321 - Molly Graham (WorkLife Podcast) on Why Everyone Just Became a Manager

0:00When you say like super IC, I think what a lot of people think is, oh, thank God I don't have to manage people. But actually what is happening, in my opinion, is that every single person in the world just became a manager, right? Because the skills and the tools required to make agents do what you want them to do are the exact same skills and tools required to make humans do what you want them to do. So actually, I think the single biggest problem facing companies right now is like so many people are such terrible managers and a lot of people hate it. So like, and maybe that's just because they don't like dealing with people's feelings and emotions, which like give them a bunch of robots.

0:35But like, actually, it means that manager training now needs to be for every single employee. Right. Because you can create as much chaos being this super IC as you can clarity and efficiency. Right. You're listening to the Modern People Leader podcast, where we go behind the scenes with today's top HR leaders and work experts. We talk to them about how they've gotten to where they're at, what they do every day, and what they see coming next for the future of work. Hope you enjoy.

1:08Molly, welcome to the pod. How are you doing? Good. Thank you. Thank you for having me. We already had like some, I like the energy. The pre-record energy was vibrant. So I'm looking forward to this one. Me too. I feel like Molly's name has probably come up more than anybody else in the last six months. Several of our guests have recommended you. The last question that we ask is, who do we need to have on next? And your name was the response at least three times. And one resounding recommendation. Who was the super fan? I want to say it was Amy from Wiz. Okay. I love it. That feels right. That feels right.

1:50Thanks, Amy. Molly. Yeah. And I think she said the operator mindset for some reason that's like, am I making this up, Daniel? I think so. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, I, these are all things I love and we've heard so much about you, Molly. It's an honor to finally have you on the pod. We have a few rituals in the show. First is what we call good news stories. It's just a way that we kick things off with a little positivity. It can be a personal or work story, something good that's happened recently, and we prefer for our guests to go first. Okay. I'm going to try to keep this short.

2:30So I published an article last week on Lenny's sub stack, and he's got a pretty big sub stack. And the article has basically been a really big aha for me about the fact that I've managed my career in a certain way, but I've sort of always felt a little broken because I didn't have like a plan and I didn't know where I was going. And I've always felt like a little bit, I don't know, whatever, like I was doing something wrong. And over the course of a bunch of conversations in the last year, I realized there's this thing called emergence, which is sort of a magical way to think about. Well, it's a concept from nature.

3:02It's like, you know, bees and a beehive don't have a plan, but they each do their thing. And then like they create a beehive or ants or starlings in a murmuration. So anyway, basically I got gifted this beautiful idea of career emergence, which is that you don't have to have a plan. And so Lenny and I published this article last week and it's been so awesome because I've been getting all these notes from people all over the world, just being like, thank you for giving me language for this. And it's like my favorite thing in the world is when I publish something that matters to people I'm never gonna meet.

3:32So it's been a joyful inbox week. Oh my God. I like I'm gonna have to fight all for an hour now to not go read because I just pulled it up and I see the Letty's newsletter post here and so yeah I'll have to I'll have to set that aside for now but that's great news Daniel what do you have so my good news is that we are like two thirds of the way unpacked in the new house and as I was sharing with you guys pre-record it feels good. It felt like an impossible task when we had probably 40, 50 boxes just stacked up in our dining room. And so we can see the light on the other side and I'm excited. I'm already loving the neighborhood.

4:20Got a nice little view here from my office window. And yeah, I'm pumped to be here. So awesome. I love that. Daniel and I have like parallel life emergence. Like we have this way unintentionally of like intentionally doing the same, being like in the same life milestones happening. So Lena is a year and a half old, your daughter, your baby girl. And Joaquin is seven months old, seven and a half. And Daniel just bought a house and moved. And we have a pending offer on another place. So we're like, we're locked in. The Austin market is softening over here. So we're like. So we'll see. We'll see.

5:01My good news, geez, in the last couple of weeks, we have had some absolute bangers on this podcast, like Laura, the CHRO at Hilton Hotels, like a few others. I'm not, that's just the one that like immediately comes to mind. Here we are with you, Molly, talking about Lenny's newsletter. Like it's an exciting time. I'm a salesperson at heart. So like when pipeline is hot, I just like, I'm like super energized and ready to go. and we have a busy MPL week this week. We got a lot in the pipeline. Like it is full of recordings. Five recordings, one every day. Wow. Five episodes, one a day. This is like old school 2021 MPL activities.

5:44So that's super exciting. And life's just good. You know, line of sight to the school, like schedule being back. I have two teenage daughters in addition to a seven month old. So like there's something reassuring and predictable about being back to the school schedule. So I'm going to leave y 'all with that today. But enough about us. You know, Molly, like I said, like Daniel said, we have, you've been highly recommended and you've been like trending in the MPL sphere. And so I'm really looking forward to the first question here. And it's what I call the Brene Brown question. Like, what's your story?

6:25Like, give us a scoop. How did you get to the point of posting these wisdom nuggets with Lenny on one of the hottest newsletters? It's the career emergence story. Tell us the career emergence, yeah. Literally. How much compensation risk do you think is hiding in your spreadsheets right now? For a lot of people teams, comp has gotten way more complex than the system supporting it. You got merit cycles, bonuses, incentive plans, approvals, benchmarking, pay equity, transparency requirements. And somehow, a lot of it is still being managed through Excel, manual uploads, or HRIS modules that weren't really built for this level of complexity.

7:07And you know, that's all fine and dandy until there are three versions of the same comp file. Or one person becomes the single source of truth. or leadership asks why a pay decision was made and the answer is harder and harder to explain. That's where BCom comes in. BCom is a purpose-built compensation platform for organizations managing complex pay programs, especially those teams that I was just referring to that have outgrown what spreadsheets can comfortably handle. It helps people in total rewards leaders run complex comp cycles at the speed of business, connect compensation, performance, and pay equity in one place, create clear governance with clear audit trails, and use AI responsibly with humans still in control of the decisions.

7:54If your comp strategy is getting harder and harder to manage, Be Calm is worth checking out. You can learn more at becom.com slash MPL. That's B-E-Q-O-M dot com slash MPL. Well, let's see. I basically spent the first 15 years of my career most of it was in tech. My first job out of college was actually leading wilderness trips in Patagonia, Alaska. And then I worked at a think tank for a minute. And then I ended up randomly, really randomly, genuinely getting a job at Google. And it was 2006. So I was like, isn't that just a website with like a box on it? Do people actually work there? And then I went to Google and it launched me in a sort of 15 year career of basically helping build companies.

8:43And And I worked in a ton of different departments, communications, HR, product management, partnerships at Google. And then I spent five years at Facebook in a very rapid state of growth, 500 employees to 5 ,500 employees, 80 million users to over a billion users. So I always say, you grew up somewhere. I grew up at Facebook for sure. That scaling experience was very formative for me. And then I burnt out at Facebook and left because I wanted to learn what it took to build something from nothing. And I joined a little startup called Quip. And that was my first experience being a COO. And I ran everything that wasn't product and engineering.

9:22We've built something for three and a half years that we eventually sold to Salesforce. And yep, I only take jobs I'm highly unqualified for, which is like one of my hallmarks. And so I ended up going to the Chan Zuckerberg initiative after that, helping Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan start their philanthropy, which, you know, sounds calm, but was actually one of my craziest experiences with scaling because we went from 20, 30 employees the week I started to 250 employees in less than a year. And so basically like that part of my career was very much about like, how do you be the right hand of someone that's truly visionary, really thoughtful, brilliant human and help them bring their vision to life.

10:01But I really hit a wall after my CZI experience and realized that it didn't bring me joy anymore. And through that experience, I had done a lot of management and I had done some writing as well. The article that I'm most well known for, which is Give Away Your Legos, was published during my time at Quip. And over the last eight years, in a very windy journey, I have basically discovered that what I love doing is building communities that help people. and I could go into the details of that journey. But, you know, that has really been, I would say my whole career has very much, there's never been a plan.

10:37It's always been like, what sounds interesting? What am I going to learn from? What's the kind of impact I want to have? And then just picking the right next step. And that's the point in the Lenny's article is about just focusing on those things. And that's actually worked out really well because it's led me on this sort of weird, magical, windy, sometimes dark road to a point now where I get to build these really deep, intimate relationships with people, both through the communities that I build and run, but also through the writing and podcast work that I do. Tell us a bit more about the community.

11:12And well, I guess the first question for you, you do a lot. You have this, you know, wildly successful podcast that you took over for Adam Grant earlier this year. You have your community. I know that there are a couple of other things you work on. You have your newsletter. How do you explain to friends, maybe that like don't know as much about your career, what you do? Like, is there a one to two sentence explanation these days? The ever present journey. If you'd asked me like two years ago, I'd have been like, no fucking idea, man. No idea. Literally, what do I do? You tell me. Now I would tell you that I basically build communities that help people feel less alone and more confident at work.

11:55And community to me is both the intimate communities I build that have 100 or 300 people in them. And then I think of my writing and the podcast work, sort of the broadcast version is still a community. It's about connecting with people. And my measure of success is basically just if anybody says that an episode or an article made a difference to them, then it was worth it to me. So yeah, it's not a perfect explanation, but it is, it's the one I've landed on. And I feel like communities are like on this amazing bull run and it's like been this, like this like surge and need for communities and wanting and desiring, you know, to find a community.

12:37Why do you think that is like, just kind of like sitting in where you are at today and like how the things that led to you, you know, being, you know, in the business of communities and helping others, like what, what do you think it is that kind of brought you here? What is it for you that kind of keeps you committed? Like you've done epic things, you could do a lot of other things, but you're doing this thing. Why is that? It's funny, I talked to someone a couple weeks ago. And he looked at me and he was like, why aren't you at OpenAI? hi. Good question. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, basically, four years ago, I got offered this crazy job that was the kind of job that anybody would look at and be like, you should want that job, you know, big COO role at a big ass company that everybody's heard of.

13:27And I was talking to this founder. And I was like, you called the right person, I'd be a great person for this job. Like, I know exactly who you are. I know exactly what you need. I would be good at this job. And it would make me fucking miserable. Like I literally was so viscerally having that experience in the interviews that I was just like, I can't do this. I would last less than a year. Like I could tell. And it was really, really hard to turn down. Like I literally had to turn down five times. And it was, I continue to have regret about not getting to do that job because I think I would have learned a ton.

13:57But it was just clearly like time for a new chapter. And it led me on a journey of just feeling deeply lost all the time. But if you'd asked me what I thought I was going to do, once I kind of pulled myself away from that COO path, I would have told you that I thought I was going to build like a consulting company that was the McKinsey for tech. And I was going to be like basically the right hand to all these founders, helping them build, you know, at greater scale. And I started doing that work and it also made me miserable. I was like, I can't do this anymore. And in the middle of that, I actually randomly sent out a thing on LinkedIn that was like, hey, I had this group when I was a COO where of COOs that I met with monthly, we called it the breakfast club and we just had breakfast once a month to like talk about how crazy being a COO was and try to learn from each other and just have some empathy for whatever shit we were going through.

14:43And that community was so important to my sanity as I was operating. And we met monthly for five years through multiple of my jobs. So I was like, hey, I want to try to create this for other people. I can't answer every single LinkedIn message I get asking for one-on-one time with an operator. So I want to try to recreate this community experience. And I got 90 responses just to one LinkedIn post, 90 applications. So like people actually like, and I was like, okay, that's big, what's happening. And so we built a little program from those 90 applications. I think we had like 40 or something people in the first cohort.

15:15And then I loved it. And my team, my little team loved it too. And it, we ended up turning it into an ongoing community. A bunch of folks that were in that first cohort are still in the community today. And I think we've just, it took me another year or two to realize that that's what I wanted to spend all my time doing. Like I was still trying to make the consulting thing happen and doing this, the glue club thing on the side. But eventually I just realized that it was all the things I loved about management, which was like teaching people, mentoring people, sponsoring people, like getting to connect with folks and help understand what motivated them.

15:53All of that was inside community work. It was like deconstructed. And I thought I would never have that again if I didn't manage a big team. And it was like building these communities. I was like, oh, this really lights me up and people are getting a ton of value out of it. So it wasn't like anything strategic. Like I ended up in community building completely by accident, but it's what brings me joy, you know. I'm like hesitating to even mention this because it's very early days and we haven't even launched anything, but I'm about three weeks into research mode for creating something very similar to what you're describing you had for your COO community, but for chief people officers.

16:32And I just feel totally re-energized just having these research interviews and dreaming up what this community would look like. But it's really tough to create something for executives that they feel like, like number one you're you're giving them the value that you're promising and two like doing it in a very intentional way like that's hard it requires way more effort than just trying to drive a thousand people into a community and so just curious like any advice any yeah when you think back over the last few years like what what's one thing that we should know or like one pitfall that we should avoid yeah i mean lots but i would say just start and start small and start clear like i think that i have never been on a path to like compete with whoever the fuck you'd like whatever community is already out there for me it was just like who are the people that that are asking for this and how can I serve them?

17:39And it similarly has never been about scale and it's never been about money. It's always been about like, can we create a sustainable way for this community to continue from a monetary perspective, but not like let's make a venture backed whatever. I don't think communities are venture backed startups. So I would just, yeah. So for me, it's been about service and asking like, what is it that these people need that is worth their time? And that has also been a long learning journey in partnership with all of them. Like the program looks completely different now than it did four years ago because we've spent a huge amount of time listening and learning and thinking about how we deliver an experience that's like consistent and repeatable and valuable because everyone's busy, right?

18:21Like I look at an hour on my calendar where I'm supposed to invest in myself and I'm like, nope, can't handle that this week, you know? And so it has to be something that people are going to choose over and over again because it's really worth it to them. And that really depends on the audience. And to me, intimacy has always been really important. I have this community that's focused on mid-career leaders inside of fast-changing companies. And then I have another community that's focused on women leaders in the middle of their lives. And they're different, but intimacy is a really big part of both of them, because I think the only way you can really create a differentiated, life-changing experience for people is if they feel like they can bring all their shit with them, you know?

19:01So anyway, that's, we could talk about it for a while, but. Yeah, no, no, I love that. And in fact, I posted today about a life changing experience I've had joining a community and totally different use case. Like I, for me, it was like, how do I protect this music practice that I have kind of rediscovered after all those years? And it's why for those watching, my background is this spacey studio dungeon studio thing. But, you know, I just will say for those listening, like go find a community and join. Even if you don't think that's what you need, like there's you get obviously there are certain obvious elements that you get in human connection and like the things that are bundled with the community you're part of.

19:48But for me, it's been way more than that. It's been the things that I totally did not expect to happen. And so more to come on all that. But we do want to talk about the kind of frame and scope of the modern people leader today. And, you know, I think one of the things that we want to jump into is, well, first of all, I can see why you've been recommended to our podcast. because as I was reading our dossier, which is just like the prep doc Claude puts together for us, and just preparing for the conversation, I love the way that you frame these things that we've talked about. It feels like at length, but also kind of circular.

20:33And you frame some of these problems in ways that are totally different. And where I want to start today is fear. I feel like we live in a world that is like, I don't want to say dominated by fear, but kind of fucking dominated by fear. And it feels problematic. It doesn't feel good. It feels yucky. It feels yucky at work. It feels yucky at home. It just, you know, it seems like there's a lot of discontent. It seems like everything is polarized. And I know there are a lot of dynamics behind that that we won't get into like in terms of how we got here but i on my bad days i get really caught up with the fact that a lot of the it feels like these conversations haven't progressed much and particularly the dialogue around ai the future of work what it means and and i think it is um it's problematic for companies and it's problematic for employees and i think that you know there's a lot of contradictory messaging that is keeping us trapped in this fear bubble.

21:41And so I want to start there. What do you think it is within organizations or groups of people that is keeping us in this kind of fear loop? Companies have overcome other fears before, and it feels like they moved on and got on with the work, but that doesn't feel like that's the case here. and curious on your thoughts for a while. Yeah, totally. You know, it's funny, like, if you zoom out and think about like, what I have been writing about and talking about, you know, for, I guess, 13 years now, ever since Legos, it's always been about the human side of work, you know, and one thing that's continually surprised me over and over and over again, is that there is a very universal human experience of work.

22:30And the first experience I had with that was when I published the Legos article, because it was like, it went viral. I did not think it was going to. I wrote the Giveaway Your Legos article for people going through rapid scale. Like I thought only if you were going through an experience like what I went through at Facebook, where your employee count is doubling all the time and all that change, that that's what would resonate with you. And the Legos article fundamentally just says, number one, it's all going to be okay. Number two, replace yourself because growth is coming for you. And the only way you can be ready for growth is if you replace yourself.

23:04And it's fucking hard, man. Everything that I just said, it's going to be okay, there's a huge emotional roller coaster that goes along with that. After we published the Legos article, I got emails from all over the world. I got emails from people at like Safeway. And I got emails from founders in Nigeria being like, thank you for writing this article for me. And I was like, I didn't write it for you. But I was like, this is fascinating. And so what happened earlier this year, or like maybe last year for me was, I realized that all my writing got like way more relevant to everyone. Because change, change, which is a lot of what I write about and all the emotional experiences that go along with change, is now in every organization.

23:52You know, what you experience when you go through rapid scale or the kind of scale that comes with technology companies is just this absolute constant state of change. And humans do not like change. Our brains do not like change. So our tendency is to want to control and to hold on to things and to try to stop the change, to focus on what we know and what makes us feel safe. And actually, it's the wrong set of instincts, you have to lean into the chaos and leap into the void in a lot of cases in order to really take advantage of that change. But where I think there were places that felt stable and clear, you know, companies that felt like the walls and the ceiling were staying in the same place, like those don't seem to exist anymore.

24:33And so what I'm witnessing happen is that there is this massive macro narrative that basically is saying, AI is coming for your job. It's unclear if you will ever work again. And good luck, basically. And then all of our employers are being like, hey, this tool, AI, is going to make your life so much better. It's going to make you so much more efficient. Please start using it. And it's literally as if someone walked into a company and like was like, here's the new person. They have the same title as you. We need you to train them and onboard them and love them hard. And then they're going to take your job in six months.

25:14It's like, who wants to do that? Do you know what I mean? So like this macro narrative is basically causing a huge amount of fear. And I would argue that it's bullshit. Like, yes, we're seeing all these stories about AI driven layoffs. I can tell you from having worked with a lot of leaders inside of those companies, those layoffs were not because of AI. They were business-driven layoffs that got an AI brand. Do you know what I mean? And it's doing a huge fucking disservice to people in the world because it makes it feel like the jobs are going away because of AI. The jobs aren't going away because of AI right now.

25:53They're going away because of bad management and bad business practices that are now being, you know, got AI layoff labels slapped on top of them. And the problem is that the best thing in the world, like I think the future is going to be defined by the people that can lean into AI with curiosity and with excitement, leaping off that clip, jumping into the voids. What does it look like? What does, you know, what needs to change? Like, how should my job evolve? How should my industry evolve? But when you have this macro fear narrative, like nobody wants to do that. Do you know what I mean? And so like a lot of what I do when I'm speaking at companies and doing workshops and stuff like that inside of organizations is say like, I think our biggest challenge, and this is particularly true for people leaders, is how do we get people to approach this with curiosity versus fear?

26:44How do we get this to not be about like, hey, replace yourself and then good luck? You know, it's more about like, how can you embrace excitement and curiosity when approaching these tools, not sort of like that deep fear that feels pervasive. So let's pretend that you, a couple years ago, whenever you were offered that COO role at the big name brand company, let's pretend you took that job. and you're still there as COO and you're trying to put this macro narrative to rest, what are you doing? What are some of the things that people leaders listening to this can do tomorrow? Yeah, totally. When I think about our recent humans times machines conversations that we're having with CHROs, there's one theme that keeps coming up.

27:34The vision is clear, the pressure is real, but the roadmap is a little bit less clear. It's one thing to talk about the future of work. It's another to sit down with your CEO and say, here's how work, the workforce, and our organization really need to change. But I get it. There are a lot of difficult questions that you need to answer. Like, what work should we redesign? How will AI reshape roles and careers? What kind of organization do we need to move faster? And these are exactly the questions explored in Deloitte's latest Human Capital Trends Report. There's some interesting findings in there.

28:12The report shows that we're no longer balancing tensions. We're at a tipping point. The report brings together insights from thousands of leaders and explores how organizations can build a human edge. It's about moving beyond simply having humans and machines to creating a system where their capabilities multiply. It looks at how companies are redesigning work for this new future, how to shift from a mindset of cost efficiency to want to value creation and how to move from static plans to dynamic orchestration of talent and technology. In other words, it helps turn big future of work conversations into practical leadership questions for a world that won't sit still.

28:50If you're thinking about how your organization evolves in the age of AI, go check it out. It's a great read. I read it a couple of times. So if you want to learn more, you can find the link in the show notes. Okay. Number one, I would just say, be really fucking careful about your layoffs. Like if you're going to do a layoff, like understand that you will be causing ripple effects inside your company for years if you, for any reason, use AI as a label inside of that layoff. Number two, I would say, you know, stories are built inside of companies over time. And I spend a lot of time working and coaching leaders on how to create clear communication.

29:25But I would be really thinking about what is that story that we as a leadership team want to tell about AI's role inside this company and AI's role inside your jobs. And to me, what I've seen thus far is that AI is an amplifier, right? It makes high performers higher performing, makes low performers more chaotic. It makes bad managers more obvious. It makes great managers more superpowered. And so, So I would be sitting down thinking like, OK, how can I get people to lean in to this moment of learning? And safety is a part of that. You know what I mean? You can't tell people, hey, your job's never going away because that's not something any of us are ever going to do, right?

30:06Rule number one. But you can say, here's how we're thinking about this. Here's what it means. One of the things I talk about a lot with leaders is everybody's an adult. You know what I mean? they just want to understand what's going on and how to think about it. And the more that you can help them understand how you're thinking about it as a leadership team, the more I think they'll feel secure and safe to just try and experiment. So I just think that meta-level narrative through all hands, through emails, I always say like, you got to say things 4 ,000 times and feel a little bit crazy in order for people to hear you.

30:40And so this is a story you're going to be telling in every all hands, every email, every Slack messages, like, how do we want to think about working well with our new robot co workers? And there's a lot inside of that. But to me, that that higher level story is the thing I would work through as early as possible. I love that. And it just made me think about a feedback that I got last year. So I got really into last year, it was this really weird, like these parallel universes of my personal life, like all of these great things happening. Like I got married, my wife, my wife and I got pregnant, we had our son.

31:24And some aspects of my work life, like thriving MPL, we grew, we had like, I think quickly doing the math, like five X our revenue for the year, a great revenue year, but I was like super, super unhappy, kind of similar, but maybe a different journey than, than I think what you shared earlier. And one of the things I did was like one, something super accessible to me was a vibe coding. And I like, we heard every, all of our guests were like talking about all these things and we're like, shit, what is this? Like I, maybe I should go try it. And so got super into AI and then thought, Oh my God, this is so freaking amazing.

32:05I want to go do this inside a company and I want to be like a driver of change. And in the interviews, one of the interviews, big, big company, thousands, tens of thousands of employees. And they were like, yeah, we just keep doing these surveys and we can't get better than like 50 % participation. Like we can't, like we, people just won't tell us. And the voices that we're hearing are the voices that we like, we know, like we expect to hear from. And, and so, you know, I'm just curious, like you implement the playbook, you know, you're, you're careful about like how you approach layoffs and, you know, you're very careful about the narrative that you are sharing about, like how your AI narrative, you know, what are some of the other things that like maybe more in like the practical, like implementation side of things that can be done to like, I guess, diminish some of the fears that employees have?

33:07Because I'm guessing maybe the survey results are better today, but I still have to feel like there's a large chunk of employees that just aren't sharing anything. Yeah. So how do you crack the nut on that particular group, that challenging group? It's interesting. There's this woman, Hillary Gridley. She's actually the guest on Work Life this week, today, tomorrow. But she's put out a survey to a bunch of managers and leaders. And she was like, last year, everyone was like, how do I get people to use AI? This year, the problem is, how do I get people to stop using it so badly? But you're asking a slightly different question, which is not about utilization.

33:45It's about sort of like the culture of sharing and experimentation. So it's interesting. Before this phase of AI, I worked at Facebook for five years, and I actually think one of Facebook's greatest strengths when I was there, no idea what it's like now, but when I was there was failing. And it's something I really think is undervalued about that company and its culture, which was that it was blameless in a crazy way. Like you could bring down the whole site and the engineering culture was built in a very specific intentional way so that it was never like, what did you do and why did you do that?

34:25It was like, huh, how'd that happen? How can it never happen again? And I think that culture, as all of your listeners know, is not built from posters and sort of like, it's built through action. It's built through the behavior that leaders show every day. And actually, I did a work-life episode with the CTO of Facebook because I really wanted him to explain to people what he did. And it's wild when you listen to that episode because you can hear as he talks how intentional he was about every single thing he did. Like when there was a retro after downtime or something going on, he was intentional about the questions that were asked in that retro.

35:12He was intentional about shutting down conversations around blame and fear so that that wasn't what kind of culturally came into retros. He was super intentional about what he said in every all hands because he was so clear about wanting to create a culture where people felt comfortable trying things. And I say all of that, by the way, in those work life episodes, he tells this story about this worldwide outage that lasted three days that cost the company bajillions of dollars and a do engineer just raising their hand in essentially their version of Slack saying, oops, I think that's my commit.

35:50Like, I think I caused this worldwide outage. And he was like, it was my proudest moment as a CTO because he was like, I realized I created the culture that I wanted because someone was willing to say, oops, I think that was me in a full on like Slack channel full of, you know, all of the leadership of the company trying to figure out what caused this outage. So point being, I think if you want to create a culture where people are energized and excited and want to share and feel creative, you got to think about your behavior. You got to think about the story you're telling. You got to think about what you're rewarding.

36:21You got to think about who you're celebrating, like how you're holding things up. It's going to come in your actions. I always say like, it's what you do, not what you say. We spend a lot of time talking about, you know, the words we use and the values and shit you put on the walls. And like, that was my job at Facebook. And mostly what it taught me is that none of it matters except what you do and how you behave and how you act. And so that to me, that's what I would be thinking about. And I don't think it's one thing, right? It's got to be all your actions and all your behaviors and the way you think about creating a system that teaches people, hey, it's safe and exciting and rewarded to experiment here.

36:55I want to talk about this idea that we're all going to become super ICs. I actually did a panel, I moderated a panel maybe in April. And one of the guys that was on it is named Brandon Samut. he's the well he's awesome he's awesome yeah i uh he was a zapier yeah he is he left he yes yeah he left zapier recently and um he was sharing how two or three people on their leadership team are now super icies like there's no humans reporting to them but they're really good at their jobs because they have all of these years of experience managing people and they're applying that to these agents that they're building.

37:43And so I know that that's a belief that you share, that like these manager skills that we've acquired over the years are going to make us really good super ICs or whatever we're going to call it. I don't know if that's the right name. This is literally my dream job to be like no direct report, like super IC. That sounds pretty good. So I want to hear what you got. Are you ready? We're ready. Okay. Well, I think the conversation is stupid. Because to me, sorry, when you say like super IC, I think what a lot of people think is, oh, thank God I don't have to manage people. But actually what is happening, in my opinion, is that every single person in the world just became a manager, right?

38:25Because the skills and the tools required to make agents do what you want them to do are the exact same skills and tools required to make humans do what you want them to do. So actually, I think the single biggest problem facing companies right now is like so many people are such terrible managers and a lot of people hate it. So like, and maybe that's just because they don't like dealing with people's feelings and emotions, which ta-da, like give them a bunch of robots. But like, actually it means that manager training now needs to be for every single employee, right? Because you can create as much chaos being this super IC as you can clarity and efficiency, right?

39:04If you do a bad job instructing 100 agents and all the problems that I spent all this time talking to leaders about, which are fundamentally human problems, like how do you create clarity? How do you create alignment? How do you have everybody rowing in the same direction at the same time? Most organizational problems start at that level. But it just gets amplified if you have, sure, like 100 employees, but then 100 agents, right? You're sending all of them differing instructions about what the most important thing is or what the goal is. If they all have different instructions, they're all going in different directions.

39:36So to me, the thing that has always been true, which is that creating structural clarity for people, helping organize them, helping them know what the most important things, helping them know what's not important, how to spend their time, that's all true for robots too. And I think the super I see conversation to me, like that label, is problematic just because it implies like, oh, thank God, we don't have to manage people anymore. And I'm like, nope, it all just got harder. Yes, maybe robots have less feelings and you could be more of a dick to them and that's fine and they'll be fine with it.

40:10But the skills of clarity and the sort of counter to that, which is chaos and lack of clarity and lack of alignment is only going to be amplified when you have all these agents following instructions from people that don't know what the fuck is going on. So to me, management skills just got more important. And sad for all of us, they're extremely hard, you know. But so I'm like, one of my curiosities is kind of like, how are companies going to handle this? Like, how are we going to think about training folks that might never manage people, but are definitely going to be managing agents to get good at that kind of management?

40:46I'm so curious also, like, I'm curious to understand like what the new, I think things like basic constructs like work output are being redefined and it's like, you know, or like the metric, the core metrics that we review as managers and leaders, like the traditional metrics, I feel like are being replaced with new metrics. Like who would have thought that we would have been looking at token consumption by employee like five years ago, like that just wouldn't have been on our radar. Can you share with us some of the organizations that might be, might be like leading the charge on redefining some of these things and like you know what what is uh what's materializing like what i mean so can i just say that every time somebody talks about token consumption by employee it reminds me of like managers that like installing productivity software on their employees computers and being like i'm gonna follow every keystroke and therefore I'm going to know how to manage you.

41:47Like, honestly, so first of all, I can say the company that I find the most fascinating, because they've been so far ahead, and they're just like, I find them just like, fundamentally such a fascinating company is Shopify. I think they, their leaders are always super far ahead. They're very creative about how they think about everything HR wise. And so I spend a lot of time like studying when they put stuff out to just understand. And we actually had this head of engineering come by glue club and um talk about a bunch of different stuff but to be honest like a lot of what he was talking about is the fact that it's like kind of a shit show out there like nobody really knows and so you just have to embrace the fact that nobody really knows and keep trying stuff and he was like i literally have switched the whole organization from claude to code to codex and back again like in the last six months you know so like i the level of chaos is not to be underestimated.

42:43I don't think there's anybody out there that's like, I got this. Let me show you how. Here's the playbook. And if they do, the playbook expires like three weeks later. So my main thing with all this, because I do think that's the other part of the fear narrative, is that out there is someone that knows how to do this and you are behind. Like, no, that's not real. That's complete bullshit. So what are you going to do today to learn? What are you going to do today to try? What are you going to do today to move forward? you know something that didn't work this week might work in six weeks because the you know the models are getting so much better so fast so I think that is a much more interesting conversation than the like how do I find the person that knows you know what I mean but anyway yeah I feel like that that would be my answer number one I'm obsessed with Shopify always will be and I would say there's nobody out there that has answers it's not real who do we need to be talking to at Shopify?

43:33Is this their CEO or anybody there? I mean, if you can get Toveon, get Toveon. But there's a guy named Farhan who's fabulous. And if you all can get him to come on, he's just brilliant. I'm honestly not sure they have a head of HR anymore. But if you haven't, have you talked to Tia? At some point, you should talk to her. She was the head of HR at Shopify and now is Mr. Beast's head of people. At some point, you should talk to her. Oh, is it Tia Silas? Yeah, exactly. But I think that the people organization at Shopify has always been a pet project of Toby's, the CEO. And I think Farhan has been a huge part of helping build and shape the engineering culture.

44:08And then actually recently he's been spending a lot of time on productivity outside of engineering. So he'd be an interesting person to have on. And so earlier when you were answering one of Stephen's questions, you said that the conversation has moved from how do we get people using these tools to how do we get them to stop doing it in such a shitty way? I know that's not the exact words, but something like that. And so what are some of the ideas that have come out of that conversation? Yeah, totally. By the way, I just want to say like on the list of companies that I've spent a lot of time with, you know, I've spent time at some of the big LLMs.

44:45Like they also don't have answers to this. Do you know what I mean? Like I just I just think the idea that anybody out there is like I got this because like when I published this post, which is the one you're talking about called Lazy Fucking Interns, because I was hearing so many stories from every kind of organization about it's not just AI slop because I feel like that conversation has been had. It's actually the watching these senior, brilliant people turn into like the worst employee you've ever had, where they're like sending you documents that you're like, what is this? And so I think there's two dimensions to the sort of intern's point.

45:26The first is that I think the meta narrative is there to tell you that AI is the most brilliant PhD-level employee that you could possibly have. And so sometimes when we work with it, we think, oh, you're smarter than me. And the voices are very sure, right? They give you an answer and they're very confident about it. But actually, AI agents and, you know, chats, whatever model you're using, like they're interns. They are badly trained. They don't have any context. They don't. And they're the worst kind of intern because they're in there like, this is my work and it is perfect. And you as a leader have to be like, no, it's not.

46:02It's a bunch of bullshit. Like, look at all this mistakes. But I think partially because of that sort of like sycophantic, confident intern that you have, it's turning these senior people into fucking interns where they're like sending you back. a document that they haven't even read. Do you know what I mean? Or they've read it, but they didn't think critically. And it's like this transferred laziness that's driving me and a lot of leaders I work with bananas. And by the way, again, prevalent at every company you would look up to and think, gosh, they must have it all figured out. So I think that goes to sort of the meta framing.

46:37There's so much of a sense that it's like these LLMs are magical. And if I I can just, I'm doing it wrong because I haven't been able to figure out how to unlock its magic or it's smarter than me. And actually it's like, we just got to start treating them like lazy fucking interns. And then we actually will probably be having the right conversation with these chatbots and robots and agents that are our new coworkers. I think the biggest point that I hear you making this entire episode is nobody has this stuff figured out the way that they say they do on LinkedIn. And this is something that Stephen has alluded to over the last couple of weeks.

47:15I don't even think we ever talked about it, Stephen, but you made a comment like, this is a conversation for another day. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's so much swirling in my head right now. I think that what just jumped out at me is no one has it figured out and this other sub-narrative, don't be a fucking idiot, right? Right. Like on both sides. And I mean that like that's a like I mean that with love. Like, you know, if you're not using it like this thing isn't going to like, you know, like infect your computer and like take over everything that is happening in your life. Like give it a try.

47:58Use some critical thinking. Do something positive like everyone can find like a use case. And then like on the flip side of that is like if you are an experienced person, don't be an idiot. like don't use it in a way that is going to degrade like who you are and the way you work and there is a lot of that and i'm guilty i'm guilty as charged i will be the first to say i have put together the slick doc and with a great prompt i don't know what the doc looked like but the problem was fucking genius and you know you learn the hard way you're like oh wow i sent this and daniel's like bro like the back half doesn't even make sense like what the heck don't do that and so that's the other thing, Daniel, that's coming up for me as well.

48:43And if you're an executive, don't just decide to lay off 100 people and say it's because of AI. Don't be a fucking idiot. Well, and I think that... You know, we hear all kinds of stories in the podcast and I'll never forget the story that was told about a Mexico Beach FMLA backfire. One of their employees was out on approved medical leave and then somebody spots them on Instagram. Feet up on the beach looking a little too okay for someone supposedly recovering. So cue the call from the CEO wanting to pull their leave and all of the panic that followed. But here's the thing. There's actual legal precedent that says a photo isn't proof of anything.

49:26You can't just yank somebody's protected leave because of how a vacation pic looks. You need real evidence. And that's a trap a lot of HR teams fall into. Making a compliance call based on gut instinct instead of actually knowing the law. And that's exactly the gap 650 has built to close. 650 helps teams manage compliance across the full lifecycle, from handbooks and policies to agreements, legal updates, and research. And their AI-powered research center gives you a way to ask employment law questions in plain English so you can better understand what applies and where. Because compliance calls shouldn't be made on gut instinct.

50:02They should be grounded in real legal clarity. for those of you that want to learn more about 650 go to the link in the show notes and let them know we sent you this is shit we would never do if it was humans right like if the summer intern you hired brought you a powerpoint presentation and was like look at this it's perfect you wouldn't be like great let me just forward that onto my boss you'd be like hold on let me sit down and review this and like actually go through it and make sure it's thoughtful and it actually reflects the 57 conversations we had. Oh, it doesn't? I'm going to make you redo it three times.

50:34But because it's this, again, we think it's this super intelligent person on our team, we're much more likely to just hit forward. And by the way, the more senior you are, the worse it is because you're basically role modeling. It's okay to not take accountability for your work. It's okay to ship something that you didn't actually vet. And that can create, I mean, we see CEOs doing this and it's like, you know what I mean? Like you're literally telling your whole company that accountability doesn't matter. So like one of my biggest rules with this is like, I don't care how you made it. You own it.

51:09You forward it to me. It's your fault. I mean, not in a like blame way, but in a like, I'm going to hold you accountable for everything that's in this doc. So like, make sure you want to be held accountable for it, you know? And I think CEOs should have that same conversation with themselves of like, if I'm shipping some thought piece out to the company, I'm accountable for the words in it, whether it was written by robots or not. And I think it's really fascinating. Like, I don't understand why working with robots has made us all start acting like lazy interns. You know what I mean? But it weirdly has.

51:39And it's got to change because the world does not need more of the stupid shit out there, you know? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's interesting. But one, I've been advising and working with an AI startup and they, the CEO Shelby, his like, you know, I've been helping in the operations go to market world. And the CEO Shelby's like, you know, nothing, nothing written by AI. Like, and he didn't mean like, you can't use AI to write something, but it's like, you've got to write it. Like you either need to review every freaking word or like you need to be, it needs to come from something you wrote and it just kind of is you know we don't have time to talk about like the culture and what they're building but it's very much aligned with like the the brand promise that they're trying to create or that they're creating for the customers and i super important and man go ahead sorry i was gonna say to me like and this is a management thing like you talked about tokens per employee and i've felt the same way for as long as i've been a leader which is like I don't give a shit how you make it.

52:47I care about the end result. So what might work for you process-wise with AI might not work for me and vice versa. I care that you are accountable to what you create and that it moves us forward. Because I think the other thing that's driving people nuts is that you can have this false productivity, right? Where it's like, I ship you a presentation, you ship me back a presentation, and everything is circular and not helpful. and not. So it's like that question of just like, what is the point? And does this move us forward is getting lost because we're measuring productivity, which again, is a sort of a false narrative in management and has been for many years.

53:24But there's these weird symbols now that AI has where it's like, did you, did you, were you highly productive with your tokens? You know, and it's like, I think we got to go back to some of those basics with management, which is like, it's what people produce, not how they produce it. And agents are a tool. They're just a tool that helps you do things. And you can use them badly or you can use them well, but it's like the end result, did this move us forward? It's what matters. And so we've only got a few minutes left and we end every episode with rapid fire questions. We ask the same four questions every guest.

53:54Question one, what's one piece of advice that you'd give to somebody starting their career today? In HR or in general? Let's say for HR. Oh, in HR, my most clear piece of advice is learn the business. You are a thousand times more valuable a people leader if you understand what it takes to build a successful company. And that is not often as easy or obvious as it is if you sit in the people chair, you think, oh gosh, if only we did X, Y, Z, people would be happier. And it's like, learn the business. That's the thing that matters. It makes you a better people leader long term. Love that. Next question.

54:32if your team gave you a superpower nickname, what would it be? Very important questions we're asking, Molly. Oh, man, you'd have to ask them. I don't know. But you know, one thing that I'm very annoying about is I spend a lot of time saying, what do you mean by that? Because I'm a big believer that there's a lot of words we use that nobody understands. So we'll just go with, what do you mean by that can be my nickname? Love it. What's a strategy or practice from another company that you'd love to steal? Oh, man. There are hundreds. I'll tell you what, Shopify has got a lot of them. But I'll give you one that's not Shopify, which is that ages ago, I did an on-site visit at Pixar.

55:10And I learned that they destroy and recreate the company every two years. They completely destroy the org chart and redesign it every two years. And I always thought that was so fascinating and so smart because they basically, well, I'm sure it's not true anymore, but they used to basically produce one film a year. But they had three in production. And so they had to reorg. Anyway, it was I just found the creativity with which they managed the organization really fascinating. Love that. Last question. Who should we have on the show next? We you were the output of what this question being asked of several people.

55:44Who do you who's what? How can you pass on that torch? Okay, well, I feel like we mentioned some I think if you all could get Farhan or Tia on, that would be sweet. But yeah, the person I was going to mention is my friend, Mark Frein, who's the chief people officer at Mozilla. He's always, he's been a COO, a CEO and a chief people officer multiple times. So he's a really thoughtful operational people leader, which I think is always a good angle. Well, he will be getting pitched here in the next few weeks. So great. Thank you for the recommendation. All right. Final tradition, one word or phrase close.

56:17What's something that's coming to mind for you as we wrap things up? Could be one word or a few. I'll tell you one of my favorite quotes that I think is useful in coaching people too which is everything in life is either love or fear oh i'll be thinking about that one steven do you have something a yeah but it's like clunky delivered in spades delivered in spades i just molly got so hyped up and like this episode for me has delivered and then some so there you go i'm gonna say emergence i love it honestly related i have to like fight my urge to to like say why i relate to things on the podcast with guests but i really related to your story yeah and i feel like i've had you know i'm not where you're at but i've had an emergence over the last five six years and yeah yeah it's pretty glory the article man it's like the reason I put it out there was because it was it has been like career changing for me to finally have a way to explain to people how I managed my career.

57:25And I've desert emails that I'm getting is people just being like, Oh, my God, finally. And so it's helpful. It's helpful. I tell people that I run an HR media company. They're like, What? Why? How? Like, how did you end up doing this? I'm definitely gonna go read it. Well, Molly, thank you so much. This, this delivered in spades, as Stephen said, and we'd be lucky to have you back in the future if you're if you're down for it. Totally. Nice to meet you both. Thanks so much for hanging out. This was really fun. Thank you. Bye guys. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Modern People Leader.

57:57We really, really appreciate it. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating. It would mean the world to us and connect with us on LinkedIn. We want to know what you think about the show and you can find links to both of our profiles in the show notes. Thanks again for listening and see you on the next episode.

58:20We'll be right back.