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Lead In 30 Podcast
Russ Hill hosts the Lead In 30 Podcast. Strengthen your ability to lead others in less than 30 minutes. Russ makes his living coaching and consulting senior executive teams of some of the world's biggest companies. He's one of three co-founders of the fastest-growing leadership training company in the world. Tap the follow or add button and get two new episodes every week of the Lead In 30 Podcast.
Lead In 30 Podcast
The Battle Between the Comfort Culture & Performance Culture with All In Podcast Hosts
347: Is there a work ethic crisis today? The guys from the All In Podcast debate Comfort Culture vs Performance Culture after recent comments from the former Starbucks CEO and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. We unpack the implications of their contrasting views—one advocating for switching off after 6 pm and the other emphasizing the necessity of intense work for startups.
In another compelling chapter, we navigate the enduring importance of in-person collaboration amid a wave of corporate returns to the office. Using case studies from Dell, Apple's campus designs by Steve Jobs, and Bell Labs, we highlight how spontaneous interactions and mentorship in physical workspaces can drive innovation and career growth. We also tackle the generational divide as younger employees lean towards remote work, potentially missing out on invaluable mentorship. Finally, we close with a balanced look at performance culture versus comfort culture, sharing personal experiences from our consulting careers to advocate for a hybrid work model that combines the best of both worlds.
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About the podcast:
The Lead In 30 Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ message him on LinkedIn!
Are we experiencing a work ethic crisis right now? I?
Speaker 2:just think that if you're running an organization, you can't take this attitude that oh, it's 6 pm, I'm switched off. You know, it just doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I agree with the guys from the All In podcast. Let's talk about it. This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill. You cannot be serious. Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.
Speaker 2:You're listening to Lead in 30.
Speaker 1:It is my favorite podcast right now. If you haven't discovered the All In podcast, I'd strongly encourage you to check it out. Not every episode is one that I'm interested in. They get way into politics in some episodes and those of you that don't agree with how most of them think politically will be turned off by some of those episodes, especially in an election year. But when these four guys in the all in podcast are talking about work ethic and work dynamics and AI and technology and starting up companies, they're at their best in my opinion. And so just quick background, and then I'll tell you about why.
Speaker 1:I'm going to play for you an extended segment from a recent episode that is going to get you like fired up, because you're going to have a strong opinion either agreeing with their take or strongly disagreeing with it. What they talk about in this clip is the debate, the debate in every boardroom of every organization that we consult as a firm. This is being debated in every company and there are strong opinions on both sides, and so I want to get into that in just a second. But again, the background on on this podcast. The all in podcast is four guys and they've got. All of them come from tech. They've started companies, they've sold companies, some of them have funds that invest in it. They, um, they, they, and they live in different parts of the world now and they've got different views politically, but, um, I just think it's a great, a great dialogue for smart people who smart people who come together for this podcast. So I'll get into the clip in just a moment and then we're going to dive in to debate the topic. It's about work ethic and whether or not you think there's a work ethic crisis right now, which is tied to this effort to work from home or hybrid work and the changes that are happening in the way that we work. I've got strong opinions on it, as do many of you, so let's talk about and debate that in just a moment.
Speaker 1:Welcome into the lead in 30 podcast. In less than 30 minutes, we give you an idea, a model, a framework, a clip from another podcast, an experience we've had, whatever it might be, to get you thinking about ways that you might more effectively lead the group that you're trying to lead, also in your pursuit of success and growth. We give you ideas to consider. I'm Russ Hill. I make my living coaching and consulting senior executive teams at some of the world's biggest companies, from restaurant companies to healthcare companies, to manufacturers, to our clients do everything from make burritos to make fighter jets, to run hospitals, to insurance companies, whatever it might be and I share in the Lead in 30 podcast, in less than 30 minutes at every episode, something for you to think about. If you want to find out more about our 30 day leadership training course, go to leadin30.com.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're going to hear various different voices. I'm not going to give you a ton of background, but I'm going to go right to the clip, and this clip is like 10 minutes long. 10 or 15 minutes long. It's a long one and if you need to just fast forward through parts of it, but the debate that happens here is amazing, and they start by talking about two different executives, and one of them is the Starbucks CEO, who just got fired and and you'll hear them talking about a clip that that went viral of where the Starbucks CEO said hey, don't try to reach me after 6. Yeah, and he lost his job.
Speaker 1:Now, now you've got Brian nickel, who was leading Chipotle, coming in to lead um Starbucks. That happened within the last few weeks, but they they talk about this clip of and what the Starbucks the former Starbucks CEO said about hours that that he's available to work, and they've got strong opinions on that and you will too. And then they talk about a clip and they play a clip from Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and a comment he made at Stanford that went viral and caused all kinds of problems and Eric ended up apologizing and Stanford ended up pulling the clip off of the Internet. So those are two clips you're going to hear him talk about. Then they're going to get into this debate about work ethic and back and back to office and those of us that have a desire to to grow companies or to grow our careers. And I don't agree. I'll just say this now and then I'll come back after the long clip. I don't agree with part of what they're saying and I'm interested in your take.
Speaker 4:Here we go. There's a big culture thing going on here, Freeberg, of hard work in corporations. I don't know if you saw Eric Schmidt at Stanford. They took this talk down and Eric Schmidt is walking the comments back. But here we go, folks. This is the money clip from Eric Schmidt.
Speaker 5:Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning, and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the startups. The reason startups work is because the people work like hell, and I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week, can you?
Speaker 6:show the Starbucks clip.
Speaker 2:Can you show the Starbucks clip? Well, that's self-evidently true. I mean, he's basically making a point similar to what I said about Google's so large that employees can hide and not do very much, and you know they can kind of it's not just Google.
Speaker 6:Oh, it's pervasive Sure of course. Yeah, it's pervasive Sure of course.
Speaker 4:Yeah, let's pull up the Starbucks CEO.
Speaker 7:I'm very disciplined about balance. If there's anything after 6 pm and if I'm in town it's got to be a pretty high bar to keep me away from the family. Anybody who gets a minute of time after that better be sure that it's important, because if not it'll just wait for another day.
Speaker 6:This makes me so uncomfortable. Just hearing that I feel Holy. I mean, retire, bro, Just retire. What does America value? Is the real question. Does America value success, performance, or does America value comfort? And the problem is American work culture has shifted to valuing comfort and that is the inevitable outcome of decades of extraordinary success. And now the performance culture is losing to the comfort culture and I think you guys are putting a lot of things together.
Speaker 8:The problem is that I don't think that that's his truth. Actually, I think that this guy's clip sounds very inauthentic. I think what probably happened is the PR and policy group of Starbucks says hey, listen, here's the average age of your employee and here's what they value, and he probably spouted some politically correct nonsense to try to inspire the troops. I think a lot of CEOs do this. I think we're seeing in modern media today that a lot of CEOs have actually become the least version of their authentic self. They are being packaged by people to dress and act and say things in a certain way, and I think what happens as a result of that is that you have a wayward culture where nobody knows what people stand for. That's when the corrosiveness of folks not working at all or having jobs at two different companies comes in. That's a total moral and ethical breach. That happens because people think it's acceptable, and I think people think it's acceptable because it's not in the talking points of how the CEOs are trying to package themselves to tens of thousands of employees.
Speaker 4:So you think this was a PR design genuflect. I like that insight Saks your thoughts overall.
Speaker 2:Well, it could be a genuflect, I don't know. Look, I would say that there are a lot of Americans who do feel that way about work, but I think it's not appropriate in two cases. Number one is if you're ambitious and you really want to rise in your organization, then you got to have more of the J-Cal attitude, which is, I'm going to be the first to work and the last one to leave and I'm going to show my boss I'm going to get promoted. So if you want to be ambitious in your career, that's not a good attitude to have. And then, on the other extreme, if you're the CEO of the company, your attitude has got to be I'm 24, seven with this shit, you know it's like.
Speaker 2:I'm always online. I'm always reachable. The buck stops with me Now. Obviously you're going to cut out time to be protected that you can spend with your family, but your attitude's always got to be that I'm available. I don't turn off my phone, I don't do any of that stuff. I just think that if you're running an organization, you can't take this attitude that, oh, it's 6 pm, I'm switched off. It just doesn't work that way.
Speaker 4:Yeah, especially if you're running one of them. I don't think that's yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you're. I just don mean it's an appropriate thing for someone like that to say when he's the CEO of a multinational corporation.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that is the key insight Saxon with you on this, which is leadership starts at the top. If the leader says, hey, listen, don't bother me after six, I'll talk to you at 9 am, Then that's just going to go through the entire organization and it's already hard enough to run these organizations Now. If you run a lifestyle business as your local cafe and you want to do that, and you're running it at a break-even, that's fine. This is a publicly traded company with shareholders with massive competition who could get taken out by all these other brands that are trying to compete with it. You have to have.
Speaker 4:This is a war, we are at war. We have to figure out how to lower prices, we need to grind every nickel from the supply chain, rent, we have to renegotiate contracts. And then, just to speak on the work ethic issue, this country is in a very significant war about going back to work and work ethic. You mentioned overemployed and the ethics around that, chamath and then there's a group of Americans and I've been studying this a bit that are opting out of capitalism or hacking capitalism. There's a very interesting movement. It's called FIRE, financial Independence, retire Early. And if you look at the two subreddits, overemployed and the FIRE subreddit.
Speaker 4:Young people are saying capitalism is there to be hacked and my way of hacking it is. I'm going to have two jobs and I had a startup come to me and say we've got this great engineer, literally from Google, who wants to work from us and he's making 400K. We can get him for $1.50. And I said oh wow, that's great. Why would he do that? Is he independently wealthy? They said no, he's keeping his job at Google. He says it takes 10, 20 hours a week and he's going to work 60 hours a week for us. And I said is that ethical or legal? And they ask you these are 20 year old founders we had backed and I was like this is incredibly unethical and you're going to get us in a lawsuit. Don't do it. But that is what's. You know the the give and take. And if you look at what happened with Dell this past six months, have you been following that Freeberg, the Dell story?
Speaker 4:No it's pretty incredible. They told everybody we're coming back to office. People were like yeah was, if you want to be work from home, you can't get a promotion and you can't get a salary increase. And you know what employees said Okay, I don't want an increase, I don't if my choice is stay at home and have no salary increase and I don't care about a raise, I don't care about a promotion. Then they said you know what? We're cutting 12,000 people. You have to come back to office. Jay Penske and his company told everybody to have to come back to office. So now that you have this era of being fit and you don't need as many people from AI, I think everybody's coming back to the office, unless you are part of the 20% of truly elite workers. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Speaker 8:Even then, though, I struggle to understand why anybody who has any ambition would think that they're going to achieve the same amount of stuff working by themselves than they will by working with a group of colleagues that you respect in a physical space together.
Speaker 6:Well influence our culture.
Speaker 8:I don't know, but I'm saying, like when you, when you look at the great things that the world needs, that we are building and should be building, I don't see to learn from each other, to grow as a person, and you're robbing yourself of all of that, and so I just think that it is a short-term optimization that a lot of people will regret, not necessarily in the moment, but when their career doesn't go where they want to, or the company they work at doesn't go where it should go to or is capable of going to, they'll start to look for a scapegoat. But the real reason is that they've abandoned the idea that they need to be together, and I just think that that's a tragedy. And, as it turns out, the best of our companies like when I rank my portfolio, the ones that are doing the best are, in total, different industries, but the single consistent theme is we are all back together in person, isn't?
Speaker 4:that interesting, makes total sense.
Speaker 2:It's much more productive because I think innovation happens as a team. You need collaboration and it's way easier to do that when everyone is together in the same place. There's more room for spontaneity, more spontaneous interactions. The reason why Steve Jobs designed the spaceship campus in that famous circle was because it maximized the opportunity for serendipity right.
Speaker 6:Like there's no. The labs did the same thing. Bell Labs had a quad that you had to walk through to go from meeting to meeting, so everyone interacted.
Speaker 4:intersected, the technical term for that is, collisions, and there's been a lot of research on random collisions and I agree wholeheartedly with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah and look. I just want to underscore this point. I think there's nothing wrong if somebody says look, my family's most important thing in my life. I only want to work 40 hours a week. I'm going to do a nine to six job with an hour lunch break. That's 40 hours. Don't call me after 6 pm. You can design your career that way, but that is not a career that's going to enable you to either run a company as a CEO or be a founder of a startup, or be on a track to one day being a founder or a CEO. It's just not compatible, I mean or even just a senior executive.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly. So you have to decide what track you're going to be on, and I think there's a lot of millennial Gen Z types who are confused about this and they have the entitlement of saying well, I want to just do the 40 hour a week thing, but then I also expect to rise rapidly and be an executive and be a founder or be a you know a CEO one day, and that's not going to work?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's not going to work and you know, in fairness, I think a lot of young people have not been mentored because they came up in the COVID generation and we're now four years later and they just haven't had the chance to be mentored or be in a in an office, and a lot of senior executives and CEOs are not coming to the office. You know, a part of my move to Austin is I'm building a theater to record the podcast in and I'm building an incubator space and we're moving back to in-person. I grandfathered the existing employees and I'm only hiring people in person now because I feel something very big has been lost in terms of meeting with founders in person and young people seeing me interact and my other senior team members with those founders in person during a pitch meeting, during a product jam session, during a fundraising review. Go ahead, shama.
Speaker 8:Can I just say something about mentoring. I also think mentoring can be described as capital M mentoring and small m mentoring. Capital M is where some person is assigned to you and they're going to imbue some magical phrase or saying or thing and all of a sudden, everything is going to work out for you. That form of capital M mentoring doesn't exist and has never worked for those that have tried it. The thing that's really productive is small M mentoring, and that happens when you model behaviors of really smart people and really capable people, really ethical people.
Speaker 8:And again, that happens because you're seeing them on a day-to-day basis, not just in a meeting. Happens because you're seeing them on a day-to-day basis, not just in a meeting, but in the gaps between meetings, and they'll include you in certain things or you'll have lunch with them. And this is what I mean by all of these people that are looking for an accelerant in their career. They've robbed themselves of the most powerful accelerant possible, which is capable people to surround themselves with. Yeah, I think it's so well said. They are going to look back on these decisions and they're going to agree with them.
Speaker 4:I agree 100%. And one of my first jobs working at Land Systems, my mentor, Mike Savino, was always working late. He was trying to move up in the organization and I wouldn't leave before he left. And then he would walk by and he'd say it was in New York city. Hey, what are you working on? I'm saying, oh, I'm reading these Novell networking books, I'm trying to get my certification, I'm trying to learn more, I want to get out of hardware and get into software. And he'd say, oh, I'm going to get some dinner. You want to come now? He was second to the highest and then I got to go to dinner with him. And then I got to hear about all the big clients. I got to hear how you know they were doing the pitches. And then he started including me in pitches and all of a sudden I went from four degrees from him to reporting into him.
Speaker 1:Okay, there is so much there to react to, so I'm basically going to react to three different categories of what was said in those clips, because I totally disagree with some of the things that the guys from the all in podcast were saying, and I totally agree with some of it. So let's go through that. So the three categories are performance culture versus comfort culture, inauthentic leaders, and I want to talk about that, and then I want to talk about mentoring. So let's start with performance culture versus comfort culture. I totally agree with the need for hard work. Like the only reason that I ever got to a position to be able to start a company was because of my work ethic, because of my desire to put tons of energy into it.
Speaker 1:Just a quick story when I first got into the consulting business, I was hired by a firm and they had a specific set of content and a framework and a methodology for what they took executive teams through. Then it was new to me and so I'd be assigned as a junior member to a consulting team that some fortune 50 company would hire and I just didn't have the level of comfort, the level of expertise, the thoroughness with our content and framework and what we did with these teams, and so, while my more senior, my more experienced in the world of consulting colleagues would go to a hotel and go to bed at 11, I'd be up till two or three in the morning studying. I got so little sleep. While they went to their lake houses, I was going to another account or two or three while they went home. I flew to Singapore tons of work ethic. The learning curve was steep because I put all that effort in.
Speaker 1:But what the crap does that have to do with work from home? That's where I totally disagree with this. So, yes, there is a group of people in the workforce that want to work from home because they're lazy, and there's another group that wants to work from home or be home a day or two or three a week. That is absolutely diehard, committed to growing and contributing. Quit lumping them together. I think it's a total disservice what they say in these clips and I think that executives get it all screwed up when they lump everybody in.
Speaker 1:For years I have worked from home technically, but I don't work from home every day. I get on a plane then and I get two hours or three hours of sleep because of time zone differences as I fly across the country, the U? S or across the world, and I'm, and then I'm with a client because and so I'm I'm working hard, but then I go back and I work from home. What does it have to do with being in an office? Nothing. And so when I'm on the road, yes, I'm interacting, I'm having those collisions as, as they talk about with coworkers and with clients and with customers and all of that, which is absolutely necessary.
Speaker 1:So I think that this hybrid environment is really necessary. So I think that this hybrid environment is really important, and I know executives who work from home companies that the executive, some executives, never go into the corporate or very rarely go into the corporate headquarters, and they're wildly successful. But, yes, they are in different offices, they are at different factories, they are at different locations one day a week, two days a week, sometimes four days a week, depending on the schedule. Are you with me on that? So I totally agree and I will say that when you're new, when you're young, like our oldest son, who had an internship this summer as he's preparing to finish his undergraduate degree yeah, I advocated for him to be in the office every day, like 90% of the time and to get there before everyone else and to be the last person to leave. That matters so much when you're entry level. I agree and and and. If you're in an industry where you travel, you ought to go to more of the markets, you ought to spend more time going to the sites, you ought to be on more flights. You've got to do that especially early on or when or when you're new to an organization. But then it's not about hours spent as much as it is effort. And sometimes those things are different.
Speaker 1:And I totally disagree with the fact that executives need to be available 24 seven. I think that's outdated and I think it's unique to some of these. Like Elon Musk, he says I work seven days a week, like he literally doesn't take weekends. That's awesome for him, that he doesn't need it and whatever else. But you could also argue that some of his challenges, some of the issues he has and some of the reasons for who knows what's true and what's not true. But if you read the biography of him by Walter Isaacson, you start to discover well, maybe he has had some mental or emotional breakdowns.
Speaker 1:And I would argue I don't know because I don't know Elon Musk, but I would assume, I would think, that some of that's due to not taking a break, which I think, that you're actually more valuable to the organization when you don't work 24 seven. So should you work hard? Yes, but do I think that? I think these guys are way off and I agree with so much of what they're saying. I'm just presenting a counter argument here to some of the points and not really bringing up the stuff that I do agree with, because, for argument's sake. But I think this 24 seven thing is totally bogus. I think it's outdated, I think it's a problem in the tech industry and I think it's a problem with a certain part of our society.
Speaker 1:So, yes, you need to be available after six, you need to be available on weekends, especially if you have aggressive growth plans for yourself and for the company or the organization that you lead. But does that mean 24-7? No, it means that you're going to be, you're going to be off the grid for a couple of hours for dinner, but you might respond to a text at eight or nine or ten. You might respond to something on the weekend, but not all the time, because that creates a culture of burnout. That's why people leave all these companies, and so I think they overstated that. So I think the answer is in the middle. Yes, you have to work hard. Yes, you need to put in a ton of effort. Yes, if you're new to the organization or new to the industry or new to the job market, you've got to be visible way more. But you can do it differently.
Speaker 1:The last thing I'll say about that topic, before I go to the other two, is part of the disservice we have here. Like there's so much wasted time just having people hang out in the office building. So when you go, you know what? Yeah, we need to put them all in the office building and you show your commitment by being there. I disagree. Do you know how much time is wasted in organizations where we're talking about nothing related to the product or the customer and so you're gaining comfort, is the executive saying, oh, at least every the parking lot's full. Yeah, but walk around the company. There's like so much wasted time and energy. So and you do a disservice and you all have heard me talk about this before, so I'm not going to go into it deep here pay your people by for performance, not for hours worked, and so the the waste in these large organizations is a result of the way that we have compensation structured. I I cannot emphasize that enough and and and the leaders that are driving the most efficiency and and the most innovation are those that are changing that systematically in organizations. They're going way more to performance space. It's not just the sales people that are those that are changing that systematically in organizations. They're going way more to performance-based. It's not just the salespeople that are incentivized, it's everybody or most people. Okay, so I could say a ton more about performance culture versus comfort culture. I think that debate is so healthy right now, okay.
Speaker 1:Second category inauthentic leaders, overly scripted. I could not agree with this more. We worked with an executive a few years ago in a very large, a Fortune 50 manufacturing company who literally could not go to any meeting, even with his direct reports. Now he was. He was over 30,000 people, ok, so very, very senior, but he could not walk into a meeting with the executive team without the communications team giving him a script. He could not stand in front of an all teams meeting without reading from the teleprompters and he lasted about two years and nobody even noticed when he left. And if they did notice, they celebrated, so inauthentic, and that does not work. I could not argue against it more. You need to be a human to the people that you lead, you need to have weaknesses and, and all of that, you need to show emotion in a good way. The last category I could say a ton more about that, maybe in another episode, but I got to keep this one to under 30 minutes and we're getting close.
Speaker 1:The last category mentoring. I totally agree with the small and mentoring and the way that you do that as somebody up and coming in an organization or even at the most senior level, is you're very intentional by being around people. So when they go to visit a client, when they go to a factory visit, when they go to a dinner, when they host a social thing, you're finding ways to be there. That's how I got wildly successful early on in the consulting space is I got on the outlook calendars of the most successful people in our firm and then I called or texted them or pulled them aside and said, hey, I noticed that you're going to be in New York and they're going to be in Connecticut. You're going to be in Orlando, you're going to be in Kansas city or San Francisco or whatever, with that client coming up in a few weeks. Do you mind if I come there? You don't even have to put me on the compensation of that package or on that project team. I just want to observe, I just want to learn from it. Nine times out of 10, they'd say, absolutely makes sense, the client won't mind at all.
Speaker 1:We're good, small in mentoring spend time being around them. I don't think that happens by going into the office every day of the week and just hanging around. I think that it's more. I think that's the old way. I think these guys are, they're young, younger and they're very successful. But I do think that some of what they advocate in this clip is outdated and that that doesn't represent the way that organizations and the workforce can be successful today. So I think you can small in mentoring in a way that doesn't mean necessarily in the office, but but looking at calendars and being around other people in a market visit, on a client trip, whatever that might be.
Speaker 1:Woo, so much in this clip. That was just awesome. Did you get a ton out of it? I think these are the debates that you ought to be having in your own mind in your own pursuit of growth and success and whatever that might look like, and inside your organization, that you lead these and hearing differing points of view on these topics is so valuable. These are the debates we need to be having because the way that we work has changed. It is changing the whole economy. The whole way that we compensate people is dramatically. It is changing the whole economy. The whole way that we compensate people is dramatically changing, and if you can be on the cutting edge of that, I think it's it's you're going to attract the best talent. All right, I got to cut it short because we're at 30. Thanks for listening to this episode of the lead in 30 podcast.
Speaker 3:Share this episode with a colleague, your team or a friend. Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill.