238. Mr Beast on hiring A-players, digital hangovers and risky workplace humour. PLUS! Are tall people really more successful?

0:00Coming up this week in work. Mr Beast is vibe checking new hires with 90 day trials. That means temporary contracts, rental cars and a clear shot at proving you're an A player. Is it actually smart hiring or just a way to avoid commitment? And in our new segment truth or lie we ask are tall people really more successful? Presidential candidates or CEO boardrooms or even your last team meeting the tall people seem to be winning. You could say they're standing head and shoulders above everyone else. There is real data behind this one, but the question is, does height cause success or is it something far more interesting that's going on?

0:35Plus, in the workplace surgery, one business owner asks, how do you build a reliable team when you're used to doing everything yourself? And how do you do it without losing control of the quality? This is Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. And together we help organisations build amazing workplace cultures. So let's get right into it after a quick word from our beautiful sponsors.

1:11Does your experience with AI sound a little like this? You prompt for 20 minutes, the output is polished, is confident and is completely flipping useless. Well that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. Mm-hmm. But you know what does know something about your business? HubSpot. HubSpot's AI. It works with your actual customer data. Every interaction, every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

1:47Welcome back. It's Leanne's favourite time of the week. It's time for the News Roundup. It is time for News Roundup. I'll cue the jingle. Jingle is being cued. Lee, what have you seen? Got a new word. Lovely. What is it then? Digital hangover. Okay. Do you want me to guess? Yeah, go. Probably feeling like a little bit overwhelmed with digital stuff. It's like if you've got a hangover, you've drunk too much. If you've got a digital hangover, you've probably consumed too much digitally. A digital hangover. You nailed it, Al. I came across it in Psychologies magazine. A bit of a pop psych moment for me this week.

2:22And it was because it was a really great piece by Ali Roth-Hurrah. Hurrah! It's not hurrah, it's farrah. Sorry, Ali. And it properly, I thought it was proper good. So it's that feeling when you've been on your laptop all day, you're mindlessly scrolling Instagram, guilty, and then suddenly you're starting to feel wired and drained at the same time. Have you ever felt that? I don't really feel wired and drained. I think I just feel overwhelmed. And like yesterday, it was a really, really rubbish day yesterday. I just didn't feel like doing anything. didn't feel motivated and I spent the morning just watching YouTube shorts and something else and I don't think that helped at all.

2:57Yeah it makes you a bit restless doesn't it? Yeah well that is what a digital hangover is so what's actually happening apparently is your brain is overstimulated by the likes of sounds of rapid visual input but your body's just sitting still and that mismatch creates what she calls what Ali calls a sensory disconnect which leaves us feeling jittery, tired and restless. That's what I felt yesterday. I thought I had too much coffee, but that's probably it. Well, there you go. You had a digital hangover yesterday, love. I did. The science, if you dig into it, could be slightly more worrying because it has been found that too much screen time has been linked to thinning in the outer layer of the brain.

3:37That's the part that deals with problem solving, decision making. You remember when people lost their absolute shiz about chat GPT and the brain imaging? Right. about how it was starting again to thin this grey matter in our brain. I didn't go across the nose. Did you miss that? Oh, LinkedIn lost their minds over it. And it's not wrong. It is a really interesting study, but it's not really new. We've seen this before with, you know, TV is going to rot your brain type thing. That's where it all comes from. So the same is true when you're just scrolling on the Tinterweb. It can actually start to affect your brain, physiologically speaking.

4:15and that could be messing with memory and movement and emotions as well. So maybe that was why you're feeling a little bit blue yesterday. So Ali included some practical suggestions in her article as to how you might manage or get over a digital hangover. She says get tactile, so hold something textured or sip something warm. Can you say that word, textured? Textured. Yeah, okay. Very good, very good. What did I say? Textured. Textured. Textured. Okay, so hold something textured like a what? Like a dog? yeah i think more of a fluffy pillow but yeah you could same thing i guess so i guess what she's getting at is you're starting to stimulate your body as well as your mind i go analog so read a few pages of a book or do some slow handwriting try the 20 20 20 rules every 20 minutes look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds um and she described screens as sugar for the brains tastes good but no nourishment um so that's a digital hangover our thoughts i like that i love analogue but the problem is obviously living here in this country is we can't really get what we don't can't get amazon the nearest amazon is germany so i use the kindle so i'm thinking go and read a book but i'm going to pick up my kindle i'm going to read my book so that's not really the same thing i started doing you remember me sitting there last thursday and i spent all day just going through we're building a secret product that we can't tell anyone about and i and i just wrote it all out in a notebook with a pencil i got to the point where I had to sharpen it three or four times and I was like oh this is this is good I must be writing a lot I I felt that I learned or I absorbed much more using a pencil and paper than I would have done if I typed it into a into a notebook yeah I think there's actually some some science that shows that actually that in terms of absorbing information actually kind of writing it out can can help with the memory of it can I just I'm so I'm so distracted because I love you so much Denning and I love that you sit there with your notebook and you're so interested and so engaged with it I would like to talk to you about the pressure in which you put your pencil on paper.

6:10Because it makes a noise that for me is a bit like nails on a chalkboard. I didn't know. So I can't sit next to you when you're writing your notebook. I have to go away or put some headphones in. But equally, I don't want to disturb the process because you look so happy. But if you see me move away, I'll just put on some white noise. That's why. I've got a pencil here. The temptation to write something now is almost too much. Okay, I promise you I will bear that in mind. I may even swap to ballpoint pen. No, no, honestly, continue to use your pencil. I'll just remove myself. We're building a new house, listener.

6:43If you follow along with anything on Instagram or whatever, I think Leanne might put some stuff on there. I haven't actually. No, that's an exclusive, listener. That's an exclusive. You heard it here first. Building a new house. So what we'll do is I'll add an extra wing, which will be the pencil writing wing. Yes. And I'll soundproof it and I'll just go in there and, oh, I can make a secret door. I can make a door out of pencils. right okay I want to finish this part as soon as I can because I want to design my door of pencils anyway anyway yeah so that's a digital hangover and when I started reading a bit more into it there's another side to it as well which is kind of more related to shame um so when you feel like you know when you post something online it doesn't go down very well and you start to spiral into have I said something awful yeah um and then and then you see there's that side of it as well can apparently um be a digital hangover uh moderation I think is the key here isn't it yeah um yeah and And just knowing yourself, I was, as you know, regular listeners, we had somewhat of a challenging summer.

7:38I had to delete my news app. I couldn't deal. Couldn't deal. I was getting sucked into all sorts of darkness. Anyway, that's, what was it called? Digital hangover. Al, what have you seen? Lee, knock knock. Who's there? HR. HR who? HR, we want to talk to you about that joke you told in the meeting because it was vastly inappropriate. That is what I've been reading about. I've been reading about being funny in the workplace and how it can sometimes backfire. Is that a really good example of how you're not funny? I thought it would be a bit of levity to the conversation. Yes, sure. Okay, fair enough.

8:17Oh, well, that fell on stony ground. Well, we will talk about that because there's a recent study by Peter McGraw, Adam Barsky and Caleb Warren from a collection of universities. It's basically America, Australia. Oh, it's like academic collab. Academic collab. they're originally in uh let me have a little look they're originally in yes so i read it in phys.org that's that's not phys as in like fizzy drinks that's p-h-y-s physics.org essentially what they're saying is it might be too risky to use humor in the workplace so humor obviously we all know this humor by its very nature is very personal like jimmy carr might make me laugh please don't cancel me cancel him but others might be horrified about what he jokes about So the researchers are saying that you run the risk of being really bland and boring if you tell clean jokes and people think you're dull.

9:04But then you go the other way and you start telling jokes like Jimmy Carmite in the workplace. That's where HR will knock on your door and will want to have a bit of a conversation with you. Let me read from the article. It says, for a joke to be funny, it has to break certain social rules while simultaneously seeming harmless. jokes that are too lame get yawns but jokes that violate too many rules may end up triggering outrage landing a joke is hard enough in the comedy club they note but in an office environment the razor thin line between hilarity and upset becomes even harder to walk now they did also point out leanne that the same joke could provoke a different reaction told by a man or a woman so they said this this is this quoting again there is harsher backlash for women than men for behaviour seen as offensive or norm violating.

9:50So I think what I'm reading from that is that I tell the joke, you tell the exact same joke, and in a broader setting, people might be a bit more shocked if you were perhaps a little bit more, I don't know what the word is. Salty, exactly, exactly. What are your thoughts? I think nothing will make humour less funny than a bunch of psychologists studying it. Tell that to two. With all respect. Peter McGraw, who's written several books on this. No, and you know, and I read articles on this and I've read journals on this and I find it really interesting, but it completely takes a topic that is light and funny and makes it very serious and introspective and steeped in discrimination, bias and social norms.

10:34And it's, do you know what? I think the thing is, let's not forget a funny person who wants to bring that energy to the office. You're not a comedian on a stage. Jimmy Carr is funny I agree he's funny he pushes it but what I like about Jimmy Carr is he doesn't discriminate he will rip anyone and everyone to shreds including himself actually which I think is important but if he talked the way he did on stage in the office he would get sacked he would get disciplined you know you just can't it's a different world I think it's about authenticity isn't it If you're making a joke that is, I think, is a shared experience of the people in the office or is something that is uniting in a way or is just part of kind of your, your kind of, what's it called, when you have your rituals in the workplace, then it's fine.

11:29But I think if you're trying too hard to be funny, that's when you're possibly, yeah, stepping into something that's a bit awkward. And also the whole like, oh, can I not see anything anymore because I'm so sensitive. It's like, if people aren't laughing, it's probably not funny. so don't but yeah i don't know i remember i remember one of i told this so many times and we thought it was always funny because it became part of our ritual when um you know alec alec won't be listening because he only used to watch us on youtube when we start putting up but um on the off chance he is hi alec um so alec was in the office in manchester and adrian was there of one of the other managers and Adrian had some gossip as he typically did.

12:11And Alec went, shut the door, which is a very northern expression for shut up. Yeah. Adrian didn't get this and actually got up and closed the office door. So it just became this whole thing that it was like, if we actually needed to shut the door, you just go, shut the door. Right. And that's funny. We weren't taking the mick out of Adrian because all three of us were there laughing together. Right. And it creates this kind of, this ritual almost within team which can be very bonding um i don't know it's all it really does depend doesn't it which i know isn't useful but you're probably not as funny as you think you are it's probably the rough rule to live by right yeah i think so and i mean also you talk about managers there and there's there's two aspects to that is the first of all if you are a manager and you're making jokes then maybe your team feel compelled to laugh at you and on the other hand if like if your manager does make a joke and you don't laugh is that gonna are you gonna get in trouble for that in theory you know there's a whole minefield and i think that as a manager you can probably probably make things a little brighter and probably make some jokes but don't be the office joker i think because then you're just painting yourself into a corner of either people have to laugh at you or you're going to go too far and get cancelled that's my thoughts i agree i think it comes down to this there's it's much easier to get it wrong than it is to get it right if you're trying to be the funny person at work all right so let's all be dark fucking humorous at work.

13:32Lee, what else have you seen? I've seen, is vibe checking new hires the way to recruit A players? This was the question raised in Business Insider this week, reporting on a new hiring approach inside the empire of Jimmy Donaldson. You might not have heard of Jimmy Donaldson, but I know you've heard of MrBeast, the world's biggest YouTuber. On the off chance that you haven't come across him, MrBeast runs one of the most watched YouTube channels on the planet. He has more than 250 million subscribers and a business that now spans loads of stuff, burgers, chocolate, video games, all sorts. And according to Business Society, his production company in Greenville, North Carolina, has introduced a 90 day trial period for all new hires known internally as a vibe check.

14:19In terms of the vibe check, what it means, what they're looking for is employees are on temporary contracts. This is important. So not permanent, temporary contracts. But the company provides short term housing and a rental car to make the transition easier, assuming that the majority of people have to move to Greenville. The goal, according to the company, is to give both sides a realistic view of the job before committing long term. and the business item piece went on to explain that the trial helps test whether someone can adapt to the speed and pressure of Mr Beast's content fast turnaround high stakes productions and very high creativity precision and within that probably very high levels of resilience other companies it should be mentioned have experimented with similar systems Zappos you're a big fan of Zappos love Zappos well they famously offered new recruits a$2 ,000 bonus to quit after four weeks if they weren't fully committed that's kind of cool it's kind of cool isn't it?

15:15A business insider also pointed out that there are risks. So Emilio Castilla, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, warned that trial periods can backfire if they use maintain a rotating pool of temporary workers rather than genuine long term hires. What starts as a fair try before you buy, a system can easily turn into a way of avoiding commitment for the company, not for the employee. So what do you think, Al? Is Vibe checking the secret to finding A players. You've always said that you're not a big fan of the A player model. I can understand why Mr. Beast wants it because it's like number one in the world.

15:53I can understand. I don't know. Do you know what I want to do? I want to go to our friends over at the Curve Group and go first of all, is this even something you can do in the UK? Does it tick all the HR boxes? Personally, I like this idea. Personally, I like the idea of going on a few dates with A... No, I can't say that. Metaphorically or figuratively going on a few dates with an employee before you actually give you sort of sign the deal um i don't know you've you've been quite vocal about work trials before you've been quite vocal about a players i think me without leanne would have gone love this i'm doing this me with leanne would go i need to learn a bit more and ask leanne what the right thing to do is i am not against work trials and i'm not against looking for top talent a players my beef with it has always been it's too vague and it's used in a way that isn't very intentional and where i think mr beast might be onto something here is the article did go on to say that he has very clearly defined what he's looking for when he says a player and i like this so his own production guide he writes that a players are obsessive learn from mistakes are coachable intelligent don't make excuses believe in youtube see the value of this company and are the best in the goddamn world at their job Do you got a job?

17:12Goddamn. So I applaud that they have taken the time to actually define what an A player looks like in the business of Mr. Beast. And I think that what's really interesting is when we can talk about vibe checks or things like that, we're talking about culture fit, which we know is actually a really poor predictor of future work performance. I think it's about 7 % to give you an idea. I think handwriting is about 5%. Right, okay. It's almost useless. Yeah. Almost useless. So I don't think what Mr. Beast is actually talking about necessarily is culture fit, but more that what he's defined is behaviours that are, and characteristics that are typically predictive of high job performance, including intelligence and coachability.

18:04Coachability is probably, and intelligence combined are probably the two things that, you know when you talk about oh I'd rather hire for attitude than experience well that's what you should be hiring for in terms of attitude really is are you coachable and I think having a trial period is gonna enable the team to understand if this person is coachable and then they're talking about things like do they believe in YouTube are you obsessed about this platform that we are and having you know worked in content creation for the last five years or so you do get obsessed with podcasts you do get obsessed with what it means to create content so I think it helps to be around people like that because when we talk to our our peers on the HubSpot podcast network like Phil Agnew from Nudge or Sonia Thompson from Inclusion Marketing we get so excited speaking because you feed off that energy so I can totally see in a high pressure relentless environment of content creation having this kind of obsessive love for the platform and the content you're creating is really important so actually I think I think that Mr Beast might be onto something here in the way that he has defined what it means to be an A player in the organization he's putting in a trial period that's very supported in terms of um the housing in terms of car you can kind of mimic what life will look like and I think that's a pretty smart thing to do my concern is always is somebody's gonna read this and the business leader go oh we're gonna introduce a new thing it's a vibe check it's gonna hire somebody for three months if we don't like him we'll get rid and it's not there's gonna be much more to it than that much more thought through um but i thought it was interesting um yeah what do you think yeah i agree i think it's a really really good idea um and it's like all of these ideas whenever i bring you something i've seen on x or something like i think this is a great idea you'll always go yes but it's not as simple as that the one thing that you always say this if you do one thing you train your managers and then if you do a second thing then you should define the job uh you've got you've got a name for it when you define job analysis you should define the role carefully and i think what he's done here is to be fair looking at his description it is very well defined so yeah very very good okay my love uh we will take a short break i think so after the break we've got the brand new truth or lie segment where i ask leanne something i've heard and she tells me whether it's a load of rubbish or not um and also we've got the world famous weekly work for surgery where i put your questions to leanne don't go anywhere see you in a second school might soon be out for summer, but Marketing School is here to stay.

20:28And it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Genuine marketing legends, Neil Patel and Eric Su bring you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years in the trenches with nearly 100 million downloads, probably a million of those are from me actually, and over two and a half thousand episodes, Marketing School delivers bite-sized marketing wisdom you can implement immediately. Whether you've got a new website, you're established business, you're going to learn the latest in SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, conversion, optimisation, and genuine online marketing strategies that work today.

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21:27Welcome back. It is time for Truth or Lie. It's our weekly myth-busting segment. So this is where we're going to take those little psychology soundbites you see on TikTok or Tiktube, as we call YouTube shorts, or even LinkedIn. And we say, does this actually stack up? Is it true? Yes, because let's be honest, psychology, pop psychology, it's full of neat little claims, isn't it? And they feel true, they feel intuitive, they're simple, they're catchy, they spread like wildfire. But when you scratch the surface, a lot of them are built on half-truths, if any truth at all. Now, I don't often do name-dropping here, but I'm going to today.

22:02Last week, we had the pleasure of having breakfast with the LinkedIn powerhouse, Yasmin Alic. He is, if you've ever been on LinkedIn, you'll know who he is. He's a Bosnian guy, lives in Zenica, up in the north of bosnia maybe about three hours from where we are um and he's just all over he also works for linkedin now i think they've brought him on so cool oh yeah he's effortlessly cool he used to be a dj he's done this he's used to be a rapper um he's really cool so we've always we've seen him quite a lot and talked to him online but this was the first time we actually met him yeah when he stood up from the table i was a little taken about because i'm not i'm not like particularly tall i think i'm 5 '11 but still he was we was way taller than me and i was like oh hello oh you're a big guy uh so uh anyway i'm digressing because i'm just a little bit i was a little bit um starstruck by meeting him he's a really cool guy anyway my question to you leanne is are successful people tall or are tall people successful is there any correlation between being tall and being successful because i'm thinking about tony robbins he's a tall guy he's very successful a lot of people i've met who've been extremely successful have been pretty tall above of average tallness, if that's a word.

23:08Lee, truth or lie? Are tall people more successful? Well, there's a lot behind this one, actually. And I think this idea really kind of took off after Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. So he pointed out in that, that American chief executives are far more likely to be over six foot tall. And then various media outlets ran with it, discussions exploded online, and suddenly everybody is convinced that if yeah if you're going to be successful you're going to have to you're going to have to grow eat the beans i don't know what much what helps you grow platform shoes platform shoes the reasoning is i guess that that simple psychology reasoning is pretty simple that height conveys authority so physically taller people command more presence in a room and when you glance around a boardroom um yeah the tall people do seem to stand out and they do seem a little overrepresented but then maybe that's a male thing and male men tend to be taller i digress let's start with what's actually true so i guess that's a pop psychology where the idea came from the anecdotal evidence um but there is actually some real data behind this so in 2004 psychologists timothy judge and daniel cable published a comprehensive study examining height and workplace success so they ran a meta-analysis we enjoy meta-analysis al why uh because oh i don't know i know what longitudinal study is i don't know what meta-analysis is so meta-analysis is when they combine the results of multiple studies so say there's been 12 studies on height and workplace success they're going to gather data of all these 12 studies to look at it with one question in mind so you've got more data from across different methodologies perhaps different cultures potentially a bigger sample size like it yeah so we like that they found that height does correlate with career success and the correlation was 0.26 which in psychology is considered a small to moderate effect so something's cool if you ever see this in an article like oh there's a correlation of 0.26 if you square that you'll get the percentage that's cool yeah so do you want to square 0.26 0.26 times 0.26 is oh 6.7 ah times by 100 6.76 percent 6.76 percent so it's quite low so it's quite low yeah quite low yeah okay all right but there is some more things to it i mean it is statistically significant in that it's higher than chance yeah um there is there is something else to this though when the same researchers calculated height in terms of earnings they found that each inch of height predicted about 600 pounds more in annual earnings which over a 30-year career adds up to roughly 125 ,000 pounds so not an insignificant amount of money and what's really cool is this pattern showed up across the world they found it in the US, Brazil, India and the UK.

26:09It's not just one culture where height is an advantage and that's important because a lot of these studies are usually confined to very western type cultures. Then there are presidents. So since 1900 the taller candidate in the US election has won 81%. Oh that's a bigger. Yeah of American presidential elections. Quite striking. go back further in history, so before photographs were widely circulated, it drops to 60%. Oh. So it's still above chance, but the effect seems to get stronger and people can actually see how tall the candidates are. So yeah, the correlation is real. Got to ask the next office question, why?

26:50Well, there are three main theories that have emerged from the research as to why height might be an advantage in work. So first there is perceptual bias. So that basically means that we perceive tall people differently. So in another study in 2012, they found that we basically showed people photos of the same person, but digitally altered them to be taller or shorter. I should like to be digitally altered to be taller. That would be nice. So the taller versions were rated as more leader-like, more dominant and healthier. The same person, same face, just stretched vertically, suddenly made them chief executive material.

27:30This is probably from evolution. There was a route, so throughout human history, physical size has typically been linked to fighting ability and dominance. Bigger opponent is on average more dangerous. And when groups face conflict, whether with rival groups or protecting resources, having physically imposing individuals on your side was the advantage. Did you have that? You had that in the pubs, right? You had all your big doormen behind you. Yep. Make you feel safe. that's well to be fair i was behind them but it came down i didn't stand out front i was not a leader i was definitely a follower in that situation you had you had your backup so that's that's the first one in terms of how he is how heat how height is perceived the second is that height actually correlates modestly with some traits that matter it works so taller individuals do score slightly higher on intelligence tests the correlation is small about 0.1 to 0.26 so again the small kind of single digit percentages depending on the study that likely reflects childhood nutrition and socioeconomic status more than height actually causing intelligence um so yeah there's that one um and the third is self-fulfilling prophecy which is really really powerful actually if you're treated like a leader from age five because you're the tall kid in class.

28:50You get practice being a leader, you get positive reinforcement, you develop confidence. So by the time you're 35 and interviewing for a management position, you've had 30 years of people deferring to you and that shows in how you carry yourself. So here's where the popular version goes wrong a little bit. So when business magazines or career advice columns say tall people are more successful, they're usually making it sound like height causes success, but the research shows it is a bit more complicated than that. So as we said, the effective size is modest. That correlation of 0.26, as we worked out, means about 70 % of the variance in earnings.

29:24So that leaves 93 % explained by other factors. So your actual skills, your education, your industry, your network, your work ethic, look, timing, all of it. And of course, context matters enormously. So those original researchers that we mentioned that did the meta-analysis, judge and cable, they broke down their results by occupation. In sales, the correlation between height and earnings was 0.41. So that's a substantial effect. That is. Yeah, 0.41, 0.48, that squared is 17%. So quite a bit more. Yeah, because sales is all about that persuasion and those first impressions. But in technical or professional work, the correlation dropped to 0.30.

30:03So still there, but much weaker. So your height matters less when you're writing code than when you're pitching to clients that doesn't mean business leader in sales that you're going to start looking for tall people it's it's it's like we said it's not quite that quite that direct um there's also the causation problem does height make you successful or do privileged children who grow up to be successful also happen to grow taller because they have better nutrition health care and less childhood stress yeah probably and then you've got to think about are we assessing candidates on on what they've achieved in the privileged setting they have or what they've the obstacles they've had to overcome to be competing at the same level so i talked about this with sonia on her podcast that basically it's for me getting into the university isn't as oppressive as someone who was maybe a carer from age seven for their family who lived in a poor socio-economic background didn't go to school blah blah blah its context can make a big a big difference um so yeah so there you go and the effect operates differently for men and women we should say as well so for men the high advantage is mediated by perceptions of dominance and physical health so people see a tall man and think strong protective leader for women it's primarily um mediated by perceived intelligence the dominance association doesn't always carry over in the same way so yeah one thing to be really clear about it is discrimination like I said you can't just go out and hire somebody for their height that is not the way not the way to do it unless of course you're recruiting astronauts for NASA and they need to be a certain height to press a button I don't know but then you've proved it for the job you've done your job analysis so there you go Al that is that is kind of the research of it so truth or lie well the claim that taller people are more successful as work is true but does come with some caveats so the correlation is real it has been replicated across cultures it's not just folklore height genuinely does give people a small statistical advantage particularly in leadership roles and client facing positions but the popular version does oversimplify it height doesn't cause success it just affects how others perceive you and it correlates weakly with some other traits and as we said in other more technical roles doesn't seem to make much of a difference the effect is more modest um so there you go is it true yes but don't over exaggerate looking for a guy in finance six three blue eyes do you know what i watched something talking about jimmy carr earlier i watched a little short from jimmy carr on tick tube um and um he was talking about someone said something about money like rich people or whatever and jimmy carr said look money is just a proxy for competence so in theory now don't come for me this is what Jimmy said, but he said, women like men with money because it's a proxy for competence.

32:53So if they've got money, they're shown they're competent at life. He said, you could also go and find people who can put up shelves and they're very popular with women because it shows competence. You might go for someone in a barman, a bar person. So I said barman because I'm using this example of a man. So this person might be, might be on like six pounds an hour, eight pounds an hour, whatever bar people are on these days, but the competence makes them attractive. So maybe it's a similar kind of thing is that the height is just a proxy for safety perhaps i don't know there is a perception that we hold isn't there when somebody has certain characteristics that they're displaying to us that we can observe without knowing somebody very well and height is something like that as is competence in very um in exactly those examples that that you've given and it is true you know we make those snap judgments if it's seven seconds we make a judgment on on somebody and then that initial judgment needs to be shaped and molded and it's the same a pretty privilege that exists as well in terms of facial structure but I think the key thing here is one don't discriminate you can't recruit somebody just for their height unless you can absolutely prove it's necessary for the job and if you are short if you're a short queen like me five foot three don't worry um your career isn't doomed please remember from those statistics 93 percent of career success is explained by other factors than height so don't despair it's going to be okay.

34:15I love it. I love it. Also, I think, did you say the people who did the study were called Judge and Cable? Yeah. That is a TV show I've watched. Two TV detectives, Judge and Cable. Get in my office, Cable! Anyway, right, so let's move on to the world-famous weekly workplace surgery, where I put your questions to Leanne. Lee, I've got question number one. They've summarized it by, thusly, how do you build a reliable team when you're used to doing everything yourself? So, it says, Dear Leanne, I run a small service-based business, and I've reached the point where I need to scale, but I'm realizing the biggest bottleneck is me.

34:47I'm still handling everything myself. And the truth is I haven't found anyone I fully trust to take things off my plate. I want to build a solid team, but I'm finding it hard to let things go. Where do you even start with this? Do you outsource first? Do you hide properly? How do you free up your time without losing control of the quality? Lee, I've personally gone through this when I've grown a couple of my companies. I'm going, it's actually more work to show someone how to do the work than it is just to do it myself. So I feel, it doesn't give us a name, but I feel this person's hurt. Leigh, how are we going to deal with this?

35:22I feel this is a common thing for managers as well. When you're bringing on new people to your team, it can feel like so much effort to have to show them or coach them to get to the right answer rather than just give it to them. I think the thing is, as you'll know, Al, as your business continues to scale, you doing that yourself just becomes unreasonable or unmanageable it gets to the point where you're going to break so in terms of of handling it in a way that is going to really feel like you'll you'll want people to take things off your plate i would spend a week tracking the time you take during stuff whether you use toggle whether you make rough notes in your diary you write it down things everything you do whether it be speaking to clients whether it be admin tasks talking to your accountant whether it be product development everything you do write it down then reflect on that after a week and look at the percentage of things you're doing that are below your pay pay grade that really the md of a company should not be doing or the tasks that are taking up so much of your time that aren't contributing to you growing your business or the tasks that you hate to do you loathe doing those are the tasks that are worth prioritizing in terms of passing off to somebody else and more than likely the majority of those tasks won't be things you wouldn't fully or you wouldn't trust somebody else to do because they are going to be the admin things or they're going to be the more transactional elements of your job or they're going to be things if you hate them more than likely they don't feed into your lean into your skill set very naturally so you have to stretch yourself uncomfortably for me That's around detail.

37:03I really struggle. Proofreading, for example, I struggle. I really struggle. When I had to do that part of my job, I would, you know, when you can get the computer to read it out to you, I'd have to do that. That's a great tip though. Yeah, it is. But it's time intensive because it takes a lot longer to listen to somebody read it out than just to read it yourself. So it probably doubled my task time as somebody who's got that skill set and that attention to detail. So there's going to be things like that that you'll want to pass on happily. What you're basically going to do then is figure out the tasks that you need somebody else to do.

37:40And then you'll be able to answer your other questions. Do you outsource it? It could be a software that you need. It could be a process that you need. It could be a person. It could be an agency. It could be multiple people. It's going to give you an idea of what you need. And then what I want you to do is do a journaling exercise for me, which I know most MDs go, oh, I don't want to do that. I know, but bear with me. all right so once you've you've created this list and particularly things that you hate to do and you don't want to spend time doing i want you to reflect on what could you be doing what would your life look like if you didn't have to do those things where would your business be how would your energy levels be feeling how fulfilled would you be in your work how much further on do you think your business would be and really kind of feel this wonderful space that you'll be in once you've started to hand these tasks over to other people this really is as much as you've said you know without giving up um giving up any control or or loss of quality this is much a psychological process of giving up your baby that you've built and trusting somebody else to to do that for you you need to really coach yourself on how wonderful it's going to be to free up your energy to free up your time to free up your creativity to focus on the things you really need to to build your business that would be my advice before you even think about hiring somebody is to actually go through go through that exercise to see what it is exactly that you need um and then we've talked before about job analysis and all that type of thing in terms of recruitment that would be your next step but i think that's the first thing is to figure out what you want to hand over what your life will look like when it is and really get excited about that yeah and i think they're probably from a business owner's point of view, there is a sort of a psychological danger here that you feel that if you do hand over your baby or you do hand over your tasks, then one, you might not be needed anymore.