280. Jack Dorsey’s A.I. Gamble, Friction-maxxing and The 10:47 PM Email. PLUS: Are Leaders Born or Made?

0:01Coming up this week in work. New research shows that when leaders send emails at 10.47pm, it's not just annoying, it's creating a climate of constant connectivity that is draining entire teams. So what's really happening when the boss never switches off and what does it cost the business? Also this week, a tech company just shed 4 ,000 jobs, but they explicitly said it's because AI was replacing them. Yep, the CEO said it publicly. Was it the right thing to do, to be honest, or should they have sugarcoated it just a little bit? And in truth or lie, leaders are born, not made. It's one of those statements people repeat like fact, but what does the actual research say?

0:42Are some people just wired to lead, or is it something anyone can develop? And in the workplace surgery, you've done the work. You've got three strong candidates shortlisted for hiring, and now you're being quietly pressured to hire a senior leader's relative instead. They're not unqualified, but they're not the best. How do you push back? 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. See, I can do it too. You can. My name is Al. I'm a business owner and I'm here to ask the questions you might be afraid to.

1:17My name is Leanne. I'm a chartered occupational psychologist and I'm here to answer them. And together we help you simplify the science of work and build amazing workplace cultures. We'll be right back after a quick word from our lovely sponsors. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn. Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content. But with a massive 900-page website, even the tiniest updates took 30 minutes to publish. Breeze, which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, helped them write and optimize their content in just a fraction of the time.

1:54The results, 30 % more page views and visitors now spend 27 % more time on their site. If you're ready for impossible growth like this, visit HubSpot.com.

2:10Hello, welcome back, welcome back. It's been a bit of a week, isn't it, in the news. Let's not touch any of that. None of that. Goodness me. Anxiety is high, I think, this week. yeah i think we'll just move swiftly along bring you a bit of levity you've got enough gravity

2:32you won't hear us talking about how somebody's laid off 4 000 people because of ai how in how tone deaf would that be in a week like this oh maybe i might quickly change my um no i can't because it was sent in by jeremy klein a friend of the show lovely guy important to talk about Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll talk about that. We'll tell you what we will talk about. Our little miniature pincher, who's a bit of an arsehole at the moment. Yeah, he's being a bit problematic recently, isn't he? Yeah, if you're listening and you are a Cesar Millan, or if Cesar Millan's listening, hello Cesar, then drop us a line.

3:07He's just, he's spinning. Every time the big dog gets up, the little dog just spins round and round and tries to bite his tail. We had this last year. Unfortunately, he ended up losing. He had chopped half of his tail. Well, I didn't do it. A vet did it for us, but chopped some of his tail off and he's still doing it. So yeah. He's 10 years old. He's a rescue. We've had about 18 months. So our working theory is he's, it's usually this time where he'll be moved on. So whether his perception of time is maybe causing some anxiety because he's expecting a change perhaps, but then we're not sure if we're humanizing him too much, trying to create boundaries.

3:42We're trying to keep the energy calm, which is very difficult, but we're trying to keep it calm. if anyone has any suggestions, tips let us know please talking of times it is time for your favourite time of the week Leanne it is time for the news round up yes it is, I'll cue that jingle what have you got? I've got a new word talk to me friction maxing what? no no no no no this was my word for next week I've got it in my web queue and I might read later oh man oh you know exactly what it is then no I don't actually, I just saw it it was on the BBC, it wasn't yesterday, it was today and I just saw it and I thought, right, I'm having that.

4:17Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, go on. I didn't look at what it was, though. Oh, well, if the BBC has picked this up, then they're a bit late, because this was a couple of weeks ago this came out. It was in the Financial Times by Isabel Beric. Oh, another friend of the show. Yes, exactly, friend of the show. So, friction maxing. Do you want to take a guess? Maxing out your friction. So, when I first saw it, I thought, approaching problems with people head on. so you actually go out and seek the fraction the friction you go look for the fires you look for the fires you you you rub up against someone you can't do that in a modern workplace but you couldn't do it you could never do it it's just it just we did not we i didn't as a so what do what is your word friction magic maxing friction maxing it describes a small but growing pushback against ultra-convenient tech, especially AI.

5:12So Isabel said that basically instead of making everything faster and easier, some workers are deliberately choosing the slower, more effortful option. So instead of... This is what's terrible. I use ChatGP to ask questions like... I asked them about the dog just then, before. Whereas two, three years ago, I would have Googled it, lots of different articles. and maybe 10 years ago I would have got my book out and read my book. So are you saying that friction action is going back to actually not saying, all right, AI answers questions straight away. It's going to get the book and sitting down with the book.

5:46Yeah, exactly. So basically it's the antidote to convenience. Right. Projecting shortcuts. Okay. So yeah, the article, which is brilliant, you should go and read it, did trace the idea back to Catherine Jezza Morton. We have some brilliant names on this show. Jezza Morton. I don't want to sound like one of those complete a-holes. But like whenever I see a name starting with a J, I panic. Because it's like, because in English it would be probably Jezza. But then we spent four or five years in Spain where that would be Jezza. And then we now live in the Balkans where that would be Jezza. So it's like, well, I don't know this person's origin.

6:23I don't know where they're from. Which one do I pick? It doesn't make me sound like a complete arse. Yeah. So I went with Jezza Morton. Yep, yep. Fair enough. That works. Catherine. So Catherine wrote in The Cut about building tolerance for inconvenience. So her concern was actually rooted in parenting. She argued that if everything feels frictionless, children won't experience boredom. And without boredom, they may never develop a love for things like reading or learning to think for themselves. Those are boring. Yeah, exactly. I have seen this called by the Gen Z raw dogging boredom. When they'll just sit in a room, they're not allowed to do anything for 10 minutes.

7:00They can't even fidget with anything. I like I like sitting in the garden and my morning rituals I wake up usually usually about half an hour before Leanne not because I think we wake up at the same time it's just I get up half an hour before you I like to have a cup of coffee sit in the garden and my rule is I don't touch my phone until I finish my coffee that's a good rule and it's lovely because I have all these lovely thoughts and then it starts getting a bit existential and it gets a bit weird so then I have to by the time I get up you're in a full blown panic exactly I'm just in the shower fully clothed, crying.

7:34Yeah, exactly. In terms of the adult world, though, coming back to our article, friction maxing might mean for us things like reading a full document rather than relying on an AI summary. It could mean writing notes by hand instead of using automated transcripts. One learning and development professional in the article quoted, she actively writes everything down and reviews it because she believes she remembers it more that way. others are turning down quick teams calls in favor of meeting in coffee meeting in person for coffee even if that means that it's going to be a couple of weeks out the article also referenced tim woo a u.s law professor professor at columbia university he is now a face of work on technology and media and a 2018 new york times essay where he argued against what he called the tyranny of convenience, suggesting that difficulty is a fundamental part of the human experience and if everything becomes about speed and destination, we're going to lose the value of the journey.

8:34Very woo indeed. There's also concern... Very nice, very nice. I'm sorry, that's probably disrespectful. I made it funny, okay? There's also concern in the article about what research is called cognitive atrophy. Atrophy. The risk that outsourcing too much thinking to air weakens our judgment every time. We have actually seen some neuroscience research on that that does show that it's true. So there you go, Al. What was it again? Friction maxing. Friction maxing. Thoughts. I saw a great video. In fact, my brother. Thank you, Andrew Elliott. Blue Goats Books is publishing ours, which he's publishing.

9:13He's published quite a few of our previous guests. I think it's actually the other way around. But anyway, go look at bluegoatsbooks.com. He said, Why did I bring him up? Oh, yeah, he sent us a video, which I'm going to talk about next week, but about Xennials. And Xennials... What's a Xennial? A Xennial is those people who were born between, specifically between 1976 and 1985. So they're neither millennials who grew up fully with technology. Oh, see, now that's confusing. Why would you call him a Xennial? Because surely that would be the person... Yeah, I understand that. But it still sounds like Zed, doesn't it?

9:48it still sounds like the bits between millennial and gen z exennial maybe it is supposed to be said exennial well I hope it is otherwise they've just ruined it for themselves and everybody else my point which is really weak and diluted now my point was that when you grew up because I grew up in that time and you just grew up in that time 76 to 84 I think then you remember the time when you were going to go and meet your friends and had no idea whether they were going to be there, whether you'd got the right place. You were out for hours. You remember a time when it was all analogue. So you had your tapes and your cassette spat it out and you had to get a pencil to wind it back in.

10:28And then you remember the time when it was all Spotify and you grew up over that sort of particular... And the bits in between that were highly illegal. Napster, yeah, all that. God, yeah, I think I downloaded most of the internet. LimeWire, I remember that. I remember LimeWire. I loved LimeWire. I used to leave it on all night. Well, it had to be because it would take like 12 hours to download one two minutes off. It's true. It's true. Oh, good times. I think the point is that back then we were allowed to be bored and we had no choice but to be bored. So my mum used to say, if you're bored, go out and do something, go out and make something.

10:59And so I used to go like make five bar gates and all sorts of stuff. But anyway, anyway, yes. So that was a bit off topic, but I'm with you. Friction Maxing, we should all be doing more of it and stop relying on AI. Yes. I also think it's worth considering. Oh, sorry. I'm not excited. I always think it's worth considering how much friction you currently have in your life anyway. Right. Because I'm thinking for some parents, they've got a fair amount of friction in their life. Trying to entertain the kids that aren't used to being bored. We have a lot of friction in our life because we don't have Amazon.

11:33We don't really, we can't do online shopping. No. If we want to do anything in terms of government processes, it literally takes us half a day. Yep. and we need to go to four different offices hand in millions of different pieces of paper and hope for the best I think we have quite a lot of friction in our lives so I'm not sure introducing unnecessary friction in our work life would necessarily be the best thing but I equally totally get in terms of making sure we continue to develop our own nuanced judgement and thinking processes and just keeping our mind quiet we probably need to disconnect and be a bit friction maxing at times.

12:15But I think maybe it's maybe looking at the bigger picture of how much friction you have in your life, generally speaking. Friction is good. Friction is good. Yeah. Yes, totally agree. Anyway, what have you seen, though? Okay, well, it's not necessarily what I saw. It's what Jeremy Klein from Change Work Life Podcast saw. He sent me a WhatsApp message because we are that kind of friends. We have WhatsApp. As opposed to other kind of. True. With some friends you don't, give you number two. Yeah. I will not be naming them here. Actually, I have some friends like that. Anyway, so Jeremy Klein, thank you so much.

12:48He basically sent me the link about Jack Dorsey from Square, how he got rid of 40 % of his workforce. Now, I'm sure you know Jack Dorsey's ex-Twitter. Of course. You can always tell if someone was part of Twitter and when they're early, by looking at their username on Twitter, his is just at Jack. And then one of the other founders is like at Mo or something. Nice. Or at, it begins with E, I can't remember. Just write in, tell me. Anyway, so he's CEO of Block. This is the company behind him. Have you ever come across Square or Cash App Square? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's announced he's cutting 4 ,000 jobs.

13:20That's 40 % of the workforce. I didn't know it was that big, actually, to be honest. So it's nearly half the company is gone. But here's the thing. He didn't just sort of like quietly did it. He actually posted on Twitter. And when I followed the link from Jeremy, it got 43 million views. Wow. he didn't blame market conditions or restructuring or that you know aligning our strategic priorities he was completely direct he basically said now re intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company a significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better so the bit and the and this thing business isn't struggling at all um it's actually beat wall street expectations last year uh revenue is up massively and i think the revenue per employee has doubled over the last 12 months.

14:06Well, they've just got rid of half his workforce. No, no, no. Well, that's the thing. Oh, sorry. Previously. It will quadruple. Carry on. But yes, it did double. So, but the thing is, that's all cool. Like, glad his company's doing well. But is it... Yes, very glad to see another billionaire. It's just billionaring. Excellent news, Jack. Is it... The question I've got for you, Leanne, is, did he do it right by being brutally honest? The investors thought so. They loved it. The shares jumped 20 % the next day because obviously looking at efficiency, margins, profitability, but the employees, hmm.

14:40Some people, so in Wired magazine, someone reported that the morale was the worst I've felt for four years and the overarching culture at Block is crumbling. Maybe that's not a problem, Lee, because essentially, can he run the company on 1 ,000 people, not 10 ,000, and use AI to do the rest and then his revenue per employee is like 10 times? What are your thoughts on the whole thing? This is quite a swing for Jack Dorsey, isn't it? Because he was quite famously criticized when he was heading up Twitter that it wasn't a very profitable company. But it was a massively large organization, like running a country kind of thing.

15:17So quite a swing. It's almost like, oh, I won't do that again. I'll go the complete opposite. On one hand, I'm like, transparency, cool. It would have caused more problems if you just blamed something else. Then you got all the commentary around. It wasn't about that. It was about AI or people talking from the inside who had either left, exit the business or remained. So I think the transparency was really the only thing he could do to minimise the massive amount of backlash I imagine he is going to get because this isn't a small round of layoffs, this is half the company. And we know in terms of survivor's guilt, we know in terms of the voluntary turnover after a round of redundancies, it's typically 1%.

16:00typically if it's 1 % of your workforce is laid off you'll get a 30 % voluntary redundancy rate over the next 12 months so he's laid off 50 % so who knows what the math doesn't math in terms of what that number should be for voluntary turnover actually what he's talking about in terms of he's costing him because I think he's paying like 6 months salary to everyone plus 1 month for every year tenure so the estimates how old is this company? I'd say probably about 8-10 years old okay and so I think estimates are around about 500 million dollars it's costing him to get rid of these people so I don't know whether that helps at all or not not in the example I was talking about no but I think I think you're right in terms of yes giving runway is good practice helping people find other alternative employment is good practice transparency is good practice my concern is more what this looks like in terms of how how jack stands in terms of ai first versus human first and i think at a time where everyone's already quite anxious about that the people remaining are not going to feel safe in any way because you've done it before brutally you could absolutely do it again you've made a very public declaration that you are now ai first I have a feeling that given another 12, 18 months, organisation is going to swing back round to be human first as a point of competitive differentiation when the labour market swings back in favour of the employees, when we see that Great Resignation 2.0.

17:44I can see Jack flip-flopping in the future. So I think it is whilst, yes, it's probably dealt with in the best possible way, it is brutal, it's still going to have a massive impact on the people being left behind because all the research shows that to be the case and i think it's a very bold move to kind of declare you are ai first when we're still not entirely sure how this is all gonna shake out so but then that's because i'm quite human first so yeah and i think that to be fair on jack um sorry jack if you're listening to be fair on jack he's um i think he's he's bullish on ai and he's i don't see him turning it around and i can see him actually going well it'd be great if we could have a hundred employees running this entire thing and the rest of it was just agents so i i can see him going down that road and what happens to the world if every organization does that well that's the thing you just said what happens if organizations went human first well some will go human first some will go ai first it's not like just because jack's doing it everyone's gonna do it i mean all right salesforce got rid of 4 000 people earlier this month um but but it's it it there was an over employment at some point in some of these SaaS companies and now there's it looks like it's a correction, a market correction but they've been correcting since just after the pandemic haven't they and that was before kind of AI went mainstream there was all that market corrections.

19:04I just don't think you can say what if everyone does it because that's like saying well everyone should be vegetarian it's like well they're not going to are they? You know burgers taste too good. Yeah I know. Anyway we'll come back to this. I'm also very sad for the 4 ,000 people because as we know the deathly arithmetic of compassion it's hard to empathize that large number of people but there are going to be tens of thousand people impacted by that in terms of the family independence and of those 4 000 people so yeah if you are one of those and you are listening i'm very sorry it's very very tough time you have my my empathy my sympathy and if you are listening one of those people there and you could either do one of two things you could either get in touch with us and we'll do a linkedin live with you we'll talk about what it was like your opinions on it um or perhaps We've had a couple of people, actually, someone from Twitter, I think, who you spoke to a while ago when they were laid off.

19:54And you basically did some free coaching for a couple of weeks. And so that's available to you as well. Leigh, what else have you seen? What's the last thing on our list? Well, speaking of leaders being annoying. Right. This is a bit of research I came across that was basically looking at what is the impact of leaders' late night behavior on employees. Where do you see this? This was in the Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology. Oh, the dupe. The dupe. The dupe. I like one of my favorites. I do like the dupe. Why have I not noticed that before? Brilliant. So this is in the dupe.

20:322025 study. So fairly warm off the press, not hot, warm. Yeah. So basically it was looking at what happens when leaders are sending emails late at night, doing messages, all that type of thing. The researchers weren't looking at it in like a technology is ruining life type way. They wanted to really understand what happens when leaders regularly use their phones, their devices outside of normal work hours and how that behavior impacts the organization. So they introduced something called climate of constant connectivity. Right. The CCC. The CCC. They did actually shorten it to that. the CCC, which is basically meaning that it's a shared belief within the company that employees are expected to be available and responsive during non-work times, like always on mentality.

21:22So what they did is they didn't just ask one person if they felt pressured. They surveyed employees within the organization and looked for agreement. There needed to be a consensus. So if people within the same company broadly agreed that there was an expectation to be reachable after hours, then that counted as a real shared climate. They had to kind of reach a critical point of consensus. Makes sense. Then separately, they measured how frequently leaders were actually using their smartphones for work in the evenings, at weekends, and that would include sending emails, responding to messages, or making work-related calls.

21:58Then they analysed whether organisations where leaders were more active after hours were also the ones where employees perceived stronger expectations of this constant availability. And they were. So the researchers found that leaders' after-hours communication predicted a stronger climate of constant connectivity, and that climate in turn predicted high levels of collective emotional exhaustion. So that's not just people feeling drained, that's like a shared sense of real depletion, like on the road to burnout across teams. Am I boring you out? no I'm listening you're like hmm hmm I'm listening sorry I was actually thinking about what we're going to have for lunch as well were you yeah yeah ah what are we going to have for lunch I don't know chicken pie no we're vegetarian now chicken pie anyway what was I saying you were saying you were saying it's collectively across the entire organisation not just like individually some people were feeling a bit burnt out because because they were the manager was emailing them it's like the whole collective feeling was yes and the researchers said that this comes from conservation of resources theory which is basically about energy so when people feel that their time and their attention and their recovery space that time at home recovery space are continually being eroded then the strain accumulates and then the recovery stops being as effective it's all very conditional and over time that shows up as exhaustion which we know is one of the one of the three symptoms of burnout so the researchers also described late night communication as a form of non-family supported behavior which makes sense you're not respecting my family time as a boundary it doesn't necessarily mean that leaders were doing it deliberately they didn't look at that it just showed how that behavior sends a signal to the employee and if senior people are visibly working into the night that employees see that as being expected to be responsive outside of ours um at the very least to be valued the thoughts i mean it makes sense i mean we don't need all these studies to know that if you're if you're receiving emails uh or even you look at an email it was sent to court to nine the previous night and even if it says something like no need to reply now or something there's still it feels to me either it's an expectation that you should reply but they're just covering their asses by saying no need to reply or worse it's someone who wants you to know they're still working because really in the real world unless you're like dealing with something which is like you know nuclear reactors where you do need to speak to someone straight away then if you scheduled that email for the next morning yeah then you know nothing's gonna happen i think again if you're working a very time sensitive operation then perhaps it would but that makes sense and also i think there are some people and And I do know of some people, or I did not know of them, who used to schedule it, who used to write it at four o 'clock and schedule it for like quarter to ten to look like they were still working.

25:01I did that yesterday because I needed to ask our accountant a question because I knew it was a bank holiday. Right. So I wrote it yesterday and I scheduled it this morning. That's nice. Yeah. That's nice. Little things, isn't it? I get what you mean. It seems, well, that's obvious, that's intuitive that if somebody, a leader is expecting people to always be on, that's going to have an impact. But equally, you're going to hear people going, oh, well, it's just easier for me. I don't expect them to reply. It's not about the intention. The leader could have the best of intentions, but still have this negative impact.

25:28And that's why studies like this are quite important. And we know that once people get tired, we're looking at lower engagement, weaker performance, and eventually a higher turnover risk as well. So energy needs to be considered a business resource. And it's not. So in terms of what people can actually do, the researcher did offer some suggestions. And they did emphasize, it's not one late email that matters if you send one email don't panic it's the repeated nature of that if you're regularly active at night if it becomes standard then it's a problem so yeah as we said scheduled it for the morning you've got the capability to do that you can still write your email in the time that you need to but just schedule it for another time second remove ambiguity so if people don't know what's expected they'll assume that they should always be available so very clear about response times, what's genuinely urgent and what the expectations are around working after hours.

26:25And third, role model boundaries. And it's so important. If you say to people as a leader, switch off, but never switch off yourself, people notice and they're going to associate that always on with leadership success. Recovery will only work if it feels like it's legitimate, like you have permission to do it. So leaders, please protect your downtime. do it visibly don't be available when you're on holiday don't be logging on when you're not very well hard boundaries because it's those behavioral shifts even though they're small are gonna start to add up to to something much bigger and better nice thank you very much okay all the links are in the show notes as they always are we're gonna have a short break but after that we've got our truth or lie and the truth or lie at the moment is or today is leaders are born not made so we'll find out whether that's true or that is a lie in just a second.

27:19Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination of business professionals. Join venture capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures, and hard lessons of the creme de la creme, so you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in business, and in life. Maybe start with episode 124, where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube, Define Leadership. Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

27:53Welcome back. Welcome back. It's time for Truth or Lie. You should know by now, that's where we basically take an idea and I put it to the end and I go, is it true or is it a lie? Lee, today we are talking about leaders are born, not made. So when people say leaders are born, they're usually talking about one of two things yeah they're talking about leadership as being genetic so something you inherit like your eye color or they believe that it comes down to fixed personality traits so things like confidence intelligence charisma something i've got all of those things yes all of those things yes so that's people who who believe that leaders are born the alternative view is that leadership is a skill it's something you can learn and it's something you can train.

28:40Researchers have tried to separate these two ideas to study them and they've done this by studying twins. That's clever. I hope they call it the Gemini Project. Maybe they did. Well, you just reminded me of Dexter. Has anyone seen the new Dexter Resurrection? Oh, yeah, yeah. It was really good. Really good? Yeah. A serial killer's born or made? I don't know. I have to get Danny on the pod for that one. Yes, we will do that. but can I just remind you we were talking about leaders yes leaders so we're talking about twins we like twin studies psychologists love a twin study so let's start with the case for that there is a genetic impairment to being a good effective leader so one study has looked at 247 pairs of adult twins of those 183 were identical twins and 64 were fraternal twins and that's important and and I'll tell you for why.

29:35Identical twins share almost 100 % of their genes, whereas fraternal twins share about 50%. So they're like regular siblings. But importantly, both types of twins will grow up in a very similar environment. So we're controlling variance in terms of the environment. What that means is if identical twins are more alike in leadership style than fraternal twins, then that extra similarity could reasonably be linked to genetics. Got it. Understand it, yes. Yeah? So the researchers took all these twins, so they have the fraternal twins, the identical twins, and if there's no difference, then it would suggest that there's no genetic component to leadership.