The world’s top culture doctor: Professor Frances Frei talks Uber, WeWork & more
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Listen to the world’s most sought after culture doctor: Frances Frei is the Red Adair of work culture problems. If something goes wrong at WeWork, Uber or Riot Games there’s one name you call… You’ll be thrilled to hear the brilliant, thoughtful interview she gives.
She’s very clear answering:
- could Uber have kept Travis Kalinick and solved their problems?
- what’s horrifically wrong with 360 appraisals?
- what is the first action she takes when she goes into a firm
- can anyone be the agent for change in culture?
- her feeling on the importance of purpose
Frances and her wife are the authors of a brand new book called Unleashed which recounts their experiences fixing Uber, WeWork and more. My initial take with the book was that I didn’t think there was any great revelations in it, but having had such a thoughtful chat with Frances I suspect that was because I hadn’t reflected on the approach.
There’s a line from former MIT professor Edgar H Schein in the book that culture consists of artefacts, behaviours and shared basic assumptions. Frei quotes his thinking, concluding that ‘to get people to behave reliably the way you want – even in your absence – you need to get them to think how you want’. This seemed like a massive insight. Maybe (for bad) it’s why some firms seem so cult-like. To make culture work we need to get everyone to think like the culture. (It also poses a question, is it healthy? It’s reminiscent of Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field)
Schein said: “the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture”.
The book has lots of clear advice of how firms should re-engineer broken culture. I was particularly impressed with the socratic approach that Frei takes, asking lots of questions. She describes how her approach is to diagnose a company’s problems while ostensibly teaching them leadership and management skills. While they’re learning she observes how they talk about each other, how they interact.
She gives some questions that anyone should be asking their team members:
“How well do you think our culture sets up people for success? Are there ways that it also undermines our effectiveness?”
“Have any of our values or commitments to each other become empty or weaponised”
“How aligned is our culture with the current opportunities and challenges?”
“What do we need to change culturally to achieve our most ambitious goals”
There’s also an intriguing exit interview question:
“As someone who cares deeply about the culture here, is there anything you think I should know about your experience or the experiences of other people?”
Not only was Frei a well regarded business professor at Harvard but her experience of talking to thousands of workers at crisis stricken cultures (like the aforementioned Uber and Riot) has given her a clear take on diagnosing and fixing broken systems.
What you’ll also learn:
- could Uber have kept Travis Kalanick and solved their problems?
- what’s horrifically wrong with 360 appraisals?
- can anyone be the agent for change in culture?
- her feeling on the importance of purpose
TRANSCRIPT
Bruce
Thank you so much for talking to me. I’m, I’m, uh, I, I’ve tried with your various different people. I’ve tried to, to talk to you a number of times, so, um, it thrills me to finally get hold of you. Um, and I, I just wanted to kick off really, because it’s the workplace culture and it’s the fact that you’ve.
You’ve had so much experience of this, uh, before we sort of delve into the book that you’ve written with your partner and, um, and your experience, really, I just wonder how do you set about trying to define workplace culture?
Frances Frei: Yeah, so I, Edgar Schein described it in a book maybe 40 years ago, and that description pretty much rings true to me today, which is that there’s three layers of culture.
It’s the. Physical artifacts, so anything you can capture with a still photo reveals a culture. It’s the way in which people behave. So that’s what you can see with a, if you were filming a movie and then it’s the sh, it’s the [00:07:00] mental models that are going on in someone’s head, and you’d need a mind reader to see that.
So it exists in those three letter levels, what people think, what they do, and the artifacts that are surrounding them. His point of view, of course, was that the, the reason you we get obsessed with culture is because of the how people behave part like what we want. If a culture is going well, people are behaving in the way we want.
If a culture is going badly, people are behaving in ways we don’t want. And the big insight is that. If you try to address behavior directly, it rarely works. And so you want to come up with the link between how people are thinking and how they behave so that you can have more success.
Bruce Daisley: I wonder if you could just explain for, for us who Edgar Shein was.
So he was an MIT professor?
Frances Frei: Yes. MIT professor, emerita professor now. Um, I bet he’s in his nineties. And the person that wrote most often about [00:08:00] culture in later years, he wrote amazing books like Humble Inquiry, right, which are also like near and dear to culture, but he’s the academic that brought the systematic study of culture onto the map.
Bruce Daisley: This, uh, I’m, I’m so glad you, you, um, you mentioned him from the off because when I was going through this book that you’ve written unleashed, um, the, the one question that I had in bold here, I wrote down a quotation that you gave about Edgar Schein’s work, and you say, uh, quote, to get people to behave reliably the way you want, even in your absence, you need to get them to think how you want.
And so that’s inspired by Edgar Schein’s work. There’s so much to unpack there isn’t there? Absolutely. For, for good and for bad. It’s so fascinating that effectively to create a culture, we need to create a, a system of thinking, of logic, of reasoning. It’s, it’s, it seems far more holistic than sometimes we, we imagine culture to be.
Frances Frei: Yeah. I think that, so particularly when we want people to behave in our absence, so in our presence, you know, we can correct things, but in our absence, I think we only have two levers. It’s. How, how well do people understand and are influenced by our strategy and how well do people understand and are influenced by our culture like that?
That’s really the discretionary behavior that’s going on around organizations when the leaders aren’t present. It’s influenced by those two things, and most organizations think, you know, they’ll have a strategy team and the CEO will be on it, or it’ll be. But the culture team is usually more of an amorphous thought, and I don’t think that’s right.
I think it’s equally important in guiding the discretionary behavior of our employees
Bruce Daisley: and this idea that we need to get people to think in a certain way. Just means that exactly as you said there, that if so often culture is, maybe, sometimes it’s an offshoot of HR or sometimes it’s, it’s a pet project of one member of the leadership team.
But if we treat this as a system of cognition, a system of thinking that the whole company’s meant to share, then it’s really a top, it’s, it’s unquestionably a top table. Position. It seems to be something I think you mentioned actually, you say you should see the chief exec role, the CEO role. You should see replace that E with a C.
That’s right. I think you mentioned at one point.
Frances Frei: Yeah, no, I think it’s right. Also, if you think of boards of directors, you know, they almost always want to weigh in on strategy. When have you heard them weigh in on culture? I would, I think they would do well to do the same. There like it’s, it’s equally important because they are the two layers.
Now I have a point of view of which should go first. I think you should set your strategy first and then everywhere where strategy is silent, culture fills in the plan. Right.
Bruce Daisley: Well, another quotation I wrote down from Shein that you used here, that is you say ‘the only thing of real importance that leaders do is create and manage culture’.
It’s, for me, it’s such a fascinating reframing, I think because it largely. Coincides with my own thinking, but to [00:11:00] read it in a business book and to read it from both yourself and mirroring Edgar Schein, it seems in especially impactful for me.
Frances Frei: And he was the person who is uh, I think no dispute the closest to it, and that was his conclusion.
And so certainly he would argue it should be elevated. In most organizations and perhaps not just taken out when things are going badly,
Bruce Daisley: I wonder if these, these are strange, um, pejorative that a lot of business people have because, so, so we are here largely because you’ve just written this book of really your, your philosophy and it’s really, it’s striking for me because unleashed is filled with empathy, lack of ego, emotion.
And I just wonder for the C-suite, for, for leaders, for managers, for, for MBA students or people who send themselves away on executive courses. These things like emotion, feel, like weaknesses to or in, in the typical, traditional narrative. And I just wonder, uh, your, [00:12:00] your take on that and, and, and whether that’s why culture has been discarded at times in the past. ’cause it felt soft.
Frances Frei: I think that there are old ways of thinking about a lot of things. So if you learn strategy 10 years ago, you would’ve thought that strategy is war. You know, like it just,
That like the art of war would’ve been your bedside reading, whereas no way, if you learned strategy in 2020, would that be your bedside reading?
And so I think that the way in which we have our thinking has evolved. I mean, if I look at the greatest culture turnaround story of my lifetime, it happened. It’s happening now. It’s, it’s happened very recently. It’s at Microsoft. Right, of course. Um, and that’s the, you know, most hard charging of cultures and they weren’t able to get their performance to what they wanted until they unleashed, I guess what you said, the empathetic, the emotional aspects of culture.
It didn’t lower the standards. Of course. It’s the way to get even more out of everyone, um, and to have everyone feel like they have a deep sense of belonging. The way to do it no longer sounds soft when we have incredible role models. I think Patty McCord did it at Netflix in a very hard to call what she did soft.
Um, and Netflix was one of the most admired companies. But to your point, I think it had a bad rap. Just like strategy, had a bad rap. Strategy is war. Okay? And that doesn’t work. Culture is soft. That doesn’t work. You know, leadership is about me. That doesn’t work. Um, so I think that in 2020 we’re ready for an updating of some of these old truths.
Bruce Daisley: I, I wonder if we could sort of maybe delve in then. So the wonderful resume that you’ve built is because largely at times when things have gone wrong in organizations. You are fortunate that you are the person that a lot of businesses have called that. A lot of businesses said, we’d love to bring you into the room.
We’ve got a culture problem right now. Tell me, could you talk me through maybe, um, broadly rather than specifically, but could you talk me through what your approach [00:14:00] is when you walk into a room and, and maybe it follows the spirit of what you’ve mentioned there, the, the sort of the lack of ego and, and to empathize, but what do you do when you walk into a room at riot games or you walk into a room at Uber?
Or you walk into a room at WeWork, what are the things you’re looking for?
Frances Frei: Yeah, so I’m, I’m assessing whether or not the organization is filled with vast majority of people at the organization are good people with a noble mission. So I, if most of the organization is evil or most of the organization is what I’ve read in the paper, I just turn around how, how would you recognize it?
Oh, golly. You, it won’t take, I’m not special in that way. You can go into an organization, interact with, I don’t know, in four hours. How many people can you interact with in. One week, how many can you interact with? You’ll get a deep sense.
Bruce Daisley: I understand, but don’t they say the curse of the psychopath is that psychopaths are able to sort of mask themselves.
I’m not suggesting that psychopath is involved here, but, but sometimes we, if we take people at face value, maybe [00:15:00] we’re all guilty of being deceived.
Frances Frei: No, but so what I would do is with some of these companies, I would teach 1500 people. I would do it in an emotional way so that I would get to hear, I wouldn’t get to just assess those 1500.
I could hear how they would talk about other people, like I could do a deep dive, and I don’t think I’m special in this way. I think anyone who went in and did this. Would get a sense of, are we talking about a few bad apples or are we talking about, this is just like the whole organization. If it’s the whole organization, I don’t have any desire to fix it.
If it’s a few bad apples. And you’ll see every organization I’ve been with has separated from like about 20 people. Hmm. And they might have tens of thousands of employees and it’s about 20 people. I’m not even gonna call them bad people. I’m just gonna say that they are people that. Couldn’t continue with the organization in their current form.
So I look to see is that the majority of people that are in it, for others, they weren’t handed the secret memos of how to behave. They might have gotten trapped in a [00:16:00] Milgram experiment where you can set the conditions for someone to behave badly. But if we change those conditions, will they behave well?
So that’s the first thing I assess is in to my satisfaction. Are they by and large good people in each of the three companies you talked about? I was overwhelmed by how good the people were overwhelmed, uh, and not what I was expecting. Ongoing in for, uh, certainly for the first one. I had read everything about Uber and it didn’t sound good
Bruce Daisley: because it’s an interesting advantage, I guess you’ve got, because you’re going in there in quite a didactic role then you, so you’re going in there to teach them something nominally, but I guess you can see how they react to that teaching
Frances Frei: and I was doing my own assessment.
Yeah. Are they, are they, because if listen, I get one time on the planet in, you know, increasingly short and I want to help good people win in ways that will be helpful to many, many more people. The last thing I wanna do is help bad apples, you know, acquire more money at the expense of other [00:17:00] people. That would give me a lot of regret.
Bruce Daisley: And so when you’re doing these classrooms, you’re teaching 1500 people there, what are you teaching them specifically?
Frances Frei: Uh, usually leader topics about leadership, because in the companies we talked about, there’s been hypergrowth. Which means you came in as an individual contributor. Five minutes later you got promoted to a manager and five minutes after that you got promoted to a manager of a manager and you weren’t given any of the secret memos on how to lead.
And leading is quite different than individual contributing. So I’ll teach management and leadership the difference between management and leadership, but I can bring you up the speed and how to be a very effective manager and a very effective leader quite quickly. Always that, and then depending on the organization to particularly organizations that have defied physics with their business model, so organizations where.
Costs have been greater than revenue, then like it’s hard for those org people in those organizations to really understand strategy. ’cause [00:18:00] physics hasn’t applied. So I will, for those organizations, I will also teach strategy in a way that physics applies, because otherwise they won’t really know how to make trade-offs.
Bruce Daisley: Got it. So, so if people are sort of, they, they’re in this singular explosive unicorn growth. Then actually it’s not that helpful if they then go and work in a company that’s growing at less speed. And so you teach them something that’s relevant for the the wider world. Business occupant.
Frances Frei: Yeah, business acumen.
When I mean, and it, and it really is, but if you’ve only operated where it’s okay for costs to be greater than revenue, it, it screws really, you’re thinking about a lot of other things too.
Bruce Daisley: Hmm.
Frances Frei: So when I go in, it’s leadership and strategy are the two keys, but I’ll be, I’ll be honest, when I went into Riot games, for example, they understood how to, they understood strategy.
I didn’t have to help them with that at all. Um, but we had some more cultural and leadership things to work with there.
Bruce Daisley: Could you talk us through that? So when you walked into Riot, you, you recount [00:19:00] it a bit. So when you walk into Riot, what was the situation you found?
Frances Frei: Um, well, they had just been woken up by the press.
I’m a very big fan of the press, but they had an article that was quite surprising to everyone, that had a lot of allegations about misconduct, sexual misconduct, interpersonal misconduct at the organization, some of which turned out to be true, the vast amount of it. Turned out not to be true, but that’s neither here nor there in August of 2018.
And so they asked if I would come in and talk to them about what could a company do to get through this. And so I went down there. I did my assessment. These were very good people. I wasn’t sure that the purpose was noble because it was games and I had never played games until I realized there are about a billion people who play games.
And so this is an. Important part of many people’s lives. And so then we went around for how do you systematically change a culture? And we did it at this point by the book, and it worked out really well. They had some classic problems like [00:20:00] some of their. Early on cultural values had become weaponized.
And what I mean by that is that there might be a, a cultural value that is, uh, a founder would put in place and it’s default to trust. And that’s like such a great value. Like all of us should give one another. The benefit of the doubt, it will just smooth things over. It’s lovely. That could under stress be taken by someone senior in the organization saying to someone junior in the organization, don’t ask questions, just default to trust.
Bruce Daisley: Mm,
Frances Frei: okay. So that beautiful value just got weaponized as soon as a value is weaponized. Certainly at scale, no matter how beautiful it was, you have to get rid of it. Um, and so part of a culture that’s broken almost always involves have redoing the cultural values this time, not from the founders down, but from the employees up, um, to see what are the right values in 2020.
And I would say that you’ll probably have to [00:21:00] do ’em again in 2025. Um. Uh, interesting thing. Every time I’ve gone through this with an organization, they keep about 60% of the old values interesting. Uh, they really cherish them, but that 40% of them became too toxic or just too misinterpreted and they have better ideas for values.
The values are almost al well are always more conducive for their current context.
Bruce Daisley: Do companies who do this well use the values to hire people? Do they, are they selective on them or is this almost. A, a positive indoctrination of people who otherwise would be normal. The reason why I ask that is that quite often I go to companies and they say, our culture is this, and I say to ’em, oh, really?
How’d you hire for that? And they don’t really appear to hire for it in any discriminating way.
Frances Frei: Yeah, so what you’ve identified is that a, a, a stronger culture will hire, develop, promote, retain by their values. A weaker [00:22:00] culture will consider the values nice things that you, that really you can’t argue against, and that you put them up on a wall and you get to say, check, I have my values.
I would say that those are really not very specific values. The most extreme example of hiring, developing, promoting values I think was probably Netflix. And then you could go on a continuum of, you know, one, we do it vaguely, 10, we do it like Netflix. I think you’re better off being closer to Netflix than to the vague notion of it.
Bruce Daisley: And, and so you, you go in and you sort of, you go into an organization like Riot and you feel that you, you go in this process, did you go in the process with them of redoing their values? And so what would be the next stage?
Frances Frei: We did a, I mean, one is we had to address the crisis because it, um, and then it was a, there was a crisis of trust, so we had to address that.
And there is the sorting out of like, who can belong here and who cannot. So in the case of Riot, it had grown so fast that [00:23:00] it’s HR processes were not what you would expect. A 3000 person. Companies HR processes to be, they had a lot of org debt and so they put in new HR processes by hiring amazing HR leader and an amazing chief diversity officer to do that.
But then they had, you know, first rate HR processes so that if. Something goes wrong, it gets investigated right away like that, that there are fair processes in place. Um, before that it was rel it was a little too reliant on who you knew and what opportunity you may have been given. And this team came in and created what I think everyone would say is a, is a much, is a process that’s got much more dignity and it’s, and it’s much more fair.
I don’t condemn the organization for not having it. They were really busy. Um. They woke up with a problem that I think they would’ve wished they had done it earlier. Um, [00:24:00] but I honestly, I mean, I think that’s what happened with Uber when they woke up with the Susan Fowler blog as well. Uh, it revealed all kinds of org debt.
When you find you’re in org debt, we know very quickly how to get out of it,
Bruce Daisley: because one of the things I guess some organizations might learn from these lesson, from these organizations is they might say, actually, good culture is something that we can bolt on later. And if we want to optimize for explosive growth, then actually carrying a bit of, as you say, org debt or a degree of toxicity actually is not a disadvantage when we’re trying to to grow very quickly.
What would your response to that be?
Frances Frei: I don’t recommend trying that strategy. Even if you could find one or two examples that did it, I’m gonna go ahead and give you a 98% fail rate.
Bruce Daisley: Right. Okay. So I’m not
Frances Frei: saying you can’t find one or two, uh, you know, unicorns, but I’m gonna go ahead and say, I’d be surprised you could get investors.
Yeah,
Bruce Daisley: okay. Correlation is not causation.
Frances Frei: Uh, and there is very little [00:25:00] correlation. There’s like one or two examples. I could give you a thousand counter examples.
Bruce Daisley: Tell me this. One of the things I was intrigued by, I’m so, I’m so fascinated with the Uber story because their success was so singular. Actually to some extent, I, I often wonder this, you know, we, we talk about sort of DNA fixing DNA and I wonder if there were one or two parts of their DNA, if they’d just fixed them.
The whole culture could have had this entrepreneurial spirit, this other one or two things of the Uber culture that the, they should have definitely held onto.
Frances Frei: Yeah, I do. I mean, I’ll take it even further. I get asked this question a lot, but do I think Uber could have been fixed with Travis Callen? Okay.
That’s interesting. He got separated and that’s like the extreme version of it. And I would no hesitation say yes.
Bruce Daisley: Right? But business, I, I read, I read a quotation when I was preparing for this. Then it said Business insider. There was a quotation there that they talked to one entrepreneur who worked with him who said, Travis is ego personified.
And when I read the, the spirit of your book and your approach and your philosophy. [00:26:00] He seems like the nemesis to your approach, and I’m sure No, he’s not. When we presented flesh and blood with someone, we find them more agreeable. But I’m, I’m intrigued how you, you could think,
Frances Frei: yeah, so listen, you should hear from that person that they could experience Travis as ego personified.
I met Travis in the spring of 2017. After the Susan Fowler blog when his company was in really big disarray, and he was super humbled. He was like, I need help. I need help on leadership. The last company I ran had eight people, and I need help on strategy, and it’s not that I don’t get the strategy, but I cannot get the strategy I understand into the hearts and minds of everyone in the organization.
Hmm. I found this humbled person who. Really wanted help. And the ways in which he asked for help were the ways in which I could be helpful. So I very much thought that we could join together because the employees were amazing. I mean, as evidenced by look how quickly [00:27:00] things changed there. And when we put education in place, they gobbled it up.
Uh, now I’m a crazy optimist, but someone who is, uh, humble enough to know that they need help. I to this day believe I could have partnered with him and we could have fixed it.
Bruce Daisley: Interestingly, I, I’m sort of coming to the same conclusions as, as maybe my philosophy when it came. I used to work at Twitter and, and one of the things that I often used to feel that the challenge of social media was that there was just this societal empathy gap that quite often we, we just, we have an absence for empathy and screens probably.
Um, and, and screens facilitate that. And so, so let’s go on to, to talk about your philosophy, because it’ll probably lead into that approach there. And you, and, and, and your partner Anna, have written this book. But, um, it’s filled, as I say, with empathy, you know, it, it’s filled with this wonderful lack of ego.
And, and by that I mean, quite often we can walk. Past the business book section of a, of the, the station bookshop. And a lot of the books are about [00:28:00] leadership and leaders, and leaders being the chosen one and leaders having the strategic vision. And your book is all about, you know, thinking about. Thinking about anyone except me, tr trying to channel a way for you to stop thinking about yourself at times.
Yeah. And it’s so refreshing. In contrast to that, how did you, as a business school veteran, how, how did you get into thinking that that might be the answer to greatest success?
Frances Frei: Yeah, so when Anne and I were working with companies, it became pretty clear that if we could. Fix a leader, but, and fix a leader to be, you know, more composed, more, uh, like all of, like, read any of those books that will say, you know, speak this way, do this, do that.
It didn’t have all that much impact in the far reaches of the organization. And so we just started doing these controlled experiments where instead of talking to a leader about themselves, we started talking to the leaders about the people in the [00:29:00] organization and what they could do to set people up for success.
Bruce Daisley: Mm-hmm. And
Frances Frei: so we would go to how do you set up one person for success? Then how do you set up more and more varied people up for success? Which is quite different because leading difference and being led by difference is, is a, doing it well is a new muscle and there just wasn’t any comparison. If the leader, like with the job that they could do on their own with the people that they could like compel to follow them versus the leader that empowers the performance of others.
They just like they. The second one was thumping, the first one. So it became no comparison. And then we were super curious why everyone kept doing the former. Um, and all the books were written about the former when, you know, we just felt like we had uncovered. But this is the secret sauce. And then also, if you think of it, you know, mathematically, like I get to have a.
Ever increasing impact, you are gonna be exhausted the number of people you have to, [00:30:00] you know, catalyze to lead. So it just became super clear in our mind through our experiments and then through our practice. Um, so it’s no surprise to us that people like, you know, that Satya, CEO, is an amazing leader because it just does not appear that it’s about him in any way, shape, or form.
Bruce Daisley: So fascinating and, and so you give really simple exercises to just be thinking of, celebrate someone uncelebrated in the office, thinking about ways to focus your attention on the other rather than on the self. It really struck me when you were just saying that there, there was something talking about the, I think there’s a book, but there’s a philosophy like vitamin N, the, the, the power of nature and that the power of nature seems to be that by focusing our energy on.
Just our insignificance, it diminishes the importance of self and exactly what you, it’s exactly what you are saying here. Anything we could do to reduce the importance of self seems to make us a better person.
Frances Frei: Well, it, it certainly will allow us to have greater reach if we go through other [00:31:00] people, because they touch people who touch people who touch people, and it just the, you know.
It, the slope is way different than the linear slope of me trying to do it.
Bruce Daisley: A wonderful example of it. You talk about the JetBlue, CEO, who just sounds like a total legend, but, um, so the JetBlue, CEO, taking a flight once a month and serving on it, was it, was that something Yeah, David, was that as still. Cool.
Frances Frei: Yeah, he does. He’s no longer the CEO of that company. Okay. But he started another airline and I sure would think he’ll be successful, but he, uh, yeah. Like the way, you know, you could have those vague signs in the wall up or you could see that David Neman got on the plane, were the apron, said, hi, my name is Dave like, and.
Honored to serve the passengers honored because that’s, they were in this business to serve that communicated more to how things are done around here than any employee handbook.
Bruce Daisley: It’s so important to get that authentic, isn’t it? I used to work for a company where the CEO used to travel on [00:32:00] public buses, turn up with his, his stuff in a, in a supermarket carrier bag, and they just wander around each of the offices just chatting to people unannounced.
They didn’t know who he was. And I know that had his successor done that it would’ve felt inauthentic. So
Frances Frei: yeah. So that’s, you’re onto something. It has to be authentic. Like that’s if we do something, ’cause it’s a good idea, but it’s not of us. To your point, the rest of us will sniff it out in a second. Mm.
So you’re absolutely right there.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah. It’s so fascinating to, to cap, to capture that mojo it seems to, we, we, we know it when we see it. But to sort of fake, it just
Frances Frei: lacks faking. It just doesn’t work. We can see it a mile away. So you have to capture your, I like your phrase, we have to capture our own mojo.
Mm-hmm. We can be inspired by other people’s mojo, but we shouldn’t adopt that policy, but we should figure out how we can authentically reveal that we’re here to be of service. For some people it might be to be dressed impeccably because they want to honor the people that they’re interacting [00:33:00] with.
Bruce Daisley: When people are being reductive and talking about work culture and, and, uh, making these things work, they often talk about purpose.
And I don’t think you spent a lot of time talking about there. What’s your, what’s your take on purpose and, and where it sits in all of these things.
Frances Frei: Yeah. So I think that a noble purpose makes everything else easier, and I do look for the noble purpose in what we’re doing, but once you have it, I don’t look beyond that.
So Uber, the noble purpose to me was liberating grandmothers around the world, that they didn’t have to be reliant on their children once they got to an age when they couldn’t drive anymore. I found incredible nobility in that purpose. That grandmothers could have right sized relationships with their, with their children again, and every corner of the globe.
Like, that’s super noble to me. I mentioned at Riot games that the a billion people play this, um, like there’s, there is no ability if we can learn how to have a positive [00:34:00] influence. That is, if left unchecked, it could be a pretty toxic, misogynistic environment of all of the billion game players. And so I wanna help the people who want to make a positive difference on that community.
WeWork, I would say the same thing that. I today, it just doesn’t make sense to me that we all own our own offices that we use occasionally. Here was a company that was like, look, we want you to be able to start a business. My wife’s first business, she started in a WeWork and was served so well. The, the level of service in the communities at WeWork was astounding and they really wanted to help.
The people in that came into the buildings. You know, even at HBSI find nobility in what we’re doing or said differently. If I don’t find nobility, it’s super hard to keep the energy going, so I don’t spend a lot of time on it. But I do think you must have a noble purpose on top of everything you do or [00:35:00] else it’s just something else is gonna take a higher priority.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah, absolutely. How, how difficult, because you also helped change the culture at HBS where you are. Uh, how difficult was it to change culture? I guess you had more at stake there. Did you, or did, did all of them feel like you equally had a lot at stake?
Frances Frei: Changing the culture for the students is much easier than changing the culture for the faculty.
Probably to your point, I’m not a student, um, and I am a faculty member, and the fact changing the culture of the faculty at HBS has been more stubborn, and it could well be because I’m, I’m too into it or, or something. So we’ve only had modest success with the faculty, but we’ve had magnificent success.
With the students.
Bruce Daisley: Just to, to finish off on the Uber thing, um, obviously you, you’ve read Susan Fowler and we’ve, we’ve talked about her. What would your approach have been when you’ve got someone who’s vocally like that? Is it worth reaching out? It had, you know, in the version of that story where Travis had turned it around, would it been worth reaching out to her specifically, or is it, is it more.
[00:36:00] Use her testimony to improve the organization.
Frances Frei: Oh my goodness. Reach out specifically, for goodness sake.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah. Yeah.
Frances Frei: I don’t even, there isn’t even any thinking.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah. It seemed intriguing that one, ’cause it’s, it felt like the way she articulated it felt like sort of college dating culture with power layered over the top.
So it just felt,
Frances Frei: and like severe mismanagement, right? Mm-hmm. Like she reported things and they didn’t go through. Now she reported horrible things. Mm. But then you have to imagine that people that were reporting less horrible things that they also weren’t going through. So to me, it was tragic and revealed a lot of management debt, and so I would’ve for sure reached out to her and tried to learn every single thing I could from her context.
And then also tell her we are. It’s going to change this organization so that it’s worthy of you and we would like invite you if you want to, to come back and inspect it. We’re sorry that you’re the catalyst of it and we want to honor you as in whatever way we can. I’m not [00:37:00] sure that any of that happened in that particular environment.
Bruce Daisley: Yes, absolutely. That all
Frances Frei: happened before I got, like, I was brought after that. Um,
Bruce Daisley: through everything, it’s, it strikes me that you are an immensely optimistic person. That you believe that actually Oh yes.
Frances Frei: Criminally if there is a George,
Bruce Daisley: but that most organizations actually we can change this. We can solve this, we can fix
Frances Frei: this.
Oh, of course we can. Of course you can. So what would you, I mean, come on, look what we can do. We can like land a spaceship on the moon. I, we could solve so many problems that we get, like crazed and that we can’t solve it because it might have to do with people or with gender or with race. I’m, I’m undaunted by any of that.
I see the capacity of human beings and sometimes we have to channel it. I think there’s unlimited capacity what the human species can do. And when we’re in organizations, I don’t find it to be more limited. We just, you know, we can get stuck. I find that we get stuck behind pebbles, not boulders, but I, I have empathy that they appear like boulders to [00:38:00] people.
Bruce Daisley: And so give, give two pieces of advice to listeners then. So the first one is if you are stuck in an organization and you believe that there are some wonderful people there trying to do the right things, but the company feels. Like it’s got an underlying toxicity or maybe it’s sort of a, just a politics running through it.
Can an individual feel like they can be a catalyst for change?
Frances Frei: Well, I would say be a catalyst for change and if it doesn’t work, then leave be. What I would not say is endure and hope that it gets better later because we all only get one time on this planet and, uh, that would be a tragedy. I think one person can catalyze change in any part of the organization.
Let me as an example, Susan Fowler completely catalyzed change at Uber, relatively junior engineer. Um, and we see this all the time. We talk about it in FedEx, but FedEx in its early days was like on the brink of bankruptcy, and the receptionist [00:39:00] saw that a, a wedding dress wasn’t gonna get to someone in time.
She felt the culture knew that it was like go above and beyond. So she chartered a plane, this is in the early days, and went and delivered the dress. Didn’t ask anyone, just went and did it. The people that were at the wedding were like, holy cow, this is service. They started frequenting FedEx and that is why FedEx exists today.
So I’m gonna go ahead and say not only should we do it at lower levels of the company, it might need to be done by people that have the, the naive optimism to just know what is right, but not worry about having to disappoint people they know have been working really hard at this.
Bruce Daisley: Those stories can be so totemic, can’t they?
They can be so powerful for making people recognize, this is what our culture looks like. This is what we can be.
Frances Frei: You know, I just finished teaching a an MBA class and, um, it was called Leading Difference. How do you, how are you led by people that are different than you and how do you lead people that are different than [00:40:00] you?
Because it’s like, what do we know about leadership and what changes when, when you’re around more difference. And I think this crisis means that it’s not just race and gender and, and sexual orientation and things like that, but now it’s health status, home status. Like we have a lot socioeconomic status.
We have a lot more difference. And I have to say, when I think about like, are we in good hands when we send those 120 students out in the world, I’m like, oh my gosh, yes. I have never felt so confident. So I’m a very big believer in having the kids in their twenties and thirties as the catalysts for change.
Bruce Daisley: Uh, I’m really interested, you talk a lot about belonging and the importance for belonging, and there’s so many layers to belonging. Specifically, you talk about the, the need for people to feel safe. The, the, the one question I was intrigued to get your perspective on is the academia, which you are also exposed to, has seen, um, really sort of belonging, morphing, morph beyond that, into identity politics, and that’s [00:41:00] had an impact on academia, pe, people.
It’s, it’s often been divisive in, in some, uh, in some colleges. And I wonder whether you think that’s coming to the workplace at all.
Frances Frei: I do, and here’s the way I would, um, I would think about it. So we use this thing called the inclusion dial, but it just like, lets you know how much belonging is there in an organization and the.
Our job is to make everyone feel safe. Once you’re safe, it’s to make everyone feel welcome regardless of the difference you represent. And then we wanna celebrate you precisely for your difference, because your difference, it turns out, is the most interesting thing about you. Not what’s in common, but what’s different.
And we want everyone to feel cherished for their difference. So there’s this inclusion dial. The reason I bring that up is that. What we try to teach people is how to move up the inclusion dial from safe through welcome, celebrated, all the way to cherished. What’s not okay, is to have one group move up the inclusion dial while another group moves down the inclusion dial.
I think that might be what you’re referring to in identity politics.
Bruce Daisley: Hmm.
Frances Frei: It’s not okay [00:42:00] to have my group be better off if it means another group is gonna be worse off. That we have to be clever enough in 2020, and we’re very far off the frontier, so I believe we can do it where everybody wins. Um, but so, so to the extent that that’s what you meant by identity politics, that one group wins over another, I would say those are not final solutions.
That’s a, that’s a brain, that’s a, a brainstorm along the way to everybody wins, but we cannot stop when one group is elevated over another.
Bruce Daisley: I, I was, um, I think when I wrote that question, I was, I was specifically interested in, I, I worked in an organization where one person flagged that they’re religious.
Beliefs were undermined by someone else’s sort of gender and, and sexuality beliefs. And it created this, this unsolvable conundrum because unless you have a value judgment that says actually. [00:43:00] Prepare, preserving this one is more important than everyone. Everything else, you kind of can’t square it and, and I was just interested, this is one of the challenges that academia’s got into.
I just wonder if,
Frances Frei: well, I find it every, so I’m, I’m a lesbian and there are some places I remember that HBS ask me to go and. Teach in a, um, middle Eastern country. When I was a junior faculty and I got asked to teach, I was a pretty good teacher. I got asked to go teach in a lot of countries. Uh, and, but for this one, I said no.
And I never said no to anything at HBS because I was so darn grateful to be there. Anyone who asked me anything, the answer was yes, but this was the first time I’d ever said no to the school. Hmm. They were alarmed and they said, why not? And I said, because it’s illegal to be gay. There. And they said, oh, but you don’t have to worry.
They’re gonna like welcome you with a red carpet. And it’s when I realized like, safe is first and then welcome. There’s no amount of welcome that can overcome safety. So that was, I didn’t feel [00:44:00] comfortable. To your point, it was incompatible. If there are incompatible things. At some point, someone is gonna have to make a decision, and you’re gonna want that decision to be based on values.
Some Middle Eastern countries make decisions in one way. Some companies in the US make a decision another way. Then there might be some laws governing it. But, you know, yes, if, if my existence says that you can’t exist, it’s gonna be. Incompatible until we get really clever brokers to come along and figure out how to break the trade off.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah, it, it’s fascinating for me. I mean, look, the, the whole idea of resilience, for example, is actually an innately conservative one. It’s like with, you know, people who. Are at the receiving end of knock back pushbacks, um, by the conservatism of the system are expected to be resilient to it even though the system itself might be innately unfair.
And so the whole idea of resilience is, is an intriguing one. ’cause it’s sort of about preserving the states quo. But that [00:45:00] one in particular for me, I’m intrigued how it, it appears that we, we can’t fully square it. I know it’s not a massive issue right now, but I just wonder if you thought it was gonna come on.
Frances Frei: Well, I do. So I think that the ones that they really look like they’re deadlock, like that, you just can’t overcome it. Uh, I can tell you if I’m only given one call, I’m gonna call, uh, a gentleman named Deepak Oltra. He’s a negotiations professor at HBS, and he has done amazing work, for example, on trying to get Republicans and Democrats to agree on gun legislation.
You would think that those two things have absolutely no overlap. He’s making amazing progress. So I think we just need people who think about it differently and people who are as clever as Deepak. And there are probably countless others. It won’t be me, but there are great people out there that can do it.
Bruce Daisley: Good answer. I had loved his book, actually. I saw him talk somewhere. Yes.
Frances Frei: Oh, it’s [00:46:00] such a, if you get to see him talk, it’s,
Bruce Daisley: he’s just, he’s just the bomb. Back when More Francis fright after this. Now back to my discussion with the world’s leading culture consultant, professor Francis f Fry. Couple of final things I wanted to ask you about.
So, okay. Um, you’re not a big fan of 360 appraisals and, uh, I, I
Frances Frei: fear I am not
Bruce Daisley: and I I just wonder if you could, could let us, I, I wonder if you could let us in on the, your take why?
Frances Frei: Yeah. Uh, largely because people aren’t trained on how to use them. The problem is that, uh, we make anonymous comments and. The world knows that when we make anonymous comments in 2020, people are gonna say copier things about women than they are about men.
I look forward to that not being true, but there is no ambiguity about, oh, is that true today or not? It is. So in these three sixties, we kind of forget that that’s true and we then evaluate people based on what people say. So it’s actually just odd to me that we forget things we know [00:47:00] very well and we use them anyway.
And as I, we talk about in the book, anytime I’ve gone to an organization and there’s a glass ceiling for women, I ask if there’s a 360 review and there is, and then I do a test with them. We, we detailed how we did it with one, but I do it all the time. I’m like, go tell me. Go get 20 men and 20 women who are of equal performance in your mind.
Get their three sixties and read what was written about them. You think they’re equal performers? So what’s written about ’em should be equal. And they come back like they’re blanched. They cannot believe what was written about the women and they can’t believe what was written about the men. So the problem with 360 reviews, maybe they’re a good idea, but they became omnipresent.
Without, I think because it just like became a good idea. They became omnipresent, but they do a lot of damage and now everyone just does them and it’s ’cause it’s a good idea. There are other things that I don’t wanna inflame, but there are some other [00:48:00] HR things that. Everyone uses ’cause they just sound like a good idea.
And when you look closely at them, it’s not clear. They’re not causing more harm than good. Uh, so three, oh, go on. What else? You’re gonna get me in trouble. Um, uh, I will give you one other one that has caused me anxiety, although I understand it gets better. But there’s a measure called the net promoter score and Right.
It was always, um, argued that cover of the book said the one measure you only need to know. And that’s just like, that’s playing with fire. Like if you know somebody’s net promoter score. It’s better than if you know their satisfaction. It’s better if you know their likelihood to repurchase. And I’ve gone into companies who will show me that the net promoter score is an inferior predictor of growth than those other scores.
Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. It was the audacity of saying it’s always right. That caused some harm because it was sold CEO to CEO. And then the CEO would say, put the net promoter [00:49:00] score into. Performance. Well, you should only do that if it’s a driver of performance, you shouldn’t do it.
’cause it theoretically sounds good. I think that that Medallia has now overcome a lot of that, but in the beginning it used to drive me and other academics, bananas because it was this untested thing put in kind of like 360 degree feedbacks like. They’re so elusive. Like don’t you want there to just be metric, like a simple metric?
Don’t you just want it to work? But we gotta like have a feedback loop to go back and say, does it? And when it doesn’t, the humility, and maybe it works sometimes, so use it then and it doesn’t work, sometimes don’t use it then. But 360 degree reviews I think have. Are done everywhere for a while, net promoter score was done everywhere.
I just think that we have more variation in reality than that, than that supposes. I can’t believe you got me to say that.
Bruce Daisley: Um oh. No, it’s intriguing though, isn’t it? I think, you know, narrative fallacy as [00:50:00] humans, we love the idea that something is the magic wand that will, that will fix all our ills and both net promoter scores and three sixty’s appear superficially. So benign and, and the fact that they promise so much, we sort of stumble into believing, get investing a lot of commitment to them, I think.
Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And, and so this new book you’ve written, it’s The Unapologetic Leaders Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. It’s really sort of a pause for thought for, for anyone in a leadership position because it’s inviting them to actually, uh, as you say there, to, to empower the people around them as, as their first act.
And if you can draw the magic out of the people who work for you, it seems to, um, inspire the, the team and the organization to greater success.
Frances Frei: And in, to use a technical term, you will then. Thump everyone else.
Bruce Daisley: I’m, I’m so, um, I’m so honored to, to talk to you. Um, I’m so grateful that you’ve shared this experience.
You’ve been at front row of some of the, the business, the biggest business stories of the last [00:51:00] few years, so the fact that you’ve shared your experience. In such a practical way. I mean, I, I didn’t get into, but for me, the, the helpful part is that you give these specific questions. You know, if you’re going into an organization, what are the questions that you might ask a team?
What are the things you can look for? So it’s the fact, it’s so, uh, your, your methodology, so practical, uh, combined with your optimism. I think it probably gives people the. The template to try and, uh, to improve their own workplace. So thank you so much for taking time to talk to us
Frances Frei: and I really appreciate your taking the time.
And, um, and on behalf of Anne too, we’re really honored that you’re helping to spread the word. We love the book. Um, or said differently. We couldn’t have written a better book. I guess that’s what’s true. So it’s the best we have to offer, and, uh, we’re really grateful that you’re helping us share it with more people.
Bruce Daisley: Well, right now the most important thing is sort of wishing health to you and, and, and your, the whole family and, uh, and in such a sort of trying time for the world, but, uh, good, good health to everyone. Thank you [00:52:00] so very much.
Thank you to Francis. I’m so immensely grateful, especially when there are ill members of her household that she took the time to talk to me. Immensely grateful. As I mentioned before, I’ve been trying to, to set that discussion up for two years, so it’s thrilling to, to meet someone. And more than anything, what a thoughtful answer on three sixties, the idea that we’ve got these biases running systematically through our organizations.
Yet sometimes the, the incumbency, the, the organization, the power that resides, doesn’t perceive them really fascinating and brilliant and thoughtful. Her book with her wife Ann Maurice, is called Unleashed. It’s out on the 2nd of June. I’m immensely grateful for your listening. If you did enjoy that, I hope it didn’t interrupt too much.
If you did enjoy that, please do leave a review or maybe share it with a friend. There’s also a mail aid. If you go to the website, [00:53:00] eat, sleep, work repeat.com, you can sign up for our weekly or fortnightly, biweekly email that goes out, that’s got all of these things, but lots more. Uh, the one last week that went out was a discussion about modes of remote working and autonomy based on the model that the founder of Automatic, the people who make WordPress talked about.
I’ve been Bruce Daisley immensely Grateful for you listening. See you next time.
