614: David Yeager PhD - The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach To Leading The Next Generation (Author of 10 to 25)

26:32Is that the right approach? We're choosing this example because you wrote about it, but there are others of young people making poor choices, but that's what you're saying is what specifically we should do. I think the idea is anytime somebody screws up, whether it's an employee or a child or a player, they had a reason why that choice made sense from their perspective. And the main thing you want them to do is to have in the similar scenario in the future, reach a different conclusion. Right. So their flow of logic led to, in this case, I'm going to drink too much. Right. Or I don't know. I have like a four-year-old and sometimes he'll just pile a chair on top of a chair and then stand on top of it to get like a cookie or something like that.

27:18And you walk in the room and your instinct is to yell and say, get down. And I forget which parenting expert I heard this from, but what I do now is I say, what's your plan? And they haven't really thought it through. And like, what's your plan if it gets unbalanced and it starts falling, you know? And like, is there another way to get this thing that you want? And it turns out that like a few questions cause them to own the thinking. And then you want them to not, the next time you're taking a nap or whatever, you want them to not be styling, stacking chairs on top of chairs and about to fall over and crack their head open, right?

27:56You don't want them to only fear making the bad choice when you're there to yell and punish. And the similar thing is true for a player in a sport. Like you don't want them to lay in fear of being yelled at and then only make the right play when the coach is monitoring and yelling. You want them to know how to make the right play because they're playing the game in their heads and they're playing in soccer player, They're playing three passes ahead. Similarly, in this case of the kid coming home drunk, you know, like if parents tend to make it about themselves, why does my kid think I'm the kind of parent who has such weak enforcement of the rules that they can blatantly violate my rules and then throw it in my face?

28:39Like that's a, that's a story parents tell themselves in their heads. They make it about us, but that's not what they're thinking about. They're thinking like two friends who I really want to impress wanted me to bring some extra hard seltzers and they're going to like me and invite me to stuff. And this might be an epic night. Who knows what will happen? That it might be a night that's so fun that we remember it 20 years from now at our high school reunion. And if I miss out on that, just because my parents said so, because I'm worried about yelling, like my parents yell at me all the time. Why am I worried about them yelling at me one more time?

29:13You know? And so like the calculation makes total sense from a kid's perspective. What you want is for them to be making an entirely different calculation besides the fear of punishment. You want it to be like, what is my goal for my life and my future and the kind of person I am? And that has to be in their minds when we're not there telling them what to do. And there's, as far as I know, there's no other way to do it than to force them to actually have that conversation with themselves and think carefully about it. in debrief after a poor decision, but also in anticipation of future scenarios.

29:48Okay. I've tried to implement some of this stuff. And let's say this is real life. You are getting curious. Your voice is composed. You're not raising it at all. I think about this before some of these conversations. You never raise it no matter what. You're asking questions and you're getting nothing. One word at best, sometimes just like, well, I don't know. you know, like you get some of that. You just keep going. You just keep hammer. I mean, what do you do when you're getting nothing? You're getting no response. You're getting a shrugging shoulders, that type of thing. How do you get to the point where you can actually have a real conversation instead of just a one person or a mom and a dad asking questions and not getting much in response?

30:35Yeah. I mean, it depends on the scenario and there's some subtlety to the questions that are asked, you know, you, you could ask a bunch of questions and come across like a prosecutor. Yes. And then like, they're not into that, you know, on a recent vacation, my son didn't want to go to ski school. And I'm like, in my mind, I'm thinking like an enforcer. I'm like, we paid so much money to come on this vacation and it costs so much to send you. And you live a privileged life. Do you know how many kids never get to ski, let alone don't have private. It's not private, but it's three or four kids, semi-private lessons on this gorgeous mountain.

31:12And you're trying to complain about that. And like, I was offended that it's a, it's disrespectful of the amount of money I spent on it and disrespectful of the plan I have for this vacation where we don't have that many days where I could ski with my wife and stuff like that. So that's my internal narrative. And, but the alternative is maybe he has some reason for being reluctant for going. And he's just masking that real reason by saying, I don't want to go. And so I was like, look, skiing is objectively awesome and fun. So it's baffling to me why you don't want to go, but I don't want to be frustrated.

31:51I want to be honest and actually care about your perspective. And it's not about me. So can you please just explain why from your perspective, it's making sense for you to say no to go to this because I'm not going to give up on this. Like I have to understand because the alternative is I force you to go, but I would really like to understand. So I'm not being a pushover there, right? You still can be demanding, but you are curious. And it turns out that especially once his meds wear off in the afternoon, he does stuff that's a little annoying. Other kids make fun of him and he has Tourette's and his sense of humor doesn't land with other kids his age.

32:28It comes across as a little immature. her. And so he doesn't want to go be made fun of by strangers who are the cool kids at a ski school. And that's a reasonable thing. You know, like I would, I would maybe not want to go. And I would never have known that if not for him, but I'm, but then I'm like, now we can troubleshoot. Now it's like, all right, well, number one, these people are making so much money on this. This counselor has to be on top of it. So they need to know what's going to happen later on in the day. And they need to be proactive. And if they don't, you know, they're, the teacher is going to be in trouble.

32:59So it's not on you. And so we can have a whole plan about going, and then we can have a compromise that if someone makes funny, I won't make you go the next day. And so, you know, then he was like, all right, fine, I'll go. And that's the example where like you, you could get, you could win the fight as an enforcer in the short term, but then you're dumber about how to help your kids. And, and again, the same thing is going to be true for employees and coaches and teachers. If you're a physics teacher, it matters why the kid got the force or momentum problem wrong, right? If it's just a calculation error, that's carelessness of the last step, but it means they got 95 % of it right.

33:42A lot of times though, kids just misread the word problem. And so everything after they wrote the words down into numbers, they got right. They did the calculations right, but they rushed when they read the word problem or they weren't English speaker and they didn't understand the logic of the word problem. And so those are two, if I'm a teacher, if I'm trying to fix that problem, those are very different assignments I would give. One would be helping you read the question. The other is just making you pay attention on your calculations. And I could just yell at you. I could say, we've already covered this 30 times.

34:11I gave you 20 worksheets. Like you weren't paying attention. You were goofing off talking to your girlfriend. You don't care about school. And you need to learn how to be a grownup. And about 50 % of American public school teachers, that's what they say to kids when they make a mistake, right? They turn it into a character lesson and just never works. It's way better to be like, all right, well, what was the source of the problem? Okay. What were you thinking there? All right. What would happen if you change that? Then the kid owns the thinking. They can actually fix it. And then they're going to not make the same mistake later.

34:42I was curious reading about Steph Okamoto at, I don't know if that's you pronounce her name, at ServiceNow and the Mentor's Dilemma. Can you go more into the Mentor's Dilemma as well as the Mentor Mindset and maybe even share the story of Steph Okamoto at ServiceNow? Yeah. So the Mentor's Dilemma coined by Jeff Cohen is a Stanford professor, a mentor of mine. I want to give him credit in his dissertation almost 25 years ago. And it's this idea that it's very hard to simultaneously criticize somebody's performance or work and motivate them. And a good example is at Microsoft, when they would do performance evaluations, you would list what people get right and what they get wrong.

35:25And in the Steve Ballmer era in the early 2000s, those performance reviews would go into a system called stack ranking, which is an old Jack Welsh GE system. and in your stack, everyone would be ranked. And if you're in the top, let's say 5%, you get a huge incentive. If you're the bottom, 5 % or 15%, you're either fired or threatened to be fired. If you're in the middle, you're treated like you're mediocre and not given a great incentive. And so that's a tough setting to get critical feedback in because if you're told and you're in that bottom 15%, you don't want to hear that, right? And it's a very evaluative setting, but Steph had to do this every, I don't know, six months or so.

36:09And she had to figure out how to have that conversation. And the conventional way is to either just be brutal, right? And you're a 15 percentile person, so you're done. Or if you care about them, withhold the feedback. Like everything's going great. I believe in you, you can turn it around. And neither of those are good because the brutal version crushes motivation. And then the withholding feedback version, what I call a protector mindset, ends up coming back to bite them because at some point they're ranked and their incentives and their bonuses are tied to this performance evaluation. And so her employees would get basically threatened to be fired or get low incentives if she withheld the feedback.

36:55So she had to learn to be honest and direct while also being supportive. And that's what I call the mentor mindset. And that's what solves the mentor's dilemma. And it's this idea that you're going to be honest about someone's limitations or flaws, but you're going to surround them with support so that they can meet those high expectations. And an example is she would talk to a person and say, all right, what can we do now? So that by the next evaluation, you're an over-performer who has high promotional velocity and they would troubleshoot. They'd be like, all right, do you want to do this cross team project?

37:27And then the employee would be like, yeah, I want to go talk to engineering. I want to build a data dashboard or whatever. And then Steph would be like, all right, well, the engineers are very selfish with their engineering time. They're not going to let someone from HR do that. So why don't I go talk to your engineering manager and make sure that you can get that time from the engineers. So Steph would go run interference at the other division and then her direct report could then go recruit the resources she needed to create this above and beyond over-performing cross team collaboration. and then they'd be back on track with high promotional velocity, but Steph never did the work for them.

38:05So it's not, mentor minds, it doesn't mean I'm going to baby you. And it also doesn't mean necessarily I'm telling you what to do. It's I'm helping you earn a reputation as being high status and prestigious through hard stuff that no one else can do, but I'm going to run interference and unblock you and provide support so that way you can meet that high standard. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. I also read about Satya Nadella and how he shifted Microsoft and this thing about Theory X and Theory Y. What changes did he make for the better when he took over at Microsoft? Yeah. So when Satya took over at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer was the CEO.

38:46And obviously, Ballmer is a brilliant person who, you know, lots of visionary things. But the company culture was embedded in this old idea of Theory X, McGregor calls it. goes back to the 1950s that really kind of Jack Welch at GE was the embodiment of. And it's this idea of when companies are bloated, you fire tons of people and you have performance evaluations every three months or six months or 12 months to fire the worst people, cut the fat. And that did temporarily boost GE's stock price, but also shipped lots of jobs overseas and eventually dismantled the company in a lot of ways. But when Bomber took over, that was the dominant idea for large companies at least.

39:33And so that was his approach. And then Nadella realized that approach caused people to fear innovation. And that's because innovation comes with mistakes. And you take a bunch of bets and some don't work out and you can't fear your job because you were on a project for six months at some advanced tech at the frontiers of the field and you didn't have product market fit because you were too early and you then didn't contribute any to sales in your division. And now you're the bottom 5%. That's a dumb way to run a tech company because then you do safe things and you're behind everybody. And you would only create a new product once your competitors had already created it.

40:17And so that bomber mentality is why we have the Zune and Bing and other failed products from, although Bing's making a comeback, but certainly a lot of products where by the time Satya took over, one product at Apple, right, the iPhone, made more money than all of Microsoft. And so Nadella said, we need to shift from a culture of know-it-alls to a culture of learn-it-alls. And other people contributed. Kathleen Hogan is a well-known HR person. And Steph Akimoto eventually worked on under Hogan on that team. And they got rid of stack ranking. They still have very tough performance reviews, but they call them a connect.

40:56And it's a time to connect with your manager about your successes, your growth areas, et cetera. And it's more of a conversation about your growth and development. Again, still demanding, still outcome focused, still high stakes, but it's formative. It's designed to help you improve as an employee. And they adopted a slogan, model coach care. And so you model the great performance you want, you coach people to do it, and you care about the people you're coaching. Now the care part was controversial initially. People are like, that sounds like a bunch of self-esteem feelings nonsense. Like we, that doesn't belong in a top technology company.

41:33But the new philosophy under Nadella and Hogan and others was, look, if we're going to ask you to go above and beyond and surpass any benchmark that's ever been had before and therefore make us be the most valuable company in the world, that's going to take personal sacrifice. That's going to take you thinking above and beyond what your manager's telling you to do. You're going to need to be proactive and at the frontiers of your abilities and that's going to be exhausting. If at the end of the day, you think your manager does not care whether you live or die, it's very hard to believe that that employee is going to go above and beyond and innovate and change the field.

42:11So care is this like key part of growth. It's not just we're sending you a card or whatever. It's like, I care about you so much that I want you to become a top performer with high promotional velocity who then gets incentives for having grown our company. That's how much I care. And I care about you too much to have low expectations for you is another way to say it. And that version of care is easy to get behind, even if your instinct is to be more of an enforcer. What I found from the care perspective, like actually doing this leading teams is there's like multiple versions of coaching. There's the coaching in the moment where maybe they said something or did something that wasn't right for whatever reason.

42:55And you talk through and figure out how to fix that specific thing moving forward to get better, right? Coaching in the moment. And then the care element, and I think there's a diversion of care there for sure because you're trying to help them get better. But then there's this coaching for long-term development where I think the leader needs to genuinely care and understand the long-term goals of each person that works for them and finds a way to help them get there. And that usually includes them leaving your team. And I said to the leaders that I eventually led, let's be known as a place where people go to get promoted.

43:35And yes, that means they're going to leave us because I had a mid-level manager job. They're going to leave us, whether it's our company or they're going to go to another company. But isn't that an amazing thing to be known for? And yes, it hurts like crazy in the short term when a stud leaves, but it's an awesome feeling and it's a great reputation and it becomes a place where everybody wants to work, especially top performers that are ambitious. and it's a longer game play. But I think that is certainly something to strive for and it doesn't happen if you don't genuinely care for people. But doing that, I think, is the right way to build a team that sustains excellence over time.

44:20What do you think? Totally. I mean, there's a great example of Steph mentoring someone named Saloni Shaw and she did that data dashboard project I described. And she was always a top performer in that case, but because she went above and beyond and got promoted early and a lot of steps, people get promoted early because she subtly gets them to do the job at the next level of either individual performance or management before they know it. And so she'll have these conversations three to six months before they thought they were going to get promoted and be like, look at this checklist. You're already one level up.

44:57So we're going to promote you early. And so that's just constantly happening on Steph's teams. So then the best people want to work on Steph's teams and they want to go above and beyond. And no one complains if Steph says, hey, your normal 40-hour-a-week job is going to keep you bored. Let's do this other thing. That's awesome. They don't view Steph as a taskmaster who's exploiting them. They're like – they want to have that promotional velocity. Anyway, Saloni was stolen away by an educational platform company because of that cross-project, cross-team project she did. But then a couple years later, she came back, and now she's the chief of staff for Kathleen Hogan.

45:38So she's basically running all of HR at Microsoft as a 29-year-old. And so sometimes when your studs get stolen, they feel that sense of loyalty, and they're like, you know, the best I ever felt was when I was doing super hard work that was acknowledged. Like it wasn't hard work that people were like, well, of course you did. We paid you. It's like hard work where they're like, that was impressive. And that was awesome. And Steph makes sure that her reports do the presentation to the senior VPs. Steph won't present on her direct reports work because A, she wants them to take it seriously enough that their reputation's on the line.

46:15But B, she wants them to get the credit. And some managers think Steph's crazy for giving the credit to her direct reports, but that's not her philosophy. And then you find that area under the curve over a long career. You have over-performers who are also deeply loyal, both to you and to the company. And so it's like a Pete and Leona story. When Steph retires, it's going to be like Pete's funeral. People are going to come out of the woodworks and talk about the lives that she changed, for sure. So cool. Before we run, David, I'm curious, let's say you're meeting and you regularly do this, I'm sure with somebody who's a recent college graduate who is ambitious, they care about themselves and others, and they want to leave a positive dent in the world.

46:59What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them? Yeah. Well, I mean, as a professor, I do this every day. I write letters of recommendation a year. I mean, the most common thing I say is like, don't, don't accept the kind of received wisdom of certain paths. Like usually the highest achieving kids are also the ones who like following the rules the most. Like that's how they got A's was listening to the teachers and turning their homework in on time. And so they're like, I need this class, this degree, this graduate school. And then I have this kind of path. And I'm always like, yeah, you know, a lot of stuff's nonsense.

47:38You don't have to do that. Um, so that's kind of one thing I always say. Uh, but the other thing is, you know, There's this complaint from employers that this new generation doesn't want to work, that there will be a job posting. There's 200 applicants. One person gets the job. And the second they get the job, they ask for vacation time to go to Aruba or they want to go work remotely from Alaska. And the employer is like, what the hell? Like you just got this job. And I've heard this story so many times. and you know i i think the conventional advice is to tell young people to basically pretend like they don't want that stuff until you've been promoted a few times like don't don't show your short-sighted self until you're 29 or 33 or something like that and like i get that but to be honest like i mean if you or i were offered a job right now and we knew you could work remotely from a vacation on Alaska for months, we would have totally done that.

48:35That would have been amazing. It's incredible to be young right now. So they're not crazy for asking to do this stuff, especially not when most CEOs, the minute the pandemic hit, went to Costa Rica or Arizona or Tahoe and they ran their companies out of a ski hut. And of course they want to do that because that's the goal. So I don't think they're entitled necessarily for asking for that kind of flexibility. They just realized that it's a possibility. Same time. I think young people need to realize that because of the stereotype, your competitive advantage is just being super duper reliable. Like if you show up and do what you said in advance, and then you ask for clarification at the right time, and then ask for more work, if that's all you do, you're the top 1 % of people in your generation right now.

49:28And, you know, fair or not, that is what the millennials want to hire. And so I, I think like, um, you know, you're not being exploited necessarily for a lot of these things, but you, you can, um, if, if you are reliable and proactive and follow through, uh, then you're rewarded and then you get all kinds of, um, flexibility because you're so good that your employer will not want to lose you. I have people where I'm like, I don't want to lose you. And so tell me what you need. I will give it to you because you're so great and I can count on you. Add surplus value. Whatever they're paying you, find a way to add 5X more than that of value to your company.

50:15And you could do whatever you want if that's what you do. Show up, be consistent, be reliable, ask for more work, add surplus value. You can do whatever you want. They'll beg to keep you, right? And I think that's how you earn it, right? That's how you earn it. And that goes for anybody, by the way, regardless of age. That goes for anybody. I think if we're regularly, I try to do this with every client. How can I add surplus value for whatever they're giving me? They should get a much greater return on that investment. And if I consistently do that, my business is great. And if I don't, I'm out of business.

50:48And that's kind of the mentality. I think anybody approaches their career that way, especially if you're starting out new, you're going to be, you're going to set yourself up for a lot of good stuff. David, this was awesome. Book is called 10 to 25, the science of motivating young people, a groundbreaking approach to leading the next generation and making your own life easier. Extremely well-written, great stories, the science and the practical application. Perfect, dude. So huge props on that. Thank you for writing it. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Yeah, totally.

51:22And I'll say that what I'm probably most interested in now is working with teams like sports teams and businesses on both product features that are building on the insights of my book and HR approaches and management approaches. And so if there are anybody who reads the book, you're like, we got to, we're training 900 retail employees a year. Like we got to do it differently. We have a drive-through. We want to make it 10 % faster and make a million dollars more per branch at Arby's or whatever it is. I'm super interested in those puzzles. And the more I work on it, the more I'll have to share when I come back and tell you success stories.

51:59I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you, man. I look forward to the next one. All right. Thanks, Ryan. See you. All right.

52:08It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, ryan at learningleader.com, and let me know what you learned from this great conversation with David Yeager. A few takeaways from my notes. Satya Nadella's model, coach, care philosophy at Microsoft. This is the opposite of what Jack Welch did at GE in his rank and yank style. That rank and yank style and the stack ranking methodology limited innovation and stopped people from taking any type of risk for fear of being fired. We want to model the right behavior, coach others, and ensure they know we care for them so they feel the support they need to take risks, sometimes fail, get back up, and work to innovate.

52:54Then it's life slash career advice. Don't accept some perceived path. Be reliable. Show up. Do the work. And ask for more work. Add surplus value. Whatever you're being paid, find a way to deliver 10x the value. value of what they are paying you. If you do that, your employer will beg you to stay, give you a raise, and look for ways to promote you. Add surplus value. And then the parental nagging study. One particular interesting point in the book is about nagging and the common tactic adults use to get people to, quote, pay attention. Research shows that nagging triggers the emotional part of a teen's brain shutting down their ability to think logically.

53:42They're not ignoring you on purpose. They're simply wired to tune out. A better way, speak calmly and neutrally to engage the part of their brain that handles planning and decision-making. This opens the door to a real conversation. And yes, I know that is easier said than done. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with David Yeager. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that, and you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you subscribe to the show, and you rate it hopefully five stars, and write a thoughtful review.

54:19And by doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.