There's an entire section in the bookshop called self-help, but there's no section in the bookshop called help others. We have hard skills, the skills you need to do your job, and human skills, the skills you need to be a better human being. You know, and I want more human skills in the world.
What we're talking about is not a recipe for success. It's a recipe for sustained success, and it's also a recipe for joy while you're succeeding, and the ability to learn your lessons when it doesn't go well. That's what we're talking about. Simon, I am so stoked to have this conversation with you.
You've taken complicated ideas, made them very simple to understand, and provided a massive gift to millions. So thank you for coming in. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
We're recording this the day after the Super Bowl. And I was nine seasons with the Seattle Seahawks. And we actually had somebody come in to talk about the infinite game. I think he got nearly run out of the business or run out of the room. Like it didn't, it didn't hang right.
It didn't work. Right. And so I think you'll have an idea of probably why, because you've been doing obviously a bunch of work around it.
But if you were to, if you were in front of the 49ers today, the day after they lost in the Super Bowl, how would you have a conversation about the infinite game? Good coaches and good owners know, have a sense of what the infinite game is, right? Clearly, the game is about winning and losing, and you should play to win, of course. But they all know what infinite game is. is because they talk about team building, you know, and they talk about off the field. And so, I mean, that stuff is all infinite game.
You talk about the quality of human being, you talk about camaraderie and teamwork. That's all infinite game stuff. And it all comes to bear on the day. So I think they have a sense of it.
They just use different language for it. So inside of a sport franchise, you can have part of it be the infinite game and part of it be the finite game. Finite game. Should we define the terms?
Yeah, let's operationalize that. Should we start there? So let's define the terms. In the mid-1980s, a philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James Kars defined these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and an agreed-upon objective, football.
If there's a winner, necessarily there has to be a loser or losers. But more important, there's always a beginning, a middle, and an end. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players. which means you don't necessarily know who all the other players are.
The rules are changeable, which means every player can play however they want. New players can join at any time. And the objective is to stay in the game as long as possible, to perpetuate the game. Obviously, we are players in infinite games every day of our lives, whether we know it or not.
No one's ever going to be declared the winner of career. Rockefeller. John Rockefeller probably thought he was the winner. I mean, I think there's a lot of people who think they did.
Yeah, right. Yeah. You know, no one's ever declared the winner of education or the winner of...
being healthy, right? It doesn't exist. And there's definitely no such thing as winning business, for example.
But what I find fascinating is if you listen to the language of so many leaders, it becomes abundantly clear that they don't actually know the game they're playing in. They talk about being number one, being the best, or beating their competition. Based on what?
Based on what agreed upon metrics, objectives, and timeframes. And this is a problem because when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game, when we play to win in a game that has no finish line, there are very predictable and consistent outcomes. The big ones are the decline of trust, the decline of cooperation, the decline of innovation. So like when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything, right? The game continues with or without the player and new players will fill the space.
In fact, Circuit City was replaced by Amazon. So it changed the whole game for Best Buy. So the rules are constantly in flux. It's existential, right?
Yeah. So a sports franchise, of course they want to win, of course. And they understand that winning championships brings in money and you know, helps keep the franchise alive. But there's more to the game than simply each game.
And it's very dangerous to think of the infinite game as simply winning a series of finite games. That's what Jack Welch used to believe, you know, which is just win and then just win again. And that's just moving goalposts, right? And that's incredibly unsatisfying, you know, because that's like saying, if I make a million dollars, I'll be happy.
Okay, that didn't happen. If I make $2 million, I'll be happy. Okay, if we make 3 million, that's what that is. That's a series of finite games. If you just hit the numbers, you'll get a bonus.
Okay, just hit the numbers again. And for some reason, if you keep doing it, whether you hit the numbers or not, life stops being fulfilling. The thrill of the first two or three times goes away.
You get good at it. It's not exciting anymore. And fulfillment starts to go down. And so the infinite game, as it applies to a sports franchise, is the joy of coming to work, not just winning the game. Sure, you get a spike each time you win, but there's a difference between happiness and joy.
Right. Happiness is fleeting. Watch a movie, go on a date, win a game, you know, have a good meal. Happy, happy, happy.
Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. And it's amazing. And then it goes away.
It's amazing. And it goes away. And drug addicts, that's all they can do is is the next hit, the next hit, the next hit or people who become addicted to money or people who become addicted to performance.
The next hit, the next hit, the next hit of performance is is is a seeking of happiness. But there's a lack of joy. The joy comes from the joy of the playing. The joy comes from the relationships that I've built along the way.
The joy comes from knowing that the work that I have done is actually of greater value than simply the money I make. It's contributing to something bigger than myself. All of this has purpose.
So the infinite game is hard for a lot of high performers to get. And it's very often the thing that they're missing when they get very successful. During my crosswalk from sport, best practices and insights.
from the psychology of sport into business. Oftentimes the astute leader will say, yeah, you know, the sport, the sport analogy doesn't quite work. I say, yeah, correct. Correct.
And I always say that the sport that kind of holds up is the ultra marathoner back to back to back to back. Right. So there's the endurance part of it.
They are not interested in oftentimes the winning of it. Certainly there are. triathletes and ultras that they want to win but for the most part that community is like did you try did you go to your edges of course people want to win but it is such a marathon in and of itself that there is no beginning and end is the the crosswalk i try to make there infinite and finite approach is more astute more astute to what we're trying to do however the in business they need to win they need to produce they need to perform to stay in the game So how do you square those two that you're playing a finite game in an infinite game? Is that how you said it?
So when you play with a finite mindset. Mindset in an infinite game. Right.
So there are always finite games within an infinite game. Okay. Right? The two, they're not mutually exclusive. The infinite game contains the finite games.
So the analogy that I like to use is being healthy, right? I want to be healthy. Well, nobody wins health, right? And there's many, many things you have to do to be healthy.
You have to eat right. You have to get enough sleep. You have to exercise.
You have to have personal relationships. You have to have friends and love in your life. All of these things matter. There's probably 30 other things we could list, but those are the big four.
And you'll never be a master at all of them simultaneously. They sort of go up and down. And it's a striving, right?
It's infinite. But you can still have finite goals within that. I want to lose X amount of weight by X date. And you can work to that goal.
And you know perfectly well, you know better than I do, that metrics matter. Like human beings need metrics. We're...
biologically designed to achieve things so that we will keep achieving things. Find food, build shelter, right? We love dopamine. When healthy, it's very valuable.
Can you imagine running a marathon without mile markers? It would actually be unnerving. There's nothing wrong with metrics.
It actually creates a ton of anxiety for people when you say just keep running and you don't know how long. What we actually do in those situations is we, the healthy people, hedge their bet just a little bit and run a little bit slower. Then they're possible.
So you never quite really know what you're capable of because if you don't know the outcome, you're trying to save your energy. Right. And so if you want to pick an arbitrary number on an arbitrary date, I want to lose X amount of weight by X date. Great.
You work towards it. You weigh yourself every day. Some days you feel good.
Some days you feel bad. It fits and starts. And you achieve your goal.
You hit your weight goal by the right date. You celebrate. Huge dopamine hit.
But you have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. It's not over. Like, it's just.
an event contained within something much larger. What I find more interesting is what happens if you miss your goal. And the answer is nothing.
Nothing happens, right? Well, on that goal, but if you miss your two quarters in a row, I call it the invisible handshake in sport and business, is that in sport, it's usually more concrete, which is the invisible handshake. It's more visible, I should say. Not for long, NFL.
So if you don't perform well long enough, you're asked not to come back to this club and maybe somebody else will pick you up. Right. So free agency.
In business, it's a little more subtle, you know, because you can hide a little bit. And I know our business friends are going, what do you mean you can hide? Yeah. In a multinational, you can find ways, you know. But if you don't perform at some metric, you're asked not to be included in this community.
The bad companies are that dog eat dog, you know, where it's only the numbers. You pit your own people against each other. and you end up building a culture.
where people will stab each other in the back, steal each other's credit, because that's the environment you've created. And you can have short-term success that way. This is not what we're talking about.
It's not a recipe for success. It's a recipe for sustained success. And it's also a recipe for joy while you're succeeding and the ability to learn your lessons when it doesn't go well.
That's what we're talking about. The dog-eat-dog world that you're painting, it can achieve, but it won't last. And at some point it will break and it will be probably dramatic or there'll be some scandal.
Almost every scandal we see in business is not an anomaly. It's usually years in the making if you just peel it back and look at the culture. When I talk about nothing happens, the reality is if you have an infinite mindset, you can still have goals. But I think what happens is we don't consider how those goals are achieved, right?
So for example, you have a sales organization that's very finite minded, hit the numbers, hit the numbers. You can. have a promotion, have a sale near the end of the year, and you can spike the numbers and you'll hit it, right?
But is it a healthy organization with high functioning team with a lot of cooperation and innovation? You know, people come and go, they're getting stabbed in the back, they're quitting, they're getting fired. Every time you have a mass layoffs, like morale is destroyed, takes way longer to rebuild that, you know, versus an organization that still has the goals, but they're also measuring how they achieve their goals. They're measuring the quality of leadership.
They're checking. Are people getting fired and are they quitting at high levels, which is disruptive and also very expensive? They may miss the goal, but it's only because they picked the wrong date.
If you look at the trend data, it's not a roll coaster like the other one. It's cool. But this beautiful and you're like, oh, you're going to hit it in 14 months as opposed to 12. I can see that. Not to mention the fact that, oh, my God, this is a high-functioning team.
And that trend will continue a lot longer over time than the other example. And that's one of the problems. Most organizations ignore my work, no matter the fact that it's usually grounded in biology and anthropology and human behavior and all that stuff.
In other words, most of my work is not my opinion. That's just how people work, right? That's just like finite and infinite games.
That's just how the world functions, right? It's not my opinion. It's a truth.
But the reason most companies don't use my work is because I can't predict when it'll work. So for example, If you say, I want to get into shape, I go, great. I need you to work out every single day for 20 minutes.
A hundred percent, you will get into shape. When? I have no clue. And neither does any doctor.
And for some people, it'll go a bit quicker. And for some people, it'll go a bit slower. But if you trust in the process, a hundred percent, it's going to work. Like, how long does it take to teach your kid how to ride a bicycle?
Nobody knows. Now, every one of us can teach our kids how to ride bicycles. It's a process.
And there's some scraped knees and there's some tears and there's some anger. But if you stick with it. 100% of people will learn how to ride a bicycle. When? I don't know.
And that's why most organizations don't use my work is because they want it to work on the arbitrary date that they pick. And they need the arbitrary number to be hit on that arbitrary date. And so what ends up happening is you abandon process for shortcuts. And I mean, we see people do it in health all the time. Like, I'd like to lose like...
Five to eight pounds. Not a lot, but I need to lose five to eight pounds. A friend of mine literally said to me, take Ozempic.
I was like, for five pounds? She's like, yeah, take Ozempic. I'm like, five pounds.
Like, whether Ozempic has side effects or not. It certainly wasn't the design. It's certainly not. Like, if I'm 30 or 40 pounds overweight, yes. But that's the point, which is the knee jerk to take the shortcut for something that's not.
difficult just requires a little effort. And that's a lot of work. And when I say work, I mean, like going to work, like our jobs, like none of it's that complicated.
It just requires a little discipline. And because of the incentive structures and the timeframes, we abandon those disciplines. And I think it's the same for how a lot of people live their lives, unfortunately, including myself, by the way, I abandon discipline all the time for a shortcut, but, uh, but, you know, it's just, uh, you know, to be aware. I think at least a spade a spade.
It's a big part. Yeah. Most people know if we put an apple and an apple pie on a table, which one is healthy? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's the apple. But I always say, but apple pie, it's fruit. So I'm going to eat the apple pie.
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Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Terms and conditions apply. Let's jump right back into the conversation. It does require great commitment towards something to be disciplined over time. And this is where your other work on understanding purpose and living purpose aligned is really important, but let's stay here for just a moment.
You say people that are companies that don't use my work. Meaning that there are some. Yeah.
That do. Sure. And I don't know if you can point to them or not, but those companies that do, what is the promise that you're pointing towards?
Like what is the, you, you, you did mention them. There's more creativity. Yeah.
Slash innovation. Yeah. There's more teaming from the blanks. Is it a higher performing organization?
Meaning. is the bet that we're going to work well together. We're going to be better teams.
And in return, we're probably going to see some profits that are going to be in performance that are going to be remarkable. Yeah. You are saying that. Yeah. Yeah.
And so if you're patient and you don't know when, but it's not like you have to wait 10 years, you know, like, you know, these things sometimes go quicker than you expect, but it's not like I'm asking you to like follow a process and then you're gonna have to wait eight times longer. It's It's just not predictable in time is the issue. And more important, it's not even when you achieve. It's that you will continue to achieve for longer. That's the more important thing.
It's an interesting bet because that is a shortened runway is a problem for all businesses, including certainly entrepreneurship. And so you're saying, yeah, if you get some of these base pillars in place, you're playing the infinite game, you're more likely to have a longer runway. And.
that's not because money is not going to run out. That's because people are going to work better together. You judge the quality of a crew by how a ship performs in rough waters, not calm waters.
A hundred percent. You know? And so, you know, I think a lot of quote unquote high-performing companies think they're amazing and think they have the best people on the planet while they're high-performing, you know, throw a, throw a pandemic at them, throw a scandal at them, throw uncontrollable factors like. you know, supply chain or a fire somewhere or a volcano in Iceland that screws up all the air freight. Show a new technology, you know, like the internet that renders your business model obsolete.
Now let's talk about how good that team is. And magical teams are the ones that hunker down and go, all right, how are we going to get through this one? A friend of mine who is a general in the Marine Corps says, you know, no plant ever survives contact with the enemy.
And I... the same in business. You can have all the grand plans you want and career plans you want, whether for your business plans for your company or a personal career. Nothing survives reality.
We're not in control. To have guiding principles that are bigger than the path. I'll give you an analogy.
So my whole career, when I worked for corporations, my reviews were always the same. Simon, you have no focus, right? And my whole life, my teachers, my parents, everybody, like, if only you would focus, right? And there's a great irony is because I'm actually more focused than most people.
I'm just focused at a distance that's way far beyond the horizon. Which means that for me, the path is flexible. I'm agnostic as a path that I take to get to a very fixed point in the far off distance. A world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do. Most people are very, very focused on the path that they've chosen.
So the analogy would be, you come out of the house in the morning and you see your neighbor packing up their car. And you'd be like, hey, where are you going? And they look at you and go, vacation. You're like, oh, cool. Where are you going?
And they said, vacation. You're like, no, no, I get that. But where are you going? They're like, I told you, vacation.
I'm like, well, then you're like, fine. How are you going to get there? Well, I'm going to take 95 and I've got a goal.
I'm going to drive 150 miles a day, right? And that's how most of us live our lives, which is we want to be successful. Vacation, right? Make it, you know, advance. It's all these amorphous goals.
I like just saying vacation. They're not a destination. It's just something. And then we plan our routes. I'm going to make this amount of money.
I'm going to do this and that and that. And like, I'm going to drive 150 miles and we're all really proud of ourselves and we hit our goal or I drove 200 miles today. I'm ahead of goal. How do you know even what road you're driving?
You don't even know where you're going. And what if a new opportunity shows up? You don't know which road to take. Now I'm the opposite. You know, I'm in Los Angeles.
I'm trying to get to California and I'm trying to get to New York, right? Let's just pretend it's an infinite. you know, goal.
It's not finite. It's way off some vision in the future. So I know I got to go due east, right?
But what if the freeway is blocked? Well, I'll take a side road that goes in the wrong direction and everybody thinks I've lost my focus because I'm going in the wrong direction. But I know that I would rather take a slow, circuitous route that gets me back to where I'm going rather than sitting in traffic. Or if somebody says, I got a jet, you want to come with me on the jet? I'm like, which way is the jet going?
Where most people are going like jets go fast. Yes. And so they're saying yes to things they shouldn't be saying yes to and no to things because they're slow or seem to go sidetrack.
And so, yes, sometimes highly focused people are focused on the path with no sense of destination. And I would rather people have a very clear sense of destination and you'll figure out a path. That's why there's innovation.
Well said. Well done. The whole thing hangs together nicely.
And so I was, you thought about this. You surprised me. You surprised me with it.
People say vacation. And I was like, oh, that's the enlightened one. The one that says, I'm going. Where are you going?
I don't know. I'm just going. I was falling in love with that amorphous, no end point, like I am going to explore life.
Yes. And I thought that's where you were going with it. And you said, no, no, no.
There's nothing Buddhist about it. No, there was certainly not. Okay. The H3, horizon three type of thinking, which is what you're talking about. And then you're hooking around that a destination.
So usually horizon three is certainly it's way out there. And to me, when I think H1, H2, and H3, that H3 tends to shift when I get to H2. And so it doesn't shift for you though. You're like, it's New York. It's so, this is what idealism is, right?
This is what vision should be. Most people, when they talk about vision, I think what they mean is a big, hairy, audacious goal. Yeah.
You know, hard, distant, achievable, you know? And true vision, like all men are created equal. Well, I mean, we're still figuring that one out 250 years later, right? Like true vision is an ideal state of the world that doesn't yet exist. And we call it vision because I can see it in my mind's eye.
I can paint a picture. It's a shining city on a hill. That's right.
You know, and we'll never get there, but we'll die trying, which is the point. This is one of the foundational practices that I use in sports psychology is to just spend a little bit of time. Let's just get clear. kind of push our seats back if we need to from, from the desk, what is the vision that you hold for yourself? And then oftentimes I need to niche that down.
Don't do post-career yet. We'll get to that soon, but what's the vision you hold for yourself during this phase? And it, it invites imagination. So it's using one's imagination to see a compelling later.
So my vision for myself is, is hooked around my purpose, but they are, they're quite different. So my vision is a world where people flourish. And I think that something that you just said in there for your vision is actually quite close to it. That's probably why you invited me and I said yes. There's something there.
Because there's cooperation here. Yeah, right. And so when I first introducedā¦ Like your work and my work both contribute to the greater good, to the same vision or similar vision.
Say your vision again. I imagine a world. So I use imagination because that's where it exists.
That's how it happens. Right? I imagine a world in which the vast majority, I say vast majority because everyone is unrealistic. Everyone's going to be, no, that's not true.
Right? That's cool. in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do.
Now, it doesn't tell you what I do. It doesn't tell you how I'm going to get there. I've made certain bets. I believe leadership matters because I think if we bet on and build and support and celebrate the leaders who are good leaders, then we're more likely to build that world. I've bet on something called human skills.
We have hard skills, the skills you need to do your job. And human skills, the skills you need to be a better human being, you know, and I want more human skills in the world. I like to say that there's an entire section in the bookshop called self-help, but there's no section in the bookshop called help others.
This is my, this is my rub with the self-help industry. Like 1980, it was all about me. And now it's like, it's for what reason? I know.
I mean, the only thing the self-help industry helped is itself. The, the, I mean, it started in less than like mid to late 1970s. And if you look at the growth curve of the self-help industry, it's huge.
And if it was working, it should be in decline. that's a good take that's a really good take yeah that's right it should put itself out of business yeah i mean the only argument you can make is that it would be generational in which case it should be relatively flat that's really good right because you gotta keep training somebody yeah oh my goodness when we're doing the publishing for the book they're like you know this is this is gonna land in self-help i was like oh god i can't believe i'm doing this but is that where your stuff sits as well no my my leadership no i write philosophy books cleverly disguises business books They really are, huh? They're in the business section. Is that your... It makes its way into the self-help world, which is fine.
They're cousins at some point. What's that? They're cousins, leadership and self-help. The decisions I made were strategic, right? Because if I put a book in self-help, no one in business will read it.
But if I put a book in business or leadership, then people in business and leadership will read it, and people in self-help will read it. With your vision as clear as it is, and you laid the bet on leadership, and you want to skill up, or add to the human skills. Do you have a handful of human skills that you would like to see modern leaders have more command of? Oh, it's such a good question.
You know, I think there is some real basics. The big one is listening. We are really bad at listening. You know, ask any spouse, how's your partner?
Are they good listeners? And I would say the majority would say, hmm, room for improvement. You know, we're We're bad at listening at work.
So I think listening is number one. I think how to have effective confrontations. You're going to have disagreements on a regular basis.
That's okay. And a lot of people are confrontation avoidant. And it's not because they don't like confrontations because they don't know how to do it. Confrontation doesn't have to be confrontational.
It doesn't have to be aggressive. It can be quite inviting, actually. But something has bent me out of shape and I want to tell you about it. That's a skill.
How to have difficult conversations. There's a good one. I saw this after George Floyd, where the number of leaders who the way they reacted to George Floyd was they did nothing.
Not because they're bad people. It's because they didn't have the skill of difficult conversations. And so they were so afraid of saying the wrong thing or igniting a situation or triggering someone that they just opted for nothing.
And it's a shame. Because those conversations needed to happen, but they didn't have the skills. Or giving and receiving feedback.
There's another one, right? Most of us like to give feedback the way we like to get feedback. The way I like to get feedback, just tell me, please. No, don't give me a feedback sandwich, please.
Because I know you're bullshitting me for the nice thing. You're being serious about the shitty thing and you're bullshitting me about the nice thing. Just tell me, right?
So the way I give feedback is the way I like to get it. One of the... Turns out not everybody likes to get feedback that way.
So you got to learn how to adjust. We frame the feedback thing on coaching. And so we'll say like, we'll do this with most teams I work with, whether business or sport, is we'll have a bit of a round table.
Like, how do you want to be coached? Yeah. And then some people are like, oh, well, what do you mean? Well, we all need to be coached. It's so that's a basic assumption.
How do you want to be coached? And there's some kind of gates, public or private. I go, uh, public. Yeah, I don't, that's fine. I mean, private might take too long.
Oh, so you want it now real time or do you want it after the meeting or do you want it, you know, within 24 hours? So good. Yeah.
So we just walk them through a couple of gates. So good. And then if they can tell their teammates that, and then now there's that like a deeper partnering on how you're going to take care of each other towards the shared purpose.
And being inquisitive like that, by the way, it goes in all your relationships. And this is what I love about teaching these skills at work, which is if we teach these skills at work, what you get are way better teams. And by the way, there's a difference between a team and people who work together.
There's a difference between a team and people who play on the same organization. A group and a team are very different. Right? Like they're not the same thing, right? Yeah.
By the way, sorry to interrupt. Teams are rare. I agree with you.
Yeah. Teams are rare. And then high-performing teams are even more rare. For all the reasons we're talking about.
That's right. The fascinating thing is high-performing teams are not obsessed with winning until they're in the game, right? All the great coaches, you know, Wooden, Coach K. The weird thing is none of them were obsessed with winning, and yet they became the winning most coaches. Actually, John Wooden said, I wish all of my friends, I'm going to get this somewhat close.
I wish all of my friends to have one championship and all of my rivals to know what it feels like to have back to back. In other words, like it's heavy. Like it's really hard to manage and maintain. Someone's going to correct me on the exact quote there.
But that idea, like I wish you'd get one win. I want everyone to get a win, you know, but like. Back to back is really hard.
He was a relationship coach. Exactly. And if you ask them, they want their people to thrive and they want their people to build a team rather than just a series of high performing players.
I mean, we know that dream teams aren't so dreamy. We know that. And the amazing thing is there's just companies underinvest in this kind of teaching because it's just that.
It's an investment, right? It's not a bet. It's an investment, right?
bets. I put money down. They spin the wheel. I win or I lose, right?
That's the financial year, right? Or the quarter, right? You take bets. But investment is like, well, I'm going to put money in this equity and I'm going to hold on for 20 years and we're going to see how it's going to go. So if I invest in my people, you'll start to see growth in that investment.
But for some, it's quicker and some it's slower and some will thrive very quickly and some it might take a couple of years. But the point is, is you're creating magical teams of people who feel, feel, because they're human. that somebody cares about them and cares about their personal growth, and they reward you with effort and love and loyalty and patience. And when things go wrong, they stick with you because that's how human relationships work. It's the same in our personal relationships.
If you make someone feel safe in your personal relationships and then you screw it up badly, they will work with you to get through the screw up. Matter of fact, infidelity, according to research, is not the reason marriages end. Right.
The big things. are not the reason relationships end. It's the accumulation of a thousand cuts. Yeah, that's right.
You know, and I'm not advocating for what I just said. No, no, but the point is, is that a healthy relationship can withstand and work through extreme stress. Whereas what appear to be healthy relationships end up breaking because of a thousand cuts that you didn't.
The tensile strength that wasn't there. Yeah. You had a line in your book about rewarding the selfish high earner.
Like that's what management. or coaches sometimes do is that we throw money at them or we move them up an org chart or we give them a captain's whatever because they're the high earner, high score, but they're actually quite selfish individuals, which when you have one of those on the team, it's an interesting thing that can take place, which is you'll keep them in the circle because he's earning for you or she is, but the team will have to bond around that selfish. whatever person is.
And then, so that person never really feels like they're part of a team because so now they're a bit ostracized, which inflames the condition. And the other, let's call it nine or 19, whatever the size of the group is, could be 1900. No, it's more intimate. I'm thinking sport right now is that they want that person on the team as long as they're keep scoring.
But as soon as it gets wonky, we don't want them. I've never met a coach yet that hasn't said to the selfish high earner. Once they let that person go, say, why didn't I do that sooner? Why are we? And the team usually says, what took you so long?
Yeah. Why are you so scared? Why was I so scared?
So when you think of great teams, what are some of the ways that you would go about helping a team be great? So first and foremost, if somebody has a performance issue and likewise, if they have a personality issue, so sometimes you have a high performer of low trust, right? That is as that is more dangerous.
than a high trust underperformer. It was my number one gate for selection at the pro teams that I would help with selection. And it is the way that Navy SEALs choose who advances in their organization too.
It takes too long. But the thing is, well, this is what we're talking about investment, right? Which I love that framing, investment versus bet. It has a totally different contour. And both have value, but just do with eyes wide open.
That's really cool. Bets are for short term and there's nothing wrong with a bet, but you can't. you can't build a thriving long-term organization. on just betting. Yeah.
You know, unless you're cheating, which is organizations do too. They all, you know, they cook the numbers to some degree. You know? Wait, how do you do that?
Well, anybody can have any metric they want. Oh. Anybody can be number one. It was like my favorite thing is like airlines.
Like if you go, I love airline advertising. It's my favorite thing in the world because it's like, you know, ranked number one, it says on the ad. And if you look at the fine print, it's like based on a five-year period of... you know, global airlines of about equal size.
He's like, he's like, you know, it's like the fine print is magical or like, or, or, or financial advertising, you know, past performance is no guarantee of, of, of future earnings. And they like number one, this, and you always go look at the fine print. They chose the conditions. It's like, everybody gets to pick their own metrics.
Every company, you know, I love talking to CEOs. I mean, this is the finite mindset, which is, they say, but Simon, you, you don't understand. We, we actually are a number.
And my answer is, for now, for now. Yes, for now. Like, you're the best for now. Like, the Super Bowl was yesterday.
Kansas City is the best for now. For now. Yeah. And there's another metric hanging right off of that, which was the Cowboys are valued at $9 billion, which is the highest valuation.
And I think Kansas City Chiefs are at $7 billion. So they're almost there. But when you look at total value, you're suggesting that.
That is, I'm suggesting that that is one way you could measure success if you wanted to. And you're saying for now. Yeah.
I mean, the, the, and to go back to your original question, which is, so how do you lead the people? And so for me, when someone's a high performer of low trust or a high trust person of low performance, I've got an issue in both. And first you coach, you either coach the personality issue.
I mean, I don't know who their role, they may, they may be an asshole. That is an option. but they may have had bad role models, or they left an organization that only incentivized performance above all else, and that's what they got good at.
Or I just don't know their story. And so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're teachable, that they're coachable. The underperformer, same thing. I don't know. Maybe there's a skill gap.
Maybe I've got them in the wrong job. Maybe they're nervous. There's a confidence issue.
But all of that is, I can coach to both of those. And for me, the time to say, I don't think this is going to work, and I want you to find happiness somewhere else is... if someone proves themselves to be uncoachable.
Now, of course, there's always exceptions, like you've got an amazing skill set for a job I don't have, you know, or it's just, you know, sometimes it's time to try something new because you're not happy and I can't help you, you know. But for the most part, those tend to be the outliers. Everybody's coachable. And for me, the time to ask somebody to leave the organization is if they prove themselves to be uncoachable. We would say in sport, we'd say we coach them until they can't or they won't.
Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. That was much more succinct, though. I'm going to start saying it that way. Much better. The point is the same, though, is that there's some barrier that somebody gets through, and they'll tell you when they don't want to be coached anymore, or they just can't do the thing that is required for them to do.
But this is why good leadership matters, because when you're creating an organization that has psychological safety built in, what you're doing is you're creating conditions. in which people can raise their hand and say, I made a mistake. I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm struggling. I've got issues at home. My kid's flunking out of school and it's affecting my work.
Like you, you know, you can bring that to work and tell somebody, whether it's a colleague or a leader, and what you'll be met with is support, right? But if you create an organization that doesn't have psychological safety, where it is performance at all costs, no one is going to reveal any of those things because... for fear that that makes them fireable or it damages their promotability or they have personal issues like that makes me sound weak. This term vulnerability is becoming popular in business now, but the word scares a lot of people. I don't want to be vulnerable.
It doesn't mean weak, right? It means that I'm revealing shortcomings or mistakes or errors, but I can do that with confidence. And I think this is the thing that people miss, which is, I'll just give you an example, right? You can deliver any of these things with confidence versus lack of confidence.
So for example, I need you to be vulnerable. I don't know how to read a P&L. So I don't know if I can, I'm going to need help.
Right? That is not confidence inspiring in anybody we're working with. Right?
You can have that same shortcoming in skill, right? Which is, hey. I know you're going to find this hilarious, but I never learned how to read a P&L.
If somebody could please just show me how to read a P&L, I will learn it and we got no problems. But for now, we're not going anywhere until somebody can tell me how to read this damn document. In one case, you're horribly insecure about the lack of skill. And the other one, you just own it. And so being vulnerable doesn't mean being insecure.
Being vulnerable just means I'm going to tell you something I don't know. This is where I keep going back to athletes. Well, that's your thing. Yes and no. But it's a base of where I draw much of my insight from.
So I was in pro sport for about 20 years. And then I popped my head into big business 11 years ago. And I was like.
How are they doing it? Yeah. How are they doing it? How are they grinding the way that they're grinding?
I mean, there's no recovery in place. They don't, the passion is not clear. You don't have seasons. Yep.
There's no seasons. They're exhausted. They're on double shifts every day, two days, every day.
Like I couldn't believe it. And so it was, it felt like there was these lobs left and right for me to go get. It was really fun. One of the things that athletes do extraordinarily well is that they are able to manage the gap.
And that gap is between. their current state of skill and the desired state of skill. And everybody knows what that gap is.
And they got people that partner with them to be explicit and then develop a plan. So for this scenario you just created, everybody would know. There's no secret. So the vulnerability is actually the opportunity. We can see you suck at that.
Pretending you don't. That's right. It's silly. Yeah, right.
Please stop that. And by the way, we're actually going to take you out of reading spreadsheets and put you over here because you're a great storyteller. Right. And so we're going to find a way to figure this out together.
We don't put athletes in compromised positions. Look, lying, hiding, and faking, unfortunately, is how a lot of people are forced to come to work. Lying, hiding, and faking.
Yeah. Lying, hiding, and faking is the way a lot of people are forced to come to work because the reward and incentive structure or worse, the punishment structure. If you reveal any of these things, you risk losing your job or you risk getting unpromoted or somebody else promoting ahead of you because, you know, they're faking it better than you are. So, you know, the great teams and you know this, which is one of the good things about sports is we all know there's something wrong because you can't hit the ball. Right.
Like I can I can see it. Yeah. Right. Where, you know.
Business, we can lie, hide, and fake a lot easier than we can in sports. So sports, you can't get away with it. So what we do is we don't fire them.
We help them work on that thing. And first, we help them get their confidence back. A slump is a terrible thing.
It's mainly psychological because they've got the skills. So every sports team knows there's a psychological component. And sometimes there's a skills component.
And yet in business, we just scream and yell at people or fire them because they're underperformers or not promote them. But we don't. recognize there's a psychological component and sometimes there's a skill component.
Usually it's the former. So good leaders, good leaders know that they do know that good leaders know that I've been saying that modern leadership will be marked by the ability to apply basic psychology. And so that's what I'm going to, the key word there is basic, basic. This is not advanced anything.
No, this is like not psychotherapy. No, this is, this is psych 101. That's exactly right. Basic functions of a human being. That's right. If somebody feels seen, heard, and understood.
They will freaking love you forever. Okay, do it again. Seen.
If somebody feels seen, heard, and understood. Okay, I got to use that one now. They will love you forever. That's really, you're so right.
And that's it. Yeah. I exist.
Well, you know that I'll get the numbers wrong, but there's data that shows that when somebody is ignored at work, right? There's something like 80% disengagement. I don't remember the number, but it's exorbitant.
If somebody gets yelled at once, right? It's something like 40% disengagement, whatever it is. And if somebody is given one compliment for one skill that they've got, it's something like 7% disengagement.
In other words, getting yelled at is actually better than being ignored because at least you know I exist. And that's, I mean, that's hilarious. It's terrible.
You know, that's how bad it is. It is terrible, yeah. If you were to design a bit of a training protocol or a basic capabilities requirement for leaders, what would be the three to five things? You said listening.
We talked about them. I think listening is the big one. And listening is a compound skill, right?
Because it requires patience. It requires empathy. You can't just be a good listener without being curious.
It's a compound skill. It's more difficult than it sounds. Yeah, that's good.
I'm kind of cheating because I said one, but it's really like six. Yeah, right. And like I said before, I think difficult conversations is a huge one.
Effective confrontation is a huge one. And for me, how to give and receive feedback is the other one. I had a colleague who couldn't take feedback well. Like I would give her feedback and sometimes it would deteriorate into absolute shouting match.
Right. I mean, and something really has to escalate for that to happen. Right. And. What I was doing was giving feedback the way I like to get it, right?
Turns out it wasn't working out very well. And so I did what you suggest with your coaching, which is I interrupted literally mid-fight. And I was like, this is clearly not working. Can you just tell me how you want to get feedback? I'll do it any way you want, right?
And what she told me was, she goes, I need you to prepare me, right? You can either say, can I give you some difficult feedback now? And I'll either say yes or no. Or I need you to schedule it in my calendar. Like we're going to have a feedback session on Thursday at three o'clock.
Are you available? Right? And as long as I did that, it was astonishing how much she could take. She could take more blunt and hard to hear feedback than almost anybody on the team. As long as I prepared her and scheduled it.
But that's because I asked. Yeah. And. Whereas, and remember, I'm in the position of authority. So.
And there's lots of us who are in that leadership position, which means I've got somebody who's not taking feedback because I'm not giving it the way that they can hear it. But I've now created a narrative in my head of they can't take feedback. And they're a problem child.
And it goes down. They're an underperformer. And so the corruption of the power dynamic, because you get to pick the narrative and they're subjected to your narrative.
They have to mold around your incompetence. You have to mold around your incompetence. And I think that happens frightfully too often. And the one thing that's incredibly dangerous in an organization is gossip. Right.
And I know a company that gossip is a fireable offense, which I love. Right. We know that employees sometimes get together after work and vent about their boss.
And healthy venting, I think, is very important. You should be able to vent and complain about work. I think that's. But creating narratives about somebody, like the number of people that tell me they have a toxic boss, I'm like, the real examples of real toxicity are actually much lower than we think.
You know, I'll give you a perfect example. It's because it's all of narrative, right? So I went for a walk with a friend of mine who was struggling at work.
And this is how the conversation began. My boss is a horrible person. She's a horrible person.
And she goes on to tell me, you know, like the whole story of what's going on at work. And I interrupted her. I go, wait, She's a horrible person. She's a horrible person. I'm like, so does she abuse her children and kick her dog?
No. Okay. So we don't know that she's a horrible person.
We know that she's a horrible leader. Okay. That's all we know.
Yeah. That's narrative. Yeah. That's really good.
But we do it in leadership as well, right? A group of leaders get together for their leadership meeting or whatever, right? And somebody's name comes up who's on the team and somebody says, oh, he's so lazy. Oh my God, that guy is such an idiot. right?
Oh, God, freaking Debbie Downer, right? And now that's the narrative among all leadership. And so every time that person's name comes up, somebody will still go, I know why he's not hacking it. Lazy, right? Now all leadership is going to treat that person as lazy, as stupid, as disengaged, as not caring.
And so it's very important. And we're all guilty of it. No one, we've all done it. There's a difference between healthy venting and forming narratives about people and or their motivations.
And the reality is we don't know. And so it's very important that if you find yourself in a group of people, that somebody starts creating a negative narrative about someone. Somebody has to interrupt it.
Go, that may be the case. Or they're struggling. We're not leading them well. We're not coaching them properly. We haven't given them any feedback.
Like I know an organization that is so passive aggressive. everybody's so nice. Everybody's so nice. And if you're struggling on a team, no one will tell you what you're doing wrong. They'll just move you to a different group, which is such a disservice to someone.
So someone actually ends up having this crap middling career, not because they're dumb or bad. It's because no one's ever given them the feedback to improve. Horrible. Now it goes the other way around as well. And you touched upon this before, which is you can overdo the positive narrative as well.
You heroize somebody. Oh, oh my God. She's the best. Oh my God, she's a genius.
I don't know how we ever got by without her. Just, she'll take care of everything. And the problem is now we all start treating that person as the hero on the team.
And it can go multiple ways. Sometimes they start believing the press and egos get blown out. Or sometimes they make a mistake and we don't actually know how to give them the feedback because now we're... deathly afraid of them leaving or getting upset because we've made them to heroes. And the reality is it is very dangerous to create heroes or villains on your team.
That is all narrative. Very cool. Now, I'm not saying don't celebrate people and not give people harsh feedback.
But if there's a band, if there's a ceiling and a floor, just narrow it down a little bit. Stay away from the sun, your Icarus, and stay away from the floor, there's a devil down there. But come closer to the medium.
Give people credit where they're due. Help people get feedback when they need it. But there's no heroes or villains.
Those are very rare on a team. They exist. They absolutely exist, but be very wary. I like for a lot of reasons what you're talking about.
One is you're talking about loving the person and coaching the behavior, whether it's a human skill or a technical skill or whatever. I love that. And I also, when I was with the Seattle Seahawks, when we're at our height, when we're at our best, when our noses were pointed in the same direction together, it was awesome. and one of the things beaks i mean i know it was fast though too that's pretty good so one of the things that was taking place is we were very clear that in the hallways we were never going to never too big of a word we were great about not talking about somebody that wasn't amongst us yeah and it was a we were disciplined we would call on discipline if that person's not here like just you know keep it moving like we don't need to say it to their face be able to confront them if it was you know and what ends up happening is that people start to feel really safe yeah because they don't they're not worried about what's happening in that conversation over there like is that about me yeah yeah it's really by the way that's a very good standard which is in private conversations that you're actually not going to say anything about somebody that you wouldn't say to you wouldn't look somebody in the face and say you're stupid or lazy you wouldn't do it yeah um that person's struggling totally legitimate you know um i'm worried about her Totally legitimate.
Right. But I think that that is a great standard. If you want to know where the floor and the ceiling are, if you wouldn't say it to their face, then you're outside of the band.
And I like the tool that you provided, which is, let's say you and I are talking, we've slipped to a lower version of ourselves. We're talking about Susie and Stuart jumps in and says, wait, I don't know that. How did you put that phrase? That might be the case. Oh, that is possible.
That is possible. Yet. We don't know if they're struggling.
We don't know if they have the right resources, if we're miscoaching them, whatever. It's really easy, which is just come up with 10 or 15 other options. Yeah. Which it could be.
The interruption is that all might be true or that might be, say it one more time to me. That might be true. That might be true. Yeah.
But like, I don't dispel the initial thing. I said they could be lazy or maybe. Or maybe. Yeah. It's the or maybe.
It's the or maybe. It's the doubt. That's right.
Yeah. It's the doubt. Or maybe. That's a good call.
So I'm not shutting anybody down. Yeah. I'm simply adding options to the list.
It was funny. It's like, I wish my wife was listening to us right now. Cause she'd say you drive me crazy with always taking a counterpoint. You know, I like the intellectual exercise of the, or maybe, and sometimes the simplicity needs to be that bell needs to be wrong, which is like, yeah, actually they did still the $10 for my dress or whatever it might be, you know, like time and place.
Right. Oh my God. So, all right. Very cool.
You also-We can talk more practical stuff too. Yeah, I love practical. Like I think we all do. And people from sports like practical. Yeah.
So, okay, I'm just-Whoa, whoa, whoa. That was a little bit, was that a jab? No.
It was a little jab, maybe. No, it was a compliment. Was it a compliment? A hundred percent.
Some of us like the invisible world. Some of us like-But we live in a tangible world. Some worlds are invisible. Remember those metrics we talked about?
Like everybody loves a metric. Yeah, we do like metrics. So, like- I want to stand on a scale to know I'm losing weight.
Just look in the mirror. It's not enough. Yes. So I'll just wax philosophical based on some of the stuff we talked about.
So difficult conversations. Starting a difficult, look, it is a skill. It's a practicable skill.
But it's actually not that difficult to start. First of all, I always like to ask permission, especially if it's with one person. Like, may I have a difficult conversation with you now? I need to have one.
Can we do it now? Because then they can go, yes. Or in an hour.
Yeah. Or tomorrow. Like.
I like letting people know it's coming. That's cool. Right. For some people that creates incredible anxiety.
But it'll be, it'll be really, well, that's up to them. Yeah. But your earlier scenario was great because she knows herself. That's what she wanted.
Yeah. Correct. But for some people, like I like to start with, can I, can I just have a difficult or an uncomfortable and slightly lower than difficult as uncomfortable. Like, can I have an uncomfortable conversation? I like challenging.
Can I have a challenging conversation? Yeah. Birds of a feather.
Right. I need to talk to you about X. Um, I don't know how to do this.
Um, I'm probably going to get some of this wrong. I might say the wrong thing. Please just bear with me because us having this conversation is more important than me doing it perfectly. Is that OK?
Can you help me with that? And that way, because we all do these things. We do them in our personal lives when we're arguing with a loved one or we do them at work, which is we do say the wrong thing.
And they will like white on rice. They will attach themselves to the thing we got wrong. And it's very difficult to unattach. But when you set the ground rules at the beginning, like I might screw some of this up, but bear with me. I'm trying to get to this point.
Right. And then you can you get permission to backpedal. Yeah. You dilute some of that assumed or ascribed power, you know, and it is one of the.
again, culprits to the traditional org chart is like when you move higher up the org, then it's easier to have difficult conversations because you determine. And it's like such a cheat because it can shortcut real skills. So what you just described are eloquent. There's empathy involved.
There's humanness. And it's human to human. Yeah.
And this is not easy for me too. And let's not try to be perfect. Let's try to work through something. Yeah.
Yeah, it's beautiful what you just said. It's human to human. And I think that's what we forget. It's called a company.
It's literally a group of human beings. You know, we are in company. I can hear my anxious part of me.
Okay, so now this is like business person, business person. The anxiety in me is like, this is, by the way, everything we're talking about feels at home. This 100%.
I hope that everything we're talking about, we're building here at Finding Mastery. That being said, there's another part, which is watching the P&L. Like, you know, making sure that we are laying the right bets and the right investments. Both matter. Both matter.
Right. If we run out of money, we run out of time to do this thing together. And so that's a part that I can hear probably some of the other anxious folks. They're like, okay, great. You guys are psychologically safe.
Really nice. People are probably great teammates to each other. But are you executing in high-octane environments? Are you performing when it matters? How do you get to that transactional thing?
So I've made that mistake, and I've gone too far down. Oh, my God, I've created an art project or a hippie commune. Yeah.
And at the end of the day, it's not an art project or a hippie commune. It's a business. But for me, I'm very clear on what the business is, right?
This goes to the point of purpose. Is the purpose of a business to make money? No. According to Milton Friedman, yes, but that's gotten us to a lot of trouble the past four years.
You've been loud about this. Yeah. You know, the purpose of a business is to advance something and money is the fuel, right?
Just like is the purpose of a car to buy more gas? No. The purpose of a car is to go somewhere and the gas helps us get there. Well, money is gas.
That's what it does. It provides energy. And so, yes, I want it to have gas.
Now, does it have to have gas at any expense? No, of course not. I'm not going to mow people over. to get to a gas station. So we know that there's ethics that have to be included.
I want to kill people to get gas, although some companies, it does get out of balance. Ethical fading, different conversation. But the problem is most companies obsess about the gas because it's the easiest thing to see, and they obsess about the gas because they don't actually have an articulated vision.
To be the best, most admired, blah, blah, blah, value, value. None of that is vision. That is uninspiring pablum. or at best a long-term goal. And it's usually about you.
And real vision is about us. It's an invitation. You and I discovered that our visions are actually inclusive of each other.
That's right. Great vision includes other companies if they want to join in or other people. You can love a company's vision and not do business with them. I celebrate companies that I don't necessarily buy their products because I love their vision. I love what they stand for.
For me, Patagonia is one of those. Are you familiar with their brand? Of course, yeah. I love Patagonia. I don't buy it.
Same with you. But I will support it and celebrate it. And I'm probably offered the more free PR than, you know, than like, I've written about them. I've got one vest. I advocate for them.
I think I, I think I might have one vest. Yeah. Um, yeah. You know, and when I say might, cause that was the last time I wore it, you know? Yeah.
But I think I have it cause I'm like, I should have one, you know, they're doing good in the world. They're doing good in the world. I should show some love. Yeah.
Let's go back to purpose for just a moment. Is that. Something I learned from Satya Nadella. I feel sorry for anybody who's forced to listen to us.
No, no, no. Because our ability to meander off topic is, for me, magical. Listen, we're going to land this bird on the perch here. There's some... I mean, this is a...
Too much? No. One too many? I appreciate dad humor and a good pun.
All right, so... You're just egging me on now. Yeah.
So, okay. Purpose. I learned this from Satya Nadella. The company is very clear on their purpose.
Yeah. Okay. And then he did some... Beautiful Aikido is he said, okay, right.
What we actually want to do is we want to have Microsoft's purpose be in service of each of our employees'purpose. That judo and Aikido is radical. So in other words, the 200,000 that are working here, make sure you know your purpose because Microsoft could just be the greatest platform, such and such, to fuel your purpose in life.
By the way, it's mutual, right? When it's at its best. I want companies to know their purpose and I want individuals to know their why as well because if I know my why and you are clear on what your why is, not some bullshit purpose statement that you put on your website because somebody in marketing told you you had like true purpose that you actually make decisions with, right? That you use to filter decisions.
If a company is crystal clear in its why and employees are crystal clear in their why, what you get is somebody goes, oh my God, working here helps me fulfill my cause. I will work here forever. And the company looks at you and says, oh my God, your why helps us advance ours.
We want you here forever. We love you. Now we're playing the infinite game, right? And so 100%.
However, there's a finite game inside of it, which I love that you did that. Yeah. And that's totally fine.
And there's good days, bad days, right? But what you said before is like, well, what's the role of money? And there's nothing wrong with an honest conversation.
And by the way, I think the mistake that a lot of leaders make is they think they have to have everything sorted out in their head before they have the conversation with somebody. I find that sometimes presenting a half-baked cake is sometimes more valuable. So for example, I'm in a situation and I don't know what to do, I'm going to tell you where I'm stuck.
You belong in this organization. You're a cultural contributor. I love that. You believe in our cause. You've been great.
I'm struggling because you work in an area that is directly a revenue producer, and that revenue is the fuel for our movement. And we've had so many quarters of underperformance. We've tried coaching, and you've been receptive to coaching. I got to give you credit.
But I'm really struggling because at one point... I want to support you, but at another point, I also have to make sure that this movement continues to be fueled and your team's performance is directly impacting that. I need you to work with me to figure this out. And it becomes a conversation.
That's really good. And what we're doing in that conversation is we're giving someone agency. And you know the research on how people feel at work about control.
Do you know about this stuff? So in the 1970s, there was a bunch of social scientists that did... some work called the white hole studies you know the white hole studies i do oh you do of course you do you have a phd in this shit this is really good yeah i was like i was about to mansplain the white hole studies to you okay so the white hole studies for those who aren't phds in psychology they there was this theory that these social scientists had in the 1970s um of this thing called executive stress syndrome the theory being that as you make your way up the corporate ladder you suffer more stress because there's more pressure, the stakes are higher, etc., etc., etc.
Right? More on your plate, more on your shoulders. And so they wanted to understand executive stress. And they did it in the halls of government in the UK, in Whitehall, because that way they could account for even healthcare. Because in private sector, you kind of account for even healthcare.
So that's what they did in government. And what they discovered was the complete opposite, which is as you make your way up the ranks, your stress goes down. And it's not because of the pressures. It's because as you make your way up the ranks, you have more agency.
Define agency for us. You get a little more control as to what your day looks like, to what meetings you can say yes or no to. You get a little more control as to how you do things.
And if you're really good at something, you can be the expert in that. And if you're really bad at something, you can literally say, I'm never doing that. When you're a junior, you have none of those luxuries.
You're told when to be somewhere. You're told how to do something. You have to be good at everything because that's your job when you're a junior.
which is really difficult, right? And so they found that the most junior employees not only have the highest levels of stress, but with high stress, you get higher rates of some cancers, diabetes, and heart disease. So people dying of heart attacks more often at junior levels, not senior levels, right?
Which I find fascinating. This is an awesome finding because agency is a word that if you don't double click on the meaning, you know, the way I operationalize agency is like, Oh yeah, I choose. You know, like I have a sense of power. I have a sense of autonomy. Agency and autonomy and efficacy, those three words get thrown around a bit, but I get to choose.
I get some choice. And so if I have a difficult situation that might include your employment, right? Which is existential, right? I want you very much involved in that conversation.
And it's not a threat. It's a conversation about a situation that I'm in. And as the leader and the person with the decision-making power in this situation, I don't know what to do.
That's cool. Right? And so I'm going to tell you that I'm stuck and don't know what to do rather than leave you out of it and make my decision.
You, you subjected to my decision. And I find that to be an amazing thing to give agency. I, one of the best bosses I ever had. Wait, wait, wait. I want to, don't forget the story.
Okay. I'm not sure we can give it. I'm not sure we can give agency.
Somebody has to, oh, I see what you mean. You can create the condition. You can allow the conditions, but somebody has to be able to step in the ring. I think they, we already have agency and the conditions, even if they're unfavorable, the person is either going to. Oh, I see the look.
Go on, go on. I see the look. Go on, go on.
Because this is now getting complicated. Yeah. It's multifaceted. Let me give you a simple-Tell me the scenario. Okay.
And then I'll throw a wrench in the works. Or some grease. Some grease. There's a bird analogy in there.
Maybe a worm. Yeah. It's getting so bad. So-Optimists more often show up for meetings late because they always think they'll get there on time.
And as an optimist, I'm habitually within the 15-minute range of acceptability. But usually above start time. I am fundamentally an optimistic earned though. And I know that you've got a point of view on optimism, which I can't wait to.
So I'm going to, so, so just, just keeping the worm analogy. Cause you reminded me. So I once showed up for a meeting late. And as I walked in, it was just a few minutes late, somebody put their head up and very aggressively said, you know, Simon, the early bird gets the worm.
And I looked up and said, the early worm gets eaten. And then I sat down. Sorry. So agency. Oh, agency.
So. So letting, letting was, or not letting, but providing agency. So I'm going to use the letting word as an analogy or as a crosswalk is that reporters up at the Seattle Seahawks would say back to us, Coach Carol and I, what we're, the culture we're trying to create along with all of the other coaches and athletes would say, wow, you guys really let people be themselves here.
No, we're not letting anyone be themselves. We're trying to understand who they are and then celebrating. All of that.
So it's not letting. It's a very controlling word. You know why letting is fair? Because it's not I agree with you and I understand what you're saying about your organization. But the reason the word letting is fair is because those reporters work in an organization where they are not allowed to be themselves.
Which is wild. Where it's the opposite of letting, right? Yeah. So they are disallowed to be themselves. Edited.
And they are edited. They are pushed back. They are stomped on. They are not seen. They are not heard.
So They work for newspapers and TV stations and radio stations. So when they say, boy, you let them be themselves, that's longing. They're speaking with longing.
That's right. So it's a fair statement. It is. But we wanted to course correct. We're not letting somebody be themselves.
We are disciplined in our approach to know who they are and then celebrate it. Same with I don't think we give agency. We can take it. But that's the problem.
Like we. And we can create conditions that make it very, very hard for somebody to flex their agency. Yeah. But it's kind of like empowerment. We don't give empowerment.
I don't empower you. You have power. So here's the reason I'm stressed with your line of thinking. Stressed. Acutely stressed.
No, minor. Minor. Uncomfortable.
Can we have this conversation? What's that? Can we have this uncomfortable conversation?
I have to put on a couch and tell you about my childhood? No, no. Here's why I'm somewhat.
stressed by this line of thinking, which is you're making it unilateral. And the reality is, is we're social animals. And yes, you have, quote unquote, agency over yourself, decision-making power over your actions and how you show up, da, da, da, da.
But we work in social environments and we're social animals. And we do respond to the environments we're in. You take a good person, you put them in a bad environment, that person will act abhorrently, you know, and vice versa. Stay in prison.
Or take somebody who is not considered trustworthy and you change their environment and that person will... rise up and shine in a way that nobody ever expected. So I don't think it's fair to say people have it or it's taken away.
It's both. I think it goes both ways. I can make you have none and I can also help create the conditions in which you're allowed to step into it.
At the same time, you can either lean into it, whether I've given it to you or not, and you can also hold it back. whether the opportunity is available or not. Yeah, as leaders, we can foster an environment and conditions.
That's the most we can do. That's all we can do. Which are incredibly powerful for people to express their agency. Yes.
How much they want to express is the choice they make. And this is the greats of historical greatness. Those are the ones that even in the most deplorable, hostile conditions, flexed agencies.
Yes. And those, so if they can do it, if Viktor Frankl can do it. Yeah.
I think I can do it. So I'm inspired by those that are able to do that. And I want to understand the conditions internally that have allowed them to express high agency in some of the most deplorable conditions. that would never reach modern employment. And Viktor Frankl, who was in the concentration camps during the Second World War and couldn't understand why all these people who are all suffering the same conditions, the same abhorrent conditions, why some had the will to live and some didn't.
And now we know from his writing, you know, we can't choose the conditions, but we can choose our reaction to those conditions. And we can be more clear about our why. And we can be more clear about our why. And I think...
And the value of those examples are because they're so extreme. Most of us will never come close, thank goodness. And that is a profound insight. And the point being that no matter what our conditions are, and I think what we're talking about, it's a difficult conversation to have these days because the bedfellow to agency is boundary. Well, that's cool.
How is it going to go accountability? Bedfellow is a cool framing. Bedfellow to agency is?
I said boundary. Boundaries. Boundaries, right? I like it.
I was going accountability. And here's what I'm getting at and why it's a more complex conversation than 20 years ago it would have been. It's because this term boundaries has been bandied about. And folks like me and folks like you talk about these terms and they get latched on and used as swords rather than shields. How about it?
So you'll find in a work environment, usually a younger... employee, but not exclusively, which is you're not respecting my boundaries or I have boundaries. And they're not declarations, they're conversations, right? And also there's irony to some of these conversations as well, because they think they're expressing agency by putting up boundaries and declaring boundaries.
But are you also willing to obey somebody else's boundaries? That's cool. So I'll give you a real life example that showed up in COVID.
Young employee working for a company. High performer, doing great. Company's looking after them.
Wonderful. And she quits. And in the exit interview, they say, what's going on? We didn't see this coming. She says, I'm burnt out.
And the company's like, what? Like, we know your workload. We know, like, we know it's a highly stressful time now, but burnt out? What?
Made no sense. Turns out what was happening is this person was an empath. This person was a great listener. And during COVID especially, the way that we used to work is we'd go to work.
And then after work, we'd go out with our friends and we'd vent about work or everything else that's going on in our life. And that was taken away from us. So what happened was, usually younger but not exclusively, so people found the empath on the team. And that person would always say yes to the phone call and would always be there to listen.
Sometimes affirm. not necessarily great narratives about boyfriends, girlfriends, work life, bosses, colleagues, whatever. And these poor empaths were taking on everybody else's stress at work to the point of burnout. And I told this story on the stage once and a young employee came up to me and goes, oh my God, I'm doing that.
There's somebody on my team I go to with all my problems, my boyfriend problems, my work problems, and they're always there for me. I'm doing that. And I said, yeah. You've constructed your boundaries.
You've told work, I'm not doing this and I'm not doing that. And yet on a daily basis, you're violating somebody else's boundaries. How about it?
Right? Yeah. I like what you're doing here. Yeah, it's good.
And so it's a complex conversation because agency, it's these, and again, this is, I think, the mistake of all of this leadership performance stuff, all of it, all the books, all the authors, all of us, all the podcasters. The huge mistake of this is. we usually talk about these things in isolation. Like you have to do this. You have agency. Don't be the victim, whatever it is.
Set your boundaries. But the problem is we're social. It's all interactive.
You know, that the way we show up, the way we act, it does have impact on other people's feelings, lives, work. And yet we are responsible. You know, it's like if I say something mean to somebody and I hurt their feelings, I have to take accountability. I'm not responsible for the way you feel. Actually, you are.
Like, you're a dick. And you made me feel bad because you talked about something that is my insecurity, and that's not nice. So this is the paradox of being human, and it's the paradox of being a leader or an employee or anything, which is every single moment of every single day, we are both individuals and a member of a group.
We're both an individual, and I'm in a family. I'm in a relationship. I'm on a team.
I'm in a church. I'm in a community. Right? And I, every day...
I'm a sapien. I'm a sapien. Every day I have to weigh decisions, some inconsequential and some very consequential. Do I put myself first at the expense of the group or do I put the group first at the expense of myself?
And the answer is yes. It's a paradox. And there's an entire school of thought that says, no, you always prioritize self over group because if you're not healthy, you can't support the group. And there's an entire school that says, no, you always prioritize group because if they don't care about you, when you're in a time of need, they won't be there for you.
And the answer is, ugh. That's the answer. This is one of the reasons being human is uncomfortable and messy and complex and complicated, because none of it is clear.
But there's only one thing that I know. You are you and you are one of many. Every moment of every day.
Now go ahead and live a life. And this is hard. And this is why leadership is hard, because we teach people how to be good at their jobs and we don't teach people how to look after other people.
And that's what makes. Any team or any company, great. That's awesome.
I love what you're doing here. It's really clear. Well done.
And that's my huge complaint about most of this leadership theory shit. And by the way, Maslow got it wrong. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?
He puts at the bottom food and shelter. And the third level up, he has human relationships. Now, belonging, right? Now, I've never heard of anybody dying by suicide because they were hungry. I've heard of people dying by suicide because they were lonely.
Belonging seems to be more important. No, the mistake he made. And by the way, he put self-actualization at the top as if you reach the top of a pyramid literally and look down at all the unactualized people. I mean, seriously?
Anyway, he's only half right. If you only think of us as individuals, 100% true. Food and shelter absolutely come first.
And belonging...... absolutely comes later and we should be working for self-actualization as individuals. But the problem is we're also members of groups, which means in that scenario, belonging comes first. And food and shelter is probably number three. And at the top is shared actualization, which is what purpose at work is.
And that's why when Satya talks about, I want you to find your why so you can have self-actualization, I want us to know our why because you working here will have shared actualization and that's why we get along. And so Maslow is half wrong. And half right. Never heard it.
Never heard your take. Never heard this take on it. And it's going to cause me some dilemma because I like Maslow. He's fine.
He's fine. He's just half right. I've never heard this ever argued. He just never considered us a social animal, except as a rung, as an individual. Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah. Part of my writings is that we are social beings masquerading like individual contributors. Yeah.
Right. We are more like a coral reef. And this is the hardest thing for every leader to have to deal with at some point.
And every junior person won't understand this until they get more senior. And every leader will have to be confronted with it. The team is more important than any individual on the team. And that is brutal, which is I can sacrifice one person for the good of the team. I cannot sacrifice the team for the good of one person.
Otherwise, the whole thing collapses. And that is excruciating. Now, too many leaders take that too seriously too quickly.
and fire too quickly with this guise of I'm doing it for the greater good, which they're not. It is the last resort to destroy someone's livelihood for the good of the team. But it's true, which is the team is more important than individual on the team. But I have to protect every individual on the team to make the team flourish.
And this is one of the reasons why we have to teach human skills and we have to teach leadership. When people join our organizations, When people join a sports team, we drill into them how to throw, how to catch, how to run, the skills of playing the game. We teach them the rules over and over and over and over until they're literally experts in the playing of the game and how you throw a ball and all the things. And yet as we promote, we usually promote people who are good at the game into a position of leadership, which is wrong, right? There's no correlation between how good you are and how good you are at leading other people.
Like, Tommy Lasorda, so-so ball player, great coach. Isaiah Thomas, like-Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan, phenomenal players, terrible coaches, right? No correlation.
That's right. But as we promote performers, we give them zero education on how to lead. And then we're surprised when the organizations break or how they misunderstand some of the things we're talking about, like boundaries.
They misunderstand why when we say things like- The team is more important than the individual. Fine, I'll just fire all the bad performers. No, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying.
Right? Well, I think most people actually don't fire. They hold on too long to the high performers rather than fire quickly.
I think that's true. I think we hold on too long to the high performers of low trust. Yeah, of the distraught culture. And At the altar of performance. And we know that they're having negative effects on everybody else.
And we know that if we let them go, it'll raise the performance of everybody else. But we're just, they're so good. Their numbers are so good.
Yeah, it's so easy like this. Right? Their numbers are so good.
But the problem is they're not loyal to you. No, no, no. The team hates them. You're destroying the company.
Everybody knows and they're waiting. And I think your point is such a good one, which is if we say the team is more important than any individual on the team, that doesn't mean. get rid of your weak ones.
What it does mean is that get rid of your toxic high performers, your toxic geniuses, because the team is more important than any individual performer on the team. I love it. It's your idea. Shared at this point.
Co-contributors, the two of us. So let's go back to, we are the day after the Super Bowl. Yeah.
49ers lost the Super Bowl. Yeah. You are in the team meeting room the next day. Yeah.
It's kind of the last day of the season. What do you say to the team? Oh, I think you don't give a rah-rah speech.
You don't give a, we got next year. Look how well you did. We made it to the Super Bowl.
It's unfair. You have to affirm the feelings that they're having. They've just been told they lost the Super Bowl.
Well, if you've lost, that means you're the loser. Now, of course, that's nonsense. You made it to the Super Bowl.
But that's not how it feels. They're dejected and they're sad and they're hurt. And we have to affirm all of those.
Because they played the finite game. Because they lost the finite game. That's all.
And we have to just sit in that with them. Be like, boy, this hurts. This really hurts. This really sucks. You're not selling the infinite game at that point.
No, no, no. No. You're acknowledging that this is a finite game.
You know, I'm a great believer in honesty. But I'm also, if you have an infinite mindset, you have more of a sense of timing, right? which is you have to tell the truth and you have to be honest and you have to get people through it, but you don't have to do it all now.
I'll give you a real life example that happened to me. So a friend of mine was in a play. So I went to see to support. And I can say with absolute certainty that it was easily one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life.
I mean, I can't tell you. It was torturous. And had it not been my friend, I would have walked out. And if I could have walked out twice, I would have.
It was so bad, right? Yeah. Now, at the end of the play, I went and hung out in the lobby and my friend came out, you know, friends and family. She's still in costume and makeup. And she comes up to me jacked up with adrenaline.
She just came off the stage. What'd you think? And she said, what'd you think? Exactly. And she knows I'm an honest broker.
She knows that I strive for honesty as often as I can. Yeah. Now is not the time or the place, right? When she's jacked up on adrenaline to have an emotional, what will be deeply emotional.
because it's not rational right now. So I can't lie, right? That's not allowed either. So I said, oh my God, I'm so proud of you. I said, it was such a thrill to see you on the stage doing your thing.
I've never seen you before. And it was a real rush to see you when you came out. All true. Oh my God. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. All true.
And I said, hug, goodbye, next. Two or three days go past and we talked and I said, can I tell you what I thought about the play? adrenaline is down emotions are relaxed she's in a rational state and she goes yeah of course and i go well the script was weak she goes yeah it was i said the directing was pretty bad she goes no i said i liked you she goes thanks and i that one other actor was incredible yeah but overall it was meh she goes no i agree and so the same goes here for the like there's a time and place like yes you have to be honest but not You don't bring rational thoughts to an emotional gunfight.
Amazing. You know? Amazing. This is an emotional time.
You hold space. They feel like shit, let them feel like shit. Amazing. It's okay. And then a month from now, we'll have the rational conversation and the infinite game.
And that's when you get the more rah-rahed up again. Simon, what a fun conversation. Fun for me too. Yeah.
I really enjoyed meeting you in this way and having fun exploring. complicated, invisible ideas, trying to make them tangible. I think we, I think we landed.
No, no, no, that didn't work. I was going to say, I think we landed the plane. We landed the bird on the perch.
Finally, it's finally there. There's definitely a bird on a perch somewhere. Somewhere. Yeah. I want to say thank you.
And where, where can folks that, um, would love a little bit more of this work, where can we drive them to or suggest that they go? All the usual places, your Instagrams, your SimonSinek.com SimonSinek.com, your, what am I? You've got some great courses.
TikToks. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's probably a good thing.
Thanks for the softball that I completely waft. So I'm obsessed with human skills. And so we've made it.
quarter our very existence to help teach those human skills so at simonsonica.com yes we uh we are teaching the human skills online learning uh in-person stuff as well um teaching human skills to individuals or or teams so that they can do all the things that we've been talking about for the past however long we've been talking i love it i hope we find a way to work together oh i would create something it'd be a lot of fun a lot of fun yeah thanks for having me thank you simon