StreamSparkAI

speaker 1: Today we're here for this, managing team performance, keeping teams motivated and focused with Bob Sutton and Beth Steinberg. I'd like to do a brief introduction and we're going to get started. Bob Sutton is an organizational psychologist, bestselling author of eight books. He studies leadership innovation, organizational change, workplace dynamics. Bob is published over 200 articles, chapters, case studies, and scholarly and applied outlets. Bob is the guy that you want na ask about all things work. Also, he is joined today by Beth Steinberg. Beth is a tech industry advisor and coach with over 25 years of experience in organizational development, talent strategy and leadership development. She's also a wonderful follow on LinkedIn. So happy to have both of you here today and looking forward to the conversation. Welcome.
speaker 2: All right. Thanks, Robin. All right, let's get going. So welcome, everybody. The first person is a professor from Pakistan. Hello. So we've got 101 people, so we've crossed the hundred person margin. So Beth and I are not going to do the formal PowerPoint presentation. Here's our 64 points. Prepared ideas. Sometimes that's useful. We're mostly going to have a conversation. And as Robin indicated, I've spent with some 40 year studying organizations, but Beth, who I think has spent nearly that long actually leading organizations, so I talk about it and she does it. So let's make this interview mostly with Beth. Please put your questions in chat, or I guess it's Q&A. It's called because we want to weave in your ideas and questions throughout to make this as interactive as possible. Okay, Beth. So Robin gave a short description of of your resume and experiences. The first time I ever heard Beth Steinberg's name was when I went to work consulting for a guy named Chris Cox, who was a 25 year old head of hr at Facebook. And Beth had just left as head of hr at Facebook, and she's had many jobs since. I'm not going to list all of them, but it's a way to warm up rather than listing your long resume. Bathso, tell us what are the three most important jobs you had and what in the most important lesson from each, just to sort of get us a sense of your perspective on leadership.
speaker 3: Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you, Bob, and thank you, Robin, for that introduction. I've had a lot of great jobs, a lot of very interesting and challenging jobs. I certainly try to learn from each of those experiences. So I'm you know trying to distill it a little bit. And I would say, you know my my very first job was at Nordstrom, and that was many, many years ago. And you know when I was there, it was still kind of the second generation of the Nordstrom family, and it was very, very much centered then around you know customer service and doing what's right for the people that you were serving. And some of the things that I learned there have stayed with me throughout my career, and I still think about them today. And a few of those things are the concept of the inverted pyramid. And you know if you haven't seen that, it's essentially you know instead of the leaders at the top, it's really the people at the top and the leaders at the bottom. And to this day, I remember a visual that they had where there were like hands supporting the pyramid. And I have always taken that with me in thinking my job as a leader is to support the people in the organization and to support the people on my team. The other thing at Nordstrom that I really learned was little things matter. And there were a couple of occasions where perhaps I did something that was you know a good thing and maybe it went through something challenging with the customer. And I would get a note from Mr. Bruce, who's now passed away, who was the second generation, just thanking me for what I did. And you know, people whoreported to me know I write handwritten notes to my team, and I think I still have those notes and they've meant a lot to me. It's a very small thing that can mean an awful lot to people. So don't discount the small things.
speaker 2: Yeah, that's straight out of Adam grants research. When you thank people, it has it actually has a remark .
speaker 3: to saying thank you. Exactly, exactly. I think a lot of times we over engineer recognition and we don't have to. We don't have to. I think you know, Facebook was certainly I wasn't there for a long time, but it certainly had a lasting impact on me. And I think what I really learned at Facebook was in the early days, I think you know and I think this still happens today, there's there's a little bit of a disdain for having structure, having management, you know feeling that people just want it to be you know a free for all. And what I learned at Facebook is you may think that's what people want. They actually don't want that. And I think you know there's there's a continuum of you know being a real bureaucratic organization and being a chaotic organization. Nobody wants either, right? What I think people want is just enough management. So there's just enough structure where things are clear. You know what you're responsible for, you know who to go to. And so what I learned, I think, at Facebook is sort of the concept of just enough management, and you can go awry de either way by too much or too little. And then I would say kind of the third company where I really learned a lot, and I use some of the concepts I learned there, you know, again, in my coaching work, in the work I do at every company, I've been it ever since. And that's really the concept of proactive talent planning and talent strategy. And when I was at Nike, they were you know they were going through a time period where e -commerce was just you know coming up. That was a long time ago. But you know to think, you know nobody really bought shoes online at that time, but they knew what was coming. They didn't have a lot of people in the organization that knew how to do those things. So a process was started around being very meticulous around planning for the competencies that we did not have, thinking about succession in a very almost mathematical way, thinking about development in terms of, you know, what do we really need to do to give the people both the critical experiences and the competency building that they need to succeed in the organization? And it was a, you know, it was a took a lot of time. It was a big process, but the results really spoke for themselves. And I've taken a lot of that with me throughout my work since Nike.
speaker 2: All right. Well, that's a lot. So let me drill in on one thing before I go back to my semi prepared question. So the point you made about Facebook is really interesting, and it's a challenge for all kinds of organizations, for universities, for every startup I've ever known of, which is the question of it's basically you were saying how much management is enough. And so so Beth and I, one reason we're here is that we're gonna to try to advertise our course, which is becoming a good leader, which you actually have to pay for and like this thing, which is free and through Stanford. But one of the things we talk about in that course, and I'd like to dig in here more, is this research. This woman's name is Lindy Greer. Lindy Greer was at Stanford for a while. Now she's at Michigan and she has all these different data sets that show the hallmark of good leaders is they know when to push, when to give orders, when to take charge, when to make decisions, and they know when to back off. And it isn't just that the best leaders are always one of the others. They know how to do this sort of power shifting, is what she calls it. So that's sort of so to you thinking for the experienced and aspiring leaders out there, what advice would you have about when to push and when to back off? What are the signals .
speaker 3: from the people you need? Well, I think I think it's an interesting question that probably doesn't have an exact answer. I think part of it is understanding your people enough to know what they need and when they need it. And you know I've always had a saying, you know provide support without removing responsibility. So sort of knowing your people enough to know, listen, I'm gonna to have to come in and intervene right now because you really need the help, but also knowing when Hey, somebody learns by doing hard things and I'm not gonna to stop, you know I'm not going to intervene from somebody doing hard things, but I think you have to really be very meticulous and and kind of read things as they go in order to make that determination. But if something's failing, you probably need to go in and figure out, right? And I think often we wait too long. And I was just, I was thinking about this today, you know, I hear about and we're probably gonna to get to a question around this, but you know, I hear a lot of leaders who are very frustrated because people aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. Frustration is not a management strategy, right? It's just not you can be frustrated that's not going to do anything. So it's your job to figure out what you're going to do instead of just being frustrated.
speaker 2: So that's a symptom that you got to do something. Basically, frustration is sympthe symptom. Not so. So I'm just thinking of Lindy's research. And just to touch on one thing. One of the times when Lindy says in evidence shows that that leaders probably should intervene and is when there's sort of stream of dysfunctional conflict among people they lead, because that's a situation where actually authority is probably necessary to get them to stop fighting, maybe to have them work on the relationship. That's one time. Another time that Lindy emphasizes is there are some decisions, let's just say, selling a company when it's a startup going public, you actually were part of a company that just is going .
speaker 3: public today. Isn't that?
speaker 2: Do I know that? Well, no, they just filed to go public File Ed times. Yeah. So so those are decisions that are not partipative, decisions that they're made ighfrom the top. But then there's things like coming up with ideas, you know brainstorming about how to implement things like that would be more participative. Okay.
speaker 3: So what to do your people's work for them?
speaker 1: Beth I heard you say some things that make a difference when you're managing people and how sometimes we wait too long to come in. And I'm wondering, how do you set people up for success if frustration is is not a good management strategy.
speaker 3: how do you set people up for success? Yeah. Well, you know I think and Bob and I had a discussion about this earlier in the week, but I think there's a lot of research around a model that's a 60, 30, ten model, which basically says 60% of success is by setting things up in the right way before somebody even comes in, right? And that's like, is the job design right? Are you clear about what competencies that you need in this role? Are you know are there clear lines of reporting and clarity, clear goals, all of those things? And so I think that has a lot to do with that. I often see people rush in to fill a need with a head count without really thinking about. And I think it's a huge, huge mistake. And then you know people often fail and it's no surprise that they do, right? And so and then you know 30% is on the onboarding, getting them, you know the relationships that they need within the organization, collaboration, all of that. And then you know 10% is really the intervention that happens when somebody is failing. So it's like it's pretty rare that that actually has has a lot of ability to succeed if the other things have not been done. And so you know I think you really need to think up front about how someone's going to be successful before just rushing in and you know hiring somebody without doing that hard work that you need to do in the beginning. Bob, what would you add add to?
speaker 2: I want to build on that a little bit. So the model that Beth is talking about was originally developed by one of my mentors, Jay Richard Hackman. And Beth actually did a post about it on LinkedIn, just just came out today. So you can read Beth spso this this is brand new stuff. Richard was at Harvard and worked, probably spent 50 years studying team dynamics. You also can read more about the 60, 30, ten model, a woman named Saal Neely, a graduate of our program. I was under a dissertation committee. She wrote a book called the remote work revolution. So if you want to dig into it more, but the upshot is, let me sort of focus from, rather than being the academic and giving you citations to underline what Beth is talking about, there tends to be this attribution error that bosses make, and we might even make to ourselves that I'm failing. It must be my problem. That person is failing. They're a loser. But if you actually look at the evidence more often, somebody's failing because they've got a badly designed organization, team or job. And you should look to the context they're in. And I mean, there's all sorts of work, including some experiments at Google where they they would take people who are in the bottom decile and instead of firing them, just move them to a new job. And on average, theymove up to about the fiftieth percentile. So it's really important to not blame the person when the environment that they're in is designed to .
speaker 3: let them make them fail.
speaker 2: That's right. So any interesting questions, Robin, before? Yeah, thanks for asking these for asking Bob.
speaker 1: We just got a new question and I think a lot of people can kind of relate to it has to do with we have some of our leaders that want to know everything about everything in the business. When much of the info is out of their purview, we feel like it's going to weigh them down if they have this information they have no authority over. However, they continue to say that they feel like they need this .
speaker 2: information even even when it's not part of the department they are managing.
speaker 3: How should we handle this? Oh, Beth, that's that's a good one. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, so I do see this happen all the time. And I kind of my first instinct is to figure out why why do they, why do they feel like they need to know this? Oftentimes it is, you know, they have a need to want to control things and information may help them. It could be a status issue that you know they feel like I think status is a really, I don't know, you know, people are familiar with the scarf model, which is a neuroscience model, which I use all the time. But you know, status drives a lot in organizations. And so, you know, I often think about, is that driving it? The reality is sometimes if you have too much information, you cannot be effective. And you know, you have different leaders and different organizations for a reason. So, I mean, I think the way that I would deal with it would be to ask the person, why why do you think this is important? Why do you think you need this? And try to dissect it from there.
speaker 2: So I just to build on this, I tend to think of this being partly a cultural issue, that there are some organizations that I'll do a comparison between Google and apple. There are some organizations where there's so much secrecy that actually it's impossible for you to know what other people are doing. And this has the advantage of focus. It has the disadvantage of sometimes it's hard to weave things together. And then there's other organizations where the norm, where nobody ever says stay in your lane, hardly ever. And the one I think of is Google, where all my friends who have worked at Google, they seem to be invited to every decision on an every mail list. And so one of our friends, Kim Scott, who wrote a book called radical candor, quite famous book Kim describes. So she's at Google and she's getting hundreds of emails today day, okay? And she's invited to go to every meeting and be involved in every decision. She she moves to apple to teach apple University. And she said, I kept thinking my email was broken. I'd get two or three emails a day. And they were always specifically on exactly what I was working on and what my team was working on. And so some of that is sort of culture. And I think the right balance is somewhere in between the two. But in different organizations, the definition of what is staying in your lane is a lot different, a lot different than apple than it is in Google. So some is what's the local game?
speaker 3: Yeah. I do think transparency you is important to build trust. But I also think you know being in a million meetings a day does not help you be better at your job. And so you know and now there's AI technology where you can summarize, you know what happens in a meeting. You could take that and you could post, this is what happened in the meeting. So people could go back and read it if it's that important to know. But I think it's something that can really be driving ineffective you know leadership inside organizations.
speaker 2: All right, that's good. So I want to ask a question about self awareness since that's one of the big themes you and I are interested in. You've already luded to it. But but I want to pull in some of the questions too. We, Ruth has an interesting question. Maybe you can help us, Robin, sort of paraphrase it to me. This is about how to deal with sexism in organizations. Maybe you can paraphrase .
speaker 1: it better than that. Robin Yeah. Ruth wants to know how to overcome male bias in leadership and corporate. It sounds like the scenario that she's talking about is females being practically ignored. Great attendance and leading the team still leaves you out of management. So basically, what Bob said, how to overcome this very obvious bias that can sometimes take place in an organization. And in this case, she's asking about male versus female, but it could be you know, any kind of bias.
speaker 2: Well, well, Beth definitely knows .
speaker 3: about the bias of mail I have heard Yeah. I mean, this is a hard one. And I think unfortunately, bias still goes on in in most organizations. I think 11 piece of advice I would give on this is in kind of a non threatening way. Ask some of the men, do they see that this is happening? And you know I think there's probably the assumption that it's happening on purpose. Maybe it's not. And you know simply raising that you know this is what you see and you know how can we overcome this? That may actually bring some awareness to them that this is happening. And so don't assume the worst. I know that's hard, but don't assume the worst. And I usually try to seek to understand a little bit and try to overcome it that way. Yeah. So even though .
speaker 2: I guess the new administration says we're not supposed to use the term unconscious bias, it actually does exist. And just to tell you a little story that I was working with the companies about 20 years ago, and there were two women on the top management team who said that they had, like the CEO, use all the right language about being inclusive and wanting to bring in powerful women and bringing them along. And so there were two women and about eight men on the team, and the women said they kept getting interrupted more. And they even said to him, you're interrupting us more than the men. And he said, no, I'm not. So they counted. And about three weeks later, they gave him the date and was interrupting the women about five or six times more than the men. And they said he actually learned something and his behavior improved. And to me, that's that's the sort of story that at least in a trusting relationship, that it did help. But you know following, I guess, you know our audience members question, there is sexism and organization, and there are also some organizations that are worse than others.
speaker 3: I would also say I would agree.
speaker 2: So so I have a question, Beth. And so since you've had a lot of jobs, you've had more corporate jobs that almost anybody I know if I do the number. So yes. So when you do an assessment for a job offer, like how do you figure out whether you're walking to a place that has extreme sexism or just the usual sexism?
speaker 3: That's not what I want. So would you honestly, it's it's it's really tough to make that assessment. You know I think job interviews are such an imperfect process because everyone's sort of putting on their best face. You know certainly you can look at the diversity of the leadership team. You can get little signals as you're talking to different people within the organization in terms of you know you can ask them direct questions about you know what are the dynamics. But I'll be honest, I think it's impossible. It's hard to know. It's hard to know. So I just wanted .
speaker 2: to briefly address a question from a woman named Kimberly, which is basically we're being nonlinear and going all over the place. Will the program be more linear? Yeah yes. The program had an entire development team. It's linear as hell. So Beth and I are not our sort of classic, nonlinear, sort of nearly gossiby self that you're getting right now. We had a whole team, including Robin and course designers. So I'm sure Robin can tell you more about the class, but we promise we're more linear in the class.
speaker 1: Absolutely. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for your question. I'm sure our team will be reaching out to you with some more information about the course. This is this is a snapshot in time of Bob and Beth having a great conversation and hearing the wide breadth of experience that they have about whatever topic that they talk about. So I really love the dynamism of these live sessions. So that's what you can look for. Kim, someone will be reaching out to you.
speaker 2: Yeah. All right. Thanks, Robin. All right, so enough for a commercial break. Let's go back to to talking. So so one of the topics that you and I keep going back to you, I would say, in terms of your work, and then just me in terms of writing, is so so in my book, good boss, bad boss, I talk about how, and this is one of the themes in the class, Kimberly, that the best bosses are in tune with what it feels like to work for them, that the best bosses have empathy. And it's not just so they can be loving and caring. It actually turns out that you can get better performance out of people and innovation if you understand what it feels like to work for you. So that's great. I can say that as an academic. But so Beth, in real life, so what do you do and how do you develop managers so they have more empathy for the people they work with and understand how their behavior impacts those people.
speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I mean that.
speaker 2: how do I do it?
speaker 3: Well, I think, you know, for my own personal leadership style, I think, you know, it certainly took me a while as I matured in my own leadership to understand how important this was. And as I you know, as I started to develop and quite honestly see leaders who I had reported to and really taking an inventory of what they did that I thought was really effective and helped me succeed and and be the best I could be, and the things that they did that I thought didn't and and were barriers to my success, and I you know I really started thinking about how do I take the things that are good and keep doing those things, and how do I never do the things that were bad? And I you know I even like made a spreadsheet of them. You know I was really conscientious of this. And so I think a couple things. Number one, I tried to coach leaders and I've tried to do this myself of really trying to understand the person individually. And I know that can be hard when you have a large team, but people are not the same. And I think you know there are some people that need much more you know feedback than others. There's some people that need much more structure than others. And you it's your job as a leader to try to understand those things and not have a much more customized approach to how you're manage managing your team. And I think when you have that relationship, you can really see what is happening and express your your empathy for the for the person and try to help them get through it. Again, it doesn't mean you're going to do somebody's job for them because you cannot do that. But you really need to make sure that you are being very open, that people can tell you things, good things and bad things. I think it's really difficult when you're the type of leader. Optimism is extremely important. And I know you know when entrepreneurs, it's very important, but you need to be able to have somebody come to you and tell you the truth and tell you when something is not working right? And so really coaching people to do that and to be able to be open with their team, it's really important. I also think showing your own vulnerability is really crucial in leadership and in developing empathy. And you know, nobody's perfect. I think, you know, I've certainly come in and had bad days and probably done things that are not good for my team. And as I got kind of older and wiser and more experienced, I'd realiboy if I do that, which I've done many times, I go back and say to the person, I'm really sorry. That was not you know, that wasn't about you. That was about me. And so a lot of it is simply .
speaker 2: just being a human being. So I mean, there's so much, so much there was, I had sort of two reactions to this. The first one to that sort of struck me is more of a story or it's like a little study. We did so some years ago we taught a class at the Stanford design school with Katherine Valand, Perry claiban, who do some stuff with Stanford online. And so anyhow, it was a class. We actually, our main clients were five CEO's of startups, all first time CEO's, all under 30, all men. So you, these are Young tech Bros, got a little money. And one of the venture capitalists we worked with described them is babies with loaded guns. They didn't know what they were doing, but they had a lot of money and and we're good technologically. So we had our student teams work with them and analyze their meeting behavior. And what they measured was a lot of these were 15 minutes stand up meetings. So they measured the percentage of talking time by the CEO versus everybody else. And they would also measure the percentage of questions that the CEO asked versus the number of statements they made. So there's one co in particular, I remember 15 minute meeting, 14 minutes of talking, all statements, no questions. And back to this sort of, this unconscious bias. And this team was all men. So this is all, you know, this classic startup, the degree to which this guy got better throughout the term by changing his behavior. He would even sort of practice the meeting before. And to me, the thing that I learned from that, and this is a self awareness thing, he had no self awareness, but once he got the data, he actually got better. And one other just story about failure. One of the most difficult places to deal with failure and vulnerability is in healcare. And healthcare decisions sometimes kill people, and there are mistakes that kill people. And one of the most striking things I ever saw was that the University of	Cincinnati Children's hospital, this is about twelve years ago, and the CEO of the University of	Cincinnati Children's hospital started out our meeting, which was on evidence based practices, by showing a video about a mistake his team made that killed a little girl by giving her the wrong solution. And he said, I think about this every day, and I talk about this constantly, because we have to be aware of the fact that that if we don't have the psychological safety for mistakes you were talking about, because that's what happened, was one nurse who was pretty sure something was wrong, but she was afraid to speak up, that we need a culture where people call each other out. And so to me, that's an extreme case of somebody trying to change a culture and using as bad a mistake as you can make, killing a nine year old child. So that was very striking to me. Okay. So Robin, there's a lot of questions coming in. What's interesting?
speaker 1: Yeah, thanks so much. So Bob, early on when we were working on the course, you said to me, Robin, the headline of the course is understanding what it's like for the people that you're leading. So the self awareness, so let's say that you have a little bit of self awareness. In the case you just gave us, they got some data, they had a little bit of self awareness and they were like, Oh, the question is, how can leaders work on developing empathy? Beth, you had said, just be a human in the world and you have developing empathy. Are there other things that they can do? If maybe it's a little bit hard for people in the workplace to be a human in the workplace, how can they work to develop some empathy? A lot of questions about that.
speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is understanding kind of the implications of their actions. And you know that oftentimes people don't. I mean, I have a saying like nobody comes in to sabotage the company. Nobody tries to do a bad job. And so a lot of times when something isn't going right, it is because somebody does not understand implications of their behavior. So I think, you know, if they have, you know, if I am a new leader and I'm trying to gauge how I'm doing, am I displaying empathy? Am I doing the right things? My strategy would be to have enough of a relationship with maybe a peer, a direct report, to ask them, please tell me the truth, you know, how am I showing up and what do you think is good and what could I modify? And then, you know, really kind of taking that to heart and using that to develop your own leadership style, but you sort of have to have the awareness and the curiosity to ask those questions. Yes. And I think that's very important to to do. So I would do A A yes.
speaker 2: And so there's questions. There's also finding ways to walk a mile in their shoes, whether it's employees or customers. And and one of my my favorite examples years ago was on a MacArthur foundation group. I was the token business person. So this shows you how focused this for k through twelve education. And I remember there was this New York City high school teacher, and she spent the week shadowing students. And the reason that she was shadowing students is she was mad at them because they were so often late to class, and she thought that they were smoking cigarettes and gossiping and smoking dope, whatever, you know, that they were just doing all this bad behavior. But and after she started shadowing him, she realized, and this is back to bsixty 3010 rule, that things were sort of structured, that it was almost impossible for them to be on time sometime. And I remember telling the story, there was a woman, so this is a seventh story high school in New York City. They have to go up seven stories of stairs, or there is elevators, but the elevators are so crowded they're useless. So the bell rings. And there's a woman who's in the basement, the teacher, her five minutes in between class, the teacher keeps them late for two minutes, okay? So all of sudden she's lost three minutes, so she starts going up the stairs. Well, it's that time a month, and this woman has to change her tampon, okay? I mean, she's not going to go to class with a leaky tampon. Goes in the bathshe, changes her tampon, and she gets to class four minutes late. And you know and the principal realized, well, there isn't enough time for them to get there. And gee, part of the problem is because the teachers are teaching him too late. So they added more time in between classes. And she started really, really rithe teachers to let him out on time. And to me, that's a really good example of having having sort of empathy in this case is you for a student, for a client, for everyone want to call them. And there's lots of other similar examples of if you understand what it feels like for the person to go through the workday, it has a huge effect.
speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I think when I was at Nordstrom, I you know when you were a manager in charge of the store, which you know you got to be, you would do anything that needed to be done. I mean, you would be busing tables in the in the cafe, all kinds of things. And it did drive such an understanding and empathy for you know jobs that were not your jobs. And I think that's really important for people to do kind of the old hp management by walking around, kind of get get out of your day to day and really take a look at what's going on inside your your department and inside your team.
speaker 2: So consistent of that, some years is a long time ago. So I spent some time with the folks at McDonald's to understand their perspective on running McDonald's. Of course, they're all franchise, so they have limited control over how they're actually ran. But when they did a model of what would be a good owner or a shift manager at a McDonald's, it would always be the person who would fill in and do what was ever necessary. We can see these, see where the restaurant, sometimes there's the restaurant manager who stands there with their arms folding, does nothing. And then sometimes there's a restaurant manager buses the table, who takes your order, who brings your drink, who fills up your water glass, and they understand how it works, and they do whatever is necessary. And to me, that's the difference between the sort of good versus not so good managers. They they have empathy and they also support everybody.
speaker 3: Yeah management is not an activity you do on the sidelines in in .
speaker 2: my opinion. All right. So let's see any interesting questions and then maybe kind have a conversation about doing tough things. Yeah.
speaker 1: this is a good one that came in. And I think this is apropos given the course and where it sits in the program too. Wondering if each of you have any words of wisdom on given that effective communication is a key aspect of leadership, many, many successful or words of wisdom you have for people who are a little bit more introverted and they're not prone to effective communication. Maybe what you've seen be successful for folks like this?
speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I go death.
speaker 2: Yeah.
speaker 3: go ahead on, go ahead. We're interrupting each. It's just I don't think, you know there are very successful leaders who are not super charismatic great speakers. And I think that's you know that's sort of a notion that is not accurate. Certainly, there are some great orators who are leaders, but to me, being a great leader is really about the person to person communication and you know that development of relationships. So I would not ever think that an introvert was not necessarily an effective communicator. I do think communication is tough and there are ways that you can build that skill. But I would not necessarily say, if you can't get on stage and do a talk, you're not an effective communicator Yeah.
speaker 2: So so building, I was going, I was getting all like this because because I think that there's there are lots of leaders I met who are fantastic. And I kind of lithat Beth brought up the 60, 30, ten thing because for leaders, yes, the ten, this might be different for politicians, by the way, but for leaders of regular organizations and teams, the 10%, they're in front of the room or whatever, it might be important. But the other 90% in the way that they set things up is really important. And I'll use the example of my wife is quite introverted, and she was managing partner of a very big law firm, and she's also CEO, the girl Scots ts of northern California. And she's quite introverted. And the way that marina tends to do things is she thinks of how to pull in the extroverts to do the talking, but she picks them, she tells them what to say, and when they screw up, she coaches them or she won't let them do it again. And that could be everything from girls at Girl Scout meetings to lawyers pitching clients. And to me, there's lots of elements of leadership that there's very successful introverts. And I just thinking of some quite successful introverts in the history of Silicon Valley. Eletand Packard were really introverted. And and by the way, Tim Cook is too, and they're doing okay. And ed Camille is pretty introverted too. For a while, my colleague huggy Rao and I were hanging out with ed Camill. And ed is the opposite of a narcissist when he wrote his book creativity incorporated. I read a first draft and I said, not enough narcissism. You hardly talk about yourself at all. And so it is possible. And he worked with Steve Jobs, so he had plenty of extra version and charisma to help him. But but to me, in some ways, it's just that introverts and extroverts need each other is the way I would think about it. All right. When else is interesting?
speaker 1: Well, Karen wanted us to know, and I think this is a good point, there's a cable tv show called Undercover Boss, which is basically what you guys described, where the CEO goes in disguise and works in the company. And this is interesting. The CEO often finds a huge disconnect between executive decision making and things that really go on. And many of the workers featured have been promoted because they actually understand what's going on.
speaker 3: I mean, I do think for sure, and I've seen this over the years, that the the more senior that you get in an organization, kind of the less you know about what is really going on. And I think part of that is you know you're not as close to the day day to day, but also the information that comes to you tends to get really filtered because people don't want to disappoint you. They don't want to tell you things you know that might be bad information. I think that's dangerous. And so I think it's really important to be the kind of leader that can hear all kinds of information and to try to stay as close to things without micromanaging, because that's a very bad thing. But you do need to understand what's what's going on inside your department and your team.
speaker 2: You do. And by the way, it's just now to flatter more powerful people. It's just the way that human organizations are. Years ago, I got to know Toby costgrove, who is CEO at the Cleveland Clinic. He went from running the eight or nine cardiovascular surgeons, being head of the largest employer in the state of private employer in the state of Cleveland. And he said, all of a sudden I became better looking, my dregot better, my jokes got funnier. And he said, it took me a while to realize that I hadn't gotten any better at all. They were just all Brown nosing me. And you really got to be careful. Be careful with that. So, so, Beth, you want to talk a little bit. We've been talking about all the nice stuff, but you know, I was just thinking Microsoft laid off 3% of its workforce this week. There's all this stuff that happens in organizations that are tough, many of which you have not .
speaker 3: only seen personally, you have done personally.
speaker 2: And I've talked to you right after you've done layoffs and you werthem in a very good place. So so let's talk about some of the tough things that leaders do, saying no, giving people negative feedback, maybe even laying people off. So what have you learned about what I would call it, doing the tough, dirty work of management? Because for me, bosses have to do that.
speaker 3: That's part of the job for sure. And I think you know the first thing I would say is if you wanna be a leader, you need to understand you will have to do hard things and things you do not want to do. That is that is part of the job. You will have to give people hard feedback. You will likely have to terminate somebody for performance. You may have to do layoffs. You may have to work in constrained environments without enough resources so that you need to be able to be able to do those things. And they are not easy. And again, I think for me, what I always try to do is when I am approaching a hard thing, I've had to you know, fire many people in my career, unfortunately, you know, it's really important to me to be clear, to be empathetic and to really treat people with dignity and respect in all situations. And you know, even when they're hard, you need to, you know, I think I've shared with Bob, like I one time had to fire somebody for doing doing, I don't even know what it's called, like a inhaling a whipped cream can in the espresso bar at Nordstrom. It was a crazy thing I had to fire somebody for. And in my hand, I'm like, why would someone do something like this? I still treated that person with dignity and respect. And you know, so you really do have to have that lens in all cases. And you know, when you were operating in difficult environments, I always try, which again, as a leader, you will do. You know, economies are cyclical. You have good times, you have bad times. You will have to do these things. I always try to help employees, you know, my team, think about what can you learn from this situation? How can you apply what you were learning right now for whatever you want to do next? What competencies are you building from this experience? And really try, you know, I don't wanna be pollyanic like, Oh, it's all fine and not at all. This is hard, but what do you learn from this hard thing? You know, when you think about if you were the CEO of a company, what would you think about from a structure perspective, from a hiring perspective to potentially avoid layoffs, right? What can you learn from these situations? I also think, quite frankly, just having a good team dynamic where people can be there for one another is really important. I've had lots of situations where teams are like, this is really hard. At least we have each other. I come in every day because we have the team. We know what we're focused on, we know the impact that we're making and we're you know we're doing this together for the good of the company, and that gets us through.
speaker 2: That's wonderful. So I'm going to ask Beth the final question a few minutes, but I want to address something that lynweg asked, which I think is really important. It's one of my pet peeves and something I've thought about my whole career. And it's funny because it even it even applies to the Cleveland Clinic. But anyhow, how can I Foster a supportive environment in a lab setting? Is a lab director rather than a competitive one, especially in a setting where multiple employees are vying for promotions. So here's the best I can do. The best I can do, and this is something I've thought thought about for years, is there's a difference between teams and organizations in terms of how they define a superstar. And in organizations that in teams that Foster cooperation, they reward people who do good individual work and help others succeed. And that, by the way, those are the surgeons who get promoted at the Cleveland Clinic. There's a famous soccer star. I can't remember her name right now, but I remember going to a speech and she described how her uncle gave her a dollar for a goal and $1, $0.50 for an assist. I think that's that's a pretty good example of that's better to give them to receive. And in an academia, I'm thinking of groups of heart surgeons, I'm thinking groups of scientists. Just having been in academia a long time, there seem to be two sort of sets of cultures. One is the I get ahead by stabbing you in the back, or at least by not helping you. And there's other ones that I get ahead by doing my good work and helping other people succeed. And you know, Microsoft, which I said, you know, I'm not happy about the 3% layoff, but I had some conversations about three or four years ago with Amy Coleman, who was then head of corporate hr. She's now the top head of hr. And she said, we completely changed our performance evaluation system under sati Nedela. So the superstars are people who don't stab people in the back and don't help people, the people who do good individual work and play well with others. And having been in academian lab situations, I've seen both kinds. So that's the best I can do. I don't know, Beth, whether you have add to that.
speaker 3: No, I mean, I just would say I definitely have worked for leaders or have worked with leaders who feel like setting up an environment where people duking it out that, you know, somebody wins and somebody loses is the way to decide who gets promoted. I think it's that's a really bad strategy, and I think it can really hurt the culture of a company. And I don't you know, Bob, I don't know if there's research on this, but like you know my guess is results will not be long term sustainable in that sort of competitive environment where they I think I think at .
speaker 2: the individual level, just read Adam granants book, give and take. His his argument is that is that and he has some team level stuff that people who are givers and leaders who are givers tend to do better in the long term as long as they don't get exploited. Okay, so we got five minutes left, so I'm going to ask Beth my final question and then Robin's going to take it away. So so I love the person who asked like, gee, this isn't very linear. Is the class more linear? Yes, we promise you the class is more linear. But I want to ask Beth that sort of a closing question. And as you can tell from Beth, she's just scratching the surface. She said, I sometimes think that if Beth would write a leadership book would be called something like leading people through hell. The number of crazy things we've been through, it's just nuts.
speaker 3: But but so you've .
speaker 2: had this remarkable career, but just sort of the you know I love to end on a positive note. So looking back, so what are you most proud of? I mean, you tend to be a very self critical person, but you've done all sorts of wonderful. What are you most proud of?
speaker 3: Let's see. I mean, I definitely am proud of my career and how hard I work for sure. But I would say what I am most proud of, especially kind of now where I'm you know sort of at the the end endish of my career, is the people that have worked on my teams who are now sheat people, officers, svps of people, you know, vps of talent and feel like they learn the skills to be able to do those jobs, you know working on on my teams. And I am in touch with so many of those people who are still in my orbit, still, you know call me for advice. I often call them for advice now. And without question, that is what I'm the most proud of.
speaker 2: And then to me, that's what great leaders do, is they produce other leaders, and then they support one another. So I think that's that's sort of sort of a beautiful answer. Okay, so we're we're at the end of our what unprepared remarks. We had some questions prepared. I'm sorry we didn't get to all of your questions and comments. They're actually fantastic. So Beth and I, we taught this class together. We'll have other future adventures together. And we look forward to seeing you at other Stanford online events. And we even do some stuff in person at Stanford now that the Covid craziness is over. So thank you so much. And thanks for hosting us, Robin. And a big thanks to my friend Beth for joining us. Thank you, Bob. And thank you, Robin.
speaker 3: Thank you both. Thank you both for coming here and having .
speaker 1: this honest and engaging conversation for an hour. It's like you guys are in the same room chatting and we just get to listen. So thanks so much and thanks everyone who joined. It's all your questions and your participation and interest that make this such a wonderful time for everyone. So you're going to be getting the recording. If you would like to see more of Beth and Bob on your computer screen, you can check out becoming a good Leader Course as linked in your dashboard. Thanks.
speaker 2: everybody. Signing off from stanyou. Bye bye.