Dealing With Today’s Employee

David finds the courage to address a topic he’s been putting off for awhile, as he is seeing more agency principals struggling to maintain both healthy and productive work environments by leading the ongoing process of resolving tensions within their teams.

Links

"Adapting to a Modern Workforce" by David C. Baker for punctuation.com

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, we make a point of trying not to do timely episodes. The topic of today's episode is Dealing with Today's Employee. Is this a timely topic, or is it a timeless topic?

David Baker: Oh, shoot. We did fall into doing something timely here, but it's not like a hot take. It's more of like the last 10 years. Are we allowed to do those? I don't know.

Blair: I think we're allowed to do whatever we want. I'm just curious. I know you get into it in this post because this is a post that has dropped already. You've received a lot of feedback from readers on it. My take on it, it's a little bit timely. It's something that has been building in you. I know from personal conversations we've had over the last few years. It may also be a somewhat timeless topic, too. I think maybe we can let the audience figure that out.

David: Yes. There's parts of it that are absolutely timeless. You hinted at just a second ago, I've been sitting on this thing forever because I'm a wuss, essentially. It kept getting thrown in my face, too, because when I'm talking with clients during the lead gen module for the consulting side, I would sometimes share my screen because they would ask, "How does this work for you? How do you write things?" And so on. I say, "Oh, well, let me show you." Okay, here's a folder of the things I've sent to Emily to get an illustration. Then here's the folder of all the articles that are ready to go. There's 60 of them. I'll sit down on a Sunday morning and I'll just pick one that I'm motivated to write."

This one was originally titled Activist Employees. It will alphabetize to the top. Inevitably, somebody would say, "What is that about? I'd say, "Oh, I'm going to rename that." I just haven't had the courage to write about that. That's the one that's been sitting there longer than anything else because I've just been a wuss.

Blair: I don't know if you've been a wuss. I think we're going to talk about issues that you probably couldn't have spoken about a few years ago. I think that's the reality.

David: Oh, that's true. We were at a point in history where this was not have been a welcome observation for sure.

Blair: Yes. All right. Hopefully, we're through that point in history.

David: We'll find out.

Blair: We'll see.

David: We'll find out.

Blair: We'll see if we still have careers after this. I'm just the interviewer, so I'm going to be fine.

David: I'm the one to be canceled, not you. Yes.

Blair: Okay. Dealing with today's employee, the implication is today's employee is a little bit different than yesterday's employee. You make this first point in this post, this idea of switching first and second place from clients to employees. I really like how you talk about what used to make you tired. Unpack this idea, switching first and second place from clients to employees.

David: Yes. Because you'd have a just a casual conversation, or maybe it was a deeper conversation about an engagement. We would, with our clients or prospects. You do the same thing. You would start to hear, after the pleasantries, it's like, "So tell me what's going on. Why are you thinking of making a change, or what are the pressures that you're feeling?" And so on. Inevitably, up until about maybe four or five years ago, I don't think there's like a firm boundary, but up until four or five years ago, inevitably, the thing that brought people to taking a deeper look at their engagement at the firm was clients. It's like, oh, I'm just like, "Their payment terms," or "They don't get back to me. Their expectations are crazy. They keep asking us to do more and more work and not pay for it." All the stuff that none of it would be unexpected to hear.

That has changed over the last few years in that those pressures are still real, but they're number two. Now, number one, what's moved up on the leaderboard is challenges with employees. I will hear this from many, many, many people who talk to me, either clients or just prospects or just people I'm connecting with. It's like this is the most challenging thing about running my firm is the team. I would agree with what you said at the beginning about the marketplace of people changing. I think the leaders have changed as well. You can definitely see that in the changes in parenting style, and that carry over to management/leadership style as well. While how you feel about clients is still up there, it's been displaced by the challenges of running your firm, those challenges that come with the people in it. That's what's changed.

Blair: I'll make a generalization and ask if you agree with this or disagree with it. It's more of a hypothesis, but let's say 10 years ago just to make this nice and clean push it far back in time, the number one comment you hear around their culture or their team is like how great their culture is, how great their team is, and Today the number one issue is they're just so fucking tired of it all.

David: Yes.

Blair: Is that about right?

David: Yes, it is including the language, I would say. Where does this come from? That part is a lot harder to really unpack. I believe it's indisputable that there is a difference in how we interact with our team. How do we explain that? Some of it comes from the whole purpose thing. There's something I didn't even write about in this article that I want to write about down the road once I get a little more clarity around it. Humans, in general, are looking for meaning. They're looking for purpose. Some of the things that supplied that to them in the past have crumbled a bit. The nuclear family is a little bit different. The role that religion and church played is a little bit different. At the same time that all of these things have changed, politics are becoming more important for people, and social media is a way to express yourself. It's just a different world.

Cultural expectations. If you just go look at the websites of firms and you pull out the one or two observations that occur on almost every website in this industry, it's about how welcoming we are, we want you to bring your whole self to work. It's about accommodation, about work hours, where you can work, what you can believe, what you can say, so people are doing that. They're bringing their whole selves to work, and now principals are saying, "Oh, could you leave a little bit of yourself at home?"

Blair: That part right there, leave that at home.

David: Yes.

Blair: Yes, that's interesting. A misunderstanding or misapplication of purpose and your point that's not in the post is that, yes, maybe the sources of purpose or the places to express it or to find it, they're not as solid in people's lives as they were before. We're looking to get that done through work.

David: Yes, exactly. I think that's more true with young men than it is with women, and there's all kinds of data about that. Scott Galloway talks about it all the time. Listen to this. This is an activism that illustrates the point. Now this is not happening in our industry. I want to make it clear. This is simply an extreme example of what's happening on the media side, which is not true for us, but it's an example of what's changed in the workplace. This is a quote, says, "Members of the Times," so the New York Times Tech Guild, "which represents approximately 600 workers, went on strike on Monday over stalled contract negotiations. The strike threatens to interfere with the paper's election coverage. The workers of the Times are demanding a ban on perfume in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement."

This is reported in Semafor just a few months ago. What were workers worried about in the past? It was like, "Let's not die on the job. Let's not be exposed to chemicals at work." Now we're talking about perfume. I guess that's a chemical. We have our lives so much more settled and in control, and we've just lost, I think, this sense of gratitude, and now it's like, "No, this work environment is really great, but I don't think about that. What I think about is how it's not oriented around me and what I want. You have told me, as an employer, that this business is built around me, and so here's what that's going to mean for you. Now that is an overstatement, I realize that, but it's just a light on what's happening in the field.

Blair: I was speaking at a conference a few months ago, and there was this really interesting confluence of events that happened. The chief creative officer from Wieden & Kennedy was doing a talk, and he showed the Nike ad they did for the Paris Olympics. I forget the specifics of the ad, and I'm not a big consumer of broadcast television, so I'd only seen it a couple of times, but it's very moving. You have these Olympic athletes talking about-- not just Olympic athletes, but professionals, talking about how competitive they are. They're single-minded in their competitiveness. Some of the lines are like, "Am I fun to be around? No." Basically, I'm an asshole because I'm going for the brass ring.

Everybody in this room, full of agency owners, is moved by this. It's a very inspiring ad. Then, a little later in the conference, these firms do this sharing of things that have happened in their business, and there's more than one example of a firm talking about how they struck an employee committee to establish the culture and the positioning of the firm. They proudly shared what their people came up with, and it was all this, I want to say, kumbaya, feel-good, safety stuff. I thought, "Am I the only one in the room struck by the contrast of these two things?"

David: The ad about crushing your opponents versus safety and belonging.

Blair: Yes.

David: The contrast.

Blair: We are cheering the person who is going for the brass ring, the person who is going for the gold medal. We understand everything in their lives that they give up to be the best in the world at what they do. We cheer that, and then at the same time we say, "But in our own business, on our own team, we're prioritizing safety and tolerance." I use that word tolerance because I think you referenced this in your piece, or maybe it was afterwards, David Maister's piece from 2001, The Problem of Standards. He talks about multiple topics in that excellent piece of thought leadership. I repost it every six months, and I have for years.

The key, why you reference it, why I always reference it, is he talks about, he doesn't use this word, but I use the word macroculture. There are really only two macrocultures. There's a macroculture of tolerance, where everybody gets to belong. Everybody feels safe. You can't really get fired here. There's a macroculture of intolerance, which is if you can't keep up, you can't stay. That Nike ad that is all about intolerance. That's the culture of a winning team and the culture of tolerance-- I didn't mean to take a position on this argument, but here I am like heatedly taking a position because it strikes a chord with me. That culture of tolerance, everybody gets to feel okay. Nobody gets left behind. We're family. We're all in this together.

I think we've swung way over to that side of the spectrum to this. We've built these firms with a culture of tolerance as opposed to intolerance. What Maister says in this post, which is really a transcript of a speech, is "There's no moral decision here. Either of these cultures is fine, but you can't mix cultures." He says that. He says either is fine. Then he says, "But I can prove to you that if you choose a culture of tolerance, your life will be miserable."

David: That's, I think, exactly what's happening. I want to make a distinction, too, between tolerance for religious beliefs or sexual orientation. The problem is that we have somehow unwittingly decided that tolerance in those areas carries over into tolerance for performance of your job.

Blair: Right, lack of.

David: Or lack of, right. When I was researching for this, I came across this quote from Dean Leak in the UK, who was an Olympian. Just to parlay what you were saying further, he says, "Our low performers are scoring highest in our engagement scores." Listen to that again. "Our low performers are scoring highest in our engagement scores."

Blair: They're most engaged because they're not actually working, but go on.

David: "And high performers are those that are least engaged. Businesses have hit the accelerator to create environments where everyone feels heard, valued, and included. Yet, we've arrived at a place where workplaces prioritize comfort over courage and agreeableness over constructive disagreement. It's time we took the foot off the pedal and looked in the rear mirror to consider the damage that's been done. The workplace has transformed into a damp, cold corridor where no one dares to offer constructive criticism or spark new ideas."

What would follow from that is, okay, I'm not going to impose from the top down the new direction of this firm. I'm going to build a lot of collaboration into this. There should be some of that to be sure. Then let the committee, over seven months, come up with a brainless recommendation that doesn't take us anywhere. This isn't going to work, folks. It's just not going to work.

Blair: I think the beginnings of it were probably pretty noble, and the motivations were pretty pure. Then one day we all wake up and it's like, "Oh, where did all the A players go?" They left. The A players left because the B and the C players pushed the A players out. You've got a lot of highly engaged people arguing about things that have nothing to do with the value that you're creating in the world.

David: Yes. The high-achieving ones leave and start their own firms. Then, unless they understand what they have started with that process, they will end up at exactly the same place. That's this culture of growth that we've created. Just bear with me, as I sort of just jokingly talk about it. You have a high performer who's tired of these other people around him or her, and so they go off and they start their own firm. They make a mark in the marketplace. Because their work is good, the clients start coming. Because the clients start coming, they say, "Oh, I need to hire people." It's like, "Okay, I want to hire high performers like me. Oh, I guess I'm not doing as much of the work anymore. I'm managing these high performers. I don't like to manage these high performers. I don't wake up in the morning dying to win next year's management award."

Then you wake up and you discover, "Oh my God, I'm in the people business now." That's when going all the way back to how we started this thing. That's when they wake up and say, "Oh shit, I didn't start this thing to be in the people business. Some of these people need more coddling than I'm willing to do. I want a culture of high performance. How do I do that? My neighbors don't appreciate that approach. My peers don't appreciate it. I read all the trade pubs. They're against it. How do I create a culture of high performance without getting canceled in the marketplace?" Again, let's make a distinction here between tolerance for certain things and tolerance for just not doing your job.

Blair: Yes. Some people are going to choose to be triggered by that word, but I'm really talking about the tolerance for standards. That's why Maister's piece is called The Problem of Standards. He said, "The problem is you can set goals and standards, but if you do not enforce them, they're meaningless."

David: Right. The enforcement is where it gets uncomfortable. Not setting the standards. It's enforcing the standards. It gets uncomfortable.

Blair: You have a great point. You call it a data point on the near shore, far shore, basically comparing offshore labor with onshore labor. Do you want to speak to that?

David: Yes. This is a specific verbatim quote that somebody wrote me recently. A principal said, "Not specific employees, but in general, it's super tough to work with the large group sensibilities. Employees now have lots of opinions on literally everything. I remember things were different in the past. Everything seems to be critiqued and evaluated skeptically, from things like the clients we bring in, our decisions, and our policies. Also, in general, critical thinking is hard to come by. Even in our higher-level employees, basic critical thinking is often skipped."

That's the near-shore issue. That's a broad brush. I know. Then you don't hear people saying the same thing about their team members overseas in far or near shore situations, where I have been told a hundred times from principals, it's like, "Between you and me--" they lower their voice, "Between you and me. I can't believe the difference in their approach to work. They're grateful for a job. The work-life balance thing is a little more flexible from their standpoint. They'll speak to issues if I ask them to, but they don't dig their feet in and feel like they've got to comment on every policy we have. They're just a delight to work with. I wish I didn't have any in-country people." Now, they don't say that, but you can read between the lines.

That's the data point. It's like, oh, wow, our workers are a little bit different. That's not true across the board, but it is a generalism that I think is basically true. How do we fix this? That's another conversation. I just want to start by acknowledging, without all the answers, I just want to say, listen, we have a problem because what's tiring people out in this field is their employees. It's not their client.

Blair: What's tiring owners firm principals out is--

David: Owners. Yes.

Blair: You do have some guidance on how to fix this. Do you want to get into it, or do you want to save it for another episode?

David: I can describe it. I think my hesitation is I just don't have many answers. I don't think there is a quick answer. I think somehow blaming this on the new generation is wrongheaded, and it's stupid. It also means that you're not taking responsibility for how you've set the culture.

Blair: That's an interesting point because this is somewhat timely. This is happening now. You make the point in this post that this isn't a generational thing. This isn't about like a certain age cohort. This is happening across all the age cohorts right now. Is that correct?

David: That's right. Yes. A 50-year-old versus a 30-year-old. One is in a different category, genealogically, whatever, that gap, that bracket, but it's still happening. I think it's really lazy just to say, "Well, this is a problem. Then you plug in some--

Blair: Millennials. Yes.

David: Yes. I just think that's lazy, and it's not true. My hesitation about suggesting the fixes is that I don't think there's a quick fix. I think the first thing you've got to do is just grow some as a leader and not be a control freak, but realize that you are cowering from doing what's in the best interest of your firm. Now, here you have to be empathetic. You have to be aware of who you are as a person. You cannot just jump into this room and start throwing things. That's wrong, too, because you are responsible for the culture that you have built. Unless it starts there, then none of the rest of this matters.

If you agree that you have allowed this culture to fester the way it has, then the fix is to very slowly change what you say and what you allow, and what you don't allow. Maybe you're not laughing at the same jokes. Maybe you're not letting certain things go by. It's a very slow, painful process. Where it really happens is where you fix the people that are on your team, where you start interviewing people differently. You're looking for skilled but curious people, resourceful, resilient. I don't know how to test for resilience, but my God, that's the most important thing on here. Independent thinkers, thoughtful, empathetic, grateful for what they have in life.

I know this doesn't necessarily fit the typical HR categories, and anybody around the world listening to this from HR has got to be dying right now. If the culture that you create is most responsible for the life you want at work, then it has to start with the people that you bring. Because there's only so much you can change people once they have joined your team. It has to start with that. Here's the big sign across all of this. I am yelling, aren't I? The big sign across all of this is you cannot let your company be a place where you don't want to work. That's what it's become for people. That's got to change.

Blair: Yes. As you're talking, I'm thinking I'd spent a long weekend in the garden doing a bunch of yard work, being a good husband to my wife who loves to be in the garden. But the whole time I'm listening to a podcast, my favorite podcast for the last few years, probably will be for the next few years. After 2Bobs is Founders by David Senra. This is the guy who reads a biography or an autobiography about an old or dead entrepreneur, some living. He's 450 biographies in. He's become quite famous among the world's greatest entrepreneurs as a learning source.

If you could listen to these biographies on anybody-- the obvious ones, Steve Jobs. I was just listening to one he did on Jensen Wong from NVIDIA. You just pick these people you've never heard of, but there's just dozens and dozens of them. None of them would let this happen. Jensen Wong had this great line: "I don't like to give up on people. I would rather torture them into greatness." He is critical. He's openly critical. He's a big believer. If I'm going to criticize you, I'm going to do it openly in front of everybody else. That way, we can all learn at the same time. He's as critical of himself publicly. There's just this culture of back to David Maister's. This is an Olympic team. We are going for gold. There are plenty of other teams you can belong to where they're not going for gold. They just want to play nice and have everybody be happy.

David: Yes.

Blair: At the end of the day, the top performers want to work in organizations going for the gold. There has to be this culture of kind ruthlessness.

David: What hurts me about this is that your culture is widely known out there, and so people joined with a certain assumption about what it is, and so that's where this is unfair because now you're changing the rules in the middle. That's why it needs to be done slowly and with empathy. Not too much empathy, but some empathy. We don't want to go right back to where we were.

What has to change at its heart, I think it's we have to be willing to have kind but difficult conversations with people about their performance and about their attitude. If we just do that one thing-- and you might need to go to a therapist before you get to the point where you can do it, but if we do that one thing, our cultures will slowly change. This is not just for you. It's for them too. You're helping to shape people who need to be resilient to get through life because you may orient your job for them around everything they want, but by God, the rest of the world isn't necessarily going to do that. It's really not fair to them either.

Blair: I think that's a good place to end. This is a big topic. I know you've grappled with it for a while. We've talked about different variations of this in private conversations. I'm glad you're putting it out there. You can hear the emotion in both of our voices as we talk about it. I suspect we'll be coming back to this at some point in the not-too-distant future. Would you agree?

David: Either that or it's been great to do a podcast together.

Blair: [laughs] Thank you, David.

David: Yes. Thank you, Blair.