Wrong Fit, Right Fit | Author Dr. André Martin

0:00the second trend, and this one's probably a little bit harder to hear, but we're coming out of some of the most prominent growth, consistent growth, at least the United States we've ever seen. And so when you have a decade of consistent growth like that, it hides a lot of sins. And so this generation of managers actually aren't that prepared. We didn't invest probably in the way that we needed to, to get them ready for this time, the time after a pandemic, in a recession, when everyone's struggling to make money. That's a different leadership skill. We don't have wartime leaders. And so I think part of the other reason you're seeing this burnout is our managers won't say it, but they're just not prepared.

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1:14Empower your team with the metrics they deserve. Sign up for your free Dora dashboard today at linearb.io slash Dora, or follow the link in the the show notes. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your co-host, Conor Bronson, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Andre Martin, author of Wrong Fit, Right Fit. Andre, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot. Good to be here. Yeah, it was really wonderful being at your book signing last night and seeing just the incredible energy here around your new book, Wrong Fit, Right Fit. I had a chance to read a couple chapters last night, and so I'm looking forward to hearing from the source himself.

1:47You're an organizational psychologist. You've over 20 years of experience in talent management and team management. And I know you've worked on employee engagement and culture with global giants like Target, Nike, Google, Mars, and Disney, just to name a few. As a champion of this kind of idea of purpose-driven culture, purpose-driven organizations, you've really helped companies spearhead value-focused digital transformations. I know it's a lot of words, but I promise we're going to unpack them, folks. And what was the inspiration behind this book? How'd it come out of your work? Yeah, the inspiration around the book, I think like most books, there's probably two pieces to it.

2:21The first one is just my personal journey, right? Looking back over 20 years of working at really great, really interesting and very distinct companies and knowing that, hey, some of them really worked for me because they allowed me to do work easily. Others were great learning experiences, but the experiences were hard. And so I think that personal experience is always where a writer starts, right? And then from there, it's been this one number that's been on my mind, in my grill, sort of keeping me up at night, which is$7.8 trillion of lost productivity in the workplace today, estimated by Gallup.

2:55I just, I look at that number and I'm like, it's just too much. You know, it just means that there's far too many people who are sitting at their desk in their company and really not feeling like they're able to do their best work. And that's my cause. I think everyone deserves that opportunity because we spend so much time at work in our adult lives. I love that you're trying to make this really important piece of our lives better because I mean, even if I work just a classic eight hour day, that is still what probably half of my waking hours per day, maybe a little less, maybe a little more depending on the person.

3:30and that is such a deep resonant impact in how people feel day to day and how people go through the world. So I love that you're thinking about that. And I know that when you set out to start writing this book, you didn't quite have that as your mission. You had a related mission. I did. How did you decide that this was the direction that this needed to go? Well, I'm a geek at heart. So I'm a researcher, you know, I have a PhD. I love sort of digging into a problem. So the first thing I did is I, after agreeing with the publisher to write a book on culture, I thought it was going to be about culture in this new era of work.

4:04So how do you build a really great culture given that we're hybrid and we're remote and all these different factors? And so I started talking to people that I know, that I respect, people that are either running companies, in companies, thought leaders in the world. And what became really clear in those initial conversations was that there's just not one way, right? This idea that there's good or bad culture, that there's toxic or engaging cultures, it just didn't hold true on the margins. There was something else happening. And so in the late conversations, it became really clear that, you know, no company in the world sets out to create a poor experience for their employees, right?

4:45If you think about it, it'd be counterintuitive to business, right? Why would I ever want to put my employees in a place where they are stressed or burn out or not able to be productive. There's just no way you can succeed. So something else is afoot. And as I dug in, it became really clear that maybe it's about a mismatch. Maybe the way that a company likes to work doesn't actually fit the preferences of the individuals that are there. And right there, we start to feel like we're slogging through mud. And that was the genesis of all these interviews to kind of ask successful leaders, tell me about your right fit experience, It's a time in your life when you had a deep and sort of authentic dedication to the way a company worked day to day.

5:26And then tell me about a time that wasn't true. And in those conversations was just the body of the book. It just started writing itself. I'd love to dig into those wrong fits to start with. How do you identify as an individual that you have a wrong fit? And then also, how does a company identify they have an issue with a lot of wrong fits? Yeah. So, I mean, I think the easiest way to know is a little exercise I have in the book, which I asked people to write a single sentence with their dominant hand and then their non-dominant hand. And when you write with your non-dominant hand, I mean, you probably tried it.

5:59There's a few things that are true. I did. First page of the book. Right. Yeah. How did that feel? It was weird. It was hard. I strangely, I will say I had shoulder surgery this year on my dominant hand. So I've gotten a little better this year about it. But even so, just the experience was very challenging. It's challenging. People describe it as stressful. It's frustrating. I don't feel confident. The quality's not as high. I end and I do not want to do it again. And that's sort of the great visceral feeling that people have in these wrong fit experiences, right? How do you know you're in a wrong fit?

6:30It feels like everyone else has a secret decoder ring for success, except for you. You reach Sunday night and instead of being excited to walk in the door on Monday morning, you have the Sunday scaries, you're dreading it. While you're at work, you feel like work is harder than it should be. you walk out stressed, you try to work harder, you end up pulling from your life because you only have so many hours in the day. And in the end, it leaves you burnt out and exhausted. Those are the things that interviewees told us what was true in these wrong fit experiences. I think if you're a company, if you're a leader in a company, you have a lot of great mechanisms you can use to hear your employee's voice, right?

7:09We have engagement surveys, we have town halls, We have all of these assets. But I got to tell you, it's pretty simple. Walk around your office. Ask people how they're doing, right? Engagement is something that you feel. Commitment is something that you feel. And if you walk through your offices and it's pretty silent and people are heads down and everyone looks a little stressed out or haggard or exhausted, you probably on the margins have some work to do to create an environment where people can do their best work. This is advice I've heard from other organizational psychologists as well, simply on a one-on-one scale of like, if when you're having those one-on-one conversations with your employees, it shouldn't be all about tasks.

7:49You need to understand how they're feeling. Is this working for them? And also, like I've had team members where I know it hasn't been quite the right fit or maybe it was the right fit, but now the needs of the organization are changing and it's no longer the right fit. And it's a very challenging thing as a leader to try to help that employee find the right fit. And it is disheartening when that doesn't go well. Well, here's what I'd say to you. It's actually not the responsibility of leaders to do that for people, right? The responsibility the leader has is to be crystal clear about your answers to four basic questions.

8:24You need to be able to tell your employees, this is why the world is better with us in it. you need to be able to be explicit about how we make money. You have to be able to tell them how work gets done. How do we collaborate, solve problems, manage conflict, socialize, develop, give feedback, all those things that make up work. And then you have to tell them your unwavering promise to them for working here. And the thing is that I'm watching in this conversation right now is it used to be in the days of decadent growth, we could just hire someone, give them a computer, set them in a seat and they're fine.

8:59Now those cycles of re-recruitment, they're shorter. And my advice to leaders is to say, hey, in any given year, if you were leading me in any given year, you probably have a thousand touch points with me. How many of those are you using to re-recruit me back to the company through those four questions? And how many of them are you using to just simply get more output out of me? And I think if we looked at the world that way, it becomes pretty simply your job. Your job is simply to remind me why I matter and why it's good for me to be here. And then the choice is up to me, right? If you tell me and you're super crystal clear and it doesn't work for me, that's okay.

9:39It's better for me. It's better for you. But sometimes what happens is I actually love working for you. I love being here and I'm just getting distracted by the noise. I have my head up. I have my social media feed on. I'm seeing all this greener grass. all these people I know that are getting better titles and bigger pay. And I might jump, not because it's bad, just because I've forgotten how important this place was for me. As a leader, how do you know if you're striking the right balance on that focus on re-recruitment, as you put it, versus striving to drive more productivity from a team member?

10:13I would just say you can't do it enough. You know, the truth is the only road to productivity is deep commitment. Because when someone's committed to your job, the thing that you get is their discretionary effort. You get them walking in, looking for a hole to fill, asking the question, what do you need and how can I help? Productivity is sort of, you don't have to worry about anymore. Right, they're bought in, it'll flow from there. They're bought in and you're getting crystal clear. You're telling them why the world's better than us in it. You're telling them how we make money, which is essentially telling them what their priorities are.

10:45You're reminding them of how we work so they can do their craft and not have to worry about all the crazy coordination of stuff. and you're saying, and remember, by doing this hard work, this is what you're going to get in return. And so it's like, I just think we sometimes make leadership really complicated. I've been guilty of that. Yeah. And so what I would tell you is how often should you do it? You should do it every day. Yeah. Every time you bump into somebody, right? The more you do it, the deeper commitment you're going to have, the less likelihood I'm going to have my head up and the more productivity you're just going to get from me in the future.

11:14And yet we have this massive problem, you know,$7.8 trillion of lost productivity. And this is a yearly figure. Yeah. And that's due to this disengagement, these wrong fits we're seeing. Why is the state of work so disheartening? You know, it's like, there's a lot of reasons why, but I think you first got to just unpack that number, right? There's, it's a really dire time for many corporations, right? You've got one in three new employees who are leaving their jobs in the first 90 days. Even the employees that stay there for six months. I'm sorry, let me just clarify. One in three employees? Estimated by job by one in three.

11:52Wow. 30 % of new joiners leave their job in the first nine days, citing three issues, right? The first one is they don't see clear learning opportunities. They don't see clear opportunities to advance their career. And last but not least, is a mismatch of expectations. Whatever was promised to them on the way in the door, by the time they got there, it looked like they thought they were landing on the moon, they ended up landing on Mars. And so that's one. Secondly is our managers. Like our managers and our leaders in tech and all these other functions, 53 % of managers are burnt out. And we know that Gallup tells us 70 % of our engagement is due to our manager.

12:33So if your managers are burnt out, there's no chance the rest of your team is going to be in good shape. So as an organization, as a leader, my first call to action is I got to make sure my managers are fully engaged, fully committed, fully energized so they can do the hard job of doing that for everybody else. It's the old analogy, right? Put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then put it on everybody else. So do you see this issue with management as far as burnout that then kind of feeds down into other team members driven by those same four factors or is there another problem that's driving that?

13:05I think there's a couple of things that happened, right? So we're coming out of COVID. Now, COVID wasn't the cause of these issues. It was an accelerant. It was a great accelerant, right? So in that time, what we saw is a lot of extra cognitive weight and stress put on the backs of our managers. I mean, think about it. Our whole systems of how we operate were turned upside down in almost a day. And so I think managers are literally just still trying to climb out of a time that put undue stress and took a great deal of energy from all of us. So that's one trend. I think the second trend, and this one's probably a little bit harder to hear, but we're coming out as some of the most prominent growth, consistent growth, at least in the United States, we've ever seen.

13:47And so when you have a decade of consistent growth like that, it hides a lot of sins. And so this generation of managers actually aren't that prepared. We didn't invest probably in the way that we needed to, to get them ready for this time, the time after a pandemic, in a recession, when everyone's struggling to make money, that's a different leadership skill. We don't have wartime leaders. And so I think part of the other reason you're seeing this burnout is our managers won't say it, but they're just not prepared. And so we owe it to them to sort of help them first get out of the energy debt and then secondly, get them prepared for a different era of leadership.

14:24So if you were an executive leader or talking to an executive leader, what would be your advice to them as far as trying to recover that energy of their managers to help their whole organization? I think there's a few things I'd say. Like the first one is really simple and it may sound trite, but if you are a manager of managers or an executive, I would tell anyone the first thing I'd want you to do is to realize that your calendar is the company. Your relationship to time, the meetings you choose to have, the cadence at which you choose to have those meetings, that is going to create the calendars for everybody else.

14:59And I think often we don't stop and have enough intention to sort of look at our day and say, hey, am I having million dollar conversations? Am I adding legitimacy to the right things? Am I keeping people focused? Am I protecting my time? Am I modeling like a way of working that's sustainable? And I just don't think our leaders see how much their frame of reference, how much their calendar, how much their relationship with time just literally impacts everyone else downstream. And so I'll give you, for instance, right? If I'm a leader who's running a company, I'm willing to take back-to-back meetings, eight hours, 10 hours a day, every single day.

15:38That's basically the expectation for everybody. Right? So I think we have to sort of stop and go, hey, we are out of the crisis, right? Now it's time to rebuild how we're going to do work in a way that's sustainable. And the first thing leaders have to do, they have to do it for themselves. I have to say, I'll give credit to my co-host, Dan Lyons, who's a CPO and co-founder of Linear B. and he has done a really good job over the last year or two of kind of intentionally resetting here because I think like a lot of other leaders who especially startup leaders are so driven and passionate about the problem they're trying to solve, you know, for VPs in engineering just like himself.

16:15Yeah. He said, hey, I am driving myself too hard. I need to commit to this value that we've stated as a company, which is I'm going to maintain a healthy life alongside my work, around my work. And again, I'll give him credit. Like he sat down, you know, this whole year he's been he's been going to yoga twice a week and he's like, this is a key calendar block. And it's it's not a calendar block that lives after work. It's hey, I'm going over lunch on Fridays. I'm going to go and spend it, take an hour yoga class and I'm going to intention set every week. I love it. And it's been it's been impactful for me, I'll say, because I love my job.

16:49I'm passionate about it. I'm driven by it. But I'm I don't always have the healthiest relationship with it sometimes. And because I want to dive into I want to solve these problems. And I have to remind myself that it's okay to pause. And in fact, that'll be positive for me to be healthier, to be more present, to be less stressed and helter-skelter about it. And I'll give credit to Dan on leading on that and helping our organization see that that's okay and being public about that. Well, I want to give credit to Dan too, because one of the things that is super clear in sort of the research we're seeing today is that very few leaders understand that their espoused values just aren't matching the felt experiences of their employees.

17:27So in essence, we're not representing the value system that we say we have or that we put on paper. So MIT did this great piece of research with Culture 500 where they actually looked at this. It's the first piece of research that's gotten to the bottom of this issue, which is they took all the espoused values of all these great culture companies, and they basically looked at annual reports and videos of the leader and career sites and all these pieces of information, and they looked at how many times was a value stated by a leader. And they ranked those and weighted them from most important to least important.

17:58And then they took that set of values. They went over to the employee review sites and they looked at how often do employees describe the company through those values. They found zero correlation. Wow, right? And so right there, you're creating dissonance that's just driving down engagement. I hear you say we're this, my felt experience is this. Therefore, there's no way I'm gonna stay committed and engaged. So Dan is an example of what every leader is going to have to start doing is if you want to state a value, you better be super ready to stand for it every single day, all the time, in every public moment, because the minute you don't, you're a hypocrite.

18:36And so I love this idea. And I also love the other thing that Dan's doing intuitively and maybe realizes that maybe he's not. By putting times when you're regaining energy, human energy is finite. Opportunity isn't. And so if our companies don't start seeing that a part of performance is actually the renewing of energy, we're never going to get it right. I remember when I used to lead these large teams, you know, Google and Target and Nike, one of the performance goals every team member had was what are you going to do to make sure that you have the same level of energy at the end of the year that you had coming in?

19:11And I didn't care what it was. I didn't care what they put there, but it held into account. For some people, it's I'm going to schedule all my vacation at the beginning of the year. For other people, it was, I'm going to take a yoga class on Wednesday and Fridays. For other people, I'm going to take a full break for lunch and actually go eat and spend time with people. And I'm like, I didn't care what it was. All I cared is that everyone understood that renewing energy is just as important to me as utilizing it. I think that's a really smart thing to do and making folks think about it and holding them accountable to this positive approach.

19:45And we've spent a lot of time so far in this conversation talking about what leaders can do. And I think that's really important. a lot of our audience as leaders. But I think we also should talk about individual careers, because that is such an important element of your book and how people can understand if they have the right fit, how to find the right fit. And whether you're a leader or someone who wants to be a leader or you're very happy with being in IC and just want to continue to grow your career and be at the right companies, this advice is very important to you. So I'd love to ask you, what's the approach that you think people should be taking to finding the right fits?

20:15Well, even important, even more important in this conversation maybe is what my interviewers told me was their strategy to finding right fit, right? So I talked to over 100 people over the course of a year, and there's a couple things that stood out, right? When I asked people about these wrong fit situations, one of the most interesting things to me was I said, hey, when did you know? When did you know it wasn't a right fit? And they would pause, they'd take a little bit of time, and then they'd sort of put their head down and shake it and say, you know what? I knew at the interview. I knew at the interview and I just didn't pay attention to my spidey sense because it was a better title.

20:52It might have been better pay. You know, I just really wanted to get out of my job. I felt like I was stagnant. And so they ended up making a decision that they knew wasn't right for them. And all of them knew it early on. And what happens there is that we actually have some tripwires in our brain that can cause us to make that mistake. Right. So when you think about confirmation bias, let's say there's all the truth about a company you might want to join, right? And you're motivated to make that decision. You're only going to pay attention to the information that confirms it. Right? Really dangerous when you're trying to make a decision like, do I stay or do I go?

21:30Especially when you see like a shiny number like, oh, this new salary. That's exactly right. Or the other thing that's true about job interviews, and we know this as well as anybody because we've both done them, is their first dates. you're the interviewee, you're on your best behavior, your best clothes, your best prepared answers, the error-free version of your resume, and I'm a company, you think I'm going to tell you anything but that this is the best place to work in the world? That seems unlikely. Right. And so we're sort of in this process where we're not actually getting to the information that matters most.

22:01So two things I would tell any talent. First one is before you jump on a job website and you start looking for a new job, you have a lot of work to do. My interviewees told me if there was one thing they wish they would have done, it would have been a ton more self-reflection before they ever opened a job advertisement. And in the book, we have these excursions, right? So they're actually built to help you get as clear as possible about some fundamental questions. First one was, what do you value in big decisions? What are you solving for right now? How do you like to do work? What kind of leader do you like to work for?

22:38Where do you want to be in 10 years? All of these questions start to do one thing that's really important in a job search, is they help you discern the signal from the noise and they help you have intention. And I think that's probably the best thing in the world that talent can do is have that intention. And then you got to ask better questions. At the end of your interview, you have five minutes. We waste those questions. Tell me why you love working here, right? They're just, they're kind of throwaway questions. We give layups because we think that's what interviewers want. That's your chance to get really clear about some fundamentals.

23:13And so in the book, we have, you know, 10 or 12 sort of questions that are a little bit different, a little bit more pointed, might help talent get a little bit clear about where they need to go. Can you share one as an example? Yeah, I mean, one of the first ones and also share a strategy I have. One of the first ones is like, tell me about a person who's joined recently that has been a tremendous success. Tell me about who they are. Tell me where they came from. Tell me what they value. Tell me how they get work done. Tell me what they did in their first 90 days. Like these questions that get at a level of depth around a person that's successful.