224. How to protect your people (and yourself) in uncertain times (Truth, Lies & Work x Nerd Journey)

0:02Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne and believe it or not, I am still a chartered occupational psychologist.

0:18Al Elliott:Until they strike you off. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. Until I go bankrupt. Again. Again. If you've listened, you already know. But anyway, we're here to help you simplify the science of work. Kind of. This August, we've been practising what we preach and actually taking some time off to charge. Yeah, but we're not leaving you hanging, obviously. Every Tuesday, we're still sharing something a little bit more relaxed, usually recorded on the terrace with a glass of wine. Not today, though, because it's raining today. It's raining. How rude. I know. To be fair, first rainy day. Since June.

0:50Al Elliott:Since June. So, yeah. Our friends in the UK, particularly in Manchester, yeah, I'm sorry about that. Yeah, but we're still bringing you something a little lighthearted, albeit on this rainy, what do they call it? rainy day play day yeah well he's to call it school he's called it school wet play but that's that's something we don't it's not a word not a term we really want to be using in these times say it out loud yeah moving on problematic but if you do want something a bit more serious not too serious not too serious but check out thursdays and this thursday you'll actually hear from a guest who's all about bringing joy back into the workplace this week that's joel zeff he's an improv comedian and author who's also worked with Microsoft, McDonald's, American Express and Wells Fargo.

1:33Al Elliott:Very fancy and also just a really genuinely nice guy. Very, very happy. But today it is Tuesday. So we've got part one of our chat with the brilliant guys at Nerd Journey. That's John White and Nick Courting. Now their podcast helps tech professionals grow their careers and they've got nearly 350 episodes of insights in everything from management, careers and over-acoupling obstacles to just how to be professional nerd. Yeah, it's an awesome podcast that we've had the real privilege of being on in the past and more recently. And that's the episode we're going to be sharing with you today. So after this very short break, you'll hear part one of our conversation with Nick and John on the Nerd Journey podcast.

2:11Don't go anywhere.

2:12Al Elliott:The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across three teams and four systems. and in our case, it's about 216 ,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it. What you should be doing is using HubSpot because why? HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already narrows the full story and when you know more, you grow more. Nice. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

3:00Welcome to the Nerd Journey podcast. Our goal is to help you, the technology professional, accelerate your career progression, increase your job satisfaction, and be more effective in your existing role. We want to bring listeners like you the career advice we wish we'd been given earlier in our careers. I'm John White, at VJourneyman on Twitter, sharing co-host duties with Nick Cordy at Network Nerd underscore. We're two former IT operations guys who have moved on to pre-sales roles with technology vendors. We have our opinions, but we also like to highlight the journeys of others and see what we can learn from them.

3:37We'd also like to ask for your feedback to make this a conversation, not a one-way broadcast. Email us at nerdjourneypodcast at gmail.com or DM us at nerdjourney on Twitter. So come join us on our nerd journey. Let's take a trip. Episode 340. What happens when you're expected to lead a large team as a people manager? How exactly are you going to succeed in doing that? According to business psychologist Leanne Elliott, one way to produce team cohesion might just be to focus on task cohesion. Leanne and her husband Al, a business owner, are the co-hosts of the Truth, Lies, and Work podcast. Both Leanne and Al have been former guests on our show, but we've never had them on together until today.

4:28Here's what you can expect to learn from part one of our discussion this week with Leanne and Al. We'll talk about the uncertainties in the world and how those have impacted business owners, entrepreneurs, and especially people managers. You'll hear about the industry trend of layoffs, how and why this might be leading to flatter organizations and larger teams for people managers to lead. But despite all these challenges, despite the environmental situation, we talk through some practical ways that people managers can still succeed, address the problems, deliver the results, and manage to support positive change and positive relationships with the members of their team.

5:11Let's get you to part one of our discussion with Al and Leanne Elliott.

5:29Al and Leanne Elliott, welcome back to the Nerd Journey. Thank you so much for having us. It's such a joy to be back.

5:36Al Elliott:It really is. It's so weird being together, but yeah, we both individually loved our experience on their journey. That's right. We had you on individually because I think scheduling-wise, it just didn't quite work out to have you together. I do want to say that each of those interviews went amazingly well, and I think that we got just tons and tons of positive feedback on each one of them. We're really happy to have you back jointly this time. Well, thank you so much for inviting us. We love our conversation with you. Yeah, they're awesome. We wanted a discussion, I guess, centered in job uncertainty and maybe economic uncertain times.

6:15It's just a theme that we're revisiting in this cyclical world, right? A few years back, it was all about boom times and, you know, should you leave your job after one year for a better job and, you know, advising people on that. And right now it's advising people in times of uncertainty. So we definitely wanted to have you on because, you know, we knew that you have, you know, fairly unique takes on that. And we also want to shine the light on the elephant from different parts of the room to get the entire picture, so to speak. We're fairly US-centric, so we don't necessarily see a worldwide view of economic uncertainty and job uncertainties.

6:56Can you give us a little bit of a different perspective, do you think? In the UK, especially there, uncertainty is the perfect word for it, John. There is a lot of uncertainty and with that a lot of businesses are some are making layoffs but I think generally speaking in comparison to the US there's more of a pause and that pause means a lack of growth a lack of investment sales are slowing down revenue slowing down people are fearful because they can see that in the business and a phrase that I've been hearing a lot recently from UK business owners and I don't know if this is maybe a lag from the pandemic or with the general uncertainty we're seeing in the world in terms of geopolitics and climate change and everything else.

7:38Now, business owners in the UK aren't pursuing growth, they're pursuing a lifestyle business. So a business that is big enough to provide the lifestyle that they want and provide the purpose of meaning in their work that they want. But rapid hyper growth is no longer the number one priority. Yeah.

7:55Al Elliott:And I mean, I don't know whether there's similar stats in the US, but in the UK, I think it's something like 96 % of the people are employed by small businesses. And when they say small businesses, 250 people or below. So they're responsible. Small businesses are responsible for the majority of people, the vast majority of people getting employed. And my personal political views aside, I think almost universally it's accepted to this government in the UK, the Labour government, which I think is your government, your Democrats. They're not really doing the things that they need to do to stabilize business and stabilize sort of commerce in the UK.

8:34Al Elliott:And it's meaning that a lot of people like Leanne said, there are big businesses who are frightened as in like, I might lose my job and a new CEO come in. But the smaller businesses would say 50, 60 employees are frightened going, if I don't get this right, I'm going to lose everything and everyone's going to lose their jobs. So I think you're right. Uncertainty is, unfortunately, that. He looks like he's going to be here to stay for a little bit. Does the focus on lifestyle that you spoke to, Leanne, from the top of those small businesses, do you think they're also being extremely mindful about their employees' lifestyle too?

9:10Or is it more centric toward the top? From the business owners I've spoke to and heard of through colleagues, they are mindful of their employees. Mindful in that let's not pursue growth necessarily during a time of uncertainty and take that risk that as I'll said could derail the entire business rather let's just sit with what we've got focus on quality focus on efficiencies and automations rather than necessarily pursuing growth at this time. I think the other main issue for UK businesses as I said with the Labour government coming in we've seen a lot of new employment laws coming in that on paper sound great but in execution actually bring a lot of risk for businesses so for example rights to flexible working on day one the national living wage basically more rights for employees which is great but what that means is when an organization doesn't feel equipped to embed those new laws very effectively aren't sure how and aren't given the guidance from the government in terms of how to do that they hesitate so they won't make any new hires under these new rules or they'll change how they're employing people in certain ways, maybe engaging more contractors than full-time employees.

10:21So I think, yes, they're mindful. I'm not sure they're putting them maybe front and center of every business decision they're making. I honestly think that is being driven at the moment by a lot of uncertainty, a lot of ambiguity, and if I'm being honest, a bit of fear. And does that fear crush the entrepreneurial spirit, Al, for those people who are really love being entrepreneurs and starting up new businesses, for example, or maybe they already have a business and they're the top person at that small business and they founded it. Kind of back to your story in episodes 235 and 36. I'd love to get your take on that.

11:00Al Elliott:I think true entrepreneurs, they live for challenges. And when things are going well, that's when they normally mess it up. So they'll get year five, year six, year seven, they've had plateaued in revenue, but still doing very well. And they will just crash the business if they're left to their own devices. So I think entrepreneurs react well to challenges in the first of three to four years of their business. So this is just another challenge where I think the problem might lie is back in the UK, there was something called IR 35, which was in and revenue 35 was a statute which allowed you to employ contractors to do basically your job, or do jobs, rather than employing them permanently.

11:43Al Elliott:Because when you employ them permanently, you had to make sure you give pension stuff, you had to pay sort of a national insurance. I know these are UK-centric terms, but I'm sure it's very, very similar across in the US. And so a lot of people would just go into this IR35. So they go, I'll have a contractor because it's so much simpler, I can just end their contract. And then I think a lot of people over the last 10 years have moved into like, oh, no, no, it's safe. we were going to have, we will have proper employees who are properly employed because, you know, it's a bit more flexible and it's a proper way of doing it.

12:11Al Elliott:And I fear we're going to go back to that way because as Leanne says, and Leanne can talk much, much more to the, to the actual legislation than I can, but it just feels an entrepreneur, like it's a risk to employ another person because, oh my goodness, I've got to think about all these other things that the Labour government brought in. And also, are the Labour government going to say that I can't, I can't fire anyone? Are they going to say that if I fire someone, I have to give them six months, like in Lithuania, in a lot of Europe, if you fire someone, Spain, if you fire someone, you have to give them six months salary.

12:40Al Elliott:That's just a huge risk in terms of employing people. And that could genuinely bring a young business down. So I think I would like to think that entrepreneurs are sort of glass half full. They're like, okay, this is another challenge. We'll work our way around it but I can see having a big impact on the decision of whether how quickly to scale with with employing people what are your thoughts yeah I agree and I think it's it's remembering that I mean globally and in the UK as well it has been relentless for business owners since 2016 you know we had the referendum then we had the pandemic we've gone through five prime ministers in as many years we've just had a recent complete government change it has been so much disruption and so much change that I honestly think entrepreneurs, business leaders are exhausted.

13:32They're burning out. And with that, like you say, an entrepreneur wants to keep fighting, they want to keep going, but it's how they invest that energy. Another thing that we've seen from business owners in the UK is choosing this lifestyle business. And with the extra time, they're freeing up through this improved quality of process and automation. It's actually spending more time on on side hustles on passion projects so actually looking at what they've enjoyed most about building their business and setting up another stream of their business that focuses purely on that whether that be talent management acquisition training and development but yes certain aspects that they gain energy from so during this period where the business may be fairly stable they're finding other ways to fill that entrepreneurial need and that that meaningful work that they're currently lacking in a business that isn't in a growth stage, which is hard for an entrepreneur.

14:23So I think we're seeing people diversify a little bit what they're doing with their business, but much more on an individual level than an organizational one. Is it similar in the UK to the US where a lot of these laws apply basically at the verge where you're transitioning from small to medium-sized business, or maybe from very small business to small business. So we have some things where it's like, oh yeah, here's this amount of protection that you get, but that's for businesses above 25 people. Or does it kind of apply across the board? I'm not an expert in employment law, but my understanding is it doesn't matter how small or large your organization is.

15:04Your first employee, these employment laws apply. And that's why for small businesses, it's such a drastic shift and such higher risk. that as i'll said businesses are just choosing not not to really focus on growth and until they figured out exactly how this all all applies and how it's going to work out i think that maybe there's this danger of basically growing your organization to a certain size and then there's like a chilling effect potentially at least in the u.s to to grow beyond a certain size which kind of feeds into this idea of like well maybe i'll start a new business with this these things that i've learned and I'll just have maybe five very small businesses each kind of having this like diversified source of income rather than take on the additional risk of growing beyond a certain size.

15:54I can understand, you know, different laws in different locales. And, you know, I'm sure in the States it's like, you know, this state has this law and this state has this other law. So I'm sure it's very, very, you know, you get these like microclimates, right, of innovation and business friendliness versus employee protection. Maybe this leads to venue shopping, right? Like I'm going to start a business in this area, but not this area. I'll hire people from here and have them travel in or something like that.

16:21Al Elliott:This is not going to fly with my wife and co-host, but there's something around the countries which allow businesses to employ and fire fairly easily in a short period of time because you can then just sort of like build something without worrying that you've got to pay someone six months worth of salary if you do fire them. Whereas there are some places where, I don't know what it's like in the US, but where you can just go, right, let's try them out. Let's try them out for six weeks. And if they're no good, fine, on your bike. And that does allow an entrepreneur to go, okay, I feel a bit freer and a bit safer about recruiting people.

16:56Al Elliott:But as I say, that's not going to fly with the culture experts because that's probably not the way you do it. I think it's a balance. And I think my understanding thing is in terms of UK law there is a window whether it be three months or six months or you could have probation periods where the full kind of rights of employees weren't fully applied until you passed that said probation period that is what has now been scrapped so you have the same rights as an employee's been there six years on the first day that you've been in work so the fact is that I could turn up to work and go off on my first day go off six for six months and and still get you know the pay that the company promises to pay and the statutory sick pay and things like that there's a trust issue.

17:31I actually had somebody on the show, a wonderful up-and-coming psychologist, and she was pointing out that there's a trust crisis at the minute because we've had so much push and pull and power swings over the last few years. Sometimes the employees have the power and they can move on, as you were saying, after a year in the job for a higher salary. And then we saw all the layoffs and then there's a fear from employees so people stay longer. And I think with the changes in laws geopolitics there's so much conflict in every sense of the word society and in our workplaces people are just lacking trust trust in their businesses lacking trust in their leaders lacking trust in their colleagues we're seeing massive increases in what we call workplace incivility at the minute which isn't bullying or harassment it's a level down from that but equally problematic where it's um infighting it's gossiping it's withholding information from a colleague that's on the rise because there's this issue with trust so I think having these laws come in are great on paper but as always with seems to be the UK government what's great on paper and it comes from the right place the execution is never thought through it's never thought through well how does actually this same law apply as you were saying John to a business that has 10 employees are expected to meet and work to the same expectations and laws and legalities as a business with 10 ,000 employees.

18:51The impact of going through a tribunal is very different for an organisation of 10 ,000 with the internal resources to manage that than a small business with only 10 people. So these blanket laws aren't necessarily helping businesses. I don't think they're always helping employees in the way that they're intended to. Yeah, the idea's in the right place, the execution, they haven't quite got right. Did you know that the UK's number one management podcast, that's us by the way, and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network.

19:20Al Elliott:We actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work. And we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode. And two out of three of us are devilishly good looking. And you're not going to say wit. Fell, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you, we need to do this in threes. The HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination. Or business professional. Seamless. Seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work.

19:57Al Elliott:And we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff. And do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business and brands as well. It is. It's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that will be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better? It can. And are we all just status-seeking monkeys?

20:25Al Elliott:I am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. But come back. Yeah, come back. Definitely come back, because Nudge isn't as good as this, so come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in.

20:40Workplace incivility at scale and the trust crisis at scale, to me, translates to, oh, I'm seeing all these layoffs from large companies and flattening of management layers and things like that. I think this naturally leads us into that topic. Why do you think so many of these organizations, at least the ones we hear about in articles and on LinkedIn and from people we know, are choosing to flatten out some of the management layers and increase those manager to individual contributor ratios? Because that's part of the byproduct of some of these layoffs, seems like. I think there's a few reasons.

21:20All of these things are cyclical. I think it's going back in Inver again to have less hierarchy there's a belief that that kind of more I guess more startup structure is better for innovation and collaboration which is lacking in our workplaces right now I'm not I don't think it's because of the structure of the organization but it's lacking another big one is that it's been very publicized over the last 18 months or so that the issue we have with not training our managers sufficiently there's been like 82 percent of managers was accidental and they didn't necessarily envisage managing people as part of their role but that was just the next step up so they took it.

21:56I read a stat yesterday I think it's like only 44 % of managers have ever had any form of training so more than half of our managers aren't equipped with the skills they need to lead our people and they're the people the managers have the single biggest impact on employee performance, motivation, engagement, outcomes, productivity. So for an organization who is hearing these things and looking at their business of where to make cuts there's an element of well if our managers are inefficient we could train them or we could just let them go because they have the highest salaries too so actually from a bottom line perspective that makes sense i can't imagine that it's a thought through seriously considered approach because for me if you have great managers they're the people that drive the success of your business i think when we talked last time we called you know managers or culture keepers a lovely phrase that you came up with nick and they really are i think it's naive to think that removing a manager is going to solve all these problems it's not because people still want and need people to to look to in an organization when there's a there's a distance and a sense of removal from senior leadership but i i think there may be the reasons why they're the higher paid there's a it seems that it's in vogue right now to flatten out our organizations to be more agile which seems to be back in in fashion as well an element that it's been very publicized managers have the single biggest impact if we're not willing to invest in great managers let's just

23:20Al Elliott:remove them but you've got to remember though that if you're looking at a like a p &l or you know a financial statement then if you were to attribute the revenue then it's very difficult to attribute revenue directly to a manager but it's easy to attribute it to an ic or someone on the production line or whatever or sales or something like that. So the temptation for a brutal CFO to sit there and go, well, let's just cut the meat, trim the fat, I think is the term, isn't it? Because it's difficult when you're looking at a spreadsheet to see the impact of what a manager does. And particularly if you are, if that's what you live in, if you live in spreadsheets and you're making the decisions based on numbers, it's a no-brainer.

24:00Al Elliott:Get rid of these people. I think exactly what Leanne's saying, what they don't understand is that the IC produces$10 ,000,$100 ,000 a week in terms of revenue because they've got an amazing manager. The CFO doesn't always see that. And I'm not necessarily picking on CFOs here, but anyone who's making decisions on spreadsheets, it's natural to come to that conclusion, I think. And oh, by the way, if you're one of those managers who hasn't been trained and you stay, you get more people too, on top of perhaps the inexperience and lack of training. We're going to ask you to maybe double the number of employees that you're managing.

24:40Yeah, I've been hearing ratios of managers managing 15, even teams of 20 people. And I tried to do 30-minute one-on-ones with every single employee on my team. And then if you count the additional upstream meetings that you have and lateral meetings that you have with 20 people, there's just no way that you have that level of attention, right? No, because I'm sure also that these managers aren't given more time to manage with a bigger team. They still have to do everything else they need to do in terms of their administration or their job in general. They just now have more people to manage. So we're not freeing up more time.