, we could articulate them to other people and hopefully shape how they see the interaction with us. So those opportunities to collaborate loom larger than the competitive elements in a given situation. We have published research earlier this year showing that when you are able to structure a team climate that is more collaborative, you're getting surprising benefits. Yes, people work better together and produce better collective outputs, but they also feel a greater sense of autonomy, liberty. Turns out collaboration liberates relative to competition.

Hmm.

Competition within a team or within a family, to kind of go back to your context, creates a sense of threat, right? You might fall behind in a win-lose situation, whereas if it's win-win or lose-lose, we're always together, right? We're never— the risk of falling behind does not exist in a cooperative situation where our outcomes are perfectly correlated. We win together or we lose together.

Right.

And so what we discovered, whether it was in the context of athletic teams, in collegiate sports, in the federal government, collaboration just increases a sense of autonomy. And then, we have all those downstream consequences, benefits of autonomy fulfillment at work. We have lower turnover rates. We have increased motivation, intrinsic motivation, and so on. Cooperation really helps get the best out of teamwork.

Is there a downside? And what I'm thinking about is it sounds great. It sounds like it's the superpower. Is there a place where there's cooperation to the point of, I guess, social loafing is where people get to sort of coast on other people's efforts, or is that just fundamentally not the root of cooperation and collaboration in the way you're speaking about it? Like, what are the dynamics that need to exist?

There is a risk of free riding, of people putting in less effort if they think they can just coast, as you said, and benefit from other people's contributions and costly effort and putting time in. When we think about hierarchies, one of the reasons that hierarchies are functional or can be functional is that they serve as an incentive system. People are intrinsically motivated to achieve. They want to become better. They want to improve. And when you have a hierarchy that functions as an incentive system within a team or an organization, people are motivated to try harder, to innovate, to contribute because they're going to be respected and admired and appreciated by others. As leaders, one of our goals is to set up an incentive structure, a system that will motivate people without becoming dysfunctional, without kind of causing ultra-competitiveness within the team that leads people to sabotage or undermine other people's performance.

I think it was Charlie Munger, or maybe it was his partner. Oh no, Charlie, I think he said, show me incentives and I'll show you the outcome that they're optimizing for. And I think there's a lot to that where you're setting it up. And so let's talk about that because you have spent 20 years studying how groups work and now you've put it all together in a book. And the book is called Level Up. And the line we say is that hierarchies are not broken, but we have just been doing them wrong. So can you lay out the heart of that argument so that we can understand the through line of the book?

Sure. We are surrounded by hierarchies in all directions. We keep ranking everything around us from the best cities to live in or the largest companies based on revenue and so on. And hierarchies often break in predictable ways. Broken hierarchies have 3 characteristics. They tend to be ultra-competitive, unjust, and unstable. Now, let me clarify what I mean by each of these characteristics. An ultra-competitive hierarchy means a system where peers compete fiercely for recognition, for opportunities, for rewards in a way that's destructive, in a way that involves sabotage and undermining each other's effort. It harms individual well-being. It harms collective performance. That's what I mean by ultra-competitiveness. Unjust hierarchies involve outcomes that people do not deserve, either negative outcomes, so you're being treated with abuse or harassment or other experiences, you're getting discriminated against in terms of the outcomes you're getting, but also positive outcomes can be unjust, right? So if you're promoted based on nepotism, that would be an unjust outcome in a team or an organization. And when we talk about instability, we're talking about an environment where people are experiencing very fast changes that are unpredictable, that lead to paranoia, to a sense of threat, to people kind of leaving the organization because we don't get the benefits of a predictable, stable environment where we might see people engaging in mentoring or supporting each other and so on. And these are 3 interrelated symptoms that together give rise to this syndrome of what I call the So 3 U's: ultra-competitive and just unstable.

It sounds like you're describing Glengarry Glen Ross, just the conditions of that movie. I don't know if you've seen it, but it has all those conditions in spades. 1990, Alec Baldwin, and he's in this boiler room where only the few survive, and if you don't, you're kicked out, and it's unfair, and it's all the things. But so, okay, so now you have a formula, the 3 U's, on something that's broken. So where does one begin? Because oftentimes, especially with the people I work with, these are people on the up and up. They're coming out of academia or they're coming out of clinical practice, and they're in an organization that could be 500, 5,000, 50,000 people. And I've worked with all those companies. Sometimes you get lucky and you get a great manager and leader. Sometimes it really comes down from the top, but often it feels like you're in a mixed sort of environment. Where does one begin if you have an opportunity to either lead a new team or join a new team? You're truing up your hierarchy to make it as optimal as you can be so that everyone can thrive.

Yeah. So what we do in the book is we present in the first half a method for diagnosing a broken hierarchy. But then in the second half, we offer both concrete tools that people can use, 22 different solutions people can use to fix a broken hierarchy. And a lot of these tools are available to people regardless of their role or their rank within the team or the organization. And hopefully, we'll dive into some examples later in the conversation. And these tools are organized around 3 main principles. And the 3 principles are organized with the acronym CPR, so common value, pluralism, relatedness. And I would recommend these principles both to people who are starting their own companies, founding companies, are growing their kind of small venture right now, but also to people who are kind of trying to fix an existing hierarchy that is broken, even if it's a larger hierarchy. So, when I talk about common value, I really talk about 2 elements. First, the hierarchy should be based on values, principles, virtues that we all believe in and support. It should kind of be based on common values. But the second element is it should create value for all of us. It should add value for the team, for the organization, and so on. The second element, P, pluralism, captures the existence of multiple paths to contributing, thriving, ascending, and leading within the organization, right? So, as a leader building something new, you want to create an environment where people feel that different kinds of contributions are valued, appreciated, that they can be meaningful members of the team regardless of the ways in which they contribute to team success. And finally, relatedness means that A hierarchy should strengthen connections between people rather than pull them apart. And there are a lot of different tools that can achieve 1, 2, or fulfill all 3 of these principles when we're trying to kind of build a new team, a new organization, or fix a broken one.

All right. That is perfect setup. I would like to dive a little bit deeper into each. So first, CPR, elegant, Acronym. Is there, if you're joining a new company or forming a new company, does the sequence matter? Is it all at the same time? Is it something that you're just repeating and embedding? Maybe we could get a little practical, or you could share some examples on how people have approached it. Is there a perfect formula, or do you just start where you are and then make sure that you're diving deeper into each at a regular cadence? How do you think people can apply it?

Definitely. So I think there are certain solutions. Let's— we talked about incentive structures, right? So for example, setting up team incentives. Think about organizations that offer shared experiences to their employees and kind of say everyone is going to have access to lunches or meals that they're going to share together, or we're going to have certain events that everyone will get to experience together. That creates a feeling that we're in this together, right? If you think about bonuses, right, team-based bonuses instead of just individual bonuses for work. So that you can start from, you can set up from the very beginning of the company in terms of the compensation structure and how you incentivize people to perform. We can think about how to limit the harmful effects of competition, right? We said you could motivate performance with some competition, but compartmentalization of competition is essential, right? So if we go back to the context of the sports teams, we're going to compete fiercely on the court, on the field, wherever the context is that we perform our sport. But everywhere else, 100% collaboration, 100% support. We're not going to have teammates stab each other in the back when they go on social media or when they are, you know, interacting with each other if we think about a collegiate context in classrooms and in dining halls and in other contexts, right? So making sure you compartmentalize competition can really protect relationships as you're incentivizing people to do the best job that they can, to be the best athletes that they can, and so on, right? So there are certain tools that how we implement them matters quite a bit in terms of the incentives, in terms of making competition bounded.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And you're making me think about ways in which you can incentivize the types of behavior that will truly benefit the organization. I'm sure you've heard this parable, but if you haven't, I'll share it, that a pottery teacher starts the year and says, I'm going to break them into 2 groups. Group A, at the end of the semester, you're going to be judged on the quality of your pot that you put together. And Group B, you're going to be judged on the volume of how many pots that you create and throw during the semester. And of course, what happens in this, you think Group A would have a better output, but it's Group B because just they incentivized taking more turns, iterating, trying more. So I think about that sometimes where one has to be cognizant of what are we optimizing for with these incentives? And then what you've brought up is how do you make it safe to compete, and then it's also safe off the pitch or off the field or off the court to not have to compete and to go break bread and to be with each other in a safe way.

I love that you bring up psychological safety. I think it's such an important quality within teams, within organizations, the willingness to take risks, to know that you will not be punished or sanctioned for speaking up or voicing your concerns. I think the CPR framework helps create these environments that are not just generating collaboration, but also creating the psychological safety that is conducive for collaborative decision-making, for optimizing performance as a team.

Yeah. Well, what I love about your tools, and I think everyone should get a copy of the book to not only understand how to diagnose, but now what to do about it. But, you're already starting to shape my mind around how one can take action. And oftentimes, In quiet conversations with my clients who are incredibly bright, motivated, but they may leave a smaller organization or a clinical practice or a medical situation and they join a company. And I see that what they're saying to me is, how do I begin? Where do I begin? Consider a scenario where somebody is joining industry maybe for the first time. I have a client They have this program where they bring in physicians and researchers to industry, and oftentimes, obviously incredibly bright and accomplished, but don't really know how to give themselves permission to get in and start being a part of the hierarchy that they want to thrive in. Somebody like that, how would you recommend that they even begin in the first few weeks or months so that they don't feel like they just have to wait for permission to engage, but they can actually go and start it themselves?

Right. So I think mapping out the different kind of skills and behaviors and tasks that are important for being a meaningful member that contributes, that is impactful, is important. Taking time to get insider information from people who have been in the organization for a period of time. The research done on this by a colleague, Jennifer Danahls, at Yale University suggests that actually listening to lower-ranking members of the organization is a great way to learn the norms.

Yeah.

People in lower-ranking positions pay more attention, care more about the norms. They can be really helpful in teaching us as newcomers how to act in a new context, learn kind of the ropes of a new environment. So that's active listening is a great tool to connect with people and learn the kind of new norms. We can also think about the kinds of thinking and the kinds of skills, social skills, that would be helpful in such a new So, when we think about ways of thinking, we developed a few years ago a framework for strategic thinking based on an acronym or organized using an acronym IDEA, I-D-E-A. And those are 4 ways in which you can think about interacting with other people. And the I stands for impact. That's a mindset where you think, how do my choices, how do my decisions and actions influence other people, their experiences, their lives? And when you're kind of coming into a new place, you could take that mindset and say, kind of learn how to contribute in a meaningful way, taking into consideration your impact or influence on other people. The D stands for dependency mindset. How do other people's choices and decisions influence me? So now you're kind of the recipient, beneficiary, or the victim of other people's choices, decisions, and actions. The E stands for egocentric.

Okay.

How do my choices, decisions, actions impact me, my experiences, my outcomes, right? And that mindset might not be very helpful for fitting in and kind of showing that you're a meaningful kind of contributor as a new member in the organization. And finally, the A stands for alter-centric thinking. How do your decisions and your outcomes influence what you're getting in the organization? And that's conducive for learning. So, I will observe your actions and decisions. I will see the outcomes you're getting, and I will learn that. I will emulate what you're doing in order to kind of be a meaningful contributing member of the organization. So, when we think about joining a new organization or when we think about ascending within an organization, it might be helpful to kind of pay attention to how we're thinking. Are we thinking through the I, the impact mindset, or the D, or the E, or the A? And I would say beyond ways of thinking, if we think about social skills, we can think about brokering as a really helpful tool for connecting with people, creating value for others, and for yourself as a newcomer. So let's say, Stuart, you're joining a new organization. And just through this active listening that we discussed, you realize that Shirley from operations could really benefit from this working collaboratively on a project with Geoffrey in marketing. and you kind of create this 3-person collaboration between you and these 2 other individuals, as a broker, you're creating a win-win-win situation, right?

Mm-hmm.

You've created a new collaboration between 2 existing members of the organizations. You're now part of this collaborative project. People will appreciate your helpfulness, your role in creating ties or increasing positive ties within the organization. So both your ways of thinking And your ways of engaging with other people through brokering, for example, will be really helpful when you join a new organization.

Yeah. This is really exciting to me because it also makes the case that you can start where you are. Even just by listening, you're being of service, but also by listening and listening through that framework that you shared, it gives you sort of a third-party objective view of yourself as thinking, where am I impacting? being impacted by others and how am I contributing and how can I contribute to others, it immediately activates some agency, Nir, that I think anyone should feel empowered by. That even if it's day one and you're the intern, you can and you should go talk to people and understand and learn about them, but also find ways to connect them with others or connect them with ideas. And immediately, I think you would start ascending in value. Because you're now being a connector for others, a resource for others, and a source of positive energy, which is not to be undervalued in a matrixed organization.

I do feel that sometimes people who feel timid when they join a new organization tend to withhold action, right? And overcoming that tendency might be very beneficial as we kind of show that we have agency, we have motivation, we want to get to know the organization, we want to become meaningful contributing members.

So something I think a lot about is giving oneself permission to speak up and be a source of contribution and driving value and speaking to the purpose of an entity. And oftentimes, I feel as though people feel timid, a little bit shy, they want to withhold, they don't want to put themselves at risk or their career at risk. And I'll share this very quick story that Harry Kramer, he was my first guest. He was the former CFO, then CEO of Baxter Healthcare for about 6 years. But he told a really interesting story when he was a junior analyst. So he was trained as a CPA, as an accountant, and he joined as an analyst. And when he was a junior analyst, he was analyzing an acquisition for Baxter, That was going to cost the company about $40 million. And he had run the numbers and he calculated and concluded that they were paying probably twice as much as they should pay. And he was trying to tell his manager and boss that this was something that he didn't think the company should do, and he wasn't being given permission to sort of elevate that to the then CEO. And long story short, he found out that the CEO at the time, again, he's a junior analyst, would go to the cafeteria at 7:00 AM. And so he waited outside the cafeteria until the gentleman showed and he said, sir, with all due respect, I'm a junior analyst. My name's Harry Kramer, and I just want you to know I'm working on this deal and I think you're overpaying for it. And eventually he got that audience. And of course he's putting tremendous amount of courage to do this. And the punchline to the story is eventually he became the CEO of the company. And I find it inspiring because he's a humble guy. He was sharing a direction that was truly of benefit to the company, to the shareholders, hopefully to the outcome that the company was looking for. But that feels almost like science fiction to a lot of people who join organizations and don't know how they can speak up and really share. And so I'm thinking about that story when you're sharing this sort of objective perspective on yourself. Do you feel like there are tools that you've come across or that you've worked with that give people more permission to advocate for something important to them that will benefit the organization but might feel a little risky or dangerous?

That's a great question. And I love what I would call the WH aspects of this story you shared from that guest. Opportunity that they discovered to be in the cafeteria at 7:00 AM. It's the kind of where and when we exert influence or how we connect with people and so on. I want all the listeners to feel agency over those WH aspects of how they engage with other people. So let's say you have an opportunity to bring up a really important issue or negotiate or resolve a conflict. It's really critical that you put yourself in the best kind of situation to achieve your goals, right? So let's talk about the question of who. Maybe your kind of intuition is that, oh, it needs to be a one-on-one conversation. So it's just me and my boss or me and the CEO of the company. But then, you have the intuition that if you invite a third party to be part of that conversation, or if you— let's go beyond the who to when and where. You do it over a lunch meeting in your boss's favorite restaurant in the park across from the office. And you're creating the perfect situation in terms of who is present, when and where we're doing that meeting, and so on. You're creating an environment. That allows you to be influential, that allows you to achieve the goals, right? So when we experience that level of agency, we can orchestrate interactions that are very conducive to achieving our goals. And hopefully, they're collaborative and they're adding value for other people as well.

I love this too because now you're getting strategic about how you build those relationships. And I often— I've told people, don't just settle for a lunch meeting. Maybe that's fine, but maybe it's a walking meeting. Maybe it's coffee. Maybe you go see something inspiring. So really thinking about the dynamics of how you do that, I think it can be really helpful to build those connections.

Yeah, and if I may add, I think that sometimes if you think about people trying to exert influence from lower ranks in the hierarchy, they inhibit themselves from engaging in behaviors that seem overly confident. But there are ways to do this. It's not just what you do. It's how you do this. And I'll give an example from research done on how 911 dispatchers influence police officers. So in this recently published research by one of our colleagues here at Stanford, Arvind, he found that the use of humor can actually be quite helpful. So 911 dispatchers have one primary job, to be able to send direct police officers to where help is needed. And it's critical that they succeed in that, right? Because if you're calling 911 and no one's coming to help, we all have a problem as a society. The problem from the perspective of 911 dispatchers is that they're not always getting respect from police officers. They are often looked down on. They're not sworn officers. They don't wear uniforms. They're seen as these kind of people occupying desk jobs that are not as meaningful, as important. But obviously, we need everyone to collaborate within the force in order to kind of get the help we need. And so in some of the examples that Arvind kind of studied and discovered, he saw that by using humor in the radio in a way that propelled other police officers to join in the bantering and the teasing, that actually motivated a police officer who's just sitting in their car to actually respond to calls from the 911 dispatchers. and go to where help is actually needed. So they might say something like, oh, there is a casino nearby. If you have a lot of spare time, why don't you go in and play the roulette? And other police officers would jump in and say like, yeah, he has a poker face too, and so on. And right, that kind of process, really, you're, as a 911 dispatcher, you're bringing others into the situation in a way that is playful and humorous. And those peers of the police officers have the same high status of the person you're trying to influence, and you're building a coalition with them. You're recruiting them to help you mobilize action in a way that is helpful to you in terms of a 911 dispatcher trying to do your job, but it is also helpful for the force overall, right? So it meets the relatedness criterion in CPR, for example, right? We're building stronger connections between people as we're doing our collective job.

That is fascinating. And it just shows you the complex fabric of social connection and that relatedness that there's probably infinite doors in. And I'm thinking about this because we're recording this right now during the World Cup. It's summer 2026. This will be out in the fall. But right now, I'm looking at all this sort of global tribalism around teams and And rituals and all of this way. And I live in Boston, Massachusetts, and I've never seen quite this love affair. When the Scots came to town in their last couple of weeks, there's just been this outpouring of affection from different cultures interacting. And I think it's given themselves permission to engage, to relate, to connect in ways that have just unlocked all kinds of potential here. So, you're making me think of all the different ways that any organization can unlock the potential that lives within because there's true magic to be unlocked between people if you can find the right way to do it.

I agree completely. I think there are ways in which we see cultures of joy emerging spontaneously during this kind of World Cup. And emotional culture is such an important component of the culture of any organization. And I think there's a lot that we can do in organizations to increase positive cultures of empathy and joy. We definitely see some of this among the players on the field as well as kind of in the stadiums.

Do you want your team to have a seat at the table? Would you like your team to speak with clarity, confidence, and influence? Reach out to us at dn8.com for more information. So let's take a look at a different dynamic, leadership and some of the elements that underpin power and status. And you talk about this, there's a toxic version of that. And, of course, I'd like to talk about the opposite as well, but maybe you could help explain to the audience the sort of relationship between power, status, and authority, where it really comes from, and what you might tell to people who are leading teams or organizations about what is the most effective way to do that based on the research, based on what you've seen.

It's a very important question and one that people in organizations grapple with all the time. So, I think One of the reasons we see a lot of confusion is that there are so many different sources of influence, of authority in organizations. It might be the fact that you're controlling certain resources that people need. It might be the fact that you have decision-making authority. It might be your social network, right? You have such influential connections that you can get things done, achieve things through that. And when I teach negotiation here at Stanford, I I try to encourage my students to think about sources of power in negotiation, for example, in a multidimensional way, right? So they might say, well, I don't have strong alternatives right now, or I don't control a lot of resources right now. So I ask them questions about their expertise, about their connections, about other alternative sources of power that might make them more— have a stronger sense of self-efficacy at the bargaining table, right? And we can take it to the same context of leadership. There are different bases of leadership and influence in organizations, in teams. And I would encourage the listeners to, A, lean into those kinds of resources and tools that have worked well for them in the past, and B, learn new tools. Observe, pay attention, see what others are doing, what might be effective within the context, especially if you're a newcomer, as we discussed previously, and try to acquire the skills, imitate other people, learn from them what they do. Now, when we talk about hierarchies in teams and organizations, we often think about those different bases, right? Expertise, connections, and so on, in terms of really 2 pillars of hierarchies, power and status. Power is commonly defined as your control over valuable resources, whereas status is your respect and admiration in the eyes of others. Now, we have jobs that fall into each of these quadrants in this 2-dimensional space of power and status in organizations, right? So, Let's take my organization as a context. Let's take Stanford. So John Levin, the president of Stanford University, has power and status. He's held in high regard by people. And he also controls budgets and decisions and personnel and so on, right? So legitimate authority in organizations often takes this form where you have both high power and high status. We can also think about people who have high status but low power, right? So I'm thinking about my expense. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Doesn't get more prestigious than that. Very smart person, used to be the dean of the GSB here at Stanford, but he retired, right? So held in high regard. If you want advice from a smart person, definitely go talk to Mike Spence. But you wouldn't necessarily say that he's controlling kind of budget decisions and so on right now.

Mm-hmm.

We can think about roles that involve low power and low status. We can think about cleaning crews that come at night. And they make sure it looks brilliant and beautiful and amazing when we come in the morning and we're kind of ready to start working in an environment that's fun and clean and really ready for us to work in. They're not often held in high regard. They're not very prominent to people. They come to work when most people are gone and are home, and you wouldn't necessarily associate them with high power. And then there is this really special quadrant that we should pay attention to, the one that we discovered in our research is really toxic in organizations, in teams, and that's those people who are in high-power, low-status positions. So let's say, Stuart, you've been traveling for work and you spent $15K, $15,000, and you need to get reimbursed for your expenses that you incurred while you traveled for work. And so you come to, let's say, Josh, and you ask Josh for help because they are the reimbursement clerk in your organization. And Josh tells you, Stuart, I do not appreciate the tone of your voice. I'm not going to help you with your reimbursement until March of 2027. And you feel that you hit a wall because you really need your $15K back. That's a lot of money. And there is a conflict now. What we've discovered in our research, in lab studies and in our research in the field, including with leaders in the federal government in the US, is that people in low-status, high-power positions feel negative emotions because they're not held in high regard by other people. That's their low-status position in the organization. And when they have power, they feel like they can act based on these negative feelings. And so, if you combine those kind of negative feelings with the license to act they feel, you get this really toxic combination that creates demeaning treatment, interpersonal conflict, really a lot of dysfunction in organizational hierarchies.

I'm just thinking of the RMV in California, the DMV, or whatever these sort of entities were. So, what does one do with that? In the sense that, are we diagnosing our organization and trying to upgrade people out of these toxic quadrants to be able to sort of change the dynamics? I mean, what does that help us do to map out or at least understand the different quadrants and dynamics?

The answer is status, right? We often get the answer wrong because we're thinking empowerment will solve all problems. Those people with the kind of low-status, high-power jobs, they already have power. They already have control over resources. Giving them more control over resources will not resolve how they feel about their job, will not resolve how other people treat them. Let's think about security in airports, for example, right? So you don't see a lot of people coming up to a TSA security officer and say, sir, ma'am, we really appreciate what you do. Thank you for keeping us safe. You might hear them say, I'm gonna be late for my flight. Can you please hurry up? And so if we are increasing recognition of the value that people in different jobs create for the organization as a whole, if we increase the status status that they're getting, status conferral from other stakeholders, employees, customers, you name it, then we will reduce the negative feelings. We might even boost their positive feelings. And then when power kind of liberates them to act based on their feelings, they will act based on positive feelings, right? Which is where we want to be. That connects to the pluralism dimension in the CPR framework we mentioned earlier. Pluralism means we're going to recognize contributions of many different kinds of role holders.

Right.

Let me give you 2 examples of how it's done in very different kinds of organizations. Think about the US military. There are so many kinds of recognition and medals and badges of honor because the US military is trying to encourage bravery and service and learning and so many other qualities and behaviors that if you think about Audie Murphy as one of the— He's acknowledged as the person who received the most recognition, the most kind of decorated soldier in the history of the US military. This was during World War II. I think he got 20 such recognitions, different ones, Purple Heart and so on. And you realize that the US military is very pluralistic in terms of recognizing different kinds of contributions. Let's go to a totally different context, elite ballet companies. In elite ballet companies, people might think it's only technical perfection. That gets you respect or status and so on. But you can actually get respect and recognition for being an awesome partner. So Stuart, you're in a perfect position to partner with so many different other dancers in terms of your ability kind of to do the co-leading, the pas de deux, or kind of other elements of the dance. Maybe you're a fast learner. We're going to have a guest choreographer in the company and you're the best person to learn kind of a new complex sequence of steps really fast. So everyone is kind of On time to make sure we kind of hit the production deadline, ready to perform. There are so many other contributions. You can have the most followers on Instagram. That would be the value you're creating for all of us. You're making sure we have a lot of followers as an elite ballet company, right? There are dozens of, at least a dozen, probably more, of valuable contributions that one might make. And so if we think about how to solve the problem with a toxic compound of power without status. Let's find ways to recognize the different kinds of value that people bring into the organization.

Yeah, it's so positive. And you're making me think of— I think there was a study done on a hospital where everybody in the hospital, from the janitor to the head surgeon, felt that they were part of the wellness of the patient. And there's a famous anecdote where someone was recovering from some traumatic surgery. And they were finally sleeping. And when the family came in the morning, they found that the room hadn't been tidied up overnight. And they sort of were a bit upset about this, that nobody was attending to the cleanliness and hygiene in the room or something like that. And it turned out that the person who came in to clean was so aware that this patient hadn't been sleeping well that they thought better of it than to bang around a mop and to maybe even interrupt their sleep. That they said, I'm part of this person's healing journey. I'm going to play my role here and make sure that I don't disturb them when they're getting this precious sleep. Let me go on to the next room. And, when that came clear, they really saw that they were tapping into a different kind of culture where everyone was part of the success instead of just isolating what they do individually.

Definitely. And, one of the interviews I conducted for the book, and listeners can kind of read it in the book, is with Professor Fatima Rodriguez. She's a leader in Stanford Health Care. And she talked about the person who was kind of the section chief of preventive cardiology before her in that kind of role. And she talks about how that person made everyone feel like they're part of the same mission, contributing together. They recognize their value. They could be the CEO or the janitor. But they're all kind of together in the goal of providing kind of world-class care to patients. And kind of going back to common value, right? That's how we bring everyone together. The best leaders, by the way, create this kind of sense of continuity between the past and the present and the future because they connect who we were— think about nostalgia— to who we are, what's our current goals and challenges and values, to who we want to be, our vision for the future, right? And so, if you have these kind of common values that everyone can get behind, it really helps not just kind of align all of us right now, here and now, but throughout time where we're headed as an organization.

Yeah. And I have found that some teams, especially when there's a lot of turnover, people leave, people join new leadership, going through a defined process where we go through the past, present, and future and have a chance to have some authorship in the future direction, then you feel like you own it a bit more because you're writing it together, you're co-authoring what these values are, and you can really lean into them.

Yeah, and I think part of it is how you manage your interactions as a leader with followers. And those interactions are not just when everyone is in the same room together in a meeting, right? The best leaders I've interviewed are doing kind of pre-meetings with people before the focal meeting in the room with everyone together. They're trying to assess where people stand and what their perspectives are and what their concerns are and whether they would feel comfortable airing those concerns in the room. Then in the room, make sure people engage, right? They participate in conversations. They contribute meaningfully to discussions to decisions, and they follow up, right? So let's say you did not speak up during a group kind of interaction. I might knock on your door and say, Stuart, can we talk? I noticed that you were kind of maybe holding back, and potentially there was something you wanted to say and you didn't share it. What happened there? Would you like to share it now one-on-one? How can I be of service to you and help you kind of influence what we kind of discussed in the room? And so on, right? So there's a continuous process of making sure that people, as you said, co-author the future and kind of help shape it together.

Yeah. It reminds me that there's another technique that Glenn Carroll at Stanford told me about, which is nominal group technique. This is sort of this process by which you want to collect everyone's insight, but you make sure that people can share it anonymously. And then they have a chance to upvote the problem solution or whatever the input is, and then read it before anyone sees where people are in the hierarchy. to make sure that all voices get across. But what you're talking about is a different lens of that. That's leadership actively engaging and pursuing all the conditions to establish a healthy, robust hierarchy. So there's probably multiple ways to go about it to make sure that you're hearing from all voices in a way that benefits the purpose and the vision.

Yeah. And if you think— if you're a leader and you think that people might self-censor because the hierarchy is— it's not wholly broken, but it's partly broken. And they worry about sanctions. Maybe there isn't a lot of psych safety or there isn't a lot of history of voice in the organization. It's literally, you can kind of make kind of certain practices the norm and encourage that. For example, in a recent paper that was published by Nicole and Lindy and Annabelle, 3 colleagues in other institutions about kind of hierarchies in teams, they talk about adaptability. And they use the example of Navy SEAL teams. And what they talk about is that they actually remove their ranks and insignia when they do debriefs after. Action in the field, right? So they're definitely about control and command when they're performing their operations in the field. But in order to allow participation in group discussions in ways that are not hierarchical, in ways that encourage lower-ranking members to contribute meaningfully, they actually remove visual signals of the hierarchy, which is designed to encourage participation, right? So there are a lot of different techniques, as you mentioned, to increase participation, increase input, make sure we improve as a team.

This is an indulgent question, but I feel like you've teed it up beautifully. One of the things I think about is how do you collect meaningful feedback at the end of any engagement, a program, something you do? And I'd be curious, you, when you're working with companies or me, and there's multiple modalities, right? You can ask people directly what worked for you, what didn't. You could also ask people anonymously. You could also ask people to reflect on it later. Given all these different ways of going about it, and you're really in pursuit of how can I truly excel, improve, get better, compound the value, and just truly meaningfully improve my product or service, are there ways in which you can go about seeking that if you maybe are outside of an organization, but you're truly looking to get the powerful signals to improve what you're doing?

It's a great question. I would say that feelings. Are a really important source of information. And there are tools created by our colleagues in other institutions to measure, for example, how people feel at the end of a negotiation, the Subjective Value Inventory created by Jared Korn at MIT and colleagues. And what they have done is basically created this self-evaluation tool that, as a leader, you could also implement with your team to ask, how do people feel? When a negotiation concluded. And you can apply it to team meetings or different modalities of communicating within the team and see how do people feel about their outcomes, instrumental outcomes, what was achieved? How do they feel about the process? How do they feel about themselves? How do they feel about the relationships, right? And so, I think the language of feelings is really helpful in that regard. I do believe that feelings are an important source of information. And if we lean into this and we accept that, Then we have another source of information that goes beyond what people might put in a written document or a report they might submit after a meeting.

Very helpful. Okay. Something that I wanted to talk about, and I'm just getting my head around a little, is conflict. And it's something that you've talked about. I talked with Julie Minson. She's a friend and colleague, just came out with a book, How to Disagree Better. And we interviewed her a few podcasts ago. It's worth Absolutely worth reading and listening to. But your work suggests that conflict is not the problem, it's just how we handle it. And I personally think that some environments need more conflict. They just need to understand how to think about it and how to engage with it. Maybe you could help us understand the value of conflict, what it is, how to sort of deconstruct it, and then how to make it advantageous for not only individuals, but for an organization to thrive.

It's an important question because we see a lot of conflict. And I think you're right. It's not the presence or absence of conflict, but the meaning that people attach to conflict and how they manage it, how they resolve it.

Mm-hmm.

There is classic research in social psychology and other subfields within psychology talking about threat versus challenge appraisals. And the main differentiator is, do I have the tools to cope with a particular event? If I do have the tools, it will be seen as a positive challenge. If I don't have the tools, it will be seen as a threat. Threat. So let's talk about a couple of tools that we might be able to use to cope with conflict more constructively in organizations. I do believe that knowledge is power. And in that regard, I want to share with listeners the dual concern model. I think it's a very useful model for understanding how people engage with conflict, how they try to manage it constructively and less constructively. So I want you and everyone else to think about a 2-dimensional space. The x-axis is how much you care about your own outcomes. The y-axis is how much you care about the other person's outcome. Let's say it's a bilateral conflict with just 2 people. If you care a lot about your outcomes and the other person's outcomes in this particular context, you will engage in joint problem solving. You will invest time and effort and listen attentively and try to find the optimal solution because you really, really care about your outcome and their outcome here. If you care a little bit about or somewhat about your outcome and their outcome, you will go for a faster solution. You will kind of go for compromise, right? That's not ideal. Joint problem solving is much better. But if you're selling a car to a friend and it feels awkward and you don't want to jeopardize the relationship and you're not sure how to go about the process, you might like, oh, let's compromise on the price quickly instead of figuring out optimal solutions. If you only care about your outcomes as a negotiator, as a leader, you're going to try to dominate. We know a lot about dominant leaders and how they influence others through kind of fear, intimidation, coercion, and so on. So in conflict management, that's also the case. If you only care about your outcomes, you're going to try to dominate the interaction. If you only care about the other person's outcomes, you're going to accommodate what they need, right? This is me playing chess with my son when he was 4 years old. Yes, bring back all the pieces. You can use the queen. Bring it. Back and so on, right? Because there are other goals and you care about the other person's outcome, not your own outcome necessarily. When you see people avoid conflict based on dual concern model, it's because they don't care. They don't care in this particular context about your outcome or their outcome. So you're kind of sending them an email or knocking on their door and say, can we talk about that raise? Can we talk about hiring another person to help with certain tasks? And they say, talk to me next week, next month. Next quarter. In order to make them engage, in order to kind of to resolve the problem that they avoid the negotiation, the conversation, you need to make them care either about your outcome or their outcome here, right? So that's kind of one way to think about avoidance and different conflict management styles that could be more or less constructive. But let's go back to feelings because I think one of the reasons, main reasons that people avoid conflicts or mismanage conflicts is because they're not sure what to do with their own feelings and other people's feelings. And so in teaching negotiation here for the past 15+ years, I've developed this framework. Again, I love creating acronyms using the EIGOT as a framework. So EIGOT stands for emotions as information, emotions as goals, emotions as outcomes, and emotions as tools. So I want my students, when they are done with that particular class, will be able to say, I got feelings. They have mastered the 3 E's. Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's unpack this. When I talk about feelings as information, what I want to say is look inside and figure out with regards to your own emotions, are you excited by that meeting? Are you afraid about having that meeting? Are you worried? Are you calm before that meeting, right? Those are meaningful signals, right? If you're really worried, maybe you should prepare better. You should do other actions. You should change— we talked about the WH aspects of the meeting— change who and when and where you're having that meeting to be more impactful and more successful. But other people's feelings are also important sources of information, right? Are they angry? Are they upset? How are they feeling about what you're pitching them or suggesting to them and so on, right? So, using your own and other people's feelings as information, that's the first pillar of I GOT feelings. G. Sometimes we set explicit goals in an interaction, right? So, I want to get this client excited about a particular proposition. I want to get someone less upset about a problem and so on, right? So we set explicit goals for ourselves for an interaction, whether it's a deal-making negotiation or a dispute resolution meeting. When we think about outcomes, I want listeners to think about those emotional outcomes of a meeting, of an interaction that were not kind of stated goals of the meeting. I didn't go into a meeting trying to make someone Kind of more calm or less upset and so on. But nonetheless, there are certain emotional outcomes that we are experiencing and I need to manage them, right? So if I made someone really angry or upset during conversation or a negotiation, I now have a relationship problem. I have a PR problem potentially with a reputation they're going to spread about me. I need to manage those situations. So I want to be mindful of the emotions that I'm creating as outcomes for myself and others. In a negotiation. And finally, emotions as tools, right? So we can think about reappraising a situation as an emotion regulation technique or redirecting attention. So if you're in sales, maybe you're redirecting attention of customers, or we can think about suppliers or investors, to more promising or exciting aspects of a particular project instead of the more worrisome or risky aspects of a project. We can think about emotion labeling, right? So you might tell me, Nir, you seem upset. I could tell you, no, that's my normal face. So people can misuse emotion labeling or get it wrong. But there are a lot of tools we can use when it comes to emotions, right? So using feelings as information, goals, outcomes, and tools is really one way to engage with conflict management and make it less intimidating than it is when we're not sure what to do with our own and other people's feelings.

You've really opened my eyes to how strong emotions play in generating outcomes that are truly beneficial for everyone. And I talk to my clients a lot about at the end of whatever engagement you're with, the meeting you're running, the person you've engaged with and they're walking to their car, they're driving home, what do you want them saying to themselves about that engagement, about that interaction? And I think if you think towards that, and maybe for yourself, it sort of gives you a starting point that you can sometimes even reverse engineer and say, if that's the intended outcome, that they feel good, as you said, about that, then maybe that's a place that you can use to sort of craft the journey. How do I get there?

Definitely, right? Once we are setting goals for ourselves, when we know what the ends are, we can tailor the means to make sure we're getting there or increase the likelihood of us getting there. And, I think setting emotional goals can be an important supplement to setting instrumental goals and process goals and other types of goals.

Yeah. So, one of the things I like to do is I always want to make sure things are immensely practical. You've given so many wonderful frameworks. So, thank you for doing that because they're very useful and the breakdown is incredibly helpful. And, I'm sure they can get more of that Not only in your book Level Up, but just from many of the papers you've written and authored. So thank you for all that, and we'll include links to all of those resources in the show. I want to talk about something else that caught my eye, which is a game. So you have come up with, in the last few years, a game, which I think is just a wonderful way for people to start practicing various skills from negotiation or whatever it would be. Could you talk a little bit about how this game came to be, what it is, and how people use it?

Definitely. So I created Promotion, this strategic game that is played in groups of 4 to 6 so that people can, through experiential learning, see how they influence others, how others influence them, and what are the consequences of choosing different means of influence when people interact with other people, right? So you put athletes or physicians or engineers or CEOs in tables, in a 6-person table, And they choose which cards they play in order to gain power and status. So the goal of the game is to gain 5 power cards and 5 status cards. And there are a lot of different action cards that you could use in order to achieve that— gossip and brokering and collaborate and compete and many other kind of action cards. And there are voting cards. You can support other people by voting them up, and you can kind of undermine other people by voting them down. And we said earlier, status is in the eyes of other people, so you cannot gain status cards in the game without getting support from others. And sometimes people kind of begin by trying to accumulate a lot of power cards, but then people might not vote for them very much, so it might be more difficult to gain status. And sometimes people build coalitions and then people kind of stab them in the back, quote unquote, right, by kind of creating coalitions with someone else. And by the way, there is a way to win in the game together with someone else. You don't have to win alone. There is a win-win, but I will not tell listeners what's the secret. strategy that gets them to a win-win in the game. And what I've observed, having played this kind of game with, uh, many hundreds of, uh, teams at this point, is that people really realize that, um, if you scale some of the negative means of influence from this 6-person team at a table to a 6,000-person organization, that could be a terrible environment to, to work in, right? So think about an organization where everyone is kind of using Burden and Gossip and some of the other negative cards that exist in the game in order to gain power and status, that would be a terrible 6,000-person environment to work in on a daily basis. Whereas if you're using kind of Collaborate and Broker and Humor and other cards that are available in the game, that gives rise to a much more supportive, collaborative environment where people are really laughing together and supporting each other and so on. And so what we do when we finish playing the game in teams is that we kind of look both at the absolute levels of power and status that people achieved in kind of different tables, but also at the emergent inequality. Because the game is designed to create a hierarchy within each table. But each hierarchy is different. Some have really steep differences between some people. Some people finish with many cards of power and status and some with very few. But in other kind of tables, you have a more egalitarian hierarchy where you've seen more support and kind of more balanced kind of gaining of power and status across people. So I've learned tremendously from having these discussions with people. And I think that playing this game with other people, whether you're in consulting or engineering or finance, opens your eyes to kind of see, well, I have a choice. I have agency, as we discussed. I can influence people in a number of different ways. And the choices that I make have consequences. They have consequences for My relationships, my reputation, and for other people.

And it's a fun way to play with it. And what I think a game like that, and I do a lot of simulations in my programs, and the reason I want to give multiple simulations or multiple games like you're playing is I think that being able to see scenarios multiple times from different dynamics, different roles, different outcomes gives you a lot of information in a short time. Which then allows you to see connections, possibilities, and opportunities.

And I think we also learn how we come across when we use different behavioral skills, right? So we kind of try something in a safe environment. We get feedback from other people. We learn how we come across. And we can also benefit them by giving them feedback. So that's another kind of useful function of these simulations that we love using.

Yeah. And the word you mentioned there, feedback, It's something that— so I've been playing a little bit with this model of feedforward. I don't know who coined feedforward. I've seen it from Adam Grant at Wharton. I don't know if him or it came from someone else, but the difference between sort of evaluating what someone did in the past versus what they can do going forward. Do you have a perspective on feedback or feedforward or just— I guess what I look at it is how do you get information that's truly useful beneficial, is additive, and does not sort of destroy relationships or trust. I mean, to me, that is the ultimate goal of feedback is you want transparency, you want to grow, you want to learn, but you also want to keep your connections and keep rapport. Unless I'm missing something, I'd be curious to hear your opinion on that.

No, I love this perspective that kind of makes us think about the arc of kind of the past and the present and the future, right? So feedforward are about the stuff that kind of we completed. forward is about the things we're going to achieve or how to recreate those situations that allow us to perform at peak levels. I think that when I think about emotions, going back to kind of an earlier point, we can think about happiness, right? And when you get positive feedback about a past successful performance, you feel happy, but that might not necessarily influence how you're kind of performing in the future. If you think about hope, hope is also a positive emotion, but hope is always about the future, right? And so, when I'm trying to think about kind of the emotional outcomes of feedback, right, I want to think about, can I make others feel, let's say, even if it's not a very positive performance experience that they've just completed, can I still instill hope in them for the future? I think hope is a very powerful emotion. It can definitely influence how people engage with subsequent tasks. So, when I think about feedback and feedforward and so on, I try to think about, the information I'm providing people, but also the emotions and the motivations I'm instilling in them going forward.

So you talk about in this book, Level Up, about hierarchies. You shared the CPR framework. So my brain is buzzing with thoughts and ideas, and especially for my clients as well and all the listeners. I can't help but think against the backdrop of what we've seen over the last 5, And I think we saw the pandemic, we saw remote work, and now there's this opposite trend with a lot of my clients where the management is saying everyone's back 5 days a week now. It's non-negotiable. And there's all kind of things happening, let alone with AI and sort of perseverating and worry and all that anxiety. I'm just curious against the backdrop, the sort of macro backdrop, Has anything decidedly changed around creating healthy, thriving hierarchies against the backdrop of remote work or in-person work and/or this additional existential threat that people feel around changing technologies, or has it really not shifted the narrative for you? It's just more the conditions in which we exist.

I love this question. I think As a scientist, I try to distinguish between timely research problems and timeless research problems, right?

Right.

So I think we all studied COVID when COVID happened, and we are all studying kind of the impact of— or a lot of us are studying the impact of the AI revolution right now and so on. So I think as technology changes, we might learn a lot of new things about the future of collaboration in teams and organizations between AI agents and humans and so on. So I think Studying the impact of AI and technology right now is a very timely question. When I think about questions related to cooperation, competition, hierarchy, leadership, and followership, I see them as timeless questions. I think they're evergreen. I don't think human nature changed very much in the last 3,000 or 5,000 years. The technologies have changed tremendously. The conditions of our lives have changed tremendously. But concerns around social comparison and trying to connect with people and influence people, those things are always there. And so, I think it's exciting for me to kind of see where we're going to be 5 years from now, but I always go back in my mind to basic principles, right? So, if we're thinking about how to structure work and work processes, let's think about remote versus onsite work, right? CPR. Who are we? What do we believe in? What are our common values? Are they served better by being in the same space or not? Pluralism. Are we enabling people to contribute, thrive in new ways, additional ways by allowing remote work, right? So maybe if that is aligned with pluralism, that can be a benefit to implement this. Let's think about relatedness, right? Are we bringing people closer together? Are we connecting, allowing them to connect more strongly, or are we pulling them apart, right? And so I think basic principles are very helpful from my perspective, and kind of asking these questions while having frameworks like the CPR in kind of mind might be helpful ways to structure work going forward.

Yeah, I agree. I think these are not easy questions, but they're going to be more successful when everyone feels engaged towards the future. Like, how do we do our best work? What should we do, and how should we engage? So very, very helpful. So looking forward, I cannot wait to get the book, to read the book. Before we end, is there anything I didn't ask about that you thought would be helpful? And then my second question, follow-up to that, you can think about is where should people go to find out more about you and your work and the book Level Up? And of course, we'll include links in the show notes and so on.

So I would love to connect with listeners via LinkedIn. I try to kind of post relevant and hopefully interesting things on LinkedIn. I encourage people to get the book whenever they get books, whether it's Amazon or Walmart or other kinds of sources online or in store. I would say that I really encourage people to think about solutions to the challenges they're facing currently in organizations that are applicable regardless of their role and rank. And we can think about things they might be able to kind of start doing tomorrow or on Monday as kind of they think about how to improve things for themselves and for others in organizations. And so I'm excited for people to try some of the tools that we have in the book. I can mention kind of one category of tools, for example, involves expressing prosocial emotions. I think expressing authentic pride and gratitude and empathy towards others is something that we can all do more of. And there are no barriers to doing that, right? You can go and write a personalized gratitude letter to someone right now, right? And we know that that will have a positive impact on them and on you and on the relationship and so on. You can on Monday spend more time with others and asking them how they're feeling. And kind of making sure you listen attentively and reciprocate by sharing things about how you're doing and so on. So, there are things that we can all do. So, hopefully, when people kind of get the book or engage with the frameworks, they see readily available tools that they can start implementing immediately to make things better in their teams.

Yeah. Well, I took away so much here, but a couple of things resonating for me. I think being a broker between people and just thinking, how can I connect others? What can I do? And I think a master of this, I listened to Jesse Itzler. He's married to Sara Blakely. She is a self-made billionaire. He's now a billionaire, but really cool guy, humble guy. But he, I think every day sends 5 text messages to people and he says things like, just want you to know, I think you're a great dad and I learned a lot from you. Hope you're doing great. And I've thought about that. Just what's holding us back from doing these things where we're being generous, acknowledging people, I think that, as you said, it's something you can do now. A well-placed email, something I learned from you. I've done that even, and miracles happen. Say, I've really learned a lot from you. So there's a lot we can do. And I think what you've really inspired me to think about, Nir, is not only the emotional impact on somebody, but also what is in everyone's best interest? How do we get there? Maybe reverse engineering it a little bit and then being really tactical. Who, what, When, where, how are we going about this? And all of this gives, I think, the language of agency to really be that person of influence that will benefit an organization. So from the bottom of my heart, I just want to thank you for a spirited, engaging, and truly thought-provoking conversation. Thank you.

Thank you, Stuart. It's been great talking to you and learning from you.

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