290. Is money the best motivator? PLUS! Londonmaxxing, hustling after 40 and The Deliberate Manager, featuring Dr Jake Tuber

28:12Dr. Jake Tuber:So with that caveat aside, I do want to suggest that there's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that money, while maybe a decent motivator, is not the best. So there was a three-wave study conducted just a few years ago in 2020, looked about over 300 employees across various European countries. So take that with a grain of salt, you know, Europe. And that was a shot at the two of you. Yes, very much so. And I just wanted to lean into your opening comments, Al, about Jake seeming nice. I had to come across as the token American on the show in this case. So there is an interesting study here.

28:48Dr. Jake Tuber:They found that performance-based pay was actually linked to lower motivation, in particular when the pay structure felt like it was trying to control or manipulate employee behavior. So in other words, while employees weren't opposed to being motivated by the tangible carrot, the reward of pay, the idea of being, hey, you're going to do this, you're going to get this extra shit. You do this and you get this extra shit. It can feel controlling in this particular environment that it was studied. There's a handful of other studies, recent ones as well, that looked at this. So in particular, in knowledge work environments where creativity is often prized, there can be a real challenge to using money as a motivator.

29:28Dr. Jake Tuber:A study in 2020 looking at over 238 employees in 64 new product development teams, they found that financial awards were linked to lower underlying intrinsic task motivation. And as you might guess, recognition and the social awards had a higher impact on intrinsic task motivation and better creative outcomes. So it wasn't just, yes, I feel more motivated or not, but it led to better results when you were motivating people through social awards, through recognition, than a very tangible, sticky feeling of getting money for doing something creative. We also know that, interestingly enough, creativity tends to be a weak point for money as a motivator.

30:10Dr. Jake Tuber:So if trying to be innovative, trying to be creative, which is, you know, maybe one of the only areas left to humans, perhaps in the knowledge work environment these days, they're going to be a little bit challenged to use money as a motivator. So an experiment on creative task done by Eckert et al. in 2012, incentives had a very small effect. And in fact, the real drivers of performance at the end of the day had much more to do with the actual skills of the employees than whatever financial rewards were dangled in front of them. So interesting findings so far, but I want to suggest something perhaps even a little bit more stark.

30:44Dr. Jake Tuber:Very large incentives, particularly financial incentives, can also backfire. So fairly well-known researcher Dan O 'Reilly and their colleagues found that very high rewards sometimes reduced performance rather than improving it. There was a study that found higher incentives can impair performance by making feedback much more emotionally charged and actually increasing the amount of errors. That was, I think, Aschugar et al. in 2015. So some interesting notations here about money and actually getting in the way. Creativity and money don't seem to mix particularly well. When it comes to money making others feel like they're very controlled and they're being manipulated, marionetted in a system of control, it tends to lower motivation.

31:31Dr. Jake Tuber:And very large incentive systems can actually backfire, leading people to make errors, sort of ramp up the pressure on them and their judgment, leading to making poor decisions. What is your vibe now? You've heard the pro, you've heard the con. Give me your current thinking. I have a question. actually. I wondered if in when you were looking through all the all the studies, whether you saw anything that kind of suggested that there's a limit to how motivating money money can be. So what I'm thinking is that if I'm if I'm already fairly financially secure, then is money going to be that less of a motivator for me than somebody who is maybe less financially secure?

32:12Dr. Jake Tuber:There's a particular study I saw that touched on this, not necessarily global financial security, but whether or not more money has limited returns. So a study by Kuvas in 2006 found that base pay mattered much more than bonus pay when it came to motivation and knowledge work. So base level pay was positively related to sort of self-reported work performance and commitment levels, but bonus level was not. In other words, once you satisfy the basics, those additional pieces were not necessarily that motivating. I think that this is very intuitive. So some of your listeners will probably be familiar with some studies that have been cited about how once you as a human reach a certain baseline level of income, extra income doesn't have a huge impact on your happiness and well-being.

33:05Dr. Jake Tuber:There was a famous study years ago, something like$70 ,000 US, which thanks to inflation is now probably probably about seven or eight million dollars U.S., is what you need to be happy. And above that level, generally speaking, it doesn't make a huge difference in your overall happiness over time. That's been challenged a bit. There are famous studies about lottery winners not being happier. By the way, I think those have all been debunked. I'm pretty sure everyone who wins, you know, 20 million dollars in the lottery 10 years later is slightly happier and more content with their life. Because you can you can obliterate a lot of the banality and misery that we all have to deal with.

33:38Dr. Jake Tuber:If you can have everybody taking care of all those little things, whether it's filing taxes or doing laundry. So I do think there's some questioning that does need to go on with some of those large scale findings. But the underlying premise of it's about enough of a baseline to make sure that you are secure and then does it make a difference? I think is huge. And Leanne, you'll know this. This to me is one of the core takeaways. And if I had to give you a sort of clean set of takeaways, it would be this. Money is a motivator. It is not reliably the best motivator. It works best when you can use money to motivate people to excel when a task has a very clear line of sight between your input and the output you're going to get for it.

34:21Dr. Jake Tuber:So the belief, the efficacy that my effort will land in certain results in these simple, non-complex tasks, money can motivate. In other words, if I said to you, go out in the street and hand out flyers to everyone you see and I'll give you a dollar for every flyer. Yeah, you're probably going to go hand out more flyers. That makes sense. But in general, when the work is really complex, certainly when it's creative and in a lot of knowledge work environments where you're not just putting in more hours and making more widgets for more money, it's going to be harder to have money as a core motivator once you reach a baseline.

34:54Dr. Jake Tuber:And for me, this really gets at my single favorite piece of research around compensation and motivation, which like the research that I personally love is not a small study conducted just last week in a published journal that none of us have read yet. It's one of the most famous studies and pieces of research ever written on this. And it's our old friend, Frederick Herzberg, who published first in 1959 and then his famous article in 1968. His theory, his motivator hygiene theory of what actually drives people to act. Herzberg's theory, I think, still sticks. What Herzberg found is that you can separate motivators into two categories, things he called hygiene factors and things he called motivators.

35:40Dr. Jake Tuber:Hygiene factors were things like perks, benefits, compensation. And these were things which Herzberg found did not increase satisfaction on the job, but could merely mitigate dissatisfaction on the job. So in other words, giving people a little bit more money, giving people perks, they could take a job that was really dissatisfying and maybe make it up to baseline. But additional money, additional perks couldn't take you from baseline to flourishing. It couldn't get you to the next level of performance, of commitment, of satisfaction. And I'm bundling those together a little bit. They're slightly different constructs.

36:17Dr. Jake Tuber:But what he did find was things like autonomy, finding meaning in work, being recognized and being part of a vision and commitment with others. Good job design. Those were the things that really took something and went from 0 % satisfaction to up the satisfaction scale. And I think the more recent research really continues in very subtle but meaningful ways to bear out what Herzberg found, which is, yes, you certainly need a baseline of compensation and money. and certainly when the task is very simple, a little extra money can get a little extra work, maybe a lot more money can lead to a lot more work, but most of the time, you need to be taken care of sufficiently and beyond that, you might drive some behaviors, but you're not gonna get real motivation.

37:01I just have a quick question and I'm not expecting to pull some research out here, but just your gut instinct, if I may. Do you think that if we compare creativity or creative careers and caring careers with the likes of Wall Street, Billions, you know, all the TV programs about that. Do you think it skews that actually money is a motivator for Harvey Specter, but not necessarily for someone in ER?

37:24Dr. Jake Tuber:What a powerful question. I do want to suggest that what motivates people is not uniform. So some people will be motivated by money more than others. Some people will be motivated by security more than others. People motivated by recognition, people motivated by performance, etc. I do think that a lot of times we tend to assume that take those financial sectors where the bonuses are huge and it's all about moving money to make money. I do think there's an assumption that what is driving people in those moments is money. But I think money is probably best thought of as a very useful, tangible scoreboard for what they're actually after, which is mastery, which is exceptional performance at their craft in the moment.

38:06Dr. Jake Tuber:And the nice thing about those careers and a wonderful thing about money is it provides the clearest metric. And so to me, this also explains why people who have a tremendous amount of money tend to still be extremely greedy and want more. It's not necessarily because they're inherently greedy. It's because they've constructed their entire self-concept and identity around their performance in their field, around how they stack up against their peers. It's a very socialized way of viewing oneself going through the world, which I think has, you know, psychological limitations and can be hard on people in a lot of ways.

38:38Dr. Jake Tuber:But it makes sense that if you're on the Forbes billionaire list at 162 and your good friend just went from 163 to 144, you're going to want to get down to 143 because it's not that the extra dollars get you something tangible that you don't have, but it's the clearest sign that you're still performing what you consider your craft really well. So I think that in a variety of these cases, I tend to look at money, yes, as certainly people who are not earning very much needed to cover basic needs and even basic comforts or even some luxury items. But once you're talking about stratospheric wealth, to me, that's a great example of how money is just an unbelievably useful scoreboard.

39:18Dr. Jake Tuber:And the reality is people then wind up getting so warped by that scoreboard that they pursue it in place of what the scoreboard is meant to serve for them to begin with, which is their life satisfaction, their contentment, their sense of mastery, their sense of autonomy and trying to get the most out of our consciousness while we're here alive on this planet. For business leaders listening who are like, OK, so it might be worth me looking into some kind of bonus incentive structure, knowing everything you've just said. Is there a danger that if there isn't a task in terms of that can have maybe more variables that the individual can't control, could drive unethical behavior to achieve that outcome to get paid?

39:59Dr. Jake Tuber:It's a wonderful question. And I'll give you the short answer, which is absolutely. There's a classic case of the individual incentives that you give someone having downstream results that you want. A classic paper, I believe, I want to say it was from 1995 by a gentleman named Steve Kerr. I'm going to miss, I always get the ordering of the title wrong, but it was something like, on the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B. And it sort of walks through all of these sort of examples where the individual incentives given to particular people in a system were ultimately going to produce behaviors contrary to what the system was going to achieve.

40:35Dr. Jake Tuber:And he walks through examples sort of in the corporate space, but everything as big as one famous example he cited was Americans' involvement in the Vietnam War. Excuse me, Vietnam conflict. I know America has not formally declared war since 1940, whatever. The Vietnam conflict, which, of course, we can't be seen as ever losing a war, can we now? So what he found was in prior wars, the soldiers were sent abroad and their mission was essentially you get to come home when you win the war. And so they were incentivized to go win the war. In Vietnam, soldiers were sent in, you're here and you come back after X amount of months.

41:10Dr. Jake Tuber:Their only goal is to stay alive for X amount of months until they were rotated back. And so what they did downstream was going to be very different. Organizations suffer this fate all the time. The classic example in a lot of modern knowledge work environments is take an individual seller, a sales executive whose job is to find new clients. They go and they promise clients the world. They sign a new client because they're incentivized to do that. But exactly what they sign them up to do is not necessarily exactly what the product team can go and deliver. And so then they hand it back to the organization and the product team is furious with them.

41:44Dr. Jake Tuber:Those people don't get along internally. They're demotivated. The product team feels like they've gotten handed work. That's not why they did this job, et cetera. And then you probably have the executives at the organization compensating the product team in some way based on overall net sales performance. So I say this to the listeners in your organization, the business leaders who are out there is think of compensation and performance as one gear in the grandfather clock of the organization that you run. And you're thinking, how do I get that clock, the output to be perfect? How do I hit my target?

42:17Dr. Jake Tuber:Tell the time correctly. You can go and shift that one gear of compensation, but at the end of the day, it's going to have all of these downstream effects because that gear exists in a very interactive, interchangeable system. So what you need is to come in with a larger vision of how do I want to tell the time to begin with? Compensation has to line up with the skills of the employees, has to line up with management practices, has to line up with the climate that managers are creating. That has to be downstream of how leaders are thinking about the changing mission and strategy of their organization, which is going to shape culture, which is going to shape how you recruit and what you promote for and a lot of the corporate policies.

42:56Dr. Jake Tuber:It's also going to have to shape the technological systems that you utilize. So all of these are different gears in this clock. And when you turn one, depending on the size of that gear and where it's positioned, it's going to have downstream impacts and you're going to get caught up. So I would absolutely encourage business leaders to take a good hard look at whether compensation is leading people towards unethical or undesirable behavior for sure. But I would also encourage them not to say, aha, I listened to this great episode. Money isn't the motivator we think it was. I know two places I can go make these tweaks.

43:28Dr. Jake Tuber:Absolutely worth looking at. But if you don't consider the larger set of constructs and systems at the same time, you're going to wind up with a clock that tells the wrong time because you tweaked the wrong year without accounting for everything happening downstream. Can I dare to say the verdict then from what you said would be true, but with huge caveats? And if you only do that, it probably won't turn out very well. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good takeaway. It is true. Money is a very strong motivator and important one. But you cannot infer from that conclusion, I'm going to go change compensation and get the behaviors I want without considering a variety of other factors about your organization simultaneously.

44:07Brilliant. Another reason why organizations need to hire organizational psychologists to help them do this stuff in the right way, right?

44:13Dr. Jake Tuber:And this is in many ways why we've seen, at least in the U.S., the rise of organizational psychology as a profession. Because so many organizations continue to step in it while they're trying to make these changes and realizing that it's not easy. And by the way, hiring an org psych team to go and fix this isn't a magic fix either. It's just really hard, messy stuff that takes time and is challenging. so don't expect that a very complex problem can somehow have a very simple solution fabulous i love that but you know i love as much you've got a kind of favorite children it is the time for the world famous weekly what famous weekly surgery i'm all i'm all i'm all try again take a breath and try again you've got this al me and jake believe in you it is time for the world famous weekly workplace surgery where i put your questions to leanne normally but now i'm putting them to jake dr jake and leanne as well so we've got question number one which is around prioritizing ai skills over experience when hiring so this reads i recently read that reddit's ceo plans to go heavy on hiring graduates because they're more ai native than experienced workers i can see the logic but it's made me question my own approach i've always hired for experience and judgment i always think that things that tend to take time to build are important am i about to get this horribly wrong.

45:29And if AI capability is becoming more important, what does that mean for how we should be building teams now? What an interesting question and very timely as well, thanks to Oracle today. And mind you, that's just timestamped the episode, the recording, isn't it? But yeah, pretty tough stuff. So Dr. Jake, do you have some thoughts on that? It depends what the job is.

45:48Dr. Jake Tuber:If you're working at Reddit and you just wrote that in, yeah, I'd probably focus on AI skills if you're a Reddit employee and just read that your CEO is doing that. If you're hiring airline pilots, probably doesn't matter as much. So I think that I'm being a bit obvious here and perhaps not doing the question justice, but it really depends on the job. The very classical org psych answer is you want to analyze what that job actually needs and really want to devote how you hire and what you hire for to the particulars of that job. Now, let me try to answer this in a way that I think will resonate with many of your listeners.

46:22Dr. Jake Tuber:Take an average knowledge work job. So if we imagine a continuum where I'm working at Reddit, Reddit is a website, an app. Most of the things they're doing are meant to live online. I can absolutely see how AI skill is the most important skill. If I'm hiring airline pilots, their job is to fly a plane, et cetera. They're not really interacting with AI all that much. At least I hope not. Not yet. Probably don't need to focus on that skill. But let's talk about the middle of this bell curve. Let's talk about most of us here. What I would really encourage is not to think of AI skills as some completely new and different category.

46:55Dr. Jake Tuber:Think of it just like any other skill that you would look at when you're trying to figure out what's going to drive job performance. Think of it maybe as a bigger, more important skill, like somebody with general computer skills in the 1980s or 1990s, but like anything else, just a skill. And then you have to look at both what the industry is that you're in, where you're strategically positioned and moving, the actual team and what they're working on. And of course, perhaps most importantly, the specifics of the role you're hiring for. If that is a role where historically access to a lot of in-depth knowledge really mattered a lot, AI is making that less relevant.

47:31Dr. Jake Tuber:AI is making it so that a decent amount of quality knowledge is at the fingertips of most employees. So in some ways, I would say you need to have sufficient AI skill to get that knowledge, but deep AI expertise, you need to be a machine learning expert, you need to understand the ins and outs of how the neural nets and LLMs work. No, probably not. But you need to have that baseline so you can utilize the wealth of knowledge that AI can bring anyone at their fingertips and then focus on some of the other skills that your job analysis has shown to be a driver of performance. If you're thinking about a job where, frankly, it's the human pieces and the experience and current and seemingly near-term future AI won't get at, then focus on those things.

48:15Dr. Jake Tuber:But I think the answer to oversimplify is it really depends on the job. And I would encourage you not to think of AI skills as somehow anything completely new and different, but just a very valuable, important current skill. Does it matter for this job and this organization? that's going to be your guiding heuristic not that there is one set of skills that matters across the board fabulous liana have you got any thoughts on that jake's jake talked about job analysis he did makes my heart very happy i i agree with all of that absolutely agree with all of that the thing i would add is yes ai native we is a term we use to describe gen z because they hit kind of a point of their their education and and it's usually kind of around like the teenage years isn't it that the native thing applies to yeah so it's kind of like they've grown up with AI that's all it means it's like millennials would kind of internet native or digital natives they called um the younger millennials so I think it's yes because they are AI native there is a likelihood that younger people are likely to be more comfortable and competent in AI, but it's not a certainty.

49:30So you can't discriminate on age and assume that no older people have skills in AI because they absolutely do. So going back to what Jake said in terms of the job analysis, if you identify that some type of understanding of AI is required, cool. But you can't then say, oh, well, only anyone under the age of 24 is going to have that because that's not that's not true so just be careful um yeah graduates are cool lots of great things graduates can do but you know it's not always just about graduates it could be somebody who has ai skills one of the interesting things about ai

50:08Dr. Jake Tuber:too and the way that we interact with it through the form of learning uh excuse me large language models is that you can become sufficiently ai native with this technology in a way that's very different than other technologies, because all you're doing is talking to it in your particular native language, and it's getting better and better at figuring out what to do on the computer side of things as you speak to it. So I would definitely encourage those of you who are listening who feel like I've missed the AI boat. It's not for me. I'm not AI native. I'm not a computer native. If you're feeling like I didn't just grow up with this, it's too late.

50:42Dr. Jake Tuber:It's left me behind. Quite the opposite. AI tools are getting better and better at taking the average person who just knows how to get work done, you can talk to that AI tool. When I sit here at my computer using AI tools, I am usually actually speaking out loud. Great shock to you listeners to know that I like talking. I'm usually sitting there speaking to it out loud in my microphone and having a discourse, asking it to research things, get things done, etc. So consider yourselves, listeners, AI natives, so long as you can speak any current human language. And I just want to add one small thing from that from the old bastard in the corner, is that when I was at school, we were given calculators and they were like, okay, well, what's the point in actually learning how to multiply now because we've got a calculator to do it?

51:25And our teacher said to us, because you need to know roughly what the answer should be because a calculator, you put the wrong thing in, you could get 25 ,000. And so therefore that's what you think the answer is. I think this is where this is going to be really relevant here because yes, someone younger might be better at putting the prompts in, might be better at talking, getting the output out, but it takes someone experienced to go, That is completely wrong. That is just not even in the realms of being right. And they know that because they've got the experience. So I think that talking to this person who's looking at hiring, yes, it's great to have someone in who knows how to use AI, but also you need someone in the corner smoking a pipe with their slippers on going, well, that just is not correct at all.

52:07I think your teacher is better than mine because mine was like, well, you're not always going to have a calculator in your pocket, are you? Actually, Mrs. Jones. Anyway, we could talk or genuinely talk about this all day, but I have two more questions for you. So the second question is, what do you do when company values quietly disappear? So this person writes, my company used to talk a lot about its EDI commitments, but recently that's gone very quiet. The strategy is gone from the website. The lead role hasn't been replaced. And when I asked about it, I was told the business is focusing on other priorities.

52:41That's where your rabbit is. As a person of color, it's made me question whether the culture I thought I was joining ever really existed. So both of you, how do you respond when a company's stated values start to feel more like words on a wall than actually reality? Thoughts? Who wants to go first? Let Jake go first. No, let Jake go first. Jake.

53:01Dr. Jake Tuber:I have often asked people to consider whether or not their company's values are just wall art. In other words, are they just the things that are in the wall on the sort of marble placard as you walk into the building or are they actually lived? In the study of company values, there's a nice distinction often made between espoused values and enacted values. So espoused values are the things that you say you're about and enacted values are what you're actually about. And what the research generally finds is that organizations tend to perform better over time when those two overlap. In other words, when what you say you do actually matches what you do do in practice, people tend to be more engaged, more motivated, etc.

53:43Dr. Jake Tuber:There's more alignment in the organization. So many organizations have this drift in general. So it's always healthy for this listener and others to say, is how we are actually asked to do the job in line with what our company puts on the wall in the corporate office or puts on the company intranet site? And in this particular case, it's one that hits home, certainly here in the States. So many organizations since the reelection of President Trump have been somewhat quietly taking their DEI statements off of their website, something like I think more than half of the Fortune 100. I might be totally getting that wrong.

54:14Dr. Jake Tuber:So fact check me on this. I've been pulling these away. Sometimes they are popping up in other subtle language, which are basically the company saying, we still care about this, but we don't want to get under the ire of the current executive branch. So rest assured they're there. Others are just coming off entirely. And especially if those populated in recent years in response to social progressive movements for them, it is absolutely valid and I think probably correct to feel that if your organization suddenly 10 years ago said they cared about these things and are that quick to pull the rug away, then, yeah, it's probably reasonable to think that those were not real values.

54:49Dr. Jake Tuber:But I think that this particular challenge is very, very discouraging for this individual in this situation. If they're saying this organization used to care about these things, do they not care about them anymore? I think certainly they don't care about them as much. I mean, say what you will about whether or not that is the ultimate end all be all of whether or not we have these values as to whether or not they're on the website and the wall. if you're willing to take them away, they're certainly not the biggest priority. They certainly take a backseat to any concerns about financial performance or the downstream consequences of having them out there.

55:23Dr. Jake Tuber:So if they were trumpeting them as the most important values and now they're off, yeah, it was BS. It was bullshit to begin with. If they're just maybe taking a pause, I would pay more attention to what's actually happening in the environment. Are you feeling like hiring is really changing? Are you feeling like the voices that are being considered are no longer the same? Are you feeling like leadership in particular is sending signals like, yeah, I'm so glad we don't have to put up with this EDI or DEI BS anymore. And now we can actually, you know, care about what we really care about. Time to look elsewhere.

55:57Dr. Jake Tuber:But if you feel like they're just really feeling the heat of the current social pressures and are doing whatever they can, I think it's okay to be a bit charitable, but, you know, use your actual real experience, the enacted nature of how the organization goes to work every day, that is what you care about. So whenever an organization comes to me and tells me what they care about, I say, you want to tell me what you care about? Show me your P &L. I will tell you what you're caring about if you show me what you spend money on. Show me what you take any discretionary choices that you can make and put it towards.

56:27Dr. Jake Tuber:And that is really what you care about. Not what you put on the wall, not what you put under your sort of applications about what you're about as a company. show me where you spend your money and your time those things you have choice over and i will tell you what you care about so to this listener i would say where's the organization spending its money and its time that is the indication of whether or not those values have just disappeared from the website but still live there or they were in fact never really there to begin with wow yeah yeah i feel like i'm just behind dr jake going yeah bully yeah anything to add brilliant not really not really the only thing that I might say to the listener is if you do feel that then the values aren't what you signed up for and you're seeing very different behaviors in the workplace that are having an impact on your experience of work be aware that the longer you're somewhere that's values are different to yours that dissonance over time is going to feel really uncomfortable I am equally very aware the economic climate we're in and the job market they were in so moving on might not be as easy but just be mindful that that is more than likely that dissonance that strain that tension is going to cause pressure on you and stress and over time could result in symptoms of burnout you know well-being will dip mental health etc so look at other ways to look after yourself as well if there if there is a reason you have to stay in that business for a longer period of time is there volunteering you can do is the thing in your community that, you know, values that you can plug into and get your kind of your meaningful work from that to try and kind of keep energy up while you're, until you're in a position where you can move on.

58:10You can't see Dr. Jake, but he's cheering what you're saying. Definitely.

58:14Dr. Jake Tuber:I'm tearing up, Leanne. I'm just, you know, it's creating such, you're hitting with my values, Leanne. Let me just put it that way. You're hitting my value. You're both espousing and enacting my value set here. So cheers. right back at you beautiful okay let's see if we can break that that loveliness in the last question as if we can get people to argue let's get let's get you two to argue like this one so the this one's about when companies promote managers but then just leave them to figure it all out what i am shook that happened well unfortunately it did happen in this case this person says i was promoted because i was good at my job but no one ever trained me to manage people I was just given a team and expected to get on with it now I'm dealing with performance issues team conflict and trying to navigate employment law without really knowing what I'm doing I bet you are if I'm honest I'm worried about getting it wrong I bet you are too now the general question is why do organizations keep promoting strong ICs but I think really the question is why did they promote me and then just leave me in the mire to figure it out myself do we want to go to Lee first and then we'll go to Dr.

59:19Jake no I think Jake is mainly okay go on Dr. Jake

59:23Dr. Jake Tuber:Well, my advice to you is to just hang on tight until early 2027 when my new book, The Deliberate Manager, is available in stores everywhere. Let me just leave you with that. So just hang on tight and I'll have all your answers in due time. I'm still editing the manuscript, so let me figure out the answers. Thank you, by the way, for teeing up such an egregious plug of a book that is nowhere near finished, by the way. I'm not sure I did get up, John Tidake. I'm not sure I did it in any way, but carry on. Listen, for those listeners who are doubting what's going on, the whole negotiation that took place in the background was Al said, Jake, will you please come on?

1:00:01Dr. Jake Tuber:We'll let you promote the book. We'll make it seem organic. You can slip it in there. You know, we don't do pay as you play kind of thing here. But, you know, go ahead and mention it. So I'll create a fake question that you can answer just to tee up your book that comes out next year. So you're getting a look at how the sausage is made here, by the way. No. It's an unbelievable question. I don't think sausage on the podcast, can we? Can we? I don't know. This is an adult podcast. We can say sausage, right? No, it's not anymore. A poor listener wants to answer that question. Why do organizations keep on throwing management at people and not training them?

1:00:41Dr. Jake Tuber:There are so many good answers to this question. And the answer that I have to give you, in all seriousness, I have no fucking idea why they keep thinking this is a good way to go about running an organization. Because all of the research you guys have talked about, do people leave their managers or do people leave organizations? The drivers, the tip of the spear in culture is people managers. The job is different as an individual contributor. Every leader at every organization would agree 100 % at those. And then you ask them to go and spend some money and some time on developing managers and they don't do it.

1:01:17Dr. Jake Tuber:it's classic root cause. Is it a matter of that they don't have the skill to go and develop it or don't have the understanding of who to go and develop it? I don't know. Do they not have the will to go and do it? Do they think it just takes too much time and energy and managers are just born not made? So we're going to throw you in there and see if it works out. I don't know. Is there just not money for that? And it truly is the last thing off the chopping block. And therefore, yes, unfortunately, we can't spend any time and money to train you. We would if we could, but we're down to our last dollar.

1:01:47Dr. Jake Tuber:I sincerely doubt that. I don't have a great answer for you, but I can tell you this. You are A, not alone. B, there are tons of great resources out there for you. And C, you can absolutely connect with other managers. Think about the people who are exceptional managers. They may not have had training either. More than half of organizations provide no manager training whatsoever before promoting people into management roles. And I I know that figure varies. I've seen it as high as 70, 72. I've seen it in the low end in the 50s. Leanne, I don't know if you have more data about that, but it is astonishing.

1:02:20Dr. Jake Tuber:So you are not alone. Go read about it. Go mentor. Honestly, AI probably has pretty decent suggestions about how to have one-on-one conversations, et cetera. But yes, you are not alone if you have to figure it out for yourself. And if you can figure out why so many companies keep making this very expensive, costly mistake, let me know. Wow. If you could copy me in on that email as well, that would be useful. I did see another data point on this just the other day from the Institute of Chartered Management. And it was 82 % of newly promoted managers have received no form of training or support.

1:02:56Dr. Jake Tuber:Unbelievable. So you're not. I should actually say highly believable, actually, given my own experience. Not unbelievable. It's highly believable. It is a classic mistake. And you know what I think? I don't know if you would agree with this, Leanne. But I actually think just a very little bit of training can go a long way. This isn't needing to take people out of their job for three weeks at an intense institute off in the woods somewhere. This is some basics. I recently just ran a large manager coaching cohort for a global PR organization. We had people from across the globe, I think 15 different time zones, checking in on six different topics once a month for six months.

1:03:35Dr. Jake Tuber:We had groups of 12 or less. It was an instructor-led group coaching conversation on these topics. And the results were outstanding in terms of people saying, I feel like a manager now. I feel like I understand the job differently. I'm thinking about my priorities differently. I feel empowered. It's nice to finally get an opportunity to talk to other people in a position similar as mine. So that's six hours over six months, not too much time, not too much money. Just something like that can make a huge difference in supporting employees. So I think it's a shock that this doesn't happen more. Yeah, it is.

1:04:09It is shocking. And I don't like you say I have no idea either. I think the other, I guess, a bit of practical advice I'd give to this this person. I don't think it should be expected that you're navigating employment law. that's why we have HR colleagues in the business to help us and if your business doesn't have an internal capability they will absolutely have an you know an outsourced capability that you should be able to to have access to or escalate to somebody above you if they need to take that to their HR representative employment law as a newly promoted manager as any manager really isn't really your area of of you know expertise you should be partnered with it by a HR professional in those types of scenarios so anything like that be very careful you don't want to break any rules are really really gonna mess things up for you go to your senior leader go to your HR person for anything around that um yeah performance issues and team conflict is really difficult isn't it I agree with Jake if there's any other managers in the business that you really admire look for maybe some informal mentorship um if you have any budget yourself a really simple thing to do I think a coaching course can be really effective because it helps you learn these kind of pro social skills like listening and empathy and and they're gonna serve you in this role and in general anyway if you do have a bit of budget um there's also so many great resources now online i'm thinking of vince sanderson who's on tiktok and youtube that does like five to ten minute videos of like how to have a difficult conversation i'm thinking of kate waterfall hill who does linda the bad manager so she'll make a skit about about linda being an awful manager and then follow it up with like a one to two minute on what Linda should have done which is really good so there's loads of free stuff out there just have a little look at who who it is that's delivering that look for somebody the way you know you can check out their credibilities cross check with LinkedIn or something see who they've worked for what roles they've done there's lots of things out there so you're not alone you might feel alone but you're not and they're absolutely things that if your organization isn't willing to help you with and that's a conversation to have to ask is there any budget for management training but if they're not there are resources out there that are gonna

1:06:19Dr. Jake Tuber:are gonna help for sure yeah and for only for only$29.99 my book coming out in early 2027 the deliberate manager can be your go-to resource for all your management needs sorry i'm cracking myself and you know what and you know what i can exclusively reveal that if you were to email dr j and use the code truth lies and work then you'll either get some money off or you can join an exclusive mastermind with him or he will just send you a check and reimburse you the entire amount we're not quite sure what it's all jeopardy dr j leanne it has been genuinely an absolute pleasure it's been a blast we need to do this more often to the point where i'm thinking let's do it every single freaking week uh absolutely loved it if you have your own question you'd like me to put to leanne and hopefully dr jake if you'll come back uh then please check out the show notes and there's a way to get in touch uh coming up thursday absolutely no freaking idea before that though.

1:07:13Dr. Jake has a very special, lovely gift for our listeners. Do you? Yeah. It's not his book. No, it's not.

1:07:21Dr. Jake Tuber:No, in fact, if some of you could help me finish that, that would be great. But in the interim, I would be delighted if you would love to follow along, join the conversation that I'm having on my sub stack, which is called WorkWise. You can join the over 3 ,500 subscribers to that. And as a special for those of you who are listeners and fans of the show, we will give you six months of access to WorkWise for free. We'll post maybe a link in the show notes or elsewhere, particular link that if you use, it's got a very strange code. I wish I could say it was just like, you know, workwise.substack.com slash truth.

1:07:54Dr. Jake Tuber:It doesn't work that way. They give you some strange code. I can't create a coupon, but there's a link to it. Would love to have you. And frankly, if at any point you're a viewer of the Substack, which typically upstates just, you know, a couple of times a week here or there with different segments, and it's something that you can't afford, just shoot me a note and I'm happy to get you a free subscription to that. Very, very kind. I'm a subscriber. I'm enjoy. I enjoy it. Me too. I actually almost fell for the April Fool's one. Yes. Yeah, I opened it after April Fool's though in my defense, but I got about, probably about two thirds of the way through and it was when, like, it was when Jake's recommended Myers-Briggs.

1:08:29I was like, bullshit. April Fool's.

1:08:32Dr. Jake Tuber:You know what's going to catch Leanne. You could literally put Leanne through the ringer on anything And as soon as you mentioned the validity of Myers-Briggs, she's like, hang on a second. Is this a reality show? That's how you get her. Yeah. Well, I was like, Leanne, there's a camera over there. There's a camera up there. Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you again for joining us, Dr. Jake Tuba. Thank you, Leanne, for being awesome. Thank you, audience, for being there and listening. And yeah, we will see you very soon. We love you all. Bye. Bye-bye. Say bye, Jake. Say bye. Bye, Jake.

1:09:08Thank you.