Brian Elliott: Connected, Effective, Workplace Future | Work 20XX Ep15

00;00;00;11 - 00;00;05;00

Cold Open

As long as your cool is doing it with a guy who's got a Band-Aid on his forehead, then I guess we're we're good to go.

00;00;05;21 - 00;00;08;05

Cold Open

Three, two, one.

00;00;09;14 - 00;00;26;23

Jeff Frick

Hey, welcome back, everybody, for another episode of Work 20XX. I'm so glad you're here. And I'm really excited about this next guest. You know, there really wasn't an opportunity to interview him before for all kinds of interesting reasons. But now we've got a great opportunity. And welcoming in through the magic of the Internet, all the way from San Francisco is Brian Elliott.

00;00;26;23 - 00;00;27;24

Jeff Frick

Brian, great to see you.

00;00;28;09 - 00;00;30;00

Brian Elliott

Great to see you, Jeff. Thanks for having me here.

00;00;30;00 - 00;00;30;22

Jeff Frick

Absolutely.

00;00;30;22 - 00;00;32;00

Brian Elliott

Glad that we finally made it work.

00;00;32;02 - 00;00;45;09

Jeff Frick

I know. I know. It's always, I always tell people when they want to get in this business, the biggest challenge is scheduling challenges. So everything else is easy. Once you've managed to schedule. But Brian, for those that don't know him, I'm not a big intro fan because you can check it all out on the Internet.

00;00;45;09 - 00;01;06;02

Jeff Frick

But he was the co-founder of Future Forum, which has a lot of great real data that we're going to get into. He also co-wrote the ‘How the Future Works’. He was a former SVP at Slack and BCG (Boston Consulting Group) and Google, so he's got some experience and he's got some data. So we're really excited to have him on, so. Brian, I'm just going to start with the big three that I get from people all the time on this topic.

00;01;06;02 - 00;01;26;04

Jeff Frick

So let's just start with culture. Can people, how do people build culture and what's the data say about culture for organizations that are not full time onsite? Still there are people. I just got a post the other day, someone said, ‘You know, we have data that says, you know, we got to be on site. That's the only way to get culture’. That's not true at all, is it?

00;01;26;21 - 00;01;47;07

Brian Elliott

Not at all. Culture is this all the behaviors that you exhibit, no matter where you are? It's how you treat people. It's what you emphasize, what you reward, what your resource, and who and what gets new opportunities and gets promoted. Those are the signals you send people to tell them what kind of culture you really have. It's not the slogans on the wall and the meals and all the rest of that stuff.

00;01;47;07 - 00;02;04;17

Brian Elliott

It's how you treat people. And it's and it's what you focus on, the data itself at Future Forum, one of things we dug into is what builds culture and connection, right? And there really is an element to this is being together. One of the phrases that I've always used is even if you're digital first, that doesn't mean never in person.

00;02;05;00 - 00;02;24;13

Brian Elliott

It really is important that you get teams together for new team formation as an example, and it's really important. Even if you've got a team that's well formed to get them together on a regular basis. We did this on a quarterly basis. We would spend three days together and it would be largely about socialization and connection and relationship building.

00;02;24;13 - 00;02;53;16

Brian Elliott

We would do volunteer activities together. We would make and eat meals together. Like finding ways to get that sort of in-depth time is really important for building a deeper understanding of one another and real connection. But it's what you do on a day in, day out basis that matters too, right? So the data that we looked at shows that people who have flexibility in where and when they work are actually more connected to their teams than those that are five days a week in the office.

00;02;54;05 - 00;03;15;24

Brian Elliott

And that may sound kind of weird when you just first think about it, but if you go a little bit deeper on it, and you understand that, like my giving you the freedom and flexibility to work from home when you want to do heads down work or to even be more distributed, come together occasionally is saying that I'm going to base my assessment of you on the outcomes you drive, not whether or not you show up.

00;03;15;24 - 00;03;25;05

Brian Elliott

It says, I trust you. And nothing builds connection like trust in the first place. So there's a lot there to unpack and get into in terms of connection and culture.

00;03;25;05 - 00;03;48;05

Jeff Frick

Yeah, well, we'll dive and we'll just kind of skim over the top and then we'll go deep dive. And you know, and a great line that Kate Lister uses all the time. You know, is you know, nine, nine floors, nine states or nine time zones. People have been distributed in work for a very long time. And, you know, whether it's plane, trains or automobile or even a salespeople, you know, a salesperson out, you know, working his accounts and out in the field, this is not that new.

00;03;48;05 - 00;03;54;27

Jeff Frick

It's interesting that it did take on this strange characteristics, but this has been going on for a long time.

00;03;55;05 - 00;04;17;00

Brian Elliott

Absolutely. Jeff 25 years of leading, you know, teams and companies in the tech space. And I haven't had a team that's been co-located in the same city, let alone the same building in over 20 years. So it's not like the pandemic was the only change that was happening. Teams are already distributed, which got more distributed. We need to learn how to manage and lead distributed teams.

00;04;17;14 - 00;04;33;00

Jeff Frick

So let's talk about the big ‘P’ that everyone likes to throw out, which is productivity. And I had a conversation with someone the other day talking about knowledge workers and they don't even, they're trying not even to use the productivity word anymore because it's hard to measure, more ‘effectiveness against objectives’. And I think that to me that's the heart of it.

00;04;33;00 - 00;04;47;15

Jeff Frick

And I think it's the heart of the pushback is a lot of middle managers that weren't trained to manage this way don't necessarily have the objectives as clearly defined so that you're measuring against objectives versus you know, presenteeism, which is a word unfortunately we've all had to learn.

00;04;48;11 - 00;05;06;16

Brian Elliott

Yeah, yeah. And like outcomes driven management is a skill and it takes time, it takes investment. It also takes an organization that's willing to say, what are our objectives, what are our key results, and how are we going to measure them? And to do that on a regular ongoing basis. And, you know, Google got famous for OKRs objectives and key results.

00;05;06;26 - 00;05;34;26

Brian Elliott

Salesforce has the V2MOM (vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures). Having a method like that matters a lot, but you also have to show people how to do it in order to make it work. And I think one of the things that happened is, you know, the pandemic just kind of shined a light on mediocre management practices, right? They always existed in the past and just became a lot more evident that if you're only method of managing, your team was monitoring whether or not their butts were in their seats, you didn't really know whether they were working then or not either.

00;05;34;26 - 00;05;50;15

Brian Elliott

So that's why this whole productivity thing makes me slightly crazy. It is really hard to measure in knowledge work, if not impossible. And why weren't we asking the same question when people were in offices? Because we didn't have a heck of a lot of evidence quite often, that that was an effective way of measuring it either.

00;05;50;18 - 00;06;12;13

Jeff Frick

You know, Marten Mickos’ great line because when he was at MySQL many years ago, he went in to an all remote situation, even though they all lived pretty close to one another because they just liked working that way. You know, his great line is ‘It's so easy to fake it at the office’. You know, you go in, you look busy, you know, make sure you kiss the boss’ butt a little bit and you know, bring’ em a fresh coffee and and your golden.

00;06;12;13 - 00;06;24;01

Jeff Frick

And he says, you know, the only thing you have to show when you're remote or not in the office is your output. And, you know, so it's it's it's you know, you get the benefits on both sides but it's, it's a great line.

00;06;24;12 - 00;06;49;21

Jeff Frick

So then the third one is innovation. And this is, this is a big one that that is more important today than ever before. Right. The world is moving quickly. You know, time in the Fortune 500 is as short as it's ever been. So if you're not innovating, you're falling behind. And the really, there's a there's a, there's a secret that some people don't know that is enabled by, you know, this style of work that actually drives innovation and that's psychological safety.

00;06;49;21 - 00;06;53;17

Jeff Frick

And most people just don't put those two things together. What's the data say?

00;06;54;06 - 00;07;08;15

Brian Elliott

Yeah, So, you know, what I hear all the time on that front is we need to get back into whiteboards and water coolers because that's what drives innovation. It doesn't you know, there's plenty of academic evidence around that. Whiteboards are and whiteboarding exercises are largely groupthink.

00;07;09;01 - 00;07;33;18

Brian Elliott

We did a study back in 2021 on this and dug into it. If you took teams that were co-located, if they were hybrid, mixed mode, if they were fully remote and compared them on the basis of their team's ability to generate new ideas, new products, new services, change processes, no difference whatsoever, like zero statistical correlation or causality between where they were located.

00;07;34;01 - 00;08;07;04

Brian Elliott

There were two other factors that did. There are two questions we asked folks that were really clear indicators. One was, Is my team willing to take risks and the other was, is it okay for me? Do I feel safe asking questions? And those two questions, those two things are psychological safety, right? It's do the people who are the introverts have the space to actually formulate their ideas and bring them forward? Do the people who don't look like the majority or who aren't the loud mouths have the time and space to actually, you know, put forward new ideas that might be heretical or might be different.

00;08;07;13 - 00;08;20;11

Brian Elliott

That's where innovation comes from. It comes from blending people from different disciplines, different backgrounds with different ideas. But it's really about how you creating the conditions under which they can contribute that actually drives innovation.

00;08;20;16 - 00;08;50;17

Brian Elliott

We had this practice that we used that I heard about first from Adam Grant called brain writing, which is we would get a research body of work that would come out once a quarter or so. It would be 120 some odd page long piece of work. And what we would ask everybody in the team to do is sit with it, spend a couple of hours, heads down, notifications off, spending time, going through it, and pull out what you think are the most 3 to 5 important findings from it. Write those down. Doesn't have to be like a long write up.

00;08;50;17 - 00;09;21;24

Brian Elliott

Just jot down what they are. Now we're going to have a meeting. Everybody at the beginning of the meeting throw all of your ideas into the pot at once. Now we can do this sortation exercise so we can see what stands out, what's common, what's different. And you're not doing that pre filtering that happens otherwise. You can also therefore put these processes in place that will give you a much better a much better odds of those innovative ideas coming forward than if you simply say, Hey, let's just throw people back together and rely on random chance as our mechanism for driving innovation at work.

00;09;22;08 - 00;09;32;02

Jeff Frick

Yeah, I'm just curious, of those things. So how many people were in the room, times three. How many? How much overlap was there generally where people were picking the same item?

00;09;33;06 - 00;09;58;23

Brian Elliott

It was usually there would be one or two that really stood out to everybody. I mean, a lot of our work, the stuff that especially early on, if you look back at some of our research, the stuff that really stood out were two things. One was time matters more than place, giving people schedule flexibility, giving people heads down time during when they're good for doing work to get work done, benefits, productivity, benefits, well-being benefits, all kinds of things, personally and organizationally.

00;09;59;05 - 00;10;21;03

Brian Elliott

And the other was the disproportionate benefits that flexibility brings to especially women with children. Because mom more often than dad is the primary caregiver and the benefits that it brings to people across race and ethnicity. Black, Hispanic, Latinx, Asian-American office workers are more likely to benefit from flexibility than their white colleagues because it gives them a break from code switching and microaggressions.

00;10;21;13 - 00;10;49;10

Brian Elliott

And that data showed up early on. Everybody’s like those two things are really important because it's not what people would have expected. Let's make sure we get into that. But then what would happen is we'd find these other little nuggets that were set in other places that got at things like how, you know, it was surprising to me as somebody who spent a couple of decades getting people into offices to build culture, that people who got flexibility actually rated culture much higher than those that have less flexibility in where they worked.

00;10;49;12 - 00;10;55;16

Brian Elliott

And so those types of things would pop out from time to time and somebody would go, That's important. We should actually focus on that,

00;10;55;16 - 00;11;13;14

Brian Elliott

Right. You know, Scott Cook from Intuit, who, you know, has built an amazing company, basically from a checkbook register. I got the opportunity interview him. And his thing is build your company based on low cost experiments. And the only way to do that, and to have more people experimenting with more data and trials is, what is what happens when it goes wrong, right?

00;11;13;14 - 00;11;25;23

Jeff Frick

Because by rule, certain percentage of those are going to go wrong. So if you just jump down their throat and, you know, tear their head off, your experimentation is going to go down. And that directly ties to psychological safety and innovation, its not that complicated.

00;11;26;09 - 00;11;56;08

Brian Elliott

Absolutely. And we don't live in a world in which going backwards is likely to be the right solution. Right. It's not like the world's going to stop changing, like we're going to sort of we're going to go back to the way things worked in 2015, 2018 to me is, do you think that everything else is going to go backwards? Because we're now living in this world in which all of a sudden, you know, the daily news about generative AI, the kind of global nature of competition these days and ongoing demographic shifts, it's not going to get easier to find talented people.

00;11;56;22 - 00;12;23;16

Brian Elliott

It's not going to get the world of work is not going to get simpler. It's going to get more complex, more complicated. And so what you're going to need to do is enlist people in that set of processes. You're going to have to get there through experimentation, through iteration, through, unfortunately, ongoing work. I've talked to a number of executives who said, you know, I think part of the challenge is for about two years now, we've all expected in the next 90 days, we're going to have the answer.

00;12;24;28 - 00;12;47;08

Brian Elliott

We're not going to have the answer. I have some I have some hard news for you. We're in a world of continuous change and evolution. So therefore, allowing your team the space to try new things, to innovate and finding those pockets of innovation internally and making them into heroes is really one of the best path forward that I've seen. Yeah, the VUCA (volatility, uncertainly, complexity, ambiguity), as they say, let's so we're, we're in summertime.

00;12;47;08 - 00;13;05;21

Jeff Frick

You've got beautiful sunlight behind you, you know and you've mentioned in other things that we're heading into, you know, one of your favorite seasons, which is the Labor Day call back to office. As you think about that. And then ironically, you know, Sundar, who makes great tools in Google Workplace, just had his pronouncement.

00;13;05;21 - 00;13;23;13

Jeff Frick

You know, please, let's everybody come back to the office. We're going to rate you on attendance. So it's not a good thing. In this pull and tug, I think it was Apple was the signature one a couple of years ago. As you talk to people on this kind of this tug and pull on this proclamation of back to the office from on high.

00;13;23;25 - 00;13;41;18

Jeff Frick

Ironically, I have this new report from Phil (Kirschner) at McKinsey who says he everyone is is high on the declaring what they want to do but low, all the way to the right, is on training and training middle managers to actually execute well. And it seems like this complete mismatch of prioritization.

00;13;42;11 - 00;14;02;29

Brian Elliott

Honestly if we put, the amount of time and energy we're putting into how many days a week somebody should be in the office is a little ridiculous because what it's doing is it's breeding resentment among employees, not really solving problems. Right. Those those companies you announced and many others have made these announcements, they've made these announcements continually for a couple of years.

00;14;03;08 - 00;14;18;04

Brian Elliott

And if you look at the stats, if you look at things like even Kastle Systems data, which is, you know, published broadly it ain’t moving. You know, I can name a number of companies that have said three days a week and they've even said, here's the specific three days a week we expect you to be in for two years now.

00;14;18;12 - 00;14;32;20

Brian Elliott

And the number that they're getting is 1.5. And when they did a round of layoffs, 1.5 became 1.7. Then about two weeks later it went back to 1.5. And the reason is, when you're saying those things, you're giving a one size fits all answer. Right? And one size does not fit all.

00;14;32;20 - 00;15;04;22

Brian Elliott

Teams have actually become, this is back to Kate Lister and talking about distributed teams, we were distributed before, were more distributed now. Almost every large scale company went from being something like 50 to 70% of their teams being geographically co-located to less than 50% of their teams being geographically co-located. So, Jeff, if you're telling me I need to be in three days a week for, you know, teamwork and team aspects, and my team isn't even in the same city, it rings false. And I'm like, why are we spending time arguing about this one?

00;15;04;24 - 00;15;23;02

Brian Elliott

Better approaches have been, how do you take a team level agreement approach. We talk about this in ‘How The Future Works,’ the book a lot. It's on the Future Forum website and everything else. But the needs of an engineering team and a sales team, the needs of the people who work in R&D labs in a biotech company are all very different.

00;15;23;15 - 00;15;43;20

Brian Elliott

How do you help those senior leaders figure out what the rules of the road are for their organization and put that locus where it should be? And that's the meeting point because to be honest, the mandates don't work, but neither does individual choice. A complete free for all is also not going to work for us. We need to figure out, like at a team level, what's the right balancing point.

00;15;43;22 - 00;15;59;06

Brian Elliott

Doing that takes work. You have to train people to do it. You have to pilot it, you have to do it. And you know what? When you do it with call it 200 senior leaders, it ain't going to go perfectly. You're going to have people that spend real time with their teams on it and go in-depth and do good work on it.

00;15;59;13 - 00;16;21;05

Brian Elliott

And you’re going to have people that check the box and file the paperwork. The trick is what do you do next? One of the companies that I've been talking with is actually doing this. They're going back and they're taking those 200 plus team level agreements and they're looking at the various aspects of how those teams are performing. What's their employee engagement look like, what's there, how are they performing against their plans?

00;16;21;05 - 00;16;40;11

Brian Elliott

And they're going to map those out in terms of quality of the planning that they did, the work they put into it and the engagement their employees have and how their outcomes are working out. I guarantee you there will be a relationship because just the act of engaging your employees in the conversation drives employee engagement. We all know and there's plenty of evidence that actually drives better outcomes.

00;16;40;15 - 00;16;50;06

Brian Elliott

So man, let's get off the top level mandates and let's figure out like, Hey, here's what we want everyone to do and we want you to spend time doing this because it's important, right?

00;16;50;27 - 00;17;11;20

Jeff Frick

Let's dive into the details a little bit about communication. You know, our friend Darren Murph, when I first interviewed him early 2020, was, you know, just banging the drum on asynch communication. It was really kind of a light bulb moment for me and the effectiveness of that in your moving more work day to async so that you get more quality time when you are either working or spending time, you know, with the team members.

00;17;11;20 - 00;17;34;04

Jeff Frick

You have kind of a unique view from inside of Slack and, you know, obviously don't say any secrets, but I'm curious in terms of, you know, kind of older people that look like you and I and their adoption of digital tools, but also, you know, without, as you said, without rules, is it just become another random Wild West thing that I have to manage on top of my emails, on top of my texts, on top of everything else.

00;17;34;04 - 00;17;46;14

Jeff Frick

So, you know, what did you see in terms of what really worked, what what didn't work? Kind of where's stuff go on the rails and, you know, maybe where are some best practices in helping people be more effective in an async digital tools world.

00;17;47;00 - 00;18;21;06

Brian Elliott

Yeah. The big thing here is to even focus on what's the benefit and value to the organization. So here's one of the things that we've been wrestling with for a while, which is I sort of said this earlier, time matters more than place, but it really is true. When you look at the ability to give people solid blocks, 2 to 3 hour chunks of time when they can be heads down, notifications off, whenever it's good for them, whether that's, you know, before 9:00 in the morning or one till three in the afternoon. If you can find ways to do that, you get a lot more productivity out of those people and a lot more engagement. We spend all this time on days a week in the office.

00;18;21;06 - 00;18;52;19

Brian Elliott

We spend so little time on something that executives and employees agree on, which is we have too many meetings. We, and the pandemic made this worse. Unfortunately, we adopted video as the solution for a lot of problems in synchronous video meetings. The 30 minute Zoom call became the solution for way too many problems, and it made our days into Swiss cheese That even became worse. So in order to fix this set of problems, first issue is recognize you have a problem and a lot of companies will say, yeah, we do.

00;18;53;02 - 00;19;11;24

Brian Elliott

We have a problem with too many meetings. But what do we do about it? Next step is, how do you start piloting out some new programs and put some constraints in place? So my team did core collaboration hours 9 a.m. until 1:00 on the West Coast was was our time not only for meetings and one on ones but you had to be available then for in-sync conversations.

00;19;12;04 - 00;19;29;29

Brian Elliott

A quick phone call works just as well. And by the way, a five minute phone call may save you a 30 minute video screen. But finding practices like that that put constraints, but you also have to help people convert what would have been a meeting into an asynchronous set of behaviors. So my favorite on that one is the status meeting.

00;19;30;26 - 00;19;50;11

Brian Elliott

We've all been in these status meetings that are the classic like Monday morning operations meeting. It's got 75 people in it, 75 people of whom probably at any point in time, 70 of them are sitting there basically doing something else or trying to get something else done, because that hour and a half Monday meeting is really not the most productive use of their time.

00;19;50;11 - 00;19;50;17

Jeff Frick

Right.

00;19;50;22 - 00;20;11;26

Brian Elliott

All they need to do is report status on a project. Please change that. Think about ways in which you sit there and do what we did at Slack, which is we had to do this ourselves. By Friday at noon, status is due on the system of record. It's JIRA, you have to update statuses. Managers of teams are responsible for identifying which projects are on track or off track and submitting those.

00;20;12;08 - 00;20;34;29

Brian Elliott

The Monday meeting then goes from being a 75 person, hour and a half long conversation to being a 30 minute, 15 person conversation, where the same ten or so executives always have to be there to resolve problems, to deal with conflicts, to figure out resource issues. But who has to show up changes based on where are those bottlenecks, where are those pinch points?

00;20;35;16 - 00;20;56;17

Brian Elliott

So it's that combination of both. Like, please, we don't need to do the weekly pipeline review live and in person on a sales team every week do we? We can do that every other week asynchronously and it helps develop some patterns and some rhythms. So it really is partly about the tools, but it's really about the managerial processes and showing people, giving them concrete examples.

00;20;57;04 - 00;21;15;04

Brian Elliott

So the best in the world at this are people who have taken those practices internally, found the team that's already doing some of that, training them, getting them to be better at it and getting them to share the story of how they did it with another part of the organization and then growing it from there. That's how you get better adoption.

00;21;15;15 - 00;21;54;19

Jeff Frick

It's funny, I had Shani Harmon on, she runs a company called ‘Stop Meeting Like This’ and her two number one things you know. Immediately stop them now are ‘The Inform,’ like I could have just read it. Don't make me sit for an hour. And ‘The Weekly,’ just to your point, her her her line is you know it basically comes turns into a series of one on ones with a very large audience and you know again and then to your point, you squeeze that, you squeeze your working time in like after the kids go to bed or super early in the morning before the work time starts and you never are working during your best work time for you. The individual as opposed to to this company.

00;21;54;19 - 00;22;12;05

Jeff Frick

But double click on the kind of mutually agreed to collaboration window, because I think that's a very interesting concept that I don't hear get enough, enough pub that I think is really important. So you do have that block that, you know, you can comfortably schedule the meeting when you do have to have it or the phone call or the quick chat.

00;22;12;24 - 00;22;28;07

Brian Elliott

Exactly. And it takes some discipline to build that because everyone's got this issue of cross team collaboration also, right? Well, if I do that for my team, how to get everybody else to respect those boundaries. And the answer is you have to work with your peers to actually make it work, right? Like we did this with the Future Forum team.

00;22;28;07 - 00;22;46;05

Brian Elliott

But we worked every week, almost every day, sometimes with the research organization, with the comms team, with marketing people and salespeople, and you would sit there and remind them continuously, Hey, can we put the standing meetings into these windows, please? Which we did. We found a way to to corral those inside. And the other thing is to realize there's going to be exceptions just like there are today.

00;22;46;05 - 00;23;00;23

Brian Elliott

Right. But the fact that it has to be an exception triggers a different process. If I you know, it's not unusual for me to get a call from a salesperson and says, hey, you know what, Nike, which is a big Slack customer, wants to have a call with you, Brian, and it's got to be 6:00 at night on a Tuesday.

00;23;00;23 - 00;23;20;06

Brian Elliott

And like big important client, I'm going to take the call, do the same thing as a team. Hey, look, folks, there's something that's come up. We really need to hop on to a call. This person's only available at 3:00. Can you make it? The benefit of doing it that way is it protects that time more often for people to get their core work done.

00;23;20;19 - 00;23;38;14

Brian Elliott

And it also respects the boundaries of teams are more geographically distributed. I had people on the East coast, I'm on the West coast, me scheduling a meeting regularly at 4:00 in the afternoon here may be fine for me, but it's 7:00 there, which means I'm interrupting somebody's dinner with their kids. Not cool. So it’s just practice and discipline to make that work.

00;23;39;03 - 00;24;14;29

Jeff Frick

The other piece of it that that I think people aren’t tying together is kind of the servant leadership or service leadership, depending which word you like better. And using those using those times not to micromanage the deliverables or the time schedule, but to actually engage specifically with the person and help them remove roadblocks and use your power as a boss, whether that's resources, time, money, whatever you have to actually help move the ball forward for all the members of the team versus micromanaging all their individual tasks, it's a completely way to different way of kind of organizing your thoughts, organize your time and really what you do.

00;24;15;17 - 00;24;37;24

Brian Elliott

Yeah, absolutely. And there's an element to this which I learned at Google. The phrase was essentially ‘escalations are okay.’ We treat escalations as a bad word. Escalations are good. An escalation is this team and this team cannot resolve this conflict. There are times when that is going to be natural because they both need access to a key resource or that their missions are somewhat in conflict with one another.

00;24;38;13 - 00;25;03;28

Brian Elliott

That's why bosses exist. That's kind of our job. Our job should be to resolve those kind of conflicts and to do the sort of resource, resource mediation that has to happen for teams in order to make them operate more smoothly. There's also a level down from that. One of things that I talked to a lot of leaders about is how do we help new managers in particular to not just learn the task of management, but get really tactical with them, like what's a good one on one look?

00;25;03;28 - 00;25;18;09

Brian Elliott

Like you should have a one on one with members of your team every week. You should do the same thing every week. It should feel to you a little rote, but what did you work on last week and how did it go? What are your priorities for this week to make sure that we're aligned and what's blocking you?

00;25;18;23 - 00;25;38;24

Brian Elliott

What what's in your way that I can help you unblock? And if you teach people to do that same thing week in and week out, that's where this whole thing of like ‘But if we give people trust, won’t you know, won’t they go off the rails?’ Not if you're actually having the conversation on a regular basis. Trust doesn't mean I let you go off for three months into the into the wilderness.

00;25;38;24 - 00;25;45;23

Brian Elliott

It means I'm working with you to make sure that we're on track. And then I'm giving you the tools, resources you need in order to be effective in the job.

00;25;45;23 - 00;26;11;14

Jeff Frick

Yeah, the other one, Adrienne Rowe likes to use is agency, even as a substitute for flexibility, because it's flexibility is kind of an outcome of agency. It's like treat people like adults. And if you can't trust them to treat them like adults, to do what they're supposed to do, then you got got different problems. Which also goes back to I think I read one of the questions in one of your write ups on, you know, I need help, which kind of, you know, circles back and psychological safety.

00;26;11;14 - 00;26;23;29

Jeff Frick

If they're not willing to ask you for help, then, you know, bad news doesn't go up to the boss. Bad things happen if it takes a long time and they never see what's really going on. So that's another, you know, super important component of the piece.

00;26;24;05 - 00;26;41;02

Brian Elliott

Yeah, absolutely. Katarina Berg at Spotify, she's their Chief Human Resource Officer, had this phrase I love to you on that same topic, which is ‘We hire adults. Why do we treat them as children?’ You know, you're hiring if you're hiring process isn't hiring adults for you, maybe you have something else that you ought to be reviewing as as you're going through this.

00;26;41;02 - 00;26;59;00

Brian Elliott

But, look man, the world's changing way too fast on us for us to assume the command and control is the right answer for all of these things. We've got to we've got to find a way to invest instead in the systems that allow people to do what they want to do, which is deliver outcomes and be rewarded for those outcomes.

00;26;59;12 - 00;27;12;10

Brian Elliott

But to do that, we need to figure out like, what are our objectives, what are the key things that we're after, what's our purpose, and how are we going to train people to sort of make sure that they're managing that and enabling that to happen as opposed to being hall monitors?

00;27;12;15 - 00;27;28;07

Jeff Frick

Right, Right. Darren's got a great quote, too. You know, if you allow people to to to do the things that are important to them outside of work too, you know, the reward that you get as an employer in terms of productivity and enthusiasm. You know, are off the hook because they're living and they're living a better life.

00;27;28;07 - 00;27;53;12

Jeff Frick

And Toby Redshaw, who was at FedEx for a long time, he had a great line in terms of discretionary effort. And his quote was, you know, if you're in a boat and everybody's rowing, you know the difference of somebody who's actually cares and rowing hard versus someone who's just sitting in the boat could be 30, 30%, 50%, two x, three X. And so, you know, how do you get that discretionary effort and that alignment around the missions? And it goes back to communication, not micromanaging.

00;27;53;16 - 00;28;18;02

Brian Elliott

But there’s also a mindset shift Jeff that I've had to make for myself, which is a lot of us get trained as leaders, that we need to have all the answers. I had this phrase that got taught to me very early on in my career as a consultant that I should be ‘seldom wrong and never in doubt’ that, you know, I needed to be pretty confident in knowing the answers to all these questions.

00;28;18;14 - 00;28;34;03

Brian Elliott

And you're often rewarded as an executive, especially as a white guy, as an executive, for doing that, because you know that pressure is there and so you respond to it. The world is way too complex for that to be the right answer for most people. But it's really hard for executives to let go that like, well, then what do I do?

00;28;34;03 - 00;28;54;00

Brian Elliott

Because I'm supposed to be setting vision. The answer is, Yeah, you got it. Your job is to set vision and set aspiration, which is here's the mountaintop that we're going to get to. Here is the thing that we are going to accomplish as a team. I believe in all of us and our ability to get there. I don't fully know the path, so I need all of you to work with me so that we can get there together.

00;28;54;09 - 00;29;16;26

Brian Elliott

And that's both like painting the vision, the aspiration being super motivational, holding people accountable to outcomes, but also saying, I trust you to figure out how you're going to get that work done. I don't care when you do. I don't care where you do it, but we're going to get it done. And that is where you get engagement. That's where you get people to be aspirational along with you, which is at the end of the day, what we all want.

00;29;16;28 - 00;29;34;09

Jeff Frick

Right? Right. I just was watching an old, it’s a great video. It's Pierre Nanterme. He's former CEO of Accenture, unfortunately he passed away but it's from 2012 and he's speaking at his old business school where he went to school. So he's feeling good and it's a small class and he just said you cannot manage and lead at the same time.

00;29;34;09 - 00;30;02;19

Jeff Frick

You just you just can't. He's like, If I'm leading a global organization, this is 2012. You know, I can't be managing what's happening in China because then I'm not in Brazil. And then if I'm managing what's happening in Brazil, I can't manage what’s happening in China. And he just talked about the difference. And even as you know, he's like for 26 years I was a manager for the last three I've been a leader and it's a very different job and I have to trust my managers to do the job. And then if they've got issues, then I need, you know, can I help them resolve it? This is 2012.

00;30;02;21 - 00;30;02;24

Brian Elliott

There’s a

00;30;02;25 - 00;30;03;09

Jeff Frick

Come on.

00;30;03;26 - 00;30;30;27

Brian Elliott

There's a back and forth there. There's an analogy there that I love that I learned man a while ago, which is dance, floor and balcony. When you're when you're a frontline manager, you're down on the dance floor, you're in the mix of it, you're in the thick of it, and you're hearing the music and you're you're in with your team and you're going at it. As a as a more senior leader, you've got to get up on the balcony where you can see the patterns and the rhythms and understand if the music and the lights are on and all the rest of that, you're directing more of it.

00;30;31;13 - 00;30;46;21

Brian Elliott

The challenge is you've got to be able to go back down on the dance floor also, right? You can't just stay up on the balcony. You have to go down every once in a while to realize how badly people are stepping on one another's toes. You have to get down there to hear that the music and the lights aren't really in sync with one another in the way that you expected them to be.

00;30;47;03 - 00;31;04;07

Brian Elliott

It's not that you necessarily have to do that yourself, but you've got to listen to your employees who will tell you, tell you that that's what's going on. I think that's part of what's happening, by the way, in our world today, which is a lot of senior executives are coming back into offices that are very empty and they're not hearing the music.

00;31;04;08 - 00;31;24;07

Brian Elliott

They're not hearing the noise. They're not hearing the chatter. Look, I was CEO of a small company in 2008 - 2009, the last time we went through a recession. And, you know, being there and really helping people come together and listening to what was going on was really important because it was challenging times. And I think Execs now are going, I'm not hearing that and I'm not seeing it.

00;31;24;07 - 00;31;35;02

Brian Elliott

And therefore I'm worried. I'm worried either. Are people really, you know, actually working at home? But I'm also worried that maybe they don't get it. The challenge is a lot of those Execs also aren't in the digital tools their teams are using. Right,

00;31;35;02 - 00;31;35;28

Jeff Frick

right, right, right.

00;31;35;29 - 00;31;46;08

Brian Elliott

I've heard this so many times. You know, my senior my team is in Slack or it's in teams, but my leadership team is in email and text messages and in the office.

00;31;46;08 - 00;32;08;11

Brian Elliott

And if we want to converse with them, we literally have to do this translator layer where we take, you know, content out of one tool and put it into another. That's painful for your team because they're bringing that data to you, number one. But number two, you're just missing it. You're missing out on the fact that those same and if you think you're worried about your business and its performance, your employees are even more worried about your business and its performance.

00;32;08;11 - 00;32;17;06

Brian Elliott

They're just having the conversation in a different place than where you are. So you've got to find a way as an executive, get off that balcony and down onto the dance floor and get into it.

00;32;17;14 - 00;32;39;11

Jeff Frick

What's interesting is in the physical world, there's so many inhibitors to actually that communication, right? There's there's all kinds of gatekeepers. And if you're I mean, you sounds like you had a relatively small company. If you have any size of the company, you know, to try to get any kind of message to anyone with authority. You know, there's so many blockers, whether it's admins or TAs (Technical Assistants) or or whatever, and the tools are not easy.

00;32;39;23 - 00;33;02;13

Jeff Frick

Where in a digital space, you know, maybe I've put up a quick instant message. By the very nature of the tools, it's short and kind of to the point. And, you know, Adrienne Rowe had an interesting question. You know, we should spend less time worrying about getting the kids to the office and a lot more time training the older white guys like you and I to use today's digital tools because that's the way the world works today.

00;33;02;13 - 00;33;09;13

Jeff Frick

And, you know, kind of forget going back to the fifties, this is what you need to do to your point to get your fingers on the pulse of what's going on.

00;33;10;02 - 00;33;28;18

Brian Elliott

Well, and every every executive knows this. About the time that, every executive that I know has heard this a dozen and more times, about the time that you are completely bored with your message, that you're sick of saying and delivering it, getting in front of people and saying it. About half your audience has finally heard it for the first time.

00;33;29;08 - 00;33;50;02

Brian Elliott

Okay. So the larger your organization, by the way, the worse that problem is, whether it was me with 350 people or Google with 3,000, this problem compounds a little bit, but it's still the same issue, which is people absorb information in different ways. Some people need it and writing, some people need the visual, some people need the video or the live, you know, verbal conversation about it.

00;33;50;02 - 00;34;14;07

Brian Elliott

Some people take more time to do it. Digital gives you some great mechanisms for doing that. Shared video Is your friend, right? A public channel internally that allows people to ask questions that has rules the road around what questions you're going to answer and when you're going to answer them. And what what you know, standards of behavior are like are great ways to get people invested in that message as well.

00;34;15;10 - 00;34;40;19

Brian Elliott

That's that's a big part of it, is we are now as executives, a big part of our job, if not almost all of our job, is communication and enlistment of our people in things. That does involve the events and the all hands and all the rest of it. But those things. For every team that's distributed, think about the difference between, you know, the headquarters staff and the message they're getting versus everybody else that maybe 80% of your employee population.

00;34;40;27 - 00;35;06;12

Jeff Frick

Yes, it’s funny. Pierre had the same thing. He's a, was a French CEO running an Irish company with most of their employees in Brazil and India at the time of the recording. And he actually said having a headquarters is bad because, you know, in aggregates this this certain amount of gravitas around that that place, he’s like I didn't want I don't want a headquarters, I don't want this central place because that's not the way the world works.

00;35;06;16 - 00;35;32;11

Jeff Frick

Know it's not it's not Jack Welch’s GE anymore. Things are moving way, way, way, way too fast. And you know, just another concept to get your thoughts on is kind of hyper personalized fashion versus average. And I think that's a big part of the return to office conversation. I think Ryan Anderson had a post this morning and, you know, unfortunately for cost reasons, you know, offices got to be average versus hyper personalization around activities.

00;35;32;11 - 00;35;42;11

Jeff Frick

The whole rest of our life is hyper personalized, our media’s hyper personalized, everything's hyper personalized. To think that average is going to work, then go back to average just makes no sense to me.

00;35;43;00 - 00;36;02;25

Brian Elliott

No, not at all. And Ryan's got way more insight into workplace design than I do by far. But you know, we spent a couple of decades shrinking average square foot per human, putting more people into open office floor plans, which demonstrably makes their desire to integrate with each other, to converse with each other, go down because it's too loud.

00;36;02;25 - 00;36;19;25

Brian Elliott

Some people put their headphones on there and they hunker in, right? It doesn't help. Now people are coming back in and what was done for the last 20 years is no is even worse. Right? Because what they need is the flexibility to say, hey, look, my team's coming together for three days. I need a space for my team to work together for that period of time.

00;36;20;06 - 00;36;46;26

Brian Elliott

But all the meeting rooms are booked up like crazy. And then also, by the way, during that, you know, ten of us need on the on occasion to go off and do individual calls or to have some quiet heads down space. The demands for that sort of flexible modular space are huge. And we are we don't haven’t equipped ourselves to do it, let alone this small problem called wifi and how many meetings people are attempting to take inside of office buildings that weren't wired for this in the first place.

00;36;47;12 - 00;37;01;09

Brian Elliott

So if I'm if I'm being told to come back and I'm coming back and set up is worse than home and my and the commute makes me less productive than I was and I can't even find my team to be together and sit together and we can't get a meeting room. Tell me again why you're making me do this.

00;37;02;03 - 00;37;19;15

Jeff Frick

Yeah, it's. And the fact that I'm carrying the entire world's information, including all the office information in my phone now. I don't have the kids pictures on my cube anymore, they're on the phone, you know, the file cabinets on the phone, and don’t have a phone number anymore. That's on the phone. It's just it's interesting how all these things have merged.

00;37;19;15 - 00;37;29;28

Jeff Frick

And then there's this. I think one of your great lines, right? Executive nostalgia of a past that didn't exist. So, yeah, it's kind of interesting.

00;37;30;02 - 00;37;59;08

Brian Elliott

Credit where credit's due. Taryn Brymn on my team came up with that one first, but a lot leaders are expressing nostalgia for the way things worked back then, Right. And they're basing a lot of these decisions on, unfortunately, in our research, 65% of execs tell us that those future work plans are being made with little to no direct input from employees, which which is a shame because as an executive, I grew up in a very different era than most of my team did, right. Not only from a technology perspective, but also from a demographic perspective, social perspective, whatever else.

00;37;59;18 - 00;38;20;27

Brian Elliott

What made me successful, especially as a white male, non-primary caregiver, is going to be very different from what it takes for my team more broadly to be successful in doing it. That executive nostalgia is a set of blinders that is going to be problematic for a number of organizations as the world continues to unfold in terms of the need for, you know, broad based, diverse talent.

00;38;20;27 - 00;38;46;27

Jeff Frick

Yeah, So we're getting towards the end of our time. And in actually, I went to that Pierre question because ultimately at the end of the day, he's got this great line that that demographic trends trump everything. And we know that, you know, birth rates are going down in a lot of developed countries. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that the talent shortage, despite the current kind of hiccups in terms of layoffs and stuff, is not going to get easier.

00;38;46;27 - 00;39;03;14

Jeff Frick

It's going to get harder. So to be able to attract, engage and retain people is only going to get. So when you think of, you know, what you're talking to people, what you're seeing on the street, because that demographic wave, it doesn't matter what you do, that that just that's a big one that moves slowly, which I see. And what do you tell people?

00;39;03;14 - 00;39;10;10

Jeff Frick

How are you telling the need to to kind of deal with the world in which we live in today and Lord only knows what it's going to be tomorrow.

00;39;10;23 - 00;39;35;02

Brian Elliott

Part of it is helping executives themselves are challenged to you, right. You never want to you know, it's like pull out the world's tiniest violin. I recognize that. But change is hard for anybody. And so helping people understand that these trends are not in the favor of things going back to the way they used to. Right. Technology changes only advancing, not retracting demographic shifts are going to continue to happen.

00;39;35;02 - 00;40;01;05

Brian Elliott

And by the way, if you think you have a talent shortage now, just wait. It's only going to get worse because Western economy demographics are declining populations. What happens then? Pretty scary stuff. But what that means is that as executives, we've got to sit there and go, I'm going to have to see through someone else's eyes. I'm going to have to take the time to recognize that a lot of the preconceived notions that I've got about what worked for me may not be right for sizable parts of my population.

00;40;01;18 - 00;40;25;13

Brian Elliott

And and that's frustrating. That's hard, and that's challenging, but it's helping people understand that that is where the world is headed and helping them sort of step back, listen to their own employees and figure out what's going on there. Deloitte just shared their story recently of doing this with their own organization. They opened up their own return to office planning process to 90,000 employees and found a way to instrument it.

00;40;25;27 - 00;40;43;28

Brian Elliott

And one of the findings they had in doing that was a lot of the notions they had about, for example, younger workers were false, right? That they made the assumption based on like, well, I've talked to my kids and they want to be back in the office more often. So therefore, this must be how that younger generation is thinking.

00;40;44;07 - 00;41;04;18

Brian Elliott

They didn't looked at the results and saw that people in their first three years of being with the organization had just as much diversity of opinion about what they needed as those in their third decade. So that was a surprise to them. Unless you're actually engaging your employees directly in this, it's not going to work. And that's not just about things like return to office.

00;41;04;29 - 00;41;17;20

Brian Elliott

That's how we're going to leverage and upend and utilize things like generative A.I., right? It's the same set of challenges, which is the way that you do that is you figure out how do you enlist people in that process so that they're not scared.

00;41;17;28 - 00;41;25;14

Brian Elliott

Many of them, by the way, are already doing it. How do you help them figure out what problems they need to have solved that this can help solve. How do you support them with training?

00;41;25;28 - 00;41;52;29

Brian Elliott

And here's the crazy part. If you thought mediocre managers were a problem during remote, wait until you see what mediocrity of management does as generative A.I. starts showing up. Because all of the problems that you've got today with new technology and what it can do within organizations is going to be compounded dramatically. You've got to expend the time in training people to be outcomes driven hypothesis led. It's it's. This world is going to continue to evolve really fast on us.

00;41;52;29 - 00;42;10;13

Jeff Frick

Yeah. Well Brian is so great to catch up on you and also and thank you for all the work that you're doing and a lot of people are doing, which is I think, also helpful just to provide the data, right? So like get off your assumptions and actually look at some data and you know, the work you've done at Future Forum to go survey the 10,000 people is super helpful.

00;42;10;13 - 00;42;14;13

Jeff Frick

So really great to finally catch up and it's been a real treat.

00;42;15;03 - 00;42;17;12

Brian Elliott

Thanks, Jeff. Great being here with you. I appreciate you bringing me on.

00;42;17;16 - 00;42;24;29

Jeff Frick

Oh, my pleasure. All right. He's bright. I'm Jeff. You're watching Work 20XX Thanks for watching, and listening on the podcast. We'll see you next time. Take care.

00;42;27;14 - 00;42;27;23

Jeff Frick

Excellent

00;42;27;25 - 00;42;29;06

Brian Elliott

And no blood came out of my forehead.

00;42;29;06 - 00;42;31;01

Jeff Frick

No, blood but it would have been dramatic, though.

00;42;31;03 - 00;42;36;07

Brian Elliott

Before we started. It was not a slow drip. It was constantly down my forehead. And so luckily, it held.

00;42;36;10 - 00;42;38;06

Jeff Frick

That was great. Thank you very much.

00;42;38;28 - 00;42;40;00

Brian Elliott

Yeah. No, thank you.

‍