Transcription
Everybody, and welcome to Inside Quest. Our goal is to take you inside the minds of the world's most effective thinkers so that you can learn with ease what they have oftentimes learned with great difficulty. If you pay attention, I promise you our guests will help you acquire the behaviors and thought patterns you need to be successful in anything that you're trying to accomplish.
All right, today's guest understands leadership. I am NOT talking about from the features and benefits standpoint; I'm talking about from a Jedi-level, deep limbic system standpoint. The way that he combines an understanding of biology and psychology, and quite frankly, just the overall human condition, gives his insights unparalleled potency and usability, which you know I am obsessed with.
His lessons on leadership ring true not only because he spent the better part of a decade systematically studying them, but because his transition from marketing consultant to evangelist for global change came as a result of a personal crisis. Having fallen out of love with the very company he created, he turned about with depression into a revolution of the self that has helped him become one of the most impactful voices in the world of leadership.
His TED talk on how great leaders inspire action through their why is the third most viewed talk of all time on TED.com. He's a two-time best-selling author whose ideology has captured the imagination of some of the most important leaders of our time, including the heads of many Fortune 500 companies, the US government, multiple branches of the military, and the United Nations.
Now, why is he so popular? Because his insights cut to the heart of what people crave in their leaders: an ability to create an environment that fosters trust, a feeling of emotional safety, and the willingness to sacrifice themselves when necessary for the benefit of others.
Please help me in welcoming the man whose own vision for the future is so inspiring that an army is rising up around him, and I very much include myself in that—the author of "Together is Better," "Start with Why," and "Leaders Eat Last," the incomparable Simon Sinek.
[Music]
What a pleasure it is to have you on the show.
Thanks for having me.
The truly our pleasure. By the way, you've been a part of the lexicon of this company since we started, when we were a very small handful of people in a very lonely office in Compton. Our chief marketing officer, Nick Robinson, said, "Dude, this guy's written like exactly what we talked about here. You've got to see it. It codifies everything that we've sort of been bumbling around with."
First, he made us watch your TEDx talk, which was amazing, and then he had us all read the book. It really did formalize sort of those vague notions of what this needed to become for us. So that became our mantra: we need to understand our why, which forced us to really put language behind it. It's been just incredibly, incredibly instructive.
One of the goals of the show is to bring on people that I just owe a debt of gratitude to, so I can say thank you.
That's nice. Thank you.
It really, really has been amazing.
So, I haunted your Twitter feed.
Okay, it's amazing.
Thank you. I wanted to start with something that you put on there. You said, "We can learn about our future from our past because regardless of technology or the speed of innovation, people are still people."
True.
The thing that I really found interesting is you seem to understand people. What are some key traits about just humans that every leader should know?
Well, I think one of the things that we forget is that we are a legacy machine working in a very different environment than we were designed for. You know, our species sort of started showing up about 50,000 years ago. There were other hominid species that existed at the time; they died off, we survived. It was those evolutionary traits that gave us the opportunity to outlive our competition but also survive and thrive even as the environment around us changed.
We lived in populations that were never bigger than about 150 people for 40,000 of the 50,000 years that we've done this on the planet. It's only the past 10,000 years with farming that we've been living in populations that were larger than that. In other words, we're not made for this, which means all the rules of being human are exactly the same as they used to be when we were living in populations of about 150.
If you can understand those things, you really understand what works and what doesn't work, regardless of the conditions. The fact of the matter is we are social animals, and we respond to the environments we're in. Always. Our very survival depends on our ability to cooperate and trust with the people that we live or work with.
Right? You can take a good person and put them in a bad environment, and that person will do bad things. You can take a person who maybe the group doesn't trust, maybe they've even performed bad acts; you put them in a good environment, and they're capable of turning their lives around and becoming remarkable members of society.
In other words, it's not the person; it's the environment. Leaders are responsible for that environment. I think leaders forget that. Leaders think that they're responsible for the results. There's not a leader on the planet that is responsible for the results. A leader is responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.
If you take care of that, take care of the people, take care of the environment, things go just fine. You know, we're obsessed with this idea of getting the right people on the bus, you know, as if it's this game that you just sort of keep changing people out, you know, some sort of mix and match or something. But we never ask which bus and who's driving the bus. You know, because it's not—if the bus matters.
So, I'm more obsessed with what happens to people when they come together in protected or unprotected environments and how we respond to those environments.
Yeah, that was a key insight for me. You say that you recursively ask why until you get to the point where you can't go backwards anymore. That, to me, is one of those moments. When you understand that humans, just by their nature, react to their environment, all of a sudden it becomes pretty critical to think about the bus, right? Not only who's on the bus, but what is the bus? What's that environment?
So, I get it from a leadership perspective. You have rank, which you do a very good job of delineating between a leader and helping people understand how, if you don't have rank, you could still be a leader for change in an environment that needs change.
So, as you said, leadership has nothing to do with rank, right? Leadership is a responsibility. As you gain rank, you may have more responsibilities over the lives of more people, but it doesn't change the nature of leadership. I know many, many people who sit at the highest levels of organizations who are not leaders. They have authority, and we do as they tell us because they have authority over us, but we wouldn't follow them.
And yet, I know many people who've made a choice, who have no rank, but they've made a choice to look after the person to the left of them and look after the person to the right of them, and we would follow them anywhere. That's what leadership is. It's the responsibility to take care of the people around us, the people with whom we work.
Leadership is a practice like any other. It is a skill that can be learned, and that means it requires practice. You don't just suddenly get a promotion, you're now in a management position, and you're a leader, right? That's not how it works.
If only.
Right? If only. I know the reality is we have to learn it, and we have to practice it. We have to get good at it, which is what the junior ranks are for. So, even if you don't have the ability to make decisions that will impact the entire organization, you do have the ability to make decisions that will impact the life of another human being: how they feel about their own jobs, how well their responsibility goes, how easily they can get work done, how supported they feel.
How supported they feel if they make a mistake. You know, do they feel that they can turn to you and ask you for help? That's all within your control. It's the same thing as being in a relationship or being a friend. Being a good friend means that our friends can rely on us, that they can trust us, they can turn to us.
There's no difference. It's human beings; it's human relationships. At the end of the day, becoming a leader is about a transition, and everybody has to go through it if you want to become a leader.
As an aside, I will say leadership is like parenting in the sense that everybody has the capacity to be a parent. That doesn't mean everybody wants to be a parent, and that doesn't mean everybody should be a parent. Leadership is the same. Everyone has the capacity to be a leader. It doesn't mean everybody wants to be a leader, and it doesn't mean everybody should be a leader.
The reason is it comes with massive, massive responsibility. Sometimes people just don't want it. It's a lifestyle they choose not to have, and that's fine. That's absolutely fine. But if someone chooses that, that is a lifestyle they would like to have, they would like to become a leader, then they have to acknowledge that they will or need to go through a transition.
When we're very, very junior, the only thing we have to do is be good at our jobs. That's it, right? Some people go get advanced degrees in how to do their jobs—engineers or accountants—and if you're good at your job, they'll promote you. Eventually, you'll get promoted to a position where you're now responsible for the people who do the job you used to do.
But nobody teaches us how to do that, and we just expect them to be good at leadership, right? It's as if we put somebody in front of the machine and demanded results but never showed them how to use the machine.
The reason we get managers, the reason we get micromanagers, the reason we get bad leaders is because nobody showed them how to do the job of leadership, for one. And two, they can't help themselves. Of course, they're going to tell you to do it their way because they actually do know how to do it better than you, because that's what got them to the promotion in the first place.
The transition we have to make is that we are no longer responsible for the job. Thank you. As I said before, we now become responsible for the people who are responsible for the job, right? There's not a manager around who's responsible for the results. We're responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.
I love talking to CEOs, and I'm like, "What's your priority?" They say, "My priority is my customer." I'm like, "You haven't talked to a customer in 10 years. You have no impact on a customer at all." What you can do is screw with someone's life who will then impact your customer or support someone who will then impact your customer, right?
Leaders are responsible for the people who are responsible for the people who are responsible for the people who are responsible for the customer. Get that chain right; that is the chain of command. Get that chain right, and everything goes just fine. Get that chain wrong, and then the people who are touching the customer, inventing the product, selling the product, figuring out ways how to build the company, manage the numbers, manage the processes, manage the operations—in other words, all the heavy lifting—get that chain wrong, and those people will spend more time protecting themselves from you than doing their job.
Right? Any company, for example, where it is standard practice for employees to feel the need to send a CYA email after every decision they make is a sign that they're taking time and energy out of their job away from advancing the company's mission in order to protect themselves from their own company. That's what that is.
Any company where it is standard practice for people to feel the need to keep a folder of all the good things they've done in their careers just in case they need it, you know, is a sign that they're taking time and energy out of their day away from doing their job in order to protect themselves from their own leaders. That's what that is.
Those are signs of bad leadership. Politics, gossip—all of these things are people acting out of self-interest. That's what politics and gossip is, right? In well-led organizations, you tend to find very little politics and very little gossip because we're not competing at that level. We're now working together to compete at a much higher level.
I'll tell you one quick story; it's a true story that captures this just so perfectly. I was staying at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas, which is a wonderful hotel, and the service there is really great. The reason it's such a great hotel is because of the people who work there.
I had an experience with a young man by the name of Noah. Noah's a barista in the coffee shop that they have just there in the lobby. I was buying a cup of coffee, and Noah was charming and funny and engaging. I think I gave a hundred percent tip. I think my five-dollar coffee, I think I gave a five-dollar tip. I mean, this guy was great. I mean, I loved talking to him; he was a joy.
I asked him, "Do you like your job?" He said to me, "I love my job," without skipping a beat. I asked, "What is it that the Four Seasons is doing that you love your job so much?" He says, again without skipping a beat, "Throughout the day, managers will walk past and ask how I'm doing and if there's anything that I need."
He said, "Not just my manager; any manager." Wow! He says, "I feel supported here." He says, "I can be myself."
Right then, magic. Then he says to me, "I also work at Caesar's Palace, and there the managers go around to make sure that we're doing everything right and catch us if we do something wrong." He says, "When I go to work at Caesar's Palace, I keep my head just under the radar because I don't want to get in trouble. I just want to get through the day and make a paycheck."
All right, same person, right? The experience that I have at the Four Seasons will be diametrically opposite to the experience that I have at Caesar's Palace, not because of Noah, but because of Noah's leadership.
Right? And the joke is, if I were to go talk to the managers over at Caesar's Palace and say, "You know, it's you," they'll say, "But you don't understand; we cannot get good work out of our people. Look, no matter how hard we try and how hard we push them, they just don't."
So we either have to replace them or push them harder. No! We respond to the environments we're in. Get the environment right, you get the right behavior. Get the environment wrong, you get the wrong behavior. If that is what is happening, it is because of leadership, not because of the people.
Yeah, there was a really famous cartoon back in the '80s: "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
Yeah, yeah, that was hilarious because it's so terrifyingly accurate. And astonishingly, look, I'm embarrassed that I have a career. You know, I talk about things like trust and cooperation. Why is there demand for my work? You know, but the fact that there is, I'll take it as an opportunity.
But what's really sort of abominable is that this is not a new idea. There are books galore and speeches galore and articles galore about what leadership is. You know, we all kind of say the same thing from a different angle, so you can pick your flavor, whichever message resonates most with you. And yet people don't do it.
What's the hang-up?
And so I get this question a lot, which is, "What are the most important characteristics about being a leader?" You know, vision, charisma. You know, I know some spectacular leaders who don't have big Steve Jobs-y visions; they're just not visionary.
And I know some spectacular leaders who really don't have a lot of charisma; they kind of just shuffle around, and you're like, "That's the guy. That's the guy," right? And they're spectacular, and people will give blood, sweat, and tears for these people.
The one thing I am comfortable saying that all effective leaders must have is courage because it is hard. It is hard to stand up against outside pressure. It is hard to stand up to an external constituency who's pushing you to do something for their short-term gain, to do the right thing for your people.
It is hard. It is a thankless, it is lonely. Sometimes you get fired; sometimes you get in trouble; sometimes you'll lose your job, and the next guy will get all the credit. It's all true.
The courage to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming pressure—only the best leaders have that courage. Only the best leaders.
And here's the folly: courage is not some deep internal fortitude. You don't dig down deep and find the courage, right? It just doesn't exist. Courage is external. Our courage comes from the support we feel from others.
In other words, when you feel that someone has your back, when you know that the day that you admit you can't do it, someone will be there and say, "I got you. You can do this." That's what gives you the courage to do the difficult thing.
It's not going off to an ashram by yourself somewhere for four weeks and coming back and finding the courage. It's not what happens. It's the relationships that we foster; it's the people around us who love us and care about us and believe in us.
When we have those relationships, we will find the courage to do the right thing. And when you act with courage, that in turn will inspire those in your organization to also act with courage. In other words, it's still an external thing. That's what inspiration is, right? I'm inspired to follow your example.
But those relationships that we foster over the course of a lifetime will not only make us into the leaders we need to be and hope we can be, but they'll often save your life. They'll save you from depression; they'll save you from giving up; they'll save you from any matter of, you know, negative feelings about your own capabilities, your own future.
When someone just says, "I love you, and I will follow you no matter what."
Why do you think that something so innate, so deeply ingrained in us as love is so... like, just yesterday—I can't believe this is true; this is actually true. I'm not making this up—just yesterday, so it means something to you guys, I looked Ron Pennant in his eyes, and I said, "I love you."
And I said it like a hundred percent to my business partner. I said it a hundred percent sincerely. It was just one of those moments where you want to connect and remember. But that's so weird; like, I don't do that often.
It's so interesting that it becomes out of context. It's the best way to say it because, like, at home with my wife, it's so easy, and I love to embody it, and I love to feel it, and it makes me feel awesome. But then I come into the office, and there's something about the context that makes it weird.
Yes, two perspectives. One is this is what vulnerability is, right? Being vulnerable doesn't mean crying. Being vulnerable means being willing to admit you made a mistake. Being vulnerable is the willingness to say, "I need help."
Being vulnerable is the willingness to express the feelings you have towards someone without fear of what other people may think of you by making that expression. Most people, especially if they don't have a trusting environment or a strong corporate culture, most people don't want to feel vulnerable.
It's dangerous to feel vulnerable. If you admit you made a mistake, but you don't know what you're doing, you've been promoted into a job that you have no clue or no business being in, that lying, hiding, and faking is a much better option, right?
But for the fact that it's more stressful, and ultimately the results will falter, right? It's counterintuitive, but that's what a strong environment means. It means I can be vulnerable.
So the fact that you can say that out loud means that there's a loving, trusting culture here that is okay with you being vulnerable. Nobody's thinking, "Oh my God, this company's going downhill; this guy's nuts; he's blubbering all over the place." You know, that's not what people are thinking.
I mean, some people are probably thinking that, but generally, that's not what people are thinking. If anything, people are going, "Cool!" And that then inspires them to feel that they can also express vulnerability, like admit a mistake, like say they screwed up, like say they need help, like say they want to offer help to someone and not fear that either.
So that's one perspective. The other reason why stuff that I talked about or that you're talking about now is so often ignored is just because it's hard to measure. You know, how do you measure leadership?
Any measure is going to be one of my questions. How do you measure trust? You know, they lack good metrics. It's very easy to measure revenues and profits and market share, so let's focus on those things because I can pull a lever here and see what happens over there, right?
But in terms of trust, I'll pull a lever here, and I won't see anything for six months. So it's not that I don't know that it exists; everybody talks about the importance of culture. Nobody seems to be focused on building it.
I've never met a CEO in my life who doesn't think people are important, and yet every day they're making decisions that prioritize a number over a person. Yeah, they literally don't care about people. They make decisions that literally brush people aside because it's hard to measure in an ultra-speedy, you know, algorithmic world that we live in.
What gets measured gets done. These things are measurable, just not in the short term.
Yeah, I was going to ask because when you talk about making this a movement, which is really exciting to them, there's this crusader out there who is incredibly effective at communicating this stuff and getting people excited about it and actually taking things from the ephemeral and making it very tangible.
Do you think that's a question you're going to have to answer at some point?
Let's show people how we...
Metrics are fine. The metrics are fine; they're just not in the short term, and they're just not fixed entirely. So, for example, do you love your wife? Right? Prove it. Like, what's the metric? Give me the number that helps me know, right?
Because when you met her, you didn't love her. Right now, you love her. Right? Tell me the day the love happened. It's an impossible question, right? But it's not that it doesn't exist; it's that it's much easier to prove over time, right?
So all leadership is the same thing. It's about transitions. So if you were to go to the gym, right? Sit, like exercise, right? If you go to the gym and you work out and you come back and you look in the mirror, you will see nothing.
And if you go to the gym the next day and you come back and you look in the mirror, you will see nothing, right? So clearly, there's no results. Can't be measured; it must not be effective, so we quit, right?
Or if you fundamentally believe that this is the right course of action and you stick with it, like in a relationship, I bought her flowers, and I wished her happy birthday, and she doesn't let me. Clearly, I'll give up. You know, that's not what happens.
If you believe there's something there, you commit yourself to act in acts of service. You can meet yourself to the regime, the exercise. You can screw it up; you can eat chocolate cake one day; you can skip a day or two. You know, it allows for that.
But if you stick with it consistently, I'm not exactly sure what day, but I know you'll start getting into shape. I know it. And the same with the relationship. It's not about the events; it's not about intensity; it's about consistency.
Right? You go to the dentist twice a year; your teeth will fall out. You have to brush your teeth every day for two minutes. What does brushing your teeth twice a day for two minutes do? Nothing, unless you do it every day, twice a day, for two minutes, right?
It's the consistency. Going to the gym for nine hours does not get you into shape. Working out every day for 20 minutes gets you into shape.
So the problem is we treat leadership with intensity. We have a two-day off-site; we invite a bunch of speakers; we give everybody a certificate: "You're a leader!" Right? Those things are like going to the dentist. They're very important; they're good for reminding us or getting us back on track, learning new lessons.
But it's the daily practice of all the monotonous little boring things, like brushing your teeth, that matter the most. She didn't fall in love with you because you remembered her birthday and bought her flowers on Valentine's Day.
She fell in love with you because when you woke up in the morning, you said good morning to her before you checked your phone. She fell in love with you because when you went to the fridge to get yourself a drink, you got her one without even asking.
She fell in love with you because when you had an amazing day at work and she came home and she had a terrible day at work, you didn't say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but let me tell you about my day." You sat and listened to her awful day, and you didn't say a thing about your amazing day.
This is why she fell in love with you. I can't tell you exactly what day, and it was no spectacular thing you did. It was the accumulation of all of those little things that she woke up one day and it's as if she pressed a button. She goes, "I love him."
Right? Leadership is exactly the same. There's no event; there's no thing I can tell you you have to do that your people will trust you. It just doesn't work that way. It's an accumulation of lots and lots of little things that anyone by themselves is innocuous and useless—literally pointless by themselves.
People will look at little things that are good leadership practice and say, "That won't work." And you're absolutely right. But if you do it consistently and you do it in combination with lots of other little things, like saying good morning to someone, looking them in the eye.
My friend George, who was a three-star general in the Marine Corps, says his test for leadership—and I love this—he goes, "His test really of a good leader is if you ask somebody how their day is going, you actually care about the answer."
Right? The number of times we're walking to a meeting, we're rushing, we go, "How are you?" Not good; I gotta get to you later; I'm late for a meeting. If you ask the question, you were standing there, and you're listening to the answer.
It's those little innocuous things that you do over and over and over and over that people will say, "I love my job." Not "I like my job." "I like my job" means, "Yeah, the challenge is great; they pay me well; I like the people."
"I love my job" means I don't want to work anywhere else. I don't care how much somebody else is willing to pay me. I'm devoted to the people here, and I care desperately about the people here as if they were my family.
In business, we have colleagues and co-workers; in the military, they have brothers and sisters. That's how they think of each other, right? If you really have a strong corporate culture, the people will think of each other like brothers and sisters.
Definitely. It's like a family, right? No, brothers and sisters, deep love, fight, but the love doesn't go away, right? We bicker; the love doesn't go away. And I'll fight with my sister, but if you threaten my sister, you're going to have to deal with me, right?
Right? We'll fight internally; we'll bicker with each other, but nobody's going to hurt each other. And if anything from the outside shows up, you're looking at a unified front. Brothers and sisters.
Now, how do you create brothers and sisters out of strangers? Common beliefs, common values, you know, parents—in other words, executives who care about their children's success, who care to raise their children, teach them skills, discipline them when necessary, help them build their self-confidence so that they can go on and achieve something more than you could have ever imagined achieving for yourself.
That's leadership: an absolute love and devotion for the people who've committed their lives to this enterprise.
That's such a brilliant reframe. It's so simple and so beautiful and unbelievably hard work.
It is, and it isn't. Here's why it is: you said it; it's hard to measure, right? It's hard for me to show, hard to measure in the short term. It's very easy to measure in the long term.
Over the long term, the traditional metrics will go up—all your revenues, profits, market share. The traditional metrics will go up, and more importantly, they'll go up more stable, right? You will be able to weather hard times better because the people will come together; they won't abandon ship.
Right? In the over the long term, the traditional metrics are just fine. But also, over the long term, your churn will go down, right? You won't be going through employees as much, right? Over the long term, you'll find that loyalty is much higher, that people will turn down better-paying jobs, right?
Over the long term, all the traditional tricks are just fine, and then some. It's only the short term that it's hard to measure.
Yeah, I'm going to say, though, there's something in between those two. In the middle, too, because with working out—so to use your analogy, if you had to go to the gym for six months before you saw any sign of change, no one would do it, right?
And there are so many variables in working out. The number one thing is to know who to listen to. The number one thing is to know what to look for, right? So if you don't experience muscle fatigue, you're probably doing something different. That's immediate, right?
I know that the next day if you experience muscle fatigue and don't notice any change within a few weeks, you're probably not eating right. So that really is still true.
So I'm sitting here thinking it could really be as simple as, like, I have a growing belief that part of what you could write down as a leader's job is to connect.
Now, how do we connect? You've given some very simple examples, and they're all incredibly real: asking somebody how their day is and actually waiting to hear the answer and caring about what the answer is.
Time spent together, right? I couldn't have a very effective relationship with my wife if there actually isn't time together. One of the things that I have personally struggled with is, as the organization has grown, just time with any individual becomes more and more difficult.
And so then you start focusing on, "Okay, wait, it's just about creating the environment." But as you lose touch with the real sense of, like, I know this person, and I can see when they're having a bad day.
Really leveraging what we have as humans, and this is why your teachings are so powerful, is you wrap it in the truth of the human experience. You wrap it in how humans really connect, like looking at each other, sensing that, like, "Hey, this is either hitting or it's not."
All of that stuff is super, super real. And as an organization, to be able to find ways in that middle ground where it's like, "I'm pretty sure this is working, and I really believe in it at a macro level, but I just want to know," because there are so many paths, right?
And you could nudge sort of one way or the other to create something that—and maybe it's as simple as, "Here's what I'm using right now: the amount of laughter right here in the office."
Maybe that's dumb; I don't know, but I'm really doing it, and I really think all day, like, how much laughter have I heard today? And I feel like when everyone is making an effort to connect with each other, to provide empathy and all that, there's a lowering of people's defenses.
And just a sort of natural outpouring of that is joking around, and so you hear this laughter bubble. And when things get really tense and stressful, I literally feel like you could have a decibel meter and just feel it coming down.
I mean, look, it's a human thing. So just as you know how your body feels after a good workout, you know how your body feels after a big greasy meal. You know that one is good for you and one is not, you know, despite what it may taste like.
And that's the problem with short-term gains, right? They feel really good in the short term. So we're highly, highly, highly trained social animals. We're highly adapted social animals. You know, we can feel social awkwardness, and we can feel when things are going well.
You know, we—you can sense it. You say you have this sense of laughter, you know, around the office. Like, we're not—we're not—we don't walk on with blinders. When, you know, we're—like I said, we're made to do this.
You know, that's why we can assess if somebody's trustworthy or not. You know, it's why we keep our walls up.
Oh my God, yeah, yeah. His results are great, but I wouldn't trust him, right? You know, as opposed to letting on, you know, but like, I trust her for anything. I trust her with my kids, my money, anything, you know?
So we're highly attuned animals, and so we're good at sensing it. But I will say there is a caveat to your metric of laughter, which is a decent one, is that scale breaks things, right?
In human beings, as I said before, we're not made for populations bigger than about 150-ish. It's called Dunbar's number. Robin Dunbar, a professor from Cambridge University, theorized that we cannot maintain more than about 150 close relationships.
And the way he defined a close relationship is if you're at a bar with a bunch of friends and somebody comes in, would you ask that person to join you or not? And it's about 150 that we would ask them to come join us.
If you think about the reason, that actually makes perfect sense, which is there's two limiting factors. One is time. If you only gave two minutes to every person you know, you'd make no close friends.
And the other one is memory. You just can't remember everybody. And so this is where leadership becomes very, very interesting because if you have a company that has a lot of people—five, six, seven, eight hundred people, a thousand, two thousand, five thousand people—clearly, you can't know everyone.
And clearly, as a CEO, look, I care about every single one of my people. You even know some of the people you work for a real, but we work for your bastards; you don't care about this, right?
So it's a nonsense statement, right? But what you can say is I desperately care about the people whose names I know and whose faces I recognize, and I care desperately about my leadership.
And I instill in them every day that I will give them the tools, and I will take care of them with one purpose, one purpose only: that they will take care of the people in their charge.
And I want those people to take care of the people, and instill in them that they take care of the people in their charge. And then by the time you get down to the masses where the actual thousand exist, because of the seniors, it's like 20 strength, right?
Where the real thousand exist, they feel about a hundred and a hundred and fifty of them can look to one of their direct leaders, to one of their direct managers, and say, "That person cares about me."
That's our boss; that's my boss; that's my leader. Not the leader; it's the CEO. That's my manager, my boss, my leader. And by the way, I hate the word boss and manager. Nobody wakes up in the morning to be managed. Nobody wants to be managed. Manage me, right?
But we do want to be led. I do want to be led. I wake up in the morning, and I want to be led. Lead me! Absolutely! Absolutely! Lead me, right?
If you have the courage and you can lead me, right, and I will follow you. So when scale shows up, you actually still maintain the rules of Dunbar's number, but now they're done.
And that's what effective hierarchy looks like, where every level feels supported by the level above to take care of the level below. And then if you're at the frontline, you feel supported by the level above and the level below as the customer or the vendor that you own that relationship.
In other words, we're all responsible for taking care of another relationship because someone's taking care of us.
Yeah, you've talked super powerfully about that, that like an alcoholic, if you don't master the step of helping somebody else beat the disease, that you never really fully beat it yourself.
And yet the parallel between being a leader requires the same thing: you taking ownership for helping somebody else be successful and building trust through that.
Yeah, the example you're using there is that the 12-step program. We all joke about the first step: admitting you have a problem. But it's the twelfth step that matters. If an alcoholic masters all 11 steps and not the twelfth, it's highly likely they'll drink again.
If they master the twelfth step, they're much more likely to overcome the disease. The twelfth step is the commitment to help another alcoholic, right? It's service.
And this really is the most powerful thing in the world, which is it's not about us; it's about others. You know, there's an entire section in the bookshop called self-help. There's no section in the bookshop called to help others, right?
And it's not about how can I lose ten pounds, how can I find the job that I love, how can I find the love of my life? You know, no, no, it's not how can I lose ten pounds; it's how can I help somebody I care about live a healthy lifestyle?
It's not how can I find a job that I love; it's how can I help somebody I care about find a lifetime of joy in their work? It's not how can I find true love; it's how can I help my friends settle down and live the life they want to live?
And ironically, if we set out to help people solve the problems that we struggled with or saw that we struggle with ourselves, that in turn is what teaches us the solutions.
Yeah, that's incredible. And the thing that really is—this is so important to me—is the human desire for connection is so strong, and we sort of check that at the door when you come into an office.
And yet you're giving so much of your time to the office that you've said that, you know, loving your job is a right; it's not nice to have; it's a privilege.
Yeah, I believe that. I believe loving your work is a right and not a privilege. I despise the fact, lament the fact, I curse the fact that so few people get to say, "I love my job," as if they've won some lottery.
You know, you go out with your friends, and somebody says, "I love my job," and everybody goes, "Oh my God, you're so lucky!" Right? That, to me, is madness. Everybody—the vast majority—should get to wake up and say, "I love my job."
It is a right; it is a God-given right that we should love where we work, and we should demand it. We should demand that our leaders provide an environment in which we want to come, where we want to care about each other, where we feel safe to express our vulnerabilities and our fears and our concerns, that we're open to correction and discipline and feedback, that we're not defensive because we know that it's being given to help us improve and grow.
And we want to improve and grow, and in turn, we will help others improve and grow because when we feel safe, when we feel that our leaders care more about us than a number, they care more about our lives and our confidence and our joy in our skill set more than some short-term gain, that they care more about our priorities than the priorities of some disinterested external constituency, then we will respond in kind.
And we will offer our blood and our sweat and our tears, and we will make sacrifices of all kinds to see that our leader's vision is advanced and that this company continues to thrive—not for them, for ourselves.
It becomes deeply personal; it becomes something we love contributing to. I talk about it all the time: working hard for something we don't care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.
And I'm tired of listening to CEOs saying, "We only hire passionate people." What, you know, what that means? How do you know that they're passionate for interviewing and not passionate for working?
You know, every person on the planet has passion, right? We just don't all have passion for the same things. Give me something to believe in. Give me something to believe in. Give me the opportunity to contribute to something. Allow me to make mistakes and try again, and you'll have passion up the wazoo.
But Noah, Noah only has passion in one of his jobs; he has stress in the other one of his jobs. Same guy, same guy, different leadership.
That rings so true with what I know about human nature. The first time I heard you talk about this, it's just one of those things that whenever something lines up with what I know to be about the way that the human mind works, it's like, "Okay, now I know that I'm really onto something."
And when you have told stories of companies that have weathered storms and how that trust goes both ways, when people feel looked after, it makes a lot of sense.
And then, too, I had never heard prior to you that the way the business has evolved was a theory that was laid out in only 30, 40 years ago. Max, and I can really feel a change that's happening in the world now, and it's such a cool time to be involved in a rapidly growing company that has a huge portion of young people in the company.
Because the demand that you're saying that people need to be made—there's something in the youth today that allows them to cry for their humanity. And I don't know if they yet know the words that you're giving them, but you nodded your head in a way I want to hear what you're thinking.
I have yet to give a speech or have a meeting where somebody doesn't ask me the millennial question.
What's the millennial question?
Apparently, millennials, as a generation—which is a group of people who were born approximately 1984 and after—are tough to manage, and they're accused of being entitled and narcissistic and self-interested, unfocused, lazy. But entitled is the big one.
And because they confound leadership so much, what's happening is leaders are asking the millennials, "What do you want?" And millennials are saying, "We want to work in a place with purpose." Love that!
We want to make an impact, you know, whatever that means. We want free food and bean bags. And so somebody articulates some sort of purpose; there's lots of free food, and there's bean bags. And yet, for some reason, they are still not happy.
And that's because they're missing this. There's a missing piece. What I've learned is that I can break it down into four pieces, right? There are four characteristics: one is parenting, the other one is technology, the third is patience, and the fourth is environment.
The generation that we call the millennials—too many of them grew up subject to, not my words, failed parenting strategies. You know, where, for example, they were told that they were special all the time. They were told that they could have anything they want in life just because they want it.
They were told some of them got into honors classes not because they deserved it, but because their parents complained. And some of them got A's not because they earned them, but because the teachers didn't want to deal with the parents. Some kids got participation medals; you got a medal for coming in last, right?
Which the science we know is pretty clear, which is it devalues the medal and the reward for those who actually work hard, and that actually makes the person who comes in last feel embarrassed because they know they didn't deserve it.
So acting makes me feel worse, right? So you take this group of people, and they graduate school, and they get a job, and they're thrust into the real world, and in an instant, they find out they're not special. Their moms can't get them a promotion; you get nothing for coming in last.
And by the way, you can't just have it because you want it, right? And in an instant, their entire self-image is shattered. And so you have an entire generation that's growing up with lower self-esteem than previous generations.
The other problem, compounded, is we're growing up in a Facebook, Instagram world. In other words, we're good at putting filters on things. We're good at showing people that life is amazing even though I'm depressed, right?
And so everybody sounds tough, and everybody sounds like they got it all figured out, and the reality is there's very little toughness, and most people don't have it figured out. And so when the more senior people say, "Well, what we do," they sound like this is what you got to do, and they have no clue.
So you have an entire generation growing up with lower self-esteem than previous generations, right? Through no fault of their own, through no fault of their own, right? They were dealt a bad hand.
Right? Now let's add in technology. We know that engagement with social media and our cell phones releases a chemical called dopamine. That's why when you get a text, it feels good, right?
So, you know, we've all had it where you're feeling a little bit down or feeling a bit lonely, and so you send out ten texts to ten friends, you know, "Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi," because it feels good when you get a response, right?
Right? It's why we count the likes. It's why we go back ten times to see if our memes and my Instagram are growing slower. Did I do something wrong? Do they not like me anymore? Right?
The trauma for young kids to be unfriended, right? Because we know when you get it, you get a hit of dopamine, which feels good. It's why we like it; it's why we keep going back to it.
Dopamine is the exact same chemical that makes us feel good when we smoke, when we drink, and when we gamble. In other words, it's highly, highly addictive, right?
We have age restrictions on smoking, gambling, and alcohol, and we have no age restrictions on social media and cell phones, which is the equivalent of opening up the liquor cabinet and saying to our teenagers, "Hey, by the way, this adolescence thing, if it gets you down, but that's basically what's happening."
That's basically what's happening, right? You have an entire generation that has access to an addictive numbing chemical, dopamine, through social media and cell phones as they're going through the high stress of adolescence.
Why is this important? Almost every alcoholic discovered alcohol when they were teenagers. When we're very, very young, the only approval we need is the approval of our parents.
And as we go through adolescence, we make this transition where we now need the approval of our peers. Very frustrating for our parents, very important for us. That allows us to acculturate outside of our immediate families into the broader tribe, right?
It's a highly, highly stressful and anxious period of our lives, and we're supposed to learn to rely on our friends. Some people, quite by accident, discover alcohol, and the numbing effects of dopamine help them cope with the stresses and anxieties of adolescence.
Unfortunately, that becomes hardwired in their brains, and for the rest of their lives, when they suffer significant stress, they will not turn to a person; they will turn to the bottle. Social stress, financial stress, career stress—that's pretty much the primary reasons why an alcoholic drinks, right?
What's happening is because we're allowing unfettered access to these dopamine-producing devices and media, basically, it's becoming hardwired. And what we're seeing is, as they grow older, too many kids don't know how to form deep, meaningful relationships.
Their words, not mine. They will admit that many of their friendships are superficial. They will admit that their friends—that they don't count on their friends; they don't rely on their friends. They have fun with their friends, but they also know that their friends will cancel on them if something better comes along.
Deep, meaningful relationships are not there because they never practice the skill set. And worse, they don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with stress. So when significant stress starts to show up in their lives, they're not turning to a person; they're turning to a device.
They're turning to social media; they're turning to these things which offer temporary relief. We know the science is clear: we know that people who spend more time on Facebook have far higher rates of depression than people who spend less time on Facebook.
Write these things balanced. Alcohol is not bad; too much alcohol is bad. Gambling is fun; too much gambling is dangerous. Right? There's nothing wrong with social media and cell phones; it's the imbalance.
Right? If you're sitting at dinner with your friends and you're texting somebody who's not there, that's a problem. That's an addiction. If you're sitting in a meeting with people you're supposed to be listening to and speaking, and you put your phone on the table, face up or face down, I don't care, that sends the subconscious message to the room that you're not just not that important to me right now.
Right? That's what happens. And the fact that you cannot put it away is because you are addicted, right? If you wake up and you check your phone before you say good morning to your girlfriend, boyfriend, or spouse, you have an addiction.
And like all addiction, in time, it'll destroy relationships; it'll cost time, and it'll cost money, and it'll make your life worse, right? So you have a generation growing up with lower self-esteem that doesn't have the coping mechanisms to deal with stress.
Right? Now you add in the sense of impatience, right? They've grown up in a world of instant gratification. You want to buy something? You go on Amazon; it arrives the next day. You want to watch a movie? Log on and watch your movie; you don't check movie times.
You want to watch your TV show? Binge! You don't even have to wait week to week to week. Right? I know people who skip seasons just so they can binge at the end of the season, right?
Instagram, if occasion—you want to go on a date? You don't even have to learn how to be like—you don't even have to learn and practice that skill. You don't have to be the uncomfortable into it.
Says yes when you mean no, but yes when you—you have to swipe right. Bang! I'm a stud, right? You don't have to learn the social coping mechanisms, right? Everything you want, you can have instantaneously.
Everything you want—instant gratification—except job satisfaction and strength of relationships. There ain't no app for that. They are slow, meandering, uncomfortable, messy processes.
And so I keep meeting these wonderful, fantastic, idealistic, hard-working, smart kids. They've just graduated school; they're in their entry-level job. I sit down with them, and I go, "How's it going?" They go, "I think I'm going to quit."
I'm like, "Why?" They're like, "I'm not making an impact." I'm like, "You've been here eight months!" It's as if they're standing at the foot of a mountain, and they have this abstract concept called impact that they want to have in the world, which is the summit.
What they don't see is the mountain. I don't care if you go up the mountain quickly or slowly, but there's still a mountain. And so what this young generation needs to learn is patience, that some things that really, really matter, like love or job fulfillment, joy, love of life, self-confidence, a skill set—any of these things—all of these things take time.
Sometimes you can expedite pieces of it, but the overall journey is arduous and long and difficult. And if you don't ask for help and learn that skill set, you will fall off the mountain.
Or you will—the worst-case scenario—the worst-case scenario, and we're already seeing it. The worst-case scenario is we're seeing increases in suicide rates; we're seeing an increase in this generation. We're seeing increases in accidental deaths due to drug overdoses.
We're seeing more and more kids drop out of school or take leaves of absence due to depression—unheard of. This is really bad. The best-case scenario—the best—there's all bad cases, right?
The best-case scenario is you'll have an entire population growing up and going through life and just never really finding joy. They'll never really find deep, deep fulfillment in work or in life. They'll just walk through life in little gene, just, "It's fine. How's your job? It's fine. The same as yesterday. How's your relationship? It's fine."
Like, that's the best-case scenario, which leads me to the fourth point, which is environment, which is we're taking this amazing group of young, fantastic kids who have just dealt a bad hand. It's no fault of their own, and we put them in corporate environments that care more about the numbers than they do about the kids.
They care more about the short-term gains than the long-term life of this young human being. We care more about the year than the lifetime, right? And so we are putting them in corporate environments that aren't helping them build their confidence, that aren't helping them learn the skills of cooperation, that aren't helping them overcome the challenges of a digital world and finding more balance.
That isn't helping them overcome the need to have instant gratification and teach them the joys and impact and the fulfillment you get from working hard over on something for a long time that cannot be done in a month or even in a year.
And so we're thrusting them into corporate environments, and the worst part about it is they think it's them. They blame themselves. They think it's them who can't deal, and so it makes it all worse.
It's not! I'm here to tell them it's not them; it's the corporations. It's the corporate environments; it's the total lack of good leadership in our world today that is making them feel the way they do. They were dealt a bad hand in it, and I hate to say it, but it's the company's responsibility.
Sucks to be you! Like, we have no choice, right? This is what we got, and I wish that society and their parents did a better job. They didn't, so we're getting them in our company, and we now have to pick up the slack.
We have to work extra hard to figure out the ways that we build their confidence. We have to work extra hard to find ways to teach them the social skills that they're missing out on. There should be no cell phones in conference rooms—none, zero!
And I don't mean the kind of like sitting outside waiting to text. I mean like when you're sitting and waiting for a meeting to start, nobody goes—this is what we all do. We all sit here and wait for the meeting to start, meaning starting.
Okay, when we start the meeting, no! That's not how relationships are formed. Remember we talked about it's the little things? Relationships are formed this way.
We're waiting for a meeting to start; we go, "How's your dad? I heard he's in the hospital." "Oh, he's really good; thanks for asking. He's actually at home, though." "Oh, I'm really glad; that was really amazing. I know it was really scary for him."
I know, it was really scary for him. "Hey, did you ever get that report on?" "Oh my God, no, I didn't. Hop up yard; I totally—can I help you out with that?" Really? That's how you form relationships.
Hey, did you ever get that report on? Oh my God, no, I didn't. Hop up yard; I totally—can I help you out with that? Really? That's how trust forms. Trust doesn't form at an event in a day.
Even bad times don't form trust immediately. It's the slow, steady consistency, and we have to create mechanisms where we allow for those little innocuous interactions to happen.
But when we allow cell phones in company, just okay, I have the meeting, and then my favorite is like when there's a cell phone there, and you go like this: it rings, and you go, "I'm not going to answer that." Mr. Magnanimous, you know?
When you're out for dinner with your friends, like I do this with my friends when we're going out for dinner, and we're leaving together, we'll leave our cell phones at home. Who are we calling? Maybe one of us will bring a phone in case we need to call the new birth or take a picture of our meal.
I'm not idealist, but I'm not insane. I mean, it looked really good; we'll take one phone. And so it's like an alcoholic. The reason you take the alcohol out of the house this week is because we cannot trust our willpower.
We're just not strong enough. But when you remove the temptation, it actually makes it a lot easier. And so when you just say, "Don't check your phone," people literally will go like this.
And somebody would go to the bathroom, and what's the first thing we do? Because I wouldn't want to look around the restaurant for a minute and a half, you know? But if you don't have the phone, you just kind of enjoy the world, and that's where ideas happen.
The constant, constant, constant engagement is not where you have innovation and ideas. Ideas happen when our minds wander, and we go, "Oh, I really could do that." That's called innovation, right?
But we're taking away all those little moments, right? You should not—and none of us—none of us should charge our phones by our beds. We should be charging our phones in the living rooms, right?
Remove the temptation. You wake up in the middle of the night because you can't sleep; you won't check your phone, which makes it worse. But if it's in the living room, it's relaxed; it's fine.
Oh yeah, but it's my alarm clock. Buy an alarm clock; they cost eight dollars. I'll buy you an alarm clock, right? But the point is, the point is, is we now in industry, whether we like it or not, we don't get a choice.
We now have a responsibility to make up the shortfall and to help this amazing, idealistic, fantastic generation build their confidence, learn patience, learn the social skills, find a better balance between life and technology because, quite frankly, it's the right thing to do.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Coming on.
Well, thanks for having me.
Thank you for coming. It's incredible. Absolutely amazing. Where can they find you?
So ironic, isn't it? Well, you can find me on social media when you're not in the meeting.
So, yeah, I'm in all the usual places. But I will tell you one thing: I have a new book coming out in September. This is—it's a thinly veiled plug, but what's made them very happy.
But what's special about it is I wanted to produce something that no digital format could reproduce. And so it's an illustrated quote book. It's beautifully illustrated. I was very sort of pushy about this, that I didn't want the illustrations done on a computer; they were done by hand.
There's a song, Aloe Blacc, the singer, the Grammy-nominated singer. The book is called "Together is Better," and he gave me a song that goes with it, and the music is at the back of the book.
And it's actually the lyrics are in his handwriting—actually his handwriting. And here's the best part: the book is scented. We scent it with a custom scent made by this amazing company called 1229, and they designed for me the scent of optimism.
So you smell the pages, and they smell like optimism. And the thing that I love about this is I can't do that in any digital book format. I wanted to create something that you had to physically engage with, and it's designed to be given as a gift.
The first page says "To" and "From" because I wanted it to be given as a gift to someone you want to say thank you for inspiring you or to give to someone you wanted to inspire. It was designed to promote this physical interaction and engaging with the real world.
So I'm really proud of it.
It's incredible and super unique.
Yeah, it's fun.