The single thing that every organisation should do to fix culture

Bruce

This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat, a podcast about workplace culture, psychology and life. Hello, I’m Bruce Daisley, just me today. Everyone else was a combination of sick or traveling and we had such a good guest that we persisted with the interview. Today’s guest is Frances Freie. Professor Frances Frei is one of the leading brains at Harvard Business School when it comes to workplace culture.

Interestingly, she started off as a professor of operations, but she’s made herself alongside her partner, Anne Morris, one of the most indispensable voices when it comes to actually going in and turning around the culture inside organizations. I’ve chatted to Frances on a previous episode and I’ve included that in the show notes because I’m so intrigued when organizations like Uber or WeWork or Riot Games go wrong, they contact Frances and Anne, they bring them in and I just wanted to know what does someone do in that situation? 

What you’re going to get from Frances today is the sort of thing that she shares both in her latest book with Anne called Move Fast and Fix Things. And that same fixing mentality goes through the optimism in their podcast Fixable. 

All of it is really suggesting that any of us can improve our workplace cultures and fix them. And in fact, the spirit of their book is that you can fix far more things than you think far more quickly than you think by I think just having a practical approach to deconstructing problems and, trying to find the root causes of them. Brilliant discussion. If you are sitting there and you’ve got maybe some of your own team issues or you’ve, you’ve got challenges at work or you’re just trying to strive and build a better workplace culture. I find the approach of Frances and, and to be so rooted in reality and rooted in the things we can do. I love this discussion. I’ve chatted to Frances before and I’m always grateful for the opportunity to pick her formidable brain on these things. Here’s my discussion with the author of Move Fast and Fix Things, Professor Frances Frei.

Bruce

Frances, thank you so much for joining me again. Because I see you as such an important beacon when it comes to trying to unpick this knotty issue of workplace culture and how we get to the heart of this. Now, your partner, Anne, can’t join us today, but I’d love to understand a bit of how you work together. Do you go into these organizations together and are you… You strike me by some of the things you’ve said, I think, on your podcast, Fixable, that you’re that yin yang. And just wonder if you could talk to me about how you work together.

Frances

Yeah, so for example, if we go to an organization, we’ll both spend the same amount of time with the organization, but in general, I will be with large numbers of people in more educational environments. It’s a beautiful way for me to get to know an organization is by teaching them things and having case discussions. And Anne will do one-on-one conversations. So we each might spend 20 hours with the organization, but…completely differently. And then we come back and see what resonates and where there’s overlap and where there’s different. And then we know where to go and do a more targeted deep dive. it’s, I would say that we’re perfect compliments. She loves one-on-one. I do not. I love big room. She does not. So we’re perfect compliments in that regard. And we have deep respect for what each and deep gratitude. for what each other is doing. I couldn’t do the one-on-one part, or I couldn’t do it well and I couldn’t do it with optimism.

Bruce

I’m sure I’ve heard you say, on your podcast Fixable, that you don’t necessarily regard yourself as a people person. And is that you more comfortable with bigger audiences.

Frances

 I’m never more comfortable if there are thousands of people in an audience and I’m on a stage, it’s the most comfortable I ever am. And it’s because, and the most intimate I feel, and I am likely to disclose far more things about myself then because I have, I don’t know why it makes me feel so safe, but it’s my preferred form of intimacy.

Bruce

 So I’d love you to kick us off. You wrote another book a couple of years ago and you’ve written a book now, How to, well, Move Fast and Fix Things, which obviously pays homage to the old Mark Zuckerberg line. And it’s really practical, actually. It’s really sort of practical guides to what any of us might do. The way I took it was that the previous book felt like it was a big picture corporate stuff. And this is like, actually if you’re in a little team, here’s what you could do this week. You can get stuck in. It’s almost like a week’s manifesto. And just wondered your perspective on that, like your perspective on where work is right now and where you think solutions to the problems going wrong didn’t work are right now.

Frances

Yeah, so I think that the reason we wrote this is that we were finding too much caution in organizations out of fear of moving fast and breaking things. So the move fast and break things, it did a bunch of damage, but the greatest damage is that it presented a false trade-off to the world. It essentially suggested you can either move fast or you can take care of people, one or the other.

So what a lot of people did is they said, well, we want to take care of people so we’re not going to move fast. And then other people were like, well, we’re going to move fast and it’s okay if there’s collateral damage of humans along the way because that’s just how moving fast is. So we didn’t like either of those. We know there’s a better third way. But if you ask me, when we took a snapshot, what’s the distribution among the two? There’s way too many moving slowly out of fear of doing.

the damage they thought must be associated. So one of the things we’re really trying to do with this book is increase the metabolic rate of individuals and organizations to go after the biggest problems we’re solving. find even our largest problems are fixable, if I can use that, if we go about it in this systematic way. So we wrote this book to increase the metabolic rate on our biggest.

because we want to be on the other side of it and we know it’s possible.

Because trust is such a big part of how you describe the systematization of culture. There was one part that really stood out to me. And it was this phrase which was, one way to build cynicism quickly in an organization, something we see all the time by the way, is to ask people for their input and then do very little with the information they give you and take a very long time to even do it.

Frances

Otherwise known as annual surveys of employees. How can it be that, like, I know you have the results instantaneously, and yet I see organizations, no lie, months, months to report back the data. And they report it back and say we’re going to do these three things and ignore everything else and then wonder why the response rate goes down and down and down.

Bruce 

so interesting. What that did, that transported me to a place that was in a culture where it was very bureaucratic, very big technology company, very bureaucratic and kind of people had just given up on certain parts of the job ever changing. Actually just like, know, a vividly relatable story. I just remember thinking, I’m just going to listen to people and try and solve one or two things. But what I’ve discovered very quickly was when one or two things started changing, people started having trust that other stuff could change. so this was so relatable and actually goes to the heart of, you lay out, identify a problem on Monday and try and solve it by Friday. And I think it’s, it’s, it’s given you the inspiration to think about culture is something that isn’t this amorphous, immovable thing, but it’s just a series of blocks and stones. And I was just really taken with that.

I loved that.

Frances 

Yeah, and the momentum that comes with progress, you we refer to it playfully as when we unleash everyone’s can-do lesbian spirit, which is just our, you know, we get to as queer women be playful here. But what we mean is that that like fixedness that we have, imagine if we unblocked that, all of us have it.

but we’re in different levels of like sublimating it because of our previous experience. Like you said, because there’s a bureaucracy as opposed to a process of, my gosh, let’s touch it once. If you see a problem, fix it. Versus see a problem, write it down, chronicle it, we’ll put it on any agenda in a year or in two years. So each of these things are choices that the organization gets to make. we find that

what one team can do and they get success and then everybody comes knocking on the door and says, how did you do that? And then they open source how they did it. It becomes contagious and contagious. And it’s a snowball going down the hill as opposed to pushing a rock up a hill.

When you go into organizations, you’re, look, justifiably, you’re the person, you and Anna, the people that organizations call when things are going wrong.

That’s half of our call. Fire prevention is the other So fire fighting is half, but fire prevention is the other half. We’re really good now. We want to be much bigger and we don’t want to break things when we get there. How do we do it? So it used to be 100-0, but now it’s 50-50.

Bruce

Here’s what I’m interested in. How much of the problem of modern work is a stasis created by too many meetings and too many emails? You know, these immovable blocks that the demands that we’ve created for people by not being intentional, by not designing work. I saw a tweet by someone, I was reviewing something the other day and the tweet said, I don’t know what you’re all talking about, there’s one job and it’s emails.

And I thought, yeah, that’s relatable. But how much cultural stasis comes from that?

Frances

Yeah, so I’ll say, so we were just on a call with a wonderful company earlier that’s in fire prevention. They’re doing so well and they want to get bigger. And our estimate after doing our original analysis is that they spend 50 % too much time in meetings. Every person, if they’re in meetings for seven hours a day, we could…optimized and they’d be in meetings three and a half hours a day. The average amount that each person is in meetings is 2X and that quality wouldn’t go down. In fact, we’ve reason to believe quality would go up and that’s pretty typical. So if you randomly select an organization that hasn’t optimized on this, it’s about 2X incorrect. And I can give you like small illustrative examples that would help you capture that. so

For example, a meeting with no agenda is a meeting where nothing will happen. And yet we all attend them and we all do them. And it’s the meeting where, what do you have to say? How about you? How about you? And we just ask everyone to speak and nothing happens. Versus, this is going to be a decision meeting. We want to make sure that all of the various points, like each person can articulate this side of an argument. Do you have something different to say on this part? And then…

Frances

Bruce is gonna go off and make the decision. Those two meetings would be run very differently. So some are advisory to a decision maker, some are information gathering, like be super clear about the purpose of the meeting, but then be super clear about who has to attend it live. Entirely too many people are attending meetings. For example, we ask people to look at last month’s meetings, cross off the ones that it wasn’t vital for you to be at.

There’s a lot of red ink on those pages. And what we say is, what if you could have listened to those meetings on 2X speed within 24 hours after they’re occurring? Maybe while you were going for a run, maybe while you were exercising. So the amount of time we spend in meetings that we don’t need to be in live because we just haven’t been deliberate about thinking about the structure of the meeting, the structure of the attendee list.

and we have this fear of missing out culture or this status culture, or I want to be inclusive, so I’m going to invite everyone. These are all lazy ways, they’re not optimizing. But if we optimized it, we would be spending, on average, half the time, we wouldn’t be working nights and weekends because you have just freed up all of that time, which means recovery was happening, which means you’re actually going to be performing better and your best employees are going to stay as opposed to your best employees are going to leave. And that’s just…

meetings. Like so, such, that’s such an easy win to optimize the meeting structure in an organization.

couple of things that struck me as you’re saying that so so even that one that you’ve said there which is going from seven hours of meetings a day to three and a half that’s still 17 and a half hours of meetings a week it’s it’s it’s an interesting experience of work that we seeing

Frances

Yeah, and listen, there are some people who their work needs to occur in the presence of other people, but it’s not most of us. And so there are some people who their life experience, because 17, I think it’s going to be the mean, but there’ll be a distribution around it, right? Some will be more than that, some will be less than that. And I’m not saying 17 is an objective one. I was just giving you that example. But the truth is,

when we collaborate, we can get to better decisions. So a brainstorming meeting is much quicker and more efficient than if each of us worked in our own private silos and then came up with our best ideas, right? The brainstorm would obliterate the performance of each of us working in our silos. So it’s think about when we come together, why we come together and be super deliberate about that. And I think that a lot of things we do because that’s how they’ve always been done.

And that should not be true in 2023.

Well, I guess that’s the opportunity at moment to some extent in that the one thing that you said there is that how much more effective could you be if you listen to a meeting on double speed? Well, last week Microsoft shipped for $30, which is I guess a pretty nominal amount, $30 per customer, the ability to read AI summaries of meetings that you weren’t in. So immediately, technology’s sitting there right on the cusp. And I’m struck by the quotation that you gave from Robert McDonald, the four,

former chief executive of P &G and he said, organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. If you don’t like the results, you need to change the design. And that notion that we might think about organizational design is a strange thing actually, because I guess most of us have been through reorg or that we’ve witnessed like a change in the…

Bruce (15:59.958)

organization structure, the management structure, actually the big change is normally a manager is getting more people or fewer people. But we very rarely think about rewiring the document.

Yeah, rewiring is the level. I like that phrase a lot, Bruce. Yeah.

We very rarely think about rewiring the organization and it strikes me that, you know, if the learning from Robert McDoll there is that we need to design organizations, how little time do we actually spend realistically thinking about how

And here’s the thing about design. You redesign it once and you execute it again and again and again. And so what we’re doing is repeating the, I’m not going to call it the sins of the past, but the pain of the past where just all of us are enduring the lack of design, the lack of deliberate design all day, every day. And we think it’s, a week away from any size organization from improving your meeting structure, your meeting culture, a week.

as with everything else. We think everything is fixable and we think everything takes about a week.

Bruce (17:06.286)

Can you give me examples of things that you’ve done in a week? I guess, you know, it’s snowballing effect, but are there things that you’ve managed to transform in a week?

Most organizations will say, we don’t want to go that fast. So they’ll take the week of effort and they’ll say, but let’s do it in a month. Let’s do it in a quarter. Some will say, let’s do it in a year. But when we count up what was the actual amount of the value added time, it’s actually a week. So very few organizations have the, it’s only the small organizations that

that are like in that experimental mindset that are willing to go quickly. But what we can say is that if your change effort is designed to be a year or your change effort is designed to be a month, we know which one has a much higher probability of success. And what is the research on like more than half of change efforts fail? It’s because we are in giving them way too much time.

Because that was going to be my next question. you give that stat, let you say 70 % of organizational change fails, which is sort of.

Well, we’ve all It’s shocking, although not when you’ve, if each one of us reflects on.

Bruce (18:23.576)

Yeah, exactly, hope over experience. But if you were going to pin that down then, do you think time’s one of the reasons why?

Well, I do. I think it’s time and it’s that we just don’t have a systematic way of doing it. you know, we’ve, as a result of all of this work of being invited in for change, we now know an optimized pass-through. I’m not saying it’s the only optimized pass-through, but this one works. So you could try another one or you could try this one. But if you do these steps in this sequence, and I think that’s the thing. So for example, in our way of thinking about it,

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the five day, you don’t go fast until Friday. If you pulled Friday forward, you would move fast and break things. So it’s doing the necessary things beforehand. Like on Monday, we have people spend a whole day, which you can realize is a lot of time in our world, a whole day going from the symptom to the root cause. Because so many organizations,

are working tirelessly on the symptoms and wondering why they never make progress. And it’s because you don’t solve a problem with the symptom. You got to get all the way down to the root cause. And so we demonstrate how to do it. But if you haven’t identified the real problem, it doesn’t matter what you do afterwards. All of that. we see, my heart breaks. I’m an operations professor. My heart breaks when there’s like non-value added effort. I see so much change effort as non-value added because it’s working on the wrong.

That intrigues me that you’re an operations professor. how did you, because Zeynep Ton is an operations professor at MIT as well.

Frances 

she’s a dear friend and colleague. And if you can both have a friend that is a hero and a colleague, she’s that for me. She’s doing more to help the world on how to define worth.

Bruce

Absolutely, truly inspirational. But I was just intrigued then, so you both started off as operations professors, so talk me through that. you come at it from the, well, tell me what…

From optimization. And we collaborated at Harvard in the same unit until MIT lured her away, rightfully so. we come at this. mean, operations is, how do you get things done and trying to optimize on achievement and sentiment? So it’s like, what’s the objective? And almost always in business, there’s like, I want my.

this group to be happier or I want to achieve something here. So that’s the objective function. Then it’s subject to a series of constraints. And that’s the world we’re in. when you look at work, it’s heartbreaking when you see the wrong constraints in place. People acting like there’s a constraint, but the constraints aren’t the right constraints. Or they’re sub-optimizing. We’re leaving so much progress on the table. And I think that one

way we do is we take too long to do things, and when you take a long time, achievement goes down and sentiment goes down. Because if it’s widgets, the widgets don’t care. But let’s say that we have a pressing problem, and I take a year to solve it, versus it’s a pressing problem and I take a week to solve it. The sentiment is going to be dramatically different. When the objects are human,

Frances (21:50.158)

Time matters greatly, we just don’t care how long they’re in the pile. But people care how long you’re having them endure a known problem, a known problem that was fixable if only you revealed the urgency. And that’s, think, we like is that we think that the problems demand a level of urgency, and we want to empower people on how to bring forward that level of urgency. And Zeynep does that with her work. She’s not like, design.

jobs that are good and dignified for people next year. No, no, no. Everything she tells you is a do it now kind of thing.

It’s really interesting to use that word power there. I guess, know, the example that I was really taken by was the Ritz Carlton example, luxury hotel. they made what was superficially a difficult decision to allow customer service agents or employees to have up to $2,000 of discretionary expense to make a customer happy. their philosophy was that this

customer lifetime value is $100,000 and so it’s a nominal amount and most times it’s not even touched. But it’s about power actually, about making someone engage with their job is enabling them to fix the thing that they can see is broken in a timely fashion that struck me.

Yes, exactly right. And in fact, I would say that it’s the power that’s tucked into empower and the employees have been empowered to solve the problem as close to near time as possible. Now it’s after rigorous training, of course, you don’t. And to your point, like the $2,000 as the upper limit, it’s most problems are solved with $25. We’re doing it. And so if you have an organization, let’s say you say, I can’t give a $2,000 budget, give a $2 budget.

Give whatever budget you can and marvel at what that level of empowerment does for your employees who are experiencing it. Because it stinks to be an employee that can’t solve your customer’s needs and you know how to do it. It’s totally demoralizing.

Bruce

So talk me through that Ritz-Carlton example and how that came about.

Yeah, so the Ritz-Carlton example, you know, they have a really beautiful ethos and they’re trading, is ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. And they do so many beautiful things, but senior people in the organization serve in black tie, new hires. Like they have this thing so that you can, like that service is not the low do it to the high, service is what we do as a matter of course. And so we teach that and then you, go and help people. And so one employee saw that a young child was really upset for having lost his Thomas the Train. Really upset. He lost it somewhere on the hotel property and inconsolable. So without getting any approval, this go out to a nearby store, buy a Thomas the Train, which is a few dollars, bring it back and give it to the child.

But here’s what the, because it was a spirit of doing this, he took pictures of the Thomas the Train in the kitchen, by the pool, like, and said, and then came back with the story of Thomas has been enjoying the hotel and here is the photographic journey of it. my gosh, the delight of this thing. Now, there’s no manual that will say this is what you should do when there’s a lost Thomas the Train, but by…

Frances (25:27.95)

putting it into the culture and giving some level of empowerment. And again, $2,000, I think it’s cost, I think the total with the taxi and everything was like $19 to solve this. These are now lifetime, lifetime devoted and the story got told in so many places. So when we can empower the frontline, you have a choice with your frontline. You can either have them explain why they have to say no, or you can empower them to do something about it.

And this wasn’t like refunding the guests experience, but to be scrappy and entrepreneurial and within constraints do something about it. And you can imagine how long that employee wants to work at Ritz-Carlton versus going to somewhere else where you have to follow the manual in that very bureaucratic way. So great for the employees, great for the customers, great for the owners. It’s like everybody wins.

you can sort of see how a spiral of distant managers take the autonomy away from workers because they feel like unless we impose strict rules then we’re never going to be able to sustain the standards and so unpicking that just strikes me as a perfectly logical reasonable thing but also a formidably complex thing. Have you seen organizations that have managed to unpick that? I mean the Rich Carlton is a wonderful

So it goes back to the, and I think Toni Morrison quote, which is, once you get that power you so richly deserve, your job is to turn around and empower someone else. And so those distant managers, are you thinking about how do I control my employees? Or are you thinking how do I empower my employees? You go down two very different paths. Now, if I’m going to empower you, I have to train you before I empower you. If I’m going to control you, I don’t have to train you, but wonder what the achievement and sentiment differences are between these two.

different ways of organizing work. And I can tell you the ones where I would want to work at and the ones where I would want to compete at, it’s the one on the empowerment. But know, the Ritz-Carlton spends a lot of money on training in order for that person to know that they can be scrappy enough to go to the toy store.

Bruce (27:40.514)

that really sort of connects with me. I remember chatting to you, I was really compelled with like the drama of you going into Uber in the midst of that storm. I was, you know, the thing I’m intrigued by, I’ve linked that episode in the show notes, the thing I was intrigued by is what you say, what you go and do. And I think the thing that you described to me is, it’s about training people to be better managers. I ran lots of sessions about how to manage people and how to manage people, dignity, how to manage,

And it just strikes me that actually that’s got something in common with what you just said there that to some extent if we think we’re going to create good cultures but we’re not going to arm the people who are responsible for managing and developing people, then we’re…

Then whose fault is it when it doesn’t work? Whose fault is it? And when we went to Uber, was going to either be there were 3,000 bad people, because there were 3,000 managers, or people were promoted so quickly they were never taught how to manage. And it was, of course, the latter. And then when we taught them how to manage, they were so grateful. It was the largest uptick of education we had ever seen. And it turned around the organization practically instantaneously.

There was a piece of research last week that said that middle managers in the UK, 82 % of them are given no training when they become a manager. so it strikes me that it’s extraordinary.

Isn’t that incredible? Yeah, like, and then you’d say, well, gosh, does a manager matter? Maybe it’s not an important job. All the research says that like how happy I am at work depends on my manager. Whether or not I stay at my job, it depends on my manager. So this is a crucial job and we give no training to it. That’s that’s exactly the thing. And then I think about competition and I’m like, I want to compete against the organizations that are not doing it. And I’m going to do it and I’m going to thump you.

Frances (29:26.584)

So that’s where my ruthless competition comes in.

What do you think that management training looks like? Are there vital components of it?

Yeah, and you so I’m from the Harvard Business School. Like it’s what we teach how to manage, which is, so you teach the fundamentals of like how to give feedback is one of them. So most people without training are terrible at giving feedback. That is, if I gave you feedback without any training, I’d have just as equal chance of you getting better as you having no change in performance as you getting worse. It is just random.

But when I learn how to give feedback, you’re going to get better at a shockingly good rate. So you have to teach people how to give feedback. Or if I observe that some of my employees aren’t doing a good job, well, if I get to teach you, I will teach you that it’s either they don’t have the capability to do it, they don’t have the motivation to do it, or they don’t have the permission to do it. Identify which one it is because the solutions are completely different.

or I see a situation where trust is breaking down, et cetera, et So it is absolutely teachable. And we have amazing schools that have been figuring out how to do this and amazing scholars that have been figuring out how to do this. So it’s maybe one of the most teachable things on the planet today.

Bruce

Yeah, it’s just, I guess, you know, if your culture’s not going right, then being systematic about building, you know, the skillset is probably not one of the first things you think about, but I’m just really taken with…

I’d have to wonder why not, particularly if you haven’t been systematic, then the thing you’re definitely relying on is the discretion of your people, invest in them.

Bruce

As I was reading this new book, there was an adjacency of ideas to the best possible thing that can teach you something, popular television. It poses a question actually. think, you correct me on how you use this. You ask this question, which is, I think you ask it in groups, do you value other people’s time as your most strategic asset? And it sent me into a little spiral of thinking and then I watched an episode of The Bear, the TV show The Bear, where there was- which is a great leadership.

Gosh, my gosh. There’s so many teachable moments in that. there was the episode, which is the best one, which is the Richie episode. And it ends with Olivia Coleman with the phrase on the wall, which was every second counts. And I thought, wow, that’s too adjacent to pass up. talk me through that. So that prompt that you say to…

Frances 

First of all, if Olivia Colman is listening, please, please come and be a guest lecturer, come and do a cameo, we’ll come to you. Because she embodied it so perfectly, so perfectly. But I do think that that was a beautiful example. And so for people who haven’t seen it, but it’s the attention to detail, she was peeling… Mushrooms? Potatoes, mushrooms, she was peeling mushrooms. And doing it with dignity and care because each mushroom is going to end up…

in front of someone else. And it was a person whose own journey that he had to go through with, and I’m above that. It’s sort of the ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. She was peeling mushrooms, what could be thought of as low level task, she’s the highest status person. It calms her down. She did it, she invited others to do it. Every second counts. What she didn’t say is every detail counts. Like there is so much dignity in what she did. And you got to watch this person go from a very rough, self-centric way of thinking to a really humbled, other-centric way of doing. And I think when we think about management or leadership, leadership is the act of making others better. First, as a result of our presence, he got better because he was in her presence, but that’s going to last into her absence. That’s going to last for his entire lifetime. Just being in her presence for those 15 minutes, that’s what we should be doing in terms of leadership and management. Every 15 minutes that we’re using. Are we changing somebody’s life?

You posed an interesting question more broadly about the idea of time and that notion asking yourself in your job whether as a manager or do you value other people’s time as your most strategic asset and I guess one of the fundamental things that underpins most of what’s going wrong with modern work is we treat time as infinite rather than finite and so we

Bruce

We never make decisions of scarcity really about if we’re inviting 20 people to a 30 minute meeting. We never think about that as a use of a scarce resort. And so I was just into…

Frances

If I had magic dust, I would, and I could only sprinkle it on one thing, it would probably be on the invite list of who has to attend in person at meetings. And we are just woefully inadequate. We actually have it like, it’s somehow some form of your corporate patriotism. If you show up in person for a meeting that you could easily have listened to while you were exercising, and thus you would be healthier and better. But this like, whole location of simultaneously hearing, neither of us are participating, we have faculty meetings in academia. faculty meetings, you should be able to dial in to a faculty meeting. And there are some cultures where they’re like, nope, you have to show up in person. Why? And they’re like, it’s good for the culture. no, no, I’m so sorry. Let me teach you about culture. Not good for the culture. Because you’ve just valued our time at zero.

Bruce

I wonder, to finish really, I’m interested if you could help us mark our card on something that is often associated together, but you make quite a compelling case to separate. it’s the themes of diversity and inclusion. Diversity and inclusion are often seen as synonymous to some extent. And I just wonder if you could give your perspective on how we should think about that.

Yeah, so, and I have a very strong, so I’m grateful that you’re asking, which is that diversity, equity, inclusion, I think is written in the wrong sequence if the sequence is supposed to be order of importance. It should be IED. So it shouldn’t be DEI. Inclusion should come first, and here’s why. If you are inclusive, and that’s a learned behavior, nobody’s born knowing how to do it, just like management, we’re not born knowing how to do it, but we could be taught. If we’re inclusive,

you will attract all of the most magnificent diversity in an organization and you’ll get the most out of it. But I have seen so many organizations bring in diversity, they never end up being inclusive and it’s a diversity treadmill. It’s not very good for the people that are different, it’s not very good for the organization. it’s inclusion first, diversity will naturally follow. In fact, if you’re inclusive, you don’t even have to give very much thought to diversity. I promise you, it will flock

but we spend so much time thinking so hard about diversity and never getting the return on it. And I think it’s because we don’t get all the way to being inclusive. It’s like, I can invite you to the table, but if I don’t create the conditions for your voice to be heard, it’s just gonna be frustrating to you. So inclusion first.

Bruce

What does this look like? If you’re a leader now and you think, I’ve always thought I’ve got this covered. What does inclusion look like? What action?

Frances

Yeah, so inclusion looks like, am I getting the unique ideas from you? So right now in this podcast, you’re very inclusive of me. And what’s the measure? I’m sharing things that I uniquely know and you’re celebrating it. And then it’s going to get celebrated even when you’re no longer here. So you’re providing your championing of those ideas. That’s what inclusion looks like. Am I getting the uniqueness out of you?

The stuff that you know, and I’m sharing you what I know, because I’ve lived it, because I’ve learned it, because of how I’ve metabolized my prior successes and failures, because I’m lucky enough to have some neurodiversity. All of those things contribute to my unique perspective. And you’re bringing that out. That’s what inclusion looks like. And what we typically do, because we really like people who are really like us, we typically set the conditions for people who are just like me to thrive.

and we’re very inclusive of people who are just like me and we’re not very inclusive of people, the more they are different, which means we have to learn the behavior. It turns out there’s a secret memo. We provide the secret memo in the book on how to be inclusive. It’s a four step process.

We’re often asked a summary of how to build a workplace where everyone feels welcome. Our short answer is to recruit great people you don’t already know. I love that detail. Give them interesting work to do and invest in them as if your company’s future depends on it. And it goes on more.

Because it does, because your company’s future does depend on it.

Bruce 

Are you optimistic about work and the future?

Frances

enormously. I’m so, because every obstacle is so darn fixable. Like I would, I’m a fierce optimist, so it’s hard to get me to pessimism, but I would be pessimistic if I was like, my gosh, the problems are intractable, we have no idea how to solve them. I can scarcely think of a problem that we don’t know how to solve. So now it’s just making sure that people have the capability, motivation and license to solve them.

Bruce

love it. Frances, I’m so grateful for your time and thank you for sharing your perspective and experience because it’s of so much value to so many of us. So thank you.

Frances

I so appreciate the invitation.

Bruce 

Thank you to Frances and her book with Anne Morris, her partner, Move Fast and Fix Things is out now. I think on the podcast we’ve got maybe one or two more episodes before we’re going to take an end of year break. But do get in touch if you’ve got any thoughts or feedback or things that you want to discuss. We’ve got a few things in mind that we’d love to tackle and we’re just intrigued in hearing your perspective. So in the meantime, feel free to get in touch and you can

Follow the newsletter and you’ll find that in the show notes. I’ve been Bruce Tainley, see next time.

you