Benefits of Adopting a Hybrid-Work Model (feat. Robert Glazer)

Foreign drum and welcome to the Enlightened Executive where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. Today we're focusing on thriving in the world of remote work and building capacity in your team. And my guest today is Robert Glaser. Robert is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency helping industry leading brands efficiently grow and refine their marketing partnerships. He's been on the number one list of Wall Street Journal and USA Today as the best selling author of four books, Elevate Friday how to Thrive in Virtual Workplace and Performance Partnerships. So welcome Robert.

Thanks, Susan. Happy to be here.

I'm so glad you're here because this is such a timely topic. So we were talking a bit about your thoughts around thriving in a remote workplace and one piece in particular. What we're dealing with is the hybrid world. Right now a lot of companies are thinking about, okay, we're going to have not going to have it all the time. We're going to have some of the time, we're going to have some employees and sometimes some employees not, or we're going to let the employee choose. What are your thoughts on best practices for how to navigate this challenge?

Yeah. So I agree with you. I think that hybrid is probably going to be the most common choice for a lot of organizations and I think it's also the biggest risk. And I say that because I think hybrid needs to be a strategy, not the absence of a strategy. McKinsey just came out with some study that said that 40% of companies have not made a decision for their go back to work strategy and 30% have been so vague that their employees don't know what they mean. So that's 70% of companies who either haven't made a decision or haven't made a clear decision. And it's causing a lot of stress and anxiety. Right. If you lived and worked in New York and you moved to Vermont during this and you're not clear whether hybrid means that you can work from Vermont, I think that is really incumbent upon companies to be super clear if they're choosing hybrid about what their definition of hybrid looks like. Is it you can do what you want and there's a whole bunch of questions about how you support that. Is it we're all in the office Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Is it you need to be in the office 50% of the time? Is it you need to be in the office for these type of meetings. Like each one of Those where can people work from? Where can they not work from? Like these things really can't be ambiguous. This is, this is like a huge thing like what's our workplace model? And I think, I think that a lot of leaders are not leading. Even if it's unpopular. Your job is to make a decision and put a stake in the ground. It's not going to make everyone happy. I actually think that some of the folks where I don't agree with their decision around look, everyone's back in the office 100% or you lose your job or otherwise. At least they're being clear and communicating what their go forward strategy is.

Right. That level of clarity in an uncertain world. That said, at the same time I know a lot of people that said we're going back beginning of September and they never anticipated what has happened with the variance.

Right.

How that's exploded. And so now they're backtracking, going are we really ready? Do you have any thoughts on those that put a stake in the ground and now are rethinking it? What should they reasonably expect employees, the time frame that they should course correct or not?

Yeah, look, the folks who said everyone's got to come back to the office like in three months, 100% or whatever it is, they don't know whether that means that 40% of their employees are now interviewing for new jobs. Right. So like whether they just started the time clock on that. So to me it's less about the timing and being like here is actually what our strategy is going to be going forward and maybe it's impacted by this short term timing. But again this is the strategy. This is what you can expect other than if you're going to be home during a variant or when we're back, this is what our in person will look like or this is what our hybrid will look like because there's a lot of questions around these things. And again you're someone who moved to bought a house two hours away, are liking that lifestyle. You may be unclear whether you can still work at that company based on whatever the requirements are going to be.

Yeah. And what are you doing at your company? I know you've got global employees, so there's already obviously a remote.

We've always been, always been remote. We've always been remote for 14 years. So but we don't tell people that they can work anywhere. That's a legal and logistical nightmare. We have specific designated areas that we call hubs that people can work from. Again there's people have said even like Trying, hey, you can work from anywhere really. What happens if your employee moves to the uk? Do you realize you might have to set up an entity there and pay a pension? And you know, UK IP law may mean that like if you're not paying them as an employee, that they may keep everything they develop. Like I've heard some nightmare stories that only, only come up. I will say to business in due diligence, like when you're going to get an investment, you're going to sell your business, then the fact that you've been doing something fundamentally illegal for 10 years tends to come up.

Yeah. So you specify certain hubs that people can work in. What about, do you ever bring your team together in an offsite type environment?

Yeah. So the reason why we have the hubs is because twice the people want to get together, they want to do social stuff. There's usually something going on every month at a hub, whether it's social get together work or doing some nonprofit thing. But like we had hub weeks for the first time in 18 months where our president and leadership team went to our seven hubs over a two week period. And so we were able to sit down with the entire company and get some feedback and social activities. And then we bring everyone, when there's not a global pandemic once a year for something called AP Summit, that's four days a week actually, like our team for being fully remote for 14 years, people see each other, they're out at clients, they're out doing stuff. Like people seen each other for the first time in the last month and they missed it. It does not mean, you know, working from home does not mean there isn't a important social and human interaction component. It just means that like the requirement of me being in the office every day, if I'm crunching a spreadsheet for eight hours like that day, why do I need to go be on the train for an hour and a half each way that day? It doesn't, doesn't make a lot of sense.

Yes, yes. And what I found is it feels like people want to go to all or nothing model. And I believe still getting together in some capacity in a safe way in person is critical. I've seen such incredible bumps in performance with teams that are doing that, doing some type of off site activity versus continuing to try to do it completely remote. So if your business allows you to do something in person and you can do it in a safe way, people are lonely, honestly. Yes, they're enjoying it, but they've recently done some Studies about the amount of loneliness from this remote world. And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to mindsets that leaders need to think about managing a remote workforce.

Yeah, look, a lot of the sort of ultimatums you see, it reminds me of when the Internet happened and you had these older male CEOs who were like, well I don't know how to use my email and I'm fully fine. And three years later they didn't have a job. A lot of these mandates seem to be coming from these older male CEOs who feel that their power dynamic is slipping away and they're saying we can't do this without all this stuff when they just had Goldman Sachs record breaking earnings with everyone working from home. So when you take this extreme thing, people feel like they're being lied to. You're saying this is terrible, but clearly it wasn't terrible. There's a lot of things missing as you're saying. So it would be better to be honest, say look, we think the office environment's really important. We think people getting together in teams. And so here's how we're going to do this. But obviously I think we've proven if you need flexibility, you feel like you're better working from home on a Friday or whatever, you can do that as long as you get done what you need to get done. I think that would just feel like a more intellectually honest approach to people than the all or nothing. Because even my publisher of my book, so I was talking to them, they were always in person, there was no remote or flexibility. And you know, I think they realized throughout this, when they're buying a book and they're having a team meeting, like those are really important to be in person. When the editor's heads down for nine hours editing a book that's about to publish, they don't really need to go into the office to lock themselves in their office with the company saying like, look here, here are the reasons and why we need to get together and when we don't. So to me that's just the essence of leadership, like telling people the truth about something. We say, look, I think it's fine to say we think important is really important in person is really important, but here's how we can accomplish that in a way that also gives you the flexibility that the market is clearly saying that they like. And by the way, if anyone liked remote work during a global pandemic, when you couldn't go for the gym, your kids were at school, at home, you Couldn't see your friends, you couldn't have lunch, couldn't travel. And you liked that flexibility. That was the worst time for remote work I could think of in the last decade.

Absolutely. I mean some people liked it. I would say I do love.

So then you'll really like.

They were fine with it.

Yeah. So then, yeah, all the introverts loved it. I think it is the flexibility more than working from home saying, look, today my kid is sick. I do not want to feel like I have to choose. If I can just work from home, I don't have to choose. Right. And I'm going to get all my work done. I think they want to, they want to feel like that's an adult decision and it's. And it accomplishes a win win. And so why wouldn't you let me do that? Right.

So other than being really clear about what your processes are, having flexibility and how you think about this hybrid model, any suggestions you have for leaders since you have somewhat of a hybrid model?

So the book is broken up, sort of what employees need and what employers need to do. You know, there's one that really crosses over and that's boundaries. People when they're working from home, they need boundaries and you need to help them with that and they need help with it. Like they need a wake up time. They need to not be bringing their work into bedroom and their phone into bedroom. They need kind of that virtual commute in the morning and that virtual home. Someone on my team was just telling me that, you know, she showers and gets dressed and does all this stuff for working remotely and then changes before she goes down to her kids. Like it's a, it's a routine to signify, like this is my workspace and this is my personal space. The more the boundaries have been thrown out, the more people have gotten stressed out. And that look, that's partially on the employee, it's partially on the company to not email them all night and send emails from all hours. One of the biggest tricks I do, if I'm emailing people after hours, I always use delayed delivery and make that email come during the next day's business hours so that I'm not creating the need to reply at 10 o' clock at night. The other real thing for leaders, I think this is a huge transition. I think these are all just best practices that people should have been ideally doing anyway. But they have to move to outcome management from input management. Right. They have to say, look, here are the outcomes I'm looking for. I'm going to be clear about the KPIs, I'm going to delegate and communicate well to you. And I'm not managing you by the number of hours that you're in your seat. I'm managing you on the results that you get. So we all understand this with sales. Like Susan, if I said you could have salesperson A, they make a hundred calls a day and they sell a thousand dollars. Salesperson B makes $10 a day, 10 calls a day and sells $10,000. Like which salesperson do you want? You want B. Now if the salesperson A is not selling very well, then I might dig into their input metrics and say, well, look, if you're not making the calls and you're not doing the follow up, but you really don't want to manage to input metrics, you want to manage to outcomes.

Yeah, absolutely. I call it in delegating or in training and delegating. You want to be outcome delegation versus task delegation as well, where it's like individual tasks and it's the same thing by counting hours. And I think leaders wanted that. They feel a sense of control when they know you're. I think initially a lot of leaders said to me, I don't know if people are really working. Like, well, if you don't know from what they're producing, then you need to be clear on what the outcomes are that you're.

That's a you problem. Right. Like if you don't know if your needs producing, then then you don't have KPIs and dashboards and metrics that all roll up into organizational goals. Right. I mean, that's a you problem, not an employee problem.

Yeah, absolutely. So we talked a little bit about building capacity. Tell me more about your thoughts on how to help leaders build capacity in their.

It seems really simple, but this formula we unlocked long ago, which was like, if we wanted to grow the organization and we wanted to grow our people with it, how do we just make our people better? Holistically, what are the productivity, leadership, time management, health, energy. These are things that people need to get better at at performing at a higher level. Holistically, you don't see a lot of people who are fundamentally different at work than at home. They're exhausted at home and tripping over their self and they come to work with a ton of energy or they're really good at prioritization at work, but then they can't prioritize everything at home. These are, these are universal skills. So we spend a lot of time on those holistic Sort of leadership and capacity building skills that for a lot of people starts with helping them understand their personal core values. Because I think as a leader, it's really hard to lead authentically, not aligned with your values. And if you're not clear on that stuff, you're probably doing a lot of the wrong things. So like, we've invested a lot of time and energy in that. People have breakthroughs and sometimes they go work somewhere else or realize, oh my God, I'm doing the wrong thing with my life. But to me, that's the core of like actually helping someone get better and build their capacity at a level where it adds value to your organization, but it also adds value to their lives overall.

Yeah. And you're saying you start that with a values discussion, both their individual values and how well they match with the organizational values.

Well, I mean, we interview on the organizational values, so I think that if they identified that their core values did not align with the organizational values, they would probably opt out. Given that we talk about our values and reward everyone and promote them and incentivize them and, you know, you'd feel like a fish out of water. It's not something on the wall. It's. There are awards and recognitions and that. But I think more, it's again, having gone through this process with some leaders, there's some real stuff they realize, like couple things of like when a leader has a core value of trust, like and that comes out in, in the core value training, usually that actually A, comes from a violation of trust that was pretty significant in their life, you know, maybe in childhood or otherwise, and B, like they've been managing this way without being able to communicate it to their teams. And this has happened enough. Now when, when, when this comes up, I'll say something. Let me ask you something. So in this training, when someone's on your team is five minutes late for a meeting one day, late with something like, what's your, you know, reaction? They're like, they get put in a mental penalty box because they're signaling to me that I can't trust them. And trust is like, these are the managers who are like, you're either in my circle or you're not. I was like, look, what would it look like to communicate that to the person and to actually explain to them that five minutes late is not about being five minutes late. It's just that you're someone for whom trust is really important and these are signals that they are not trustworthy. And then these kind of breakthroughs happen where they're like, wow. Like, I didn't realize my, my leadership style was bogged down, like, from things that are, like, from my childhood and stuff that I never really put together. Why they're so important to me. I mean, there's been example. An example. There was one where someone on our team, you know, realized they had a core value, self awareness. They had a parent who would just kind of embarrass them their whole childhood by being not self aware, you know, too loud too this to that. And so anyone on their team showed signs of self awareness and they were just kind of all over them about it. And these are the things that were just like completely changed. The way that they lead their teams, communicate their teams and say, look, I can actually go to you and say, this is my playbook as a human being. This is what matters to me. Here's how you can manage me. And we've just seen a huge improvement in the performance of those teams and the leadership.

What I like about this conversation is going beyond just saying trust is a core value of mine.

Right.

What I've learned is people build trust in different ways. What do they mean by that? Trust can be a loaded word, Right. I trust you. I don't trust you. There's actually some core distinctions with a trust. And an example you gave, it's really about reliability. Did you do what you said you were going to do? Other people value trust based on, say, competency or other people value trust based.

On believability, or there's just unbridled loyalty, which is not earned in some cases. Right. I mean, that was Donald Trump's version of trust. It's like you just have to be unwaveringly loyal, like, no matter what you do.

Yeah.

And this is why specifically when we do these, we don't let people come away with one word, core values. They have to do a phrase or an expression. The other one, integrity. I've come up with eight definitions of integrity. You know, how do you mean this? Truthfulness versus, you know, a morality issue. Or you do what you say or you say what you do, or living in line with your purpose, like when you actually start asking people what integrity means to them. It's five or six different definitions.

Absolutely. And without that conversation to delve deeper into it on how can we work better together, what are my pet peeves? What's going to trigger me? And I could not agree with you more 100%. Those triggers were formed early in childhood and they show up in your leadership today. But if I want to work effectively with you, I need to know what they are. And so I think often having those conversations of like, this is what's going to build trust with me, and this is what it looks like, and this is what, if you do this is going to diminish trust with me. Please don't do that. I would love to know that as an employee walking in, so I don't step in it. Right. Step in the way.

And also with their boss. So one of the things that people with a lot of trust orientation around a core value have is that they overwork to earn trust because they can't communicate to someone else that, look, it's very important that you trust me. So I just need to know that. I need to know where I stand, or else I'm going to be sitting here, like, running myself fricking ragged trying to earn your trust. And when you know you have that person on your team, and I know a couple of them, when I know they're struggling with a decision or whatever, I'm like, look, Susan, I trust you to make this decision that is like giving them gold. Like, that is like, you know, talk about the. My son had to read this book in kindergarten. Like, filling your bucket like that is how to fill someone's bucket. Who trust is important to them is to say to them explicitly, like, you can make this decision. I trust you to do it right. That suddenly all their ambivalence goes away.

Exactly. Well, you also talk about inspiring people to rise beyond their current level of capabilities. What have you found in managing your own organization that works?

I once drew these lines, and I think there's three types of leadership, right? There's setting this high bar and then jumping over it and watching everyone else trip and not be able to get over and being like, why can't you jump over the bar and clear the bar? I can clear the bar. Then there's the organization. Just lower the bar so that everyone jumps over it, but, like, nothing is really being accomplished. And I think there's this third thing where you actually raise the bar higher in the first thing, but you are on the backside, like, holding hand, trying to get everyone up over it and saying, look, we have super high expectations here, high goals. I'm not going to lower these, but how can we help you? What do you need? All this development stuff and really feel like that person wants them. And they will know if they can't get over the bar, but they feel like that person did everything they could to help them try to achieve those objectives. And I think that's ultimately the highest performing organization.

Yeah. So have you seen where you've raised the bar and you just ultimately saw the person couldn't rise to it? Did you keep that person anyway because they were good at their functional job and they couldn't move beyond Sometimes that's a question for some leaders.

So this is the whole subject of my next book, which will be Elevate youe Teams. And I actually have a drawing and a graph on this. I think when an organization, let's say it's growing 30% a year, like that's the just demand curve that is needed and there's people. So if you're the pick a function like marketing. Well, if you're the lead person in marketing at a small company, you may be the marketing manager and then it's a VP and then it's a director. Well, depending on that curve, you probably can't evolve that quickly. Right. If it's a 50% growth rate, like you can't go from a bookkeeper to CFO in three years, even if that's the organization needs. So in a lot of those cases, that person has to understand that they're getting better. But what is needed is actually someone who has a capability set that starts above them and. And that they'd really benefit from learning from that person and that they're continuing to grow in their manager role. They were just an associate, now they're a manager. They're just not ready to be the director yet.

Right.

A lot of people just can't handle that from a pride standpoint. It's not that you need to let the people go. They're good, culture fits, they're growing as a manager. It's just objectively you need a director. And that to me is. That is another essence of leadership. Again, the really great leaders will say, look, I am going to coach this person as much as I can need. If there are any baseball fans out there, I call it the Grady Little moment with Pedro Martinez. Where it was the Yankees, it was the playoffs. Pedro Martinez pitched a great game. He was visibly exhausted. He started giving up hits. The manager went to take him out and the player convinced him that he should stay in and blew the game. Right. So a good player always wants to stay in the game. Like a great manager. Says Susan, you're amazing. I'm coaching you. You're going to be a director one day. But I can't make you a director right now because that is going to be. You aren't there. And the organization needs it and I will fail a lot more people than you if I make that decision. So back to that bookkeeper CFO thing. I had a friend working hypergrowth company put the controller into a CFO role. Knew she wasn't a CFO but just felt. Didn't want to lose her, didn't want to hurt her temperament.

She made a million sense of loyalty. Right. You've been with and the employee feels like I've been with you since the beginning. Why wouldn't you do that? You don't promote from within kind of conversation.

And she made a million dollar error like in the first six months on the job. And to me that is the quintessential example of that was a great controller who is a bookkeeper. She was on a growth track. But they were not being intellectually honest with what the organization needed then, which was an experienced cfo.

You know, I've heard it recently said that we need to start thinking about this pandemic in a different terms and endemic meaning it may not there's going to continue to be variance. We may be dealing with this for 10 years, maybe longer. And I think a lot of CEOs were and people in general thought okay, we just have to suffer through this for a year. Okay, year and a half, okay, Pandemics last two years. We should be done when everything can go back to normal. And I think what we're learning is there is no normal anymore. Like what was. We have to shift to a new way of living. And I would love to hear your thoughts on what does that mean for many CEOs and leaders. What do they need to shift in their own mindset as you think about this being the new way of working.

Yeah, look, I think you said it perfectly. We are not going back to 2019. Because if you actually look at what's happened, mostly trends have accelerated maybe five years that were already in play. The shift to digital. My parents never ordered from Instacart in their life before the pandemic. And now they're not going to the grocery store every week. So I think a lot of these changes and stuff, again, I think people are just hoping if you're clinging on it back to going to 2019, it's not there. I mean you and I both know Eric Huberman. Eric's in a great example of built out this multimillion dollar space. It was cool, it was swanky for his company, didn't believe in remote work. They went virtual for 18 months. He asked his company what do you want to do? And 90% never want to go back to an office again. So they're like, let's get rid of the space. Eric did what most people haven't done, which is not get caught up in the sunk cost fallacy of, we did this, we were here. I got to double down. I have these office leases. The best decision that you can make for your team, your organization or otherwise about the future of work is like, looking forward and talking to them now and understanding where the market is today. You've got to get over the sunk costs and the decisions that you made years ago. And I think there's organizations that are doing that, and they're just doing quickly. And we talked about this a little bit at the beginning. I think there's others that are wavering and, like, that's not leadership. Whatever you choose is not going to make everyone happy. But not choosing anything is probably going to make more people unhappy. So I think the businesses that are doing well aren't waiting to go back to anything. They're going forward, and they're figuring out what the best strategy for their business is, what their workplace strategy is, and even bigger going forward. Like, what's my new talent strategy? Do I build up, you know, if I need 100 designers, do I think about building a team in Sao Paulo or, you know, where there's a ton of design talent? So they're the ones sitting there with a whiteboard saying, how do I take advantage of these changing things? Because I don't think they're not going back.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm thinking how to help people in this circumstance. So your new book, tell us a little bit about that. And where can people learn more about getting themselves up to speed with what the current environment and current reality is requiring of them and their leadership?

Yeah. So how to Thrive in the Virtual Workplace. It's available anywhere. Books are sold online probably now for a lot of people. Amazon, like I said, the book is two parts. I think it's the people part of if you want to be an employee who's working remotely or hybrid most of the time, what does that look like for you, and what does good look like? And then for an organization, what is it going to look like to adopt this? And it's based on a lot of our own experience over a decade and talking to a lot of other CEOs and best practices that we've seen across the organizations that have made that shift. So that's available again, bookstores or at www.robertglazer glazer.com. there's a course on the website that goes to it. And I think for a lot of people, again, realizing just a lot of these decision points that they're going to have to figure out, like we said before, like, yeah, okay, I want to be hybrid. What does your version of hybrid look like? Because I've heard 10 different versions of hybrid. So realizing that that's a nice first step. But then there's steps 2, 3, 4, 5 that follow that. And I have spoken to a variety of management teams lately at medium to large organizations, and I am shocked how they are not anywhere down this road on where they need to be, where people are getting ready to come back to work in the next couple of weeks or months.

And I think your hybrid strategy also has to fit in with your values. Circling back to our initial conversation. So in what ways does it, what would it look like to be hybrid and still honor those values? How do we do that? And that's worth an important discussion with your team. So it's also not to make these decisions in a vacuum. It's to get the voice of the employee as well as input. It's not the deciding factor, but it's input.

Yeah, get, get the input. Because again, if 90% of your people want to come back and you want to get rid of the office, then you might want to know that. But understand that the input's probably going to be messy and all over the place. But as you said, then input's great. But leaders make unpopular decisions and it's time to make. Make those decisions.

Make decisions.

Yeah.

All right. Well, thank you so much, Robert. I'm so excited that you joined us today and I appreciate you taking the time.

Thanks, Susan.

So if you like this episode, you're not going to want to miss my interview with Matt Brannigan of the Hoffman Institute, whose approach to personal development is to help leaders recognize the underlying patterns from their childhood, to help guide their behavior so they can start leading from a more authentic, enlightened place. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive. Sam.