S4,E19: Radical Adaptability - Competing in the New World of Work

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman. Welcome everyone to another episode of the No Ego Podcast. I have been looking forward to this episode for months. I can't wait to bring you, um, our guests. Many of you are reaching out and Telling me it feels as if things are falling apart. Things are not getting better. They might even be getting worse. And what I keep encouraging all of you to do is bless the falling apart. Let all of that fall away. Most of it wasn't working for us anyway. So many of us are grieving things we didn't even like, like old ways of working. So I'm just encouraging you to let go of what was no longer working and to let go of that part of you that needed to stay attached to it. And let's move from hanging on to really making this time one in which we join forces and create something new. When I was a counselor, I talked to people a lot about the in-between times when you're letting go of a life you loved or liked or realized you didn't like all that much, and you hadn't yet built The new life you're gonna love. Man, those are fun times where we can really come together and recreate life and work. And that's why I'm so excited to have Keith Ferrazzi on. You all know Keith. Everybody knows Keith as the guy who wrote Never Eat Alone, Who's Got Your Back, number 1 bestselling author, New York Times bestselling author, frequent contributor of Harvard Business Review. And I'm so excited because he has been busy during this pandemic, interviewing so many leaders and working with Harvard once again, and coming out with Harvard's top pick for post-pandemic book. And you're gonna love his book, but I'm gonna let him tell you all about it. But it really is a new way to look at the future of work. And the book's called Competing in the New World of Work. But it goes beyond the competing part to really how do we— Take what was working for us and bring it along, but build a lot new. So Keith, I'm so honored that you're on the podcast and I'm so excited about your new book.

Sai, you are not only a joy, but you are so thoughtful. Thank you so much for that beautiful introduction and all the hard work you did getting prepared for the discussion. So I'm really excited about this as well, truly.

I am excited. You know, when the pandemic first hit, which seems like a million years ago, I called a mentor of mine and I'm like, I want to be in there helping. I come out of healthcare. And she said, Sai, you can go back and you can work the front lines and you can help one-on-one. But what would really help is for you to go in and bring new insight to the world, for you to use your research skills and your study, and for you to help provide perspective and bigger thoughts on this. And Keith, that's exactly what you did. You have been busy this pandemic. I connected with you at WorkHuman. Yeah. And you were in the midst Of tons of research. Tell me about it.

Well, just like you, at the peak of the pandemic, I asked myself, where could I now utilize all of this crazy extra time? You know, I had organized my garage, no more junk drawers, all of that. Now, what do I do next? And I recognized what we were in not only as a crisis, but like in all crisis, I recognized it as an inflection point. And so, the question was, how do we make sure that we don't crawl out of the rubble? And I thought the rubble was going to be 3 months, right? But we don't crawl out of the rubble and go back to old workways. We leap forward 10 years. We go forward to work, not back to work. And with that in mind, I activated my network. You mentioned my book, Never Eat Alone. Got a pretty intensive network. I activated my network and I said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a set of one-on-one interviews with leaders and thought leaders, entrepreneurs, unicorns, Fortune 500s. And we're going to ask the question, what are the practices that you're using that are allowing you to survive and perhaps even thrive in this incredibly new volatile world where we were having to wake up on a daily basis and look around the corner and figuring out what's going to bite us in the butt next? And then based on those set of combined insights, we started hosting small focus groups of 5 people each. And in those focus groups, we'd bring the insights, we'd massage them, and we'd refine them into something better. Then we had 300 companies working with us. We would take those insights and extract them and insert them into these companies, into very specific teams who would try them on, and we would measure both from survey diagnostics and outcomes diagnostics, we'd measure what worked and what didn't. So, we came up with a set of high-return practices, not just best practices. We call them high-return practices that were focused on living in a radically volatile world, which Sai, I think you would recognize as I have for quite a long time. We've been living in volatility for decades.

Yeah, we just had the illusion. We had the illusion that we knew what the heck was going on.

Well, we've been living in volatility and we've been clinging to old workways because we could. And it's been a struggle. But then, all of a sudden, the pandemic hits. And frankly, it was exhausting to live in old workways while we were living in this kind of volatility. And many organizations continued to cling by their fingertips until today. They're so fractured and fatigued and just overly exhausted. I swear we can't continue to do this. And I'm glad for the exhaustion because it's finally getting people to realize—

I am so glad it finally broke us.

Yes, it's finally getting people to realize we can't keep doing what we've done.

Well, there was a luxury out there, whether it was supported by power structure or supported by over-functioning of some people. It was this— there wasn't enough to break us. There was this luxury of this buffer. While I have compassion for what people have gone through individually in this health crisis and all the other things falling apart, I have such excitement about it because it finally was enough to break us. You know, the psychology of humans is we will hold on to what's not working. We'll feel more comfortable holding on to what's obviously not working than risking something new that actually has been researched and proven, which I love that you've done, is that not only do you have a great network, but that you have really made this into an evidence-based, a research-based practice. And one of the things that I love that comes out of the work that you're doing is language. Any new way of moving through the world more skillfully requires language and reframing. And so even, you know, best practices— Adam Grant reframed it to better practices. And you're saying, you know what, here's what we know today: they're pretty high-value practices. And that just gets off of the silver bullet. They aren't silver bullet. They aren't, you know, the best in the world. But we have tested them, and they're pretty good. And people are getting a lot of value out of them. There's a lot of language and reframing that came out of, of your work.

Thank you. Yeah. Well, first of all, let me give you the framework. In a world where we're living in excessive volatility, you've got to live a new leadership model. The first thing I started asking heads of HR and executives was, do you feel like leadership competencies need to change in a post-pandemic world? And the first answer was no. Totally. Well, no. And the first answer was no. They did not believe that was true. They felt that part of it was because these HR leaders didn't want to have to redo their leadership competencies that they had—

No kidding.

Hundreds and hundreds of hours working on. And then, I asked the question differently and I said, what attributes of your current leadership competencies do you need to dial up? And what ones might you potentially dial down? And what uniformly came out was a screaming 4 areas that we needed to focus on more. Number one was foresight. Interestingly enough, fewer than 15% of companies foresaw the pandemic in a way that they were able to truly react to it. Ironically, many organizations that have strong operations in China were caught on their heels on March 13th, 2020, just like everyone else. Whereas some organizations like Lockheed Space, which actually didn't even have operations in China, had a foresight process that was simple. It was a high-return practice of on a monthly basis meeting with the executive team during staff meeting. They would spend 5 minutes and every member of the executive team would have a different lens to look at risk and opportunity. So, the Chief Marketing Officer was looking at it from the perspective of competition. The head of sales was looking at it from a perspective of customer insights. The CFO was looking at it from the perspective of macroeconomic policy, etc. And what they would say in 5 minutes is, does anybody have a risk or an opportunity that we should discuss putting into assessment? It would take 5 minutes. Everybody would go around. And if in fact somebody said something that was reasonable, the executive and the team would say, let's put that into a separate meeting. It's called an assessment meeting. Let's kick it around and let's decide if it goes into planning. Well, in December of '19, one of the executives said, I've been hearing about this virus in China. I think it's worthy of us taking a look at. They decided to put it into assessment. They went full virtual in February. Literally, they went full virtual in February. They had no problem with PPE. They had no problem with getting computer screens. They, in fact, they stockpiled an abundance of it and they ended up regifting it to their customers and others in the community as a result. I mean, that's just an example of how a team can utilize a high-return practice, which is so simple, to gain significant foresight, which is one of the 4 areas that we wanted to talk about. And I can maybe before we go on, let me just go over all 4 and then you can double-click on any ones you want. Yes. Foresight is one. Agile is the next. Companies were practicing what I call crisis agile during the pandemic. We can describe what that means and how do we go into full agile on an ongoing basis. The next one is collaboration and inclusion. So much. That's such a rich area. We rebooted the way we collaborated. And unfortunately, still, people have not rebooted the way they work in remote and hybrid as the way they should. We can go deeply there. And then finally is resilience, where I'm spending more and more of my time now in partnerships with folks like BetterUp and Ezra and Headspace and Ginger and Weight Watchers, really looking at how do we sustain long-term resilience among a team. So those are the 4 areas that we have documented these incredible high-return practices for leaders. And I'm very proud of the outcome of the book.

Love it. Love it. And one of the things that You did that I love, and I want to point out to people, to my listeners, is you transcended this polarity either/or. Like, do we have the right leadership competencies, or do they need, you know, rewritten? And everybody just groans because it's like this, you know, there's no good outcome there. And you're saying, wait a minute, how do we dial these up? And that's why I use the terms like, how do we just take what you have and modernize it? Like, what do we dial up? What do we dial down that transcends this who's right and wrong and all this polarity? Yeah. And then you did a second thing we talk about a lot with no ego, which is you just said, you know, let's get curious. Let's welcome the new. Let's pay attention in a simple way. Like with foresight, let's pay attention to what's coming. And the common mistake people make is in the same meeting, they decide whether or not it's a risk and how much of a risk and what they should do about it. And the whole thing just falls apart. And it's saying, no, let's first decide if it merits further assessment. And then let's decide if it merits planning. And, you know, you're a writer, I'm a writer. Whenever I get blocked, it's because I'm trying to write and edit at the same time. And what I love about some of your high-value practices is that you really just have these gates, that it's a simple way through the world. It's very skillful. Does this merit this? Does it merit that? But it's— I love it. Foresight, collaboration, inclusion, Resiliency and agility or agile. So let me double-click on a few of these. These are awesome. Please. I am talking a lot with people— we'll save resilience for a minute— but I'm talking a lot with people on like the phases of crisis management. And in the beginning, you get people, you just as a leader, make sure people are safe. And then you get them connected to each other so people aren't alone. And then basically, you just get stuff done. Like, you do whatever it takes to work. And that's when this pop of innovation comes out, but it's usually not sustainable. It's like, you know, University of Nebraska, when they didn't have PPE, they figured out how to use UV light in huge rooms to hang people's stuff up to like get one more use out of it. Well, multiple-use PPE is probably not a long-term strategy, but most people get stuck there. I have found in my research where, you know, they set up a workstation but it's not ergonomically well. They teach people to use Zoom. But people have old practices like lurking instead of collaborating and, you know, leaning into that. So I would love to hear your view of how to get from crisis agile to full agile. Because for us, we talk about radically simplifying and then questioning every single thing before you put it back in the mix. It's like, question everything and really curate a whole new way through the world based on what you've learned. So, are there similarities there between crisis and full agile?

So, first of all, let's describe what crisis agile was, which I love it because it was really a beautiful way of working. At the peak of the pandemic, or prior to the pandemic, we were working with Delta Airlines to coach that executive team through the transformation they were going through. And They were one of the best-run airlines in the world. Gil West, who was the chief operating officer there, is a revered executive. And we were working for them to help rethink the travel industry. And we were meeting on about a— we were meeting on maybe an every 2 to 3 month basis as they were thinking about how to pivot to reorient themselves to really cover innovation in travel. And when the pandemic hit, they had to go. So, if you think about it, what we were doing is we were working on every other month sprints, right? We were showing up. We were engaging on an assessment of what was possible. We were planning out the sprints. We were identifying the hills of work. We were identifying the teams. We were working cross-functionally. And we would do these every other month stand-ups. Which is a principle of agile similar to working in sprints. Now, when the pandemic hit, we went to everyday sprints. You know, we'd have to wake up every day and figure out, okay, what's new? What's our next day look like? What have we achieved yesterday? And that working in short agile sprints with interdependent cross-functional standups Scrums where people are wrestling ideas together, you know, where candor is high because the stakes are high right now. That's powerful. Very few executive teams work in agile. People think of agile as something for software. They think of agile as something for program management where you break your work down into sprints. You stand up, you have cross-functional wrestling matches at the end of every sprint report. But that's the way executive teams should work. And we did. We did during the crisis. So now, the question is, how do we continue to hold on to those? We call them bulletproofing exercise, which is the high-return practice here. So, we used to do report-outs. Somebody's thread of work, the chief marketing officer is working on a new branding campaign. They do a report-out. But the way that used to work, was the executive would probably go around and pre-sell the campaign to the right people so that they could get into this staff meeting and get out without anybody mucking around in their shorts.

Well, zero courage. There's no courage because it was like such a big consequence for even questioning what was reported.

Well, there was a myth. There was a myth that said you don't challenge your peers in a room. Because it's throwing them under the bus. Well, that's a myth. How about you do challenge your peers in the room because you don't want them to fail?

Yeah, that's your job. That's how you keep them safe.

And we identified 8 critical myths of work that this happens to be one of them that I'm mentioning to you right now, that we identified these old ways of thinking, the ways that needed to be rebooted. And we brought those into the book. And we talked about, this is the way we used to think. Here's the way we need to think. And here's a high-return practice to deliver on it. So, when we were practicing this crisis agile, we didn't care about turf. We didn't care about silos. Teams represented whoever needed to get the job done. We just busted down silos or church. Didn't matter. Now, that's glorious. That's what we've been researching. I started Deloitte Research a number of years ago. when I was the Chief Marketing Officer there. And Deloitte Research had a wonderful report about 5 years ago or so talking about how we're now working in networks, not org charts. Well, that's fine. But what in the heck do you— how do you run that? How do you manage that? Yes. And so, that's what we really tried to— so, in the chapter on agility, I believe that agile, very traditional agile that's taught in software organizations, project management organizations, That those basic principles, which we break them down in that chapter and say, you know, forget if you're a program manager, but if you're a leader, how do you lead with the principles of agile? Right. And we break that in. Yeah.

And I was thinking when, from the name of it, the conceptual, you know, move with agility. But what I'm even more excited about, as you explained it, is, you know, we saw huge transformation in IT organizations as they move from waterfall to agile and really be able to move quickly in a world full of disruption. And one of the key things that your group has done is take something we know to work, an expertise, and generalize it to another group. And so when I work in healthcare, a lot of times people have these amazing clinical skills and they can basically communicate with someone and let them know that they have cancer while giving them hope. Yeah. And then when they come out of that room and they say, I need to have a hard conversation with a peer, I don't know how to do that. I'm like, but you do. You just have to generalize your clinical skills to like your colleagues' skills. And whenever we can take something that's proven and has a framework and we know, already know how to teach it, and we already, you know, have all the components of it and use it in a wider capacity, It's so exciting. And I think a lot of times, when we talk about new things, we think they have to be new innovations. But a lot of innovation comes from using what we know to work in some areas in broader capacities. So I absolutely love that, because I work with so many executive teams. And what I am asking them to do are the components of the agile philosophy. But it'd be so nice to say, read this, be like this, have, you know—

Right.

Use these types of Scrum activities. Yeah,

right. You know my work, it's very prescriptive. I love it. I, I don't believe in concepts. It's like, you know, angels dancing on the, on the head of a pin. It doesn't mean anything. Um, so I want to get very practical and very specific.

And people want tools. That's what we have found out in our work. People want tools. Now the, the nudge is, is to get them to use the tools, and that often requires facilitation in the beginning, you know, as, as they're doing new things. But you've brought up great stuff as far as I'd love to hear either more of the myths or wherever you were going to go with this. I cannot wait for people to jump into this new book.

Thank you. Well, look, let's go to inclusion for a section, collaboration and inclusion, because one of the biggest myths we, well, and there's, what you'll see is there's interdependency between all of these, which is great. So, agile is— I believe agile is the new operating system for companies. But if you're going to be agile and you're going to do work in sprints, and when you show up at the work, you're going to be much more collaborative at stress testing and bulletproofing each other's work, then that's where new rules need to happen around collaboration. So, for instance, as I mentioned, the old assumption is, well, I don't speak up and challenge my peer. That's throwing them under the bus. Well, no, speaking up and challenging a peer is actually assuring that they don't fail. And so, this new social contract that needs to be adopted for collaboration is so important. And I'll give you another one, which is we don't start collaboration with meetings. One of the reasons today when I start talking about resilience, people immediately say, oh yeah, Zoom gloom. We're on calls too much. Well, yes, we are, because we're not effectively using collaboration outside of meetings. We think that collaboration equals meetings. And now, I use Gil as an example from Delta Airlines. He said that's the biggest thing he learned when he moved from Delta Airlines to Cruise, where he was chief operating officer at Delta. Now, I think he's president or COO over at Cruise, which is the General Motors subsidiary, but it's its own independent unicorn around self-driving cars. He realized that when he would say, oh, well, that's a problem, let's call a meeting on it, the team would say, no, we use a meeting when we can't crack the code otherwise. So, there's a wonderful best practice called a decision board that we identified. Instead of a meeting, use a decision board. So, normally you'd say, so, look, we have a problem. Let's say that problem, it's a manufacturing problem and we're delayed on retooling The manufacturing line. Okay, fine. Well, let's call a meeting of 12 people to talk about that. No, let's put a SharePoint document or a Google Doc out, and here's what it's—it's a—it's a spreadsheet, and it says in the first column: Here's the problem we have. We're late in retooling. Here's the potential solution that whoever puts it out would like to entertain. Maybe reduce the complexity. of the product so that it's quicker to retool? Third one is, what are the challenges that's going to cause? Well, marketing is going to say the complexity product is needed, etc. And then finally, who should be involved? These 12 people. You put the Google Doc out to the 12 individuals. They all start debating in the cloud so they can see each other's answers. No, that's not the problem. This is the problem. Here's another solution. What about these people? They should be invited. By the time you're done, you have like 35 people involved in the conversation in the cloud. What we found in examples is the original 12 people that we assumed had input, 4 of them were valuable. And of the people who really cracked the code, ultimately, there's literally another 5 or 6 individuals who would have never been invited to the meetings in the first place Because there are different layers of the organization. So, that decision board, you know, in one particular manufacturer, and the example I was actually using is true, one particular manufacturer, they ended up reducing the cycle time of this issue from a year and a half to literally less than a month. They cracked the code in this issue with 2 meetings of 6 people each that were very different than the people that they would have included at the beginning. And they closed the books on an issue that they've been struggling with for a year and a half. Asynchronous collaboration is where you start. So, the old assumption that you start collaboration with a meeting, false. You start it in the cloud. Now, that's one of the myths associated with collaboration and inclusion of which we identified many and illustrate them in the book.

Absolutely love it. Absolutely love it. One of the things that surprised me most in my research is anything that is verbal, which is a lot of meetings, is fodder for the ego and this defensiveness and protectiveness. And we're kind of toggled down into our most primitive self. But anything we can get out that's conscious and visible and able to be seen while it's being worked, that is out beyond the ego, is so important. And absolutely love putting it out there and watching real time people Way in, opt out, direct you to other people, include folks, you know, just the, the, the interest that would pique rather than a boring meeting, right? To just watch this. It's like watching this really great crime thriller be— this mystery be solved right in front of your eyes. I mean, I just think about the engagement that would entail and how that would be something I would go down the rabbit hole and spend probably hours at night watching and thinking and contributing rather than any of my behavior ever in a meeting. Love it. Love it. Collaboration. And we have so many tools right now where one of the things I'm noticing in trying to help people modernize their leadership is that we've gotten away from letting tools support and really run our work. And We have an underreliance on tools and we have an overabundance of tools. And it's almost, there's some arrogance or some ego to, I don't want to turn my will over to this tool and let, you know, it be the support of our work. And we find if people use tools, if they use disciplines, dedications, formats, you don't have to be fancy and clever. Like standardized ways of moving through the world produce

a lot. Let's be specific. Let's be specific for your listeners. So we've been working with about 300 CIOs. And one of the things that I'm trying to help them awaken to is that when they put a tool in place, so for instance, there's a wonderful tool, which is an electronic whiteboard. I don't know if you know of a company called Mural.

I do. I love it.

Yeah, Mural. It's wonderful. I love it. And it's one thing to put Mural in and teach people how to use Mural. It's another thing to teach people how to reinvent the way they work so that they would use Mural differently, right? So for instance, you can, you can put a tool in and so people immediately go back to, okay, we would use a whiteboard to annotate—

In a meeting.

In a meeting. Right?

Yeah.

And so they think about Mural as a tool to use to annotate during a meeting. Well, what about keeping that whiteboard alive in everybody's desktop to constantly over a period of weeks be adding to, annotating in multiple sessions, including by yourself, so that it continues to grow, you know, and follows each individual, right? So, I mean, it's so powerful to think of it in a different way, but you now have to reinvent the way you think about work in order to use the tool effectively.

Which is, I'm glad that you differentiated that because I think so many people, when they even hear the word tool, see it as a way to do their current approach faster or easier. And what we know about the, the reality-based leadership tools is that built in is a way to work differently. I think it requires some vulnerability. So many of the tools right now are giving visibility and over time. And so people have an inside view into how you're thinking and evolving. And there's this vulnerability about putting something out there in view of others, which I think is, is another area that we can all grow in is— Yeah. I know in writing my first book, every book, giving somebody a shitty first draft is the most vulnerable thing I've ever done. I'm like, no, I want to keep it hidden for longer until it's better. And the dilemma is the only way it's better is if I turn this crappy thing, you know, over to the group.

It's an iterative process. And I totally agree with you. I mean, the idea of using Using your peers for iterative input and iterative feedback.

But I have to separate out my identity from my rough draft. My rough draft is, here's my part of the crowdsource. And, you know, resiliency is really— the most resilient people we found are the ones who are amazing at crowdsourcing. They put something out early and often that asks for help. And they benefit from the collective genius. And that's such a new way of working is to not say, this is my best work, give me my final grade. But to say, this is something I'm thinking about, add your perspective. And it gets it away from who I am as, you know, my image, my identity, how I want to look. It gets me beyond ego to just be, you know, here's something I want to throw out there; let's see where it goes. And in that way, I think we'll need to follow with measuring Differently. And, you know, even feedbacking is such a ridiculous thing when you think about collaboration. It's like feedback is, I accept your offer or not. Here's my opinion of it. Whereas in a collaborative space, rather than feedback, it's like, yes, and, and you've left me wondering about this, and how would you handle that? It's curiosity and inquiry.

Exactly.

Beautiful. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Amazing stuff. What were the other surprising— is there another myth out there you're like, whoa?

Well, I think one of the bigger myths is that more people you include in collaboration, the slower the process gets. And what we found was, of course, that's just not true. It's the fact that we used to go into these sessions with the perspective of peer feedback is merely the same as managerial feedback. What I mean by that is if a manager gives you feedback, you take it because they're telling you as authority that they want something different. But the contract associated with peers giving you feedback is that they're giving you data and input, but both the person giving the feedback and the person receiving it realizes that the person receiving it is in control of the feedback in a peer situation. You've got to recontract feedback. So, you know, we get defensive about feedback because we think that with feedback comes an obligation of doing something with it. But it's data. Thinking about feedback as data Not a directive. And so, that's a big shift that we have to make when we start shifting to peer-to-peer feedback from authoritative, hierarchical, more control-oriented feedback. And that's part of what we have to coach people to because otherwise, if you move into a world where you're opening up all of this input and the person receiving it thinks that input means directive, then you get mushy bullshit consensus.

Mm-hmm.

And that's just not true.

Or paralysis, because I also see where somebody comes out with a, you know, an idea and the feedback is all the reasons it won't work. And basically then people go, well, until I handle all of those objections, I can't move forward. And it's like, no, wait a minute, they've just identified some potential risks. You get to decide which are probable, which are, you know, have direct impact, what we're willing to accept, like putting it in perspective. Because I have a lot of clients that It's got to pass all these gates to even see the light of day. And the odds of anything seeing the light of day are pretty low. I love the idea of renegotiating feedback, the contract of it.

Exactly. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah.

So, you know, let's— maybe we can talk a little bit about resilience as well, because right now your listeners are obviously going through a very difficult and stressful time. And I've written 2 pieces for HBR. One of them will be out soon. The other one was published earlier where we looked at what makes a resilient team. And what we found was that it wasn't what people thought. That people thought resilience— if you're an HR leader, you think resilience is putting, is throwing, is offering programs for the organization, meaning you're offering online meditation and you're offering You know, various forms of mental well-being or mindfulness initiatives, which is, which is all important. But the number one drainer of, of, of, of people's emotional well-being is actually getting things done effectively. And so what we found was that focusing on the

hassle factor,

it's focusing on the work and the people and the relationships. Mm-hmm. And the candor. It's draining to be in a room with a group of individuals and not be able to hear you speak your voice. It's draining to be, to be collaborating with people and to go over one call after another call. So, it's the work itself that needs to be addressed as much as anything else. So true.

And the meetings after the meetings where everybody agrees. And I mean, we call it in our world the drama involved in the relationships and the work and the inefficiency. You know, where's the easy button? And can people just say yes and how can I help rather than, you know, slow things down? And a lot of people are slowing things down based on their own preference or their own safety needs rather than taking care of themselves and their processing so that they can come in and have the ability to say yes and let's make it easy.

Yeah. You know what I realized? We haven't even told them the name of the book.

Okay, we haven't. I think I mentioned it, but you tell me. It's called Competing in the New World of Work, right?

It is Competing in the New World of Work. And, um,

and let's talk about how they can even get it. But you go, you talk about the book because we haven't given them the details.

Yeah, they can get it everywhere. But the thing that if you're interested, we went ahead, for me, my mission in life is not just for, you know, people to understand these things, but to execute on them. And so we put together a very detailed video series around the book. And it's a series of 10-minute videos that you can work through with your team to bring them to this same awakening that we've just been talking about and give them the distinct practices to start using the book now, even without reading it. So we've got this wonderful video series, which we're going to be selling as of February 15th, I believe, but now it's free and it's free if you buy the book. So if you buy the book before February 15th, you get the video series for free, which I think we'll be selling for $1,900 or something like that. So you go to radicallyadapt.com, which is the place where we have put this. offer up or the website where all of our content is, goforwardtowork.com/book. And that's all of our research.

Keith, can you say that again? Because we might have cut out. So, there's this great video series and go from there just to make sure we got

it. We've created a great video series for you to be able to implement this book. It's a series of 10-minute videos that you send around to your team. And that you're all able to discuss how do we become as a team more agile? How do we work more effectively with foresight looking around corners? How do we readopt and reimagine the myths of inclusive and collaborative work? And how do we be a more resilient team? So, there's 8 of these videos. And you go to radicallyadapt.com or go to the Research Institute book, Research Institute site, goforwardtowork.com/book. And you can get this video series for free. It's available for you if you sign up before February 15th for the book.

Love it. So I know everybody's already Googling the book and is very excited about it because so many people are talking about what should happen, what could happen, what needs to happen. And what I love about your work is While people are talking theory, as you said, you come down and you go, try this specific thing, work like this differently. Here's the tool, or here's a different way of working. Let's bash these myths. Let's give you something new. And I'm really excited about it. I am hoping people jump on pre-ordering the book. And, you know, as I said before, it's Harvard's Best pick post-pandemic. Like, there's answers here, folks, um, and it's how to really do well in this brave new world. And the new world isn't even new anymore, it's the now world. So, um, so excited about that. Is there anything that you touch on in the book in regards to, um, like, well-being and, um, In mental health? Is that a topic? And I ask that because I get asked that a lot from folks, like, especially HR, where they think, when it comes to resilience— let me be a little bit more clear— when it comes to resilience, a lot of people think about strengthening the individual to be able to succeed in spite of crappy circumstances. And I'm all about that. That's a big part of my work. But that should be momentary. And the sweet spot is when great processes and great collab and meets, you know, resilient people, that if we can go beyond the individual and tap into the genius of the collective, it's really where the power is, and it restores people. But I know people are also concerned just about, in the meantime, the wellbeing of their amazingly talented workforce. Any insight there that you have?

Yeah, well, I think you were just tipping on it, and I would take it one step further into a practice. The problem with resilience is we think of it as an individual game, helping individuals be more resilient. And the reality is—

Which is how it can get weaponized then, right? It can be like, what is wrong with you? You're not resilient.

Yeah. And people looking at what does it mean to be resilient as an individual. The reality is that high-performing teams own each other's energy. And one of the things that's a very simple practice is something that we call an energy check, where at the beginning of a meeting every other week, the executive, the leader says, okay, hey, in Zoom, in the chat room or whatever, let's put the level of energy each of us has right now, 0 to 5. 0 is I'm in the dirt and 5 is I'm skipping on rainbows like with unicorns. And with that very simple practice, what one recognizes is if you're going to put a 2 or below, you're telling people that there's an issue. And so, the leader stops and says, Jane, I saw you put a 2. Are you okay? Anything we can do to help? And Jane Wood might say, well, the kids were up late last night and I am just tired. Fine. I get that. Or Susie might say, well, to be honest, My husband's been diagnosed needing kidney transplant. And I was in both of those meetings when those kind of responses came back, specifically the kidney transplant. And Susie, not Susie, but Susie had been sitting on that information for days. Now, for team to own each other's presence and energy needs to be purposeful. This is the kind of conversation that would happen walking down the hall or in a break room or at lunch break. But now we need to build this more proactively and purposefully into the room, along with a social contract that says, you know, we are there for each other.

Yeah. And I think that leads to things that maybe aren't part of your personal life to say, my energy is zapped. We all sat in a meeting, you know, 3 weeks ago where you said, go forth and multiply. And I've met nothing but resistance from your teams. And it felt like little support outside this decision. You know, even to get to that level of risk with teammates to say, I'm not feeling the love here. I feel like this got made into my program, not our decision. You know, where, where are the offers of support? The more vulnerable you can get and ask for help personally, I think it also gets you more courageous asking for help professionally. Like, can you help me with this? I'm not getting the help I need. Did courage come up in conversations? We talked about it 15 years ago in a lot of conversations. I'm finding courage comes up a lot. It's almost like a modern competency.

Well, you know, I feel like embedded, if you take a look at courage, there's different types of courage. Speaking up candidly in the room when it's risky to do so. is an act of courage, but we focus on the practice that leads to the behavior of speaking up. Voicing vulnerably when you're struggling takes courage.

Courage, yeah.

But we focus on the way in which to dial up personal intimacy and vulnerability and the practice that a leader leads to extract that kind of intimacy in the room. So I think courage, courage to me is similar to, to, to a word like trust, where it's a big word, both of them, but you have to break them down to design them.

The label we put on it, but not necessarily the, um, people don't know how to get there, like be courageous. It's, I like that you break it down to say, here are the essential behaviors. That, you know, lead to you walking through the world courageously.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So it's interesting. I really like how you talk about managing energy. I think one of the core new roles of a leader is not managing the work of their people. You know, that comes through collaboration. It doesn't need to be you know, filtered through you, but managing the energy of your people. Not that you can fix it, but that you can call it out, be aware of it, and, you know, bring in, call in the resources necessary to keep energy at higher levels.

Well, I think energy is a good, it's really a good litmus test of the resilience of a team. Now, and that's obviously both physical and mental. Accumulate into the energy piece. We look at mental well-being. We look at physical well-being. And we can tell that with a team's energy levels, reported energy levels, that's a good focus on where they are. Now, we've partnered with lots of organizations, as I mentioned earlier, that are bringing different vantage points to fix that energy problem, where I think we've added a lot is to look at, as I said, not just what programs bring energy to, like mindfulness, etc., but what is actually degrading the energy and how do we fix it at its core. And as we— as I said earlier, we've identified that the work itself has been disproportionately important, uh, to draining energy, and that needs to be fixed. Like this idea of Every collaboration starts in a remote meeting. No, it doesn't. Use asynchronous collaboration. You reduce the number of meetings by 30%. You give yourself back time. Now, one of the problems a lot of teams do is they actually reduce number of meetings with asynchronous, but they keep still filling their calendar full of meetings. Yeah. So, they give themselves no time to do the asynchronous thinking. So, I block on my calendar 2 hours a day Sometimes in half of an hour increments, sometimes 1-hour increments. Time that is my meeting time without people. It's my asynchronous meeting time. It's the time that I'm working on documents. It's the time that I'm responding to documents. I'm originating documents. That's so important. Otherwise, all of this work gets squeezed to the night and the weekend, which is totally inappropriate.

It is. It is when you have your least amount of energy. And I think too, that involves boundary setting and willingness to be solo. I've worked with a lot of executives, and we've looked at why they fill up their calendar. And there's some resistance to being alone with one's own thinking and being alone with one's kind of, you know, time through the world. It's a form of procrastination to stay busy. In fact, when the pandemic first hit, one of the most popular reflection questions we put out there is, now that you're not able to be busy when the world stopped, like, What is this revealing to you? What did that busyness keep you from knowing about yourself or about your relationships or about your priorities? And I think it's, it's really important. And it's important to make sure we're using the right format for the right amount of, or the right type of work. That there is some work that just is being alone in your own thoughts, moving through the world. I'll never forget when I first became a VP in a healthcare system. I was in charge of strategy, as if that were even possible. And I had just read this really thought-provoking magazine. I set it down on my desk and all of our offices were in this glass hallway. And my CEO walked by and I was just sitting at my desk, like looking out the window. Yeah. And he walked by, he caught my eye, and he backed up. He goes, Wakeman, what are you doing? And I go, I guess I'm just sitting here thinking. And he actually said, well, stop that and get back to work.

Oh my gosh!

It was just like, we both laughed that he caught himself, but we both laughed that I go, I'm in a strategy. You want me to stop thinking and get back to work? He's like, that was such a weird reaction of mine. I got so scared when I saw you like Just pondering.

Staring out. Yeah.

Yeah. But we, I think we all have that.

You've used that in one of your books.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. It was just, it was, it was something.

Well, you know what's funny? I was working with the team the other day and something very similar happened, which sometimes we just have to, and it really does get to these core myths about work. Yeah. I mean, if you're not doing, and that, that essence, if you're not doing, you're not working, right? That essence, that's a myth that needs to be debunked. Another one that I had the other day was there was a team that was brainstorming what are the attributes of a high-performing team that they wanted to adopt. And the executive had stepped out of the room and the team was working on a mural board on this topic. And he came back in and he saw up there the word fun. And believe it or not, this poor executive said, Fun? Take that off there. You know, sometimes work is tough. Sometimes work is tough. This isn't all just fun. Now, he was probably reacting to the over-indexing that we've seen with the, you know, the millennial population wanting to work from home, wanting this, wanting that. And there's a lot of older executives that are very frustrated with the shifting balance sheet, you know, the shifting scales toward employee primacy. And employee well-being that employees are picking up and voting with their feet because they can work at many companies anywhere in the world without, you know, having to move. And they're voting with that. And so he was probably reacting to all this fresh, this pent-up frustration. Well, I'm so happy I was in the room because I just teased the poor guy afterward. I was like, no, wait a second. You smiled. That looks like you're having fun. Now stop it. Now stop it where this is not fun. So we were able to sort of debunk a little bit about some of that underlying assumption that he had about work.

And I think debunking this myth is so important from a therapist standpoint. We want people to start noticing what they actually are believing and then question that belief if it's true. Like the frustration is like work, you know, can't be all fun. And it's like, well, once you really notice that reaction and you start to look at, you know, What you're really saying is that meaningful work is innately fun to do. It's innately engaging. And as you get more complex with that, you know, it's so important for us to notice our beliefs, to question them with inquiry, to see if actually the opposite may be true. I just worked with one exec, and he, he's like, I am consuming too much alcohol when I come home from work. I'm like, well, what's your belief on that. He's like, I believe alcohol to be relaxing. And I'm like, well, is that true? Does the science say alcohol relaxes you? It interrupts your sleep. You wake up with a racing heartbeat. It's a way to procrastinate, so you're more stressed the next day. Like, is it true? He goes, oh my gosh, I've believed for years alcohol's relaxing, but once you put it like that, it's not that relaxing.

Right.

And, and I'm like, well, could the opposite be true? Alcohol is not relaxing, and maybe you find something that is. That just that inquiry of your own beliefs, mis-thinking, your automatic reactions is part of evolving as a leader right now. You know, so much is in the book. I want people to go to radicallyadapt.com, radicallyadapt.com. We'll put that in the notes. Get your book, get signed up for this incredible video series, which a lot of people take my podcast and try and force their team to listen to it. Go straight to Keith and get the video series just with the purchase of a book. Amazing. But I know that people, we can't be sometimes what we can't see. And so you're working to really also highlight examples of those who are successfully working in new ways, moving through this current world more skillfully with your Tony Hsieh Awards. And I know my listeners are the, the perfect group to not only participate in highlighting how people are going to use these new practices, but also in sharing ones they've discovered on their own with the community. Do you want to talk more about—

Yeah, I would. And I would just direct your audience to thetonysheaaward.com, thetonysheaaward.com. And what we're doing there is when Tony passed away, I wanted to make sure that the brilliant mind that he was, which was constantly innovating, first on employee engagement in his book around happiness, Then on holacracy and self-managed organizations. He was always out on the cutting edge, radically innovating around human capital. I wanted to make sure that that didn't dissipate, that his legacy didn't dissipate. So we started with the TED Conference, an award that we launched in 2021, the first cycle. And now we're into our second cycle of the award. And what we're looking for are folks like yourselves who really believe in elevating humans in the workplace and have very specific practical things that you're doing that help elevate people in the workplace. And the application process is very simple. The judging process is very robust. We've got folks like Adam Grant and others helping us look at this data and accumulate this data and bring it back to the world. So, I would say that no one's ever going to fill Tony's shoes. But maybe hundreds and thousands of executives applying for this award will collectively begin to do so. So, what I'd ask is go to thetonysheaaward.com if you would like to apply. We're looking for— you don't have to be Tony. You just have to be doing something that you consider innovative around elevating humans in the workplace. So, apply. And then by applying or by following us, you'll be able to come to our events. You'll be able to get our newsletters. And we're really going to be working to share this information with folks just like yourself. And if you're in HR and you want to be a part of the judging committee, all of that is great. Please do. We'd love to have you.

Love it. Love it. And yes, put your part out there on how— because there's so much innovation out there right now. And again, collectively, I think being part of that whole community collectively, we can see how others are doing it. And I'm a pretty, like, visual, experiential person. So I love those great examples. Unfortunately, Keith, we are out of time.

As we always are.

We always are. Yes, we're never out of time. And we're always out of time. I need to wrap up. But I wrap up usually by giving people either an assignment for self-reflection or, you know, some activity I want them to go out and do. And there's so many practical things that you have given on that I think people can come up with their own assignment. My intention is, since I'm heading in to see my team in person for the first time in like 6 months, is that we are not going to use meetings as the first step in collaboration. We're going to use meetings to identify what we want to further assess and be curious about or solve. And then I'm going to send it out into some really different interactive collaboration Spaces, so I'll let others define their own. Keith, thank you so much for not just coming on my podcast, but the work that you're doing. You really are helping us be be better, and I appreciate that.

Sai, thank you very much. I love talking to you.

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and trans. Transform your world place. I'm Sai Wakeman.