300. JP Morgan's sex scandal, A.I. fears and the executive presence problem. PLUS! Are diverse teams better? With Dr Jake Tuber

17:31I like that. One of the challenges that I think organizations will see as well is that there is a big conflation happening between whether or not technology can do a job and whether or not organizations are actually capable of adopting that technology.

17:47Dr. Jake Tuber:So when you see a lot of predictions from leaders at organizations like Microsoft, like OpenAI about AI is going to be able to do all of these jobs. Yes, in a vacuum, you could construct DNA of an organization from scratch that would enable AI to do that work. But that's very different than implementing AI in a system that has a lot of different handoffs and moving parts. And it's been built far more around human inefficiency than we realize. I see it as very similar to the fact that self-driving cars, if they were the only things on the road, would drive extremely safely all the time. But they're navigating a road infrastructure that was built for humans and is still being driven by humans.

18:26Dr. Jake Tuber:So they stop and stutter and don't work perfectly in all the places, some new places that are built just for them. They do just fine. But within human infrastructure, it's a challenge. And so I do think that AI adoption will still lag behind the technological capabilities because there's an infrastructure problem. They don't have the roads there, so to speak, to allow AI to flourish. And just because it can get done technologically, it doesn't mean the organization can do it. But that won't stop leaders from spending money on AI or maybe as we can talk more about saying that AI is the reason that they're making job cuts, etc.

19:01Dr. Jake Tuber:The AI can do some of the tasks, but the tasks all added together is not the full sum that makes up the work getting done. I love that. The roads aren't there. where we're going, Marty, we don't need roads. I love that. I love that. We will definitely come back to that. There was a really quickly, there was also, I saw another thing, there was a survey by Gartner, I think, saying that 70 % of the rollout of AI agents have failed in industry, which makes sense because there's a whole like, I don't know about you, but I'm really in this nerdy AI stuff on X. And so I'm like looking at all the stuff that's really cool and how you get right into Claude and you get into memory and harness and all that.

19:40Whereas actually, we're like 0.1 % of the population, us nerds. And the majority of people are just going, oh, well, let's just get Claude to do that. And it drops a bollock, as they're saying again in the UK. Anyway, Lee, any more on that or do we need to go to Mr. Jake? No more on that.

19:54Leanne:I'll leave a link in the show notes. Jake, what have you seen this week?

19:57Dr. Jake Tuber:Have you heard about the salacious employee lawsuit happening at JP Morgan? I haven't. So the simple version, Al, is that a junior... Sorry, can I just stop you there? The simple version, Al, that's one of the nicest and most offensive things anyone's ever said to me. But carry on. The simple version. Let me break this down, Al. So there are people who have money and they call it a bank. And those people want other people to have money. And so they have a thing. They go to a building and they sit at... Sorry. I got a lot of... Nobody can see this, but Al is bright red. Let me tell you about the salacious lawsuit, though, across the pond from y 'all.

20:45Dr. Jake Tuber:So the version here is that a junior male employee has accused a senior female employee of essentially threatening his career and making racially insensitive remarks unless he submitted to all sorts of interesting sexual escapades. while the senior female employee categorically denies the entire thing, saying not only it's been blown out of proportion, but the entire thing is absurd and made up. So the interesting part, I think, for our purposes, is that word of the proposed settlement was leaked to The New York Times. J.P. Morgan offered a million dollars to this junior male employee just to settle the suit and keep it quiet.

21:26Dr. Jake Tuber:And he and his law team said no. Now, this might make it sound like there's obvious guilt and he realizes that he's got a lot more to gain by playing this out in the courts and letting this litigate. But it's also entirely plausible that$1 million is just the cost of doing business for a company like JP Morgan. It would cost them less to spend that million and pay this thing out quietly than to bother litigating it for years, than the amount of money attributed to the bad press, etc. And I think that's probably something that I bet most of our listeners don't realize, which is just the frequency with which companies settle suits here in the U.S.

22:05Dr. Jake Tuber:anyway, simply because it is just much cheaper to consistently settle lawsuits than it is to actually go through the process of discovery and pay for lawyers and outside counsel and litigation before you even get to something like bad press on a major scale. And I can tell you that I have worked with many companies where I have seen employees file absolutely, frankly, absurd lawsuits claiming things that I happen to know are just completely untrue. And the amount of time they get settled for an amount of money that, frankly, I don't think the organization should pay is staggering. And that's part of why employees keep doing it.

22:43Dr. Jake Tuber:Now, it's not a lot to the organization. And after the employee has to pay their lawyers out and taxes and all those other things, it's actually not all that much to them usually either. But this is built in to large companies P &Ls is the cost of just paying out a certain amount of lawsuits every year because it's simply cheaper and quicker and easier to pay them than it is to fight them. I heard a stat, and this is probably one of those like old wives tales. And there's a fancy word for old wives tales. And I can't really think what it is. I'm sure, Jake, you'll tell me what it is. but where if you earn over$100 ,000 a year in the U.S., you've got a one in three chance of being sued at some point in your life.

23:20Is that completely made up? Is that one of those?

23:22Dr. Jake Tuber:Oh, it could easily be the case, but I'm sure that might also count, you know, somebody suing you for a fender bender or something like that. Technically, the insurance company won't pay it. So I don't know how you'd really measure that, but yeah, it wouldn't shock me. But yeah, there's a shocking amount of, and it depends what you consider really getting sued, right? Is sending a letter saying we're intending to file suit, getting counted? is that but the u.s is such a heavily litigious country that this doesn't surprise me at all there's a whole industry whether it's ambulance chasing attorneys and personal injury to the corporate space where folks are just kind of buying and selling settlements it's kind of wild

23:59Leanne:my frustration with with this approach is that it comes a bit farcical doesn't it just comes to a game of like whether we we just we just don't know there's never any accountability in terms of somebody having to be found guilty in a sense of of something wrong or immoral or unethical that they've done in workplaces and I and I understand that if that if you're in that litigious environment organization's going to put aside a budget for that but it also then to me feels a bit icky because there's just an assumption that whether it's true or not, somebody's going to fuck up at some point this year in a way that is, you know, and if it is true, then what an awful, awful thing for this individual to have gone through.

24:50Leanne:And particularly for a man to raise concerns about this, it's actually quite rare. So really there could be a lot to learn from this and take from this and hold J.P. Morgan and this individual to account for this in a way that could be very progressive for our workplaces. So I think my frustration is less about the money itself, but how it influences a system that should be about some form of justice or accountability. And it just brings it back to a money game, which I'm not sure is useful for anybody, really. In a different world, in a world, in a different life, I trained as a maths teacher for like 11 to 18.

25:33I'm not sure what you call it in the US, but it's a middle school and upper school here. And one of the best bits of advice I got was never put yourself in a situation where someone could make an accusation. One of the children could make an accusation. So if you're in a room, always keep the door open.

25:50Dr. Jake Tuber:Ideally have someone else there. And it felt very sad because we're going back to like the early 1800s when I was teacher training. but it did feel really sad at that point but since we've moved on that's one of the best advice i've ever got so in any situation where it's with male female whatever i will always try and ensure that i'm not in a in a room with a closed door because just that you know that idea of all where there's smoke there's fire and all that you just you could just be fucked couldn't you from just someone just uttering nine words and then that's your career just up in flames it's it's such a tough reality to balance both the desire to believe people who come out saying, I've experienced something really horrible for me, and yet at the same time maintain the capability if it's proven to not be true to not hold it against the person who is accused, right?

26:39Dr. Jake Tuber:You have that illusory truth effect in where whatever gets put out into the world just sort of sits in people's brains as if it's true, even if it's debunked tenfold later. And that's really challenging. I've definitely known quite a few people who have been, I don't want to say necessarily wrongfully accused, that there's been part of it or accused of something that didn't really rise to the level of it was. And it kind of lives on in a really sad way. And then there's, of course, many more times where somebody doesn't raise their hand to make a completely credible accusation because they don't believe that they'll be believed or something like that.

27:10Dr. Jake Tuber:So it's just a really painful, complicated case by case situation where this sort of thing happens. And yes, the fact that I think, Leanne, to your earlier point, we don't always get a chance to really figure out the truth, we really just kind of figure out the situation and move past it, is very dissatisfying. And certainly the American legal system has really been built around that. Al, to your point as well, some of my friends who are employment lawyers love to remind their clients and others that they should never say or email or text or Slack or whatever, anything that they wouldn't be okay with being in red out loud in a courtroom in front of their friends and family.

27:46Dr. Jake Tuber:And that's pretty good advice. If you're not sure if you whether or not you'd be okay, having that read out in front of your closest friends and family in the whole world, and wind up on Google's first page forever, probably just don't do it or say it. Yeah, that's really, really good advice. Right, we are running short of time. So I will quickly tell you what I've been looking at this week. We've got Dr. Jake here. And so this is this is very apt because Dr. Jake is very lovable. And Stockholm startup lovable is apparently giving every employee an automatic 10 % pay rise on their work anniversary.

28:17So this is like, you don't have to negotiate for it. There's no annual review to see whether you're going to get it. There's no politics of, well, he got 15%, he got 8%. You just, if you stay, then you get 10 % on every annual. Year on year? Year on year. Wow. Now bear in mind, this is a tight, this is a small company really in terms of AI. I think it's 100, let me just check. I did write this down. They're going to say,

28:38Dr. Jake Tuber:it's just one employee. It's a single member. You made me cough on my own spit there. Yeah, I think it's 120, 20 odd employees. So it's not massive. And it has only been going for a couple of years. So, you know, we don't know what's going to happen. It's in AI, which, you know, it might be bought out. It might go out of business, whatever. But the point is, the longer you stay, the more valuable you become. So the head of growth, now let me just double check this. The head of growth, Alina Verner. I like saying that. Alina Verner. She basically said, and I'll read, employees shouldn't have to reprove their worth every single year just to keep what they've already earned.

29:17Now, to be fair, Lovable, it's not your average company. They're just crossing$400 million in what they call ARR. Well, everyone calls ARR, but annual recurring revenue. Easy for me to say.

29:29Leanne:$400 million in annual recurring revenue. Yep. That's almost what you guys do for this show. Almost, Jake, almost. And we're like, we've been going, yeah, longer. What does Lovable do? Lovable is a vibe coding. Well, they probably don't call themselves a vibe coding. But basically, if you want to go and build a website, then you go to Lovable and you create a website and you give it an English, like a natural English prompt. And it would just basically build a website. And it's different to Claude in that you build it and then they host it. You don't need to like go and say, right, thanks for the files.

29:59I will now upload to AWS or Cloudflare or whatever you do. They just host it all and it's all done. So it's for.

30:04Leanne:We see where that recurring revenue bit is coming in then. Well, exactly. They're a bit smart. I can't say they're smarter than Anthropic being the most valuable company or the fastest growing company. in the world ever. But they are, I think they're pretty smart and I think they're pretty cool. But the point is, sorry, I've gone off track here. I've gone nerdery. The point is, to the two of the world famous eminent psychologists in the world, my thought was, if you're automatically going to get 10%, does that mean that you're a bit less motivated to put your best in? Thoughts? Dr. Jetsch, we'll go to you first and then we'll go to the second best psychologist in the room.

30:43I mean, you're not wrong, but ouch.

30:46Dr. Jake Tuber:Shouldn't be starting with me. You know, I appreciate the reflexive instinct that, okay, well, if we're decoupling performance management from pay, then what's the incentive to keep trying? I don't think you should be worried about that. I do think, in fact, it's probably healthier to decouple performance management from the actual paid incentive structure that employees rely on year over year. But I also would go the other direction now, which is I hope they don't just get rid of measuring and driving for performance in general. And I don't think they are as well. So I don't think we should read this as if employees are just never going to be assessed on performance and they're just going to continue to coast and do their job with 10 percent more coming year over year.

31:32Dr. Jake Tuber:I do think, though, that the idea of, hey, we're just going to say what you get across the board. You don't need to fight about it. You don't need to argue about it. You know what you're walking into. Now you're focused on actually getting ahead, et cetera. And again, it doesn't mean there aren't promotions. There aren't new opportunities and roles. But this gets back into some of the things we discussed a few episodes ago around hygiene factors versus real motivators. And I love the idea of decoupling performance rewards from performance management. I think it's hard to do, but I think this is an impressive way to continue to think about it.

31:59Dr. Jake Tuber:But I'll also add, by the way, this isn't all that novel. There's a lot of jobs in the U.S. and elsewhere where you're in a job and as part of your union rate, you just get a certain raise every year. You might be able to negotiate more. It might not be this set in stone. But this isn't absolutely unheard of. A lot of teacher salaries and other things work this way. So it's not crazy.

32:17Leanne:I'm with Jake. I think what I would be more excited about, and this is good. Don't get me wrong. This is lovely. I want to hear about the other stuff it's being coupled or it's being done alongside of. like is pay transparency a thing does everybody know in terms of salary is pay equity a thing how is how is performance managed them and how is that reward in terms of promotions or development or other aspects of recognition I think sometimes my concern is business owners listening might go oh cool so I'll just give everyone a 10 % pay rise every year and that's my job done and it's like no no that's nice but that's as you know as Jake said that's that's not the be and all end of all of motivation, it's a bit more, dare I say, holistic than that.

33:04Leanne:There's more to it. So I'd want to hear more what's going alongside it to get really excited about it.

33:08Dr. Jake Tuber:Good point. I don't think that simply saying you're going to earn more next year, that's a bit more than just index to the cost of living and inflation, is necessarily going to stop people from trying. In fact, if people seem to stop trying because of that, it's a great indicator that they probably don't belong at your organization, period. I don't know if it necessarily would weed out people writ large because everybody is still there for a paycheck. It's a job. But it would weed out people who are only tied to the value of the work being directly attributable to their compensation in the very near term.

33:40Dr. Jake Tuber:And it's not that you can't work really well with employees who want to be compensated more for doing well. But depending on your strategy, depending on the kind of choices you want people to make short versus long term, it can lead to not so great consequences at times. So I do think there's something really to this. And I've been on Lovable myself. I actually checked it out a couple of months ago randomly, and it seems like a pretty cool site. So it doesn't surprise me that they're doing cool stuff internally as well as externally. Nice, nice. Okay, we need to go to a very short break. After the break, we've got Truth or Lie.

34:12That's where Dr. Jake is going to be illuminating us on whether something is a truth or it is a lie. And then we've got the world-famous weekly workplace surgery where I put your questions to both Leanne and Dr. Jake. Don't go anywhere.

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34:58The seven day weekend is your weekly dose of business finance and side hustle motivation. So go subscribe and get brand new episodes featuring a mixture of guests and Laura's hard earned tips that will teach you how to build the digital tools necessary to build your own seven day weekend. No butter required.

35:14Leanne:For a taste of what's to come, go and listen to A Day in the Life of an Anti-Workholic, where Laura explains how to maximize your productivity with some fun and quirky techniques while living your best life. This is so up my street. Listen to 7 Day Weekend wherever you get your podcasts.

35:38Welcome back to Truth or Lie. Is that a time of the week where we take a popular workplace idea and ask if the research actually backs it up?

35:45Leanne:And this week I get a week off. Thank you. Thank Thank you, Dr. Jake. You're my hero. And we are examining together, but let's be honest, Ellen, I've done very little to contribute to this segment, if diverse teams perform better. It is a claim that has been growing since the 1990s when businesses stopped treating diversity as a legal obligation and started treating it as a competitive advantage. The idea is basically that varied perspectives lead to better decisions and more innovation. But is it true? Dr. Jake, Over to you.

36:17Dr. Jake Tuber:Leanne, this is the part of the show where I make the recurring joke that our segment is really called, It Depends. Which, of course, is the correct answer to any good question. But I will say in this case, the answer to your question about whether or not diversity engenders better performance depends. I would say on two major things. One, what kind of diversity, what do we mean by that? And what kind of tasks is a team working on? So they have been studying this for quite some time because in addition to pushing diversity for moral or ethical reasons, organizations in the 90s that looked at this started saying, hang on a second, there might be some money to be made out of diversity.

36:58Dr. Jake Tuber:It's not just a do-gooder move. This is actually a do-better move. And they have done quite a bit of research, really I would say most of it in the past 20 years or so, and I'll share some of the highlights. So first and foremost, what kind of diversity generally produces better results? So task-related diversity, meaning differences in skill sets, in education and expertise or even experience, that is more consistently linked to better performance than what you would call demographic diversity, race, age, gender, etc. So a study in 2011 from Bell et al. found this as well. So if you are diverse with respect to what specific skills and experiences you're showing up with, that's generally going to help you out.

37:43Dr. Jake Tuber:And it does help. Diverse teams in the right ways do tend to generate more innovation and creativity. Studies in 2010, Hunt et al. 2018 found the same thing. There is some value in having what you might consider demographic diversity, though. In particular, cultural and demographic diversity, so racial, ethnic, et cetera, can improve decision quality and problem solving. But it can also, and this is where it gets really interesting, it can also increase conflict in teams. It can reduce cohesion. It can slow down coordination. People tend to communicate differently, have different assumptions, et cetera.

38:18Dr. Jake Tuber:And those can both be great at helping decision quality and problem solving, but can also get in the way. And while those diverse teams do tend to perform pretty well on things like creativity and innovation, et cetera, that's not always true when the work is pretty standardized or repetitive. In fact, some research as far back as 2007 found that homogenous teams sometimes coordinate more efficiently on those standard repetitive tasks. So where does this really leave us in answer to our question? Well, a large meta-analysis, Al, that one's for you, suggests that diversity alone doesn't guarantee higher performance.

38:56Dr. Jake Tuber:The outcomes really depend on, as you might expect, how well that diversity is led and managed. So places with great leadership, culture, et cetera, diversity is a real asset. Places where management and leadership really suffer and there's not enough psychological safety, then diversity can actually slow teams down and hamper things. So I think that really leaves organizations with two challenges. And Leanne, Al, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. First, diversity generally that matters most is the diversity of thought and perspective, what we might call cognitive diversity. But that's kind of weakly correlated with many of the measured categories of diversity, like race and ethnicity.

39:39Dr. Jake Tuber:So if you want to dig deeper, like many of those findings are pretty predictable. Nationality and culture tend to show stronger correlations with cognitive diversity, but national culture and measurability, that makes sense. That shapes norms. Whereas things like educational background, profession, socioeconomic class, those often predict cognitive differences strongly, much more strongly than just race. So there can be a mismatch in terms of what we want to get out of having a diverse team and that what actually drives performance. If we're all just looking for basic categories of diversity that are easier to measure and check the box on, we may not actually get the benefits of diversity that we're seeking.

40:20Dr. Jake Tuber:And that's really Number one. The second thing that I'm seeing is that all of this is nothing without the right management and leadership, without enough psychological safety, without the right norms for getting all those diverse perspectives to flourish. Diversity might actually make things worse. So baseline, you need to strive for good management. That's where I come down on it. Interesting. Lee, thoughts?

40:43Leanne:If you do one thing. Yeah. It's all about managers, isn't it? I have a question so I remember reading Adam Grant's Hidden Potential and he was talking about how the issue with diversity as it currently is in terms of of kind of assessing it or recognizing it in recruitment structures is that as you say it's a tick box exercise rather than taking it to what that individual's necessarily been through so in everything you've kind of summed up about diversity How might we apply that in certain aspects of organizational life, such as recruitment, to know that we're recruiting diversity in the right way, assuming we have the management structures to manage it once we're in the organization?

41:27Dr. Jake Tuber:It's a bit of a catch-22 because in some ways, some of what you're suggesting we look for, we've actually made illegal to scan for, at least in the US. There are certain questions you rightfully, for decent reasons, can't ask about because it leads to prejudices and bias that we don't want. At the same time, those might actually reveal things about their educational or economic background that are actually really interesting indicators for how they did in school or beyond. So I do think there's a bit of a catch-22 there. I also think that it's just not traditionally what organizations have looked for.

41:58Dr. Jake Tuber:It doesn't mean they can't find them, though. It just takes different tools and approaches. To be able to look for cognitive diversity, you might have to use a broader and at times slightly more expensive suite of psychometric tools to help evaluate candidates than just, say, looking at things on their resume. That's going to slow down a recruitment process a little bit. It should mean that the people you actually hired, you stick around and do better, and I would argue it's probably net worth it. But that's not exactly what recruiting and HR is incentivized to do when they're told we need to replace this person, get butts in seats.

42:29Dr. Jake Tuber:They just run the same playbook they've always run. So you need to essentially look under different rocks if you want to see different things scurrying about. But we don't necessarily give organizations the tools and time and, frankly, energy to go about doing that. So what do they do? They use proxies, things like race or ethnicity, et cetera. And that's a real challenge. I was speaking with, not long ago, an old friend who works in HR at a large financial institution here in New York. And they were talking about how if you look at their organization on paper, they're incredibly racially diverse.

43:02Dr. Jake Tuber:because of hiring pushes they've really made for the past several decades. But all of the people who come from diverse racial backgrounds are from the same 12 universities of all the superstars who they're hiring anyway. So the kind of person that's going to Princeton, Yale, UPenn, etc., and going into finance in New York City, the fact that that person has darker or lighter skin really doesn't differentiate the way they've been shaped as a person because they largely came up in a socioeconomic strata or class or series of experiences that actually make for a relatively homogenous group of people underneath the surface.

43:38Dr. Jake Tuber:And so that's what's so hard, is what you want is diversity underneath the surface. And oftentimes the only proxies that we can look at or do look at are things that are very superficial. You said something there, and I'm going to horribly butcher what you said, but something about diverse teams tend to perform especially well on creative or innovative or maybe non-routine tasks. and then you use this word homogenous, which I've only ever seen on Describe Milk, homogenous would be more like standardized or repetitive tasks. And I'm like, okay, as a stupid business owner, I'm like, what the hell am I supposed to do with that?

44:15Am I supposed to recruit for compliance and I just want everyone to look exactly the same and then for the creative, I want everyone to be different. What am I supposed to do with that?

44:25Dr. Jake Tuber:I would say there's two answers to this in my mind. The first is focus on regardless of who you recruit for, setting up management to get the most out of their teams. So good management practices, training and educating managers, really writing out and clarifying norms and expectations and not just leaving them up to the whims of whoever happens to be in the room. Because whether or not you have a homogenous or heterogeneous team, you want to make sure that your managers are getting the most out of those conversations that they're happening. And that is where diversity can really flourish. So if you have one management that is well-trained and well-equipped in place, you don't need to worry as much about whether or not the team being too diverse or not diverse enough will do its job.

45:08Dr. Jake Tuber:Number two, then, if you have good management in place, you can focus entirely on hiring for the right skill sets, abilities, and knowledge rather than really thinking at all about what those people are. Because you're going to have teams that are really diverse, potentially in background, be able to perform really well on creative and innovative non-routine tasks. So if what you want to get out of your business is creativity and innovation, then in those particular areas, look for a diversity of cognitive skills. You can use other proxies for cognition beyond just necessarily how they perform on a Watson Glazer assessment, if you will.

45:42Dr. Jake Tuber:But try to use those tools and techniques to figure out cognitive diversity strengths. And then you don't have to worry about as much whether or not they're actually going to flourish because you've got the management in place. What do you think, Lee?

45:53Leanne:I agree it all comes down to that job analysis doesn't know what the knowledge skills and abilities somebody needs to do that job and and detaching from where where we wrongly assume that might come from and what's sticking in my head and this is such an al example is suits you know the tv show Mike Ross yeah Mike job god damn but you know how Mike Ross was like everyone had to go to Harvard to be able to work at the law firm but then Mike Ross walks in completely not from that background at all but has the as jake saying the cognitive ability to to walk into that world and challenge it and think differently whilst thinking similar enough to to reach the outcomes in the way the organization needed them to and it's such it's a silly example but the point to make that if you're just if you forget about harvard if you forget about the university if you forget about where these skills you think they should have been developed for some kind of nonsense prestige perspective and actually just think about what is the knowledge skills and ability somebody needs to this job and how do we how do we assess them in a recruiting process in the best way we can that is non-biased and that is hard as well because a lot of things like psychometrics have a very bias in terms of of certain white demographics so we need to be careful with that as well so so yeah and what I love about this as well is it's this is I don't know about you Jay but I think when it comes to recruitment and psychological assessment work it's one of the most sciencey bits of psychology we have in terms of org psych.

47:22Leanne:So much research behind it, so many years that I think it's the origin of the field, right?

47:27Dr. Jake Tuber:Like the actual origins of industrial psychology go back in the US to selection for World War One and putting the right people, you know, putting the idiots in the front of the lines with guns and all the smart folks who need to do strategy behind, right? That's really how IO psychology really took off that and Frederick Taylor's scientific management of measuring performance in the US over a century ago. And I think you're right. It's applied statistics at its core, which is what that aspect of job selection really is. And it's funny you mentioned that suits peace, Leanne, because I'm actually in the midst of a project right now working with a tremendous law firm here in the US, really love them, that is finding that they're not able to get recruitment right out of law school.

48:07Dr. Jake Tuber:And they're really relooking at how they're going about doing things. But it's a good reminder, I think, for people like you and I who know all the science and literature about this, that recruitment happens in the real world and it's really messy. So we can sit around and talk all day about, wouldn't it be better to just put things out there and really look at skills and use these tools, et cetera. That hiring manager is getting yelled at by some partner at a law firm right now to make sure they have a robust enough class of summer associates and they can only go to so many places and to get into the on-campus interviewing schedule at various schools this late in the year is difficult.

48:40Dr. Jake Tuber:So they're going to go back to the places they did and the people that need to go and run those interviews, they're busy partners that need to build 2000 hours a year. And so to train them up on something new and convince them to buy in on a completely new approach to hiring, that's not super easy. And so while yes, you and I can sit here all day and say, wouldn't it be great to just look at the skills and detach from all the school names and look at resumes completely blind. And the reality is most organizations are like, I need to hire somebody for this one job today. I posted it online. I really want to get this person in because someone else is going to quit if we don't get them some relief and support here.

49:12Dr. Jake Tuber:We've got 15 applicants. I think diversity matters. Two of these folks are minority women. I'm going to give them more of a shot. And I totally get it. I totally get it. I don't think it's necessarily right or wrong. But a lot of these things, I do think that people like you and I, Leanne, get lost in the kind of woulda, coulda, shoulda world. And the reality is the actual day-to-day pressures of people making these decisions are much more influenced by, gosh, who's actually responded to this job and seems halfway decent and we can get them in before we lose out on everything that we need to get done.

49:42Dr. Jake Tuber:And then we're stuck and we just get into that loop again.

49:45Leanne:I don't know about you, but I know when I've worked with clients in terms of recruitment, I've almost had to say to them, just humor me. Just let me do one role and let me show you the difference it will make. And it's once they then see that in terms of the fit, the levels and performance in those first few months and the engagement they're then in in that role, they're with the organization four or five years. it's almost like you need to, we, as you're right, as psychologists, we need to kind of put our neck on the line as well and go, just trust me with one role. Let me show you. Yeah.

50:14Dr. Jake Tuber:And I call this the Dwayne, the rock Johnson theory of change management. You can't go from being the rock to being Dwayne Johnson right away. So if you look at the rock, he was a wrestling star, right? I don't know what worldwide wrestling federate something when he was first going into movies, It was, if you look at the movie poster, it said the Scorpion King featuring The Rock because that's who he was known at. Now, he wants to stop being typecast as just a big brute because he's charming and handsome and thoughtful. And so he wants to move into more mainstream movies. But you can't just start calling yourself Dwayne Johnson.

50:52Dr. Jake Tuber:Nobody knows who you are. Everybody knows you as The Rock. So if you look at his movie posters in the early 2000s, it's all featuring The Rock. And then slowly you start to see him being this movie starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, right? Gridiron Gang starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson. And now if you see movie posters, it's Fast and Furious 15 starring Dwayne Johnson. You've got to spend a little bit of time doing both. And I think people in our space have to have a little bit more of that Dwayne the Rock Johnson time where you're like, I don't need to upend everything you're doing in recruiting because the literature says it's wrong.

51:24Dr. Jake Tuber:Let's take off a little piece here that we can bite down on. Let's chew this one bit, see how it goes. And then eventually we can become Dwayne Johnson. I love that. And I love your deliberate decision to choose the Rock rather than Kanye West, because that's been a slightly more awkward metamorphosis. I was going to go also with the transition that Ludacris made to just becoming Chris Bridges, right? He was Ludacris, the rapper. Then it was Chris Ludacris Bridges. And now it's just Chris Bridges. That's, you know, same thing. But yeah, we can make this a Kanye free. Listen, you're the one spending all the time on Twitter or X or whatever.

51:58Dr. Jake Tuber:That's not me. So if there's anyone here that's in Kanye's orbit, you know. Just to be clear, I do not follow or have anything to do with Kanye, Yee or whatever. He's calling himself. thesis god i'm ashamed that i think i might know what the new name was anyway i tried to set myself up for a most seamless link by saying you made a deliberate decision and then i was going to say talking of deliberation and deliberate jake's book the deliberate manager the eight postures that make management conversations work is out in february 2027 and he also has cheeky i don't know he's getting paid by the word or not or not but the title seems to have a parenthesis after that so i think there's probably more words in the cover of this book than there actually is in it But the Deliberate Manager is out February 20th, 27th.

52:40We thought we'd get a little bit of a head start. I'm helping you with the annoying amount of promotion you're going to do. And we know you, so we know it will be annoying and relentless. But we're really excited about it. So this week's surgery is dedicated to your most burning management questions. Now, I have not said it yet. So this is welcome to the World Famous Week at World Place Surgery, where I put your most burning management questions to Dr. Jake. Are you ready for question number one?

53:06Dr. Jake Tuber:I am so ready I am so ready can I be annoying now or does that start moving?

53:11Leanne:oh you started that long time ago friend don't worry ouch zing alright shots fired I do feel really bad because this is probably literally the third person third time we've ever spoken and all of those times I have taken the chronic piss out of you so I'm so sorry about that I do love you I was going to say

53:28Dr. Jake Tuber:all of those times I have been sufficiently annoying you haven't you haven't I'm standing on firm ground let me get on to question number one so so this question is all about be someone is a new team lead and it's draining them and they want to know what's going wrong so hi dr jake i've been leading a small team for about a year now and while things look fine on the surface i'm finding it much harder than i expected i struggle to be clear without sounding harsh i second guess myself i'm not sure how involved i should be and i don't want to micromanage and on top of that i feel like i just don't have a grasp of what's going on it's starting to feel quite draining and i'm thinking a lot about work outside of hours.

54:06So my question is this, is this just what the first few years of management feels like or are the things I should be doing differently to make this a little less stressful for me? Dr. Jake, over to you.

54:17Dr. Jake Tuber:I'm sorry to this person that management has been so tough. That's really hard. And I think you're not alone in thinking and feeling this way. What I would first do is push back though on this, which is, are you bringing me assumptions or are you bringing me data. When you say you're struggling to sound clear without sounding harsh, when you're not sure how involved to be without slipping into micromanagement, is that because you've been told this by your subordinates or your colleagues or your boss? You've been giving this feedback, or is that just a fear you have? Because the first thing I would say is if you're not 100 % sure of this, go get that data.

54:55Dr. Jake Tuber:Test these assumptions. I'm not sure that's really true, And you are very, very, very right to think that you don't want to be micromanaging and you want to get things right. But I also suspect that someone who's worried about these things is probably doing a better job as a manager than you think. So my first question to you is, how do you know any of this is true? It might just be that this is what the first year of management feels like. And certainly second guessing yourself in any new role is entirely understandable. But I'm not sure this is true. So before you kind of put yourself out there as fledgling and failing, go find out.

55:29Dr. Jake Tuber:Ask for a 360. Ask for some feedback from others. Get that data. Take it upon yourself to find out if any of this is really the case. Excellent answer. Lee, anything to add?

55:37Leanne:Yeah, I agree. And I love that you said that, Jake. I was saying the same, that somebody who's even worrying about these things is probably doing a better job than the majority of managers out there. because you care genuine concern is one of the biggest predictors of of of good management and performance so i love that the thing i would say is that i try and unravel this from a people management problem to an operational management problem because you mentioned there a couple of things in terms of like not not sure if you're feeling on top of things not sure if you're slipping into micromanagement change has been tougher than i thought having been a manager in in a team that needed change from a performance perspective needed a turnaround micromanaging was was kind of part of the job to get on top of everything to see what's going on literally sitting down with each member of staff and being like what are you doing how are you doing it how is this supporting our targets how you know your productivity your sense of um capacity it was very micromanaging for about six months but once I got on top of that and I helped my people get on top of things operationally I could step back change was easier because they had more capacity for change emotionally and cognitively so I wonder whether there's some unraveling here as well when you're asking those questions in terms of is this true how much of this is people management and how much of this is operational because the operational bit is the thing you need to solve first is also the easier thing to solve.

57:10Dr. Jake Tuber:And I would add to that, Leanne, I think there is a place for some degree of micromanagement. The key is how you go about doing it. And it reminds me of an executive I was just working with who just inherited a new deputy. This is someone in journalism that runs a department section at their newspaper and was worried that the deputy was going to need a little bit more instruction from the get-go. They thought they would be better up to speed. And the person I was working with anyway, was concerned that they were coming across as micromanaging. And so we were chatting through what to do about it.

57:40Dr. Jake Tuber:And where we kind of got to was, it might be okay to do this, but let the person know that you know you're doing it and why you're doing it. So if you feel like you've stepped into a new role as a manager, it's okay to say, hey, I want to make sure that I set you all up for success, that we can really check off X, Y, Z boxes before moving forward. I also want to get my hands around the specifics. So I'm going to be a bit more micromanaging at first. I'm going to be in the weeds a bit more. I'm going to ask for some updates. I'm not doing it because I don't trust you. I'm doing it because I don't want to have to send you off in one direction only to feel like later I sent you in the wrong direction.

58:13Dr. Jake Tuber:So just know that I'm going to loosen the reins over time and let's have constant check-ins and you can tell me if I'm doing it too much. But I think micromanaging isn't inherently the problem. It's when you micromanage without realizing that you're doing it and without talking through your management strategy deliberately with your team.

58:28Leanne:Yeah, I agree. And that intention, isn't it? A lot of the micromanaging as well, it's protecting your team from noise above because then you've got the answers to kind of bat away the senior leadership questions without having to overstress your team.

58:42Dr. Jake Tuber:And it's time bound, right? I'm not going to be doing this with you forever. I'm doing this right now. It's my first year. It's my first few months. I want to get my arms around the thing so that I can really set you free and not have to worry about checking in later, et cetera. So if you explain to folks that, hey, I'm going to be having my hands in the weeds a little bit more here for X, Y, Z amount of time. Let's pull up and talk about it if you think I'm doing more than is necessary, but I'm open to it. I think that gives you a little bit of permission there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love that.

59:07I love that. And just as a non-scientist answer, there's something which I don't think you realize if you're perhaps a little younger or perhaps a little more inexperienced at work is that you're never going to meet your potential in real life. And there's a point for that because your potential is always going to be if you're growing. your potential should always be a good like 10 yards in front of you so if you are feeling this stress that you're not as good as you should be great because you've got high expectations for

59:31Leanne:yourself and you're willing to strive towards those yes Al that's beautiful thank you very much I read it I read it in a fortune cookie to be honest okay okay we will come back to executives in a second nice nice foreshadowing I like it question number two I saw what my team think and now what? Uh-oh. I've been managing a team for years. I know that people always vent about their manager, but recently I came across, or accidentally came across, a private group chat, oh no, from my team and read some of the messages about me. They're respectful and positive with me in person, but what I read was much more critical and unfiltered.

1:00:08It's left me feeling a little unsettled. I wish I hadn't read it, but now I have. Is this how they actually think, Or is this just somewhere they can vent? Ooh, thorny one, Dr. Jake.

1:00:20Dr. Jake Tuber:That hurts. That's really hard. I don't even mean just at work, but just to find out people who you think think of you one way are talking about you differently when you're not around. Gosh, that pulls us all back to grade school, doesn't it? And it's really a challenge. change, here's what I think is the painful reality, which is, yeah, it's probably more likely that what you pulled out of that conversation is a bit real, is a bit more how they actually feel. And that's not necessarily the worst thing. Listen, the fact that they want to show up differently for you, yes, you don't want them to be faking it.

1:00:55Dr. Jake Tuber:But I will say, charitably, there is something to be said for managing one's own experiences of somebody else to have a better working relationship with them, whether it's your subordinate to a boss or peer to peer. We do this sort of thing all the time. It just hurts to know that it's somehow inauthentic. What should you do about it? Gosh, that really does depend on how transparent you want to be and how direct you feel comfortable being. There is a world in which you actually bring it up and say, I found this. But if you're going to do that, it has to be, listen, I saw this. I'm sure you didn't intend me to see it.

1:01:28Dr. Jake Tuber:And I'm glad I did because clearly I've been failing you. If you feel like you need to show up differently for me than you actually have. So if you're going to bring it up, you've got to make it about what you want to do better going forward for the team. And here's the thing. If you're not going to bring it up, you still have to find a way to bring up what you're going to do differently, better for the team. Because the bottom line is whether or not you bring this up, you now know that they feel differently about you than they're acting towards you. So whether or not you choose to make it a discussion and bring it right out in the open or just have a conversation with them where you say, hey, listen, I've been thinking about just kind of reset here as it's, you know, mid-June or whatever particular occasion you want to reference.

1:02:10Dr. Jake Tuber:I want to make sure that I'm showing up for the way that you want me to show up. Let me get your feedback. Maybe it's time for a bit of a 360. Maybe it's time to find some ways to get some more insight of them. But either way, you have a choice here, which is that you can be pouty and upset that they haven't been as direct with you as you would have liked. Or you can say, bottom line is I've got some data. I know that they don't feel they can share with me their real feelings and they're not getting from you what they need. What am I going to do about it to show up better for them? And I think even if it's not as emotionally satisfying in the moment as calling them out and saying, aha, found it.

1:02:44Dr. Jake Tuber:I think either way, if you look at this about what you need to do forward looking, you're going to be much more

1:02:48Leanne:successful excellent lee thoughts yeah i couldn't agree more i'm i'm a little bit concerned by the accidentally came across a private group chat how does one accidentally come across a private group chat so i worry almost coming clean and saying and saying that you've seen this could also damage trust in some way depending on how you came across that so i'd be more inclined to be proactive about it and and particularly there's somebody in the team that is a bit more vocal or that you feel has been a bit more direct with you in the past and sitting down one-to-one and go look I just feel like we can do things better around here I just feel that there's improvements we could make there's changes we can make there's things that I can do to make your job easier and make this work these outcomes outputs easier to achieve can you talk me through some of those things I want you to be brutal I want you to be honest I want you to be direct because this is how we improve this how we make things better and I think if you get the trust of one person that tends to ripple effect once you have them one-to-one with other people because Jane who had that one-to-one with you go do you know what they were actually really receptive now it's pretty straightforward and pretty direct with them it models the behaviors that you're allowing your team to enact in these types of conversations where you're seeking this feedback to drive improvement and that is essentially giving people psychological safety isn't it which is the term of of probably the last couple of years but it's it's it's modeling that in a way that saying to people i want you to be direct i want to make this better and they they might have an inkling that this is where it's came from maybe they have a feeling that that you saw this group chat and even if they did how cool is that of you to respond in a way that's like i'm not going to call it out i'm not going to make this awkward i just want to be proactive in terms of making improvements okay on to question number three and um this is this is all about what makes someone look executive and they've got we've got rabbit ears or um um what do you call them the double commas that fly in the air in the u.s

1:04:45Dr. Jake Tuber:you've got a proper name for them haven't you quotation marks there you go that's the words every day's a school day i'm sorry are quotation marks just a u.s english phenomenon i i thought they were pretty universal no no i'm just i'm not very well read i think that's it have you come across a quote before right okay moving on moving on this this person writes i've been a director for about 18 months and i keep getting the same feedback i'm great at execution but i need more and they've got these again these weird like commas up in the air executive presence the problem is no one can redefine what that means i've heard things like gravitas or how you show up but nothing concrete so i've started watching the people who do get promoted to vp and above They speak less, but connect the dots.

1:05:36Don't get defensive when challenged. Keep communication short and seem comfortable with ambiguity. I can see the difference, but how do I bridge the gap? So, Dr. Jake, is executive presence something that you can learn through light behavior, or is it more of a mindset shift? Thoughts?

1:05:57Dr. Jake Tuber:I think it's probably a bit of both. And I do think there's a bit of art versus science distinction here. I think people who seem to have whatever we would call executive presence, and I've yet to find any legitimate concrete definition of it. It does seem to be one of those, you know it when you see it, Justice Potter type terms. But I do think that there is some degree of gravitas, charisma, poise that is generally hard to pin down as a very learnable, discrete behavior. But it is also broken down as a science. I mean, like I think a lot of things they point out, right, connecting the dots, not getting defensive, short communication that is really focused on what your listener needs to get rather than the way you are making sense of the information in your own head.

1:06:42Dr. Jake Tuber:those are a lot of outward things that people who you'd be thinking of as an executive where time is short and decisions are serious that is something that is the case so i do think that's real there's a really important question here though that i know we won't get the answer to but really i think is something we have to discuss which is i'm reading this and my first thought that I cannot shake is, is this a woman or a man? Because I often feel like executive presence is a term that gets thrown at women to describe essentially the same thing at men, but when it's positioned towards women, it is positioned as a deficit that they need to acquire.

1:07:25Dr. Jake Tuber:Whereas for men, what we're really probably just talking about is this person needs more directive leadership skills, And it's positioned as almost like this bonus, this next step, this positive benefit they can have. And I have often felt that executive presence is a gender coded term that usually gets used to describe women who just don't seem classically heteronormatively masculine enough. and so I'm fascinated by the person and obviously other elements of their demography and their culture and there's so many things here that make this a Rubik's Cube that would constantly shift. It's not just like that one data point is everything but I do think it's worth noting that executive presence partially the perniciousness of it is that it's so ambiguous.

1:08:09Dr. Jake Tuber:It's so ethereal. It can mean so many different things to whoever is mentioning it and you can't ever quite put your finger on why someone lacks executive presence. Like, well, do they not do this? Do they not show up this way? Do they not come? No, they just don't really seem to have it. Well, that's a really great way to dismiss someone without having really concrete evidence. So, I'm fascinated to know about this. And it's something I've written about and thought about before that executive presence itself is valuable insofar as it can be broken down into discrete behaviors that one can achieve.

1:08:42Dr. Jake Tuber:And when it is, it's usually described just as leadership skills. Nice. Leanne, can you give us your thoughts and use the word perniciousness again?

1:08:50Leanne:I do not know what it means, no. But I enjoy it.

1:08:53Dr. Jake Tuber:You know, honestly, I don't really know what it means.

1:08:58Dr. Jake Tuber:Sorry, go on. Pernicious means having a very harmful, destructive, or ruinous effect, often in a subtle, insidious, or gradual way. So, yeah, okay. Why should you type that so fast? Blind squirrel finds a nut twice a day. That's our clip. That's our clip.

1:09:15Leanne:i have for a long time had beef with women leadership programs because whenever i've actually seen one it very much looks like teaching women how to lead like men right and it frustrates me that these other qualities are dismissed because they're too soft or they're too feminine or they're not direct enough or hard-hitting enough they're not executive enough and it's like do you remember me talking to john amici and he was like when did someone just decide that oh this person's too reflective and introspective to be a leader this person's too empathetic to be a leader this person's shows too much concern for their people to be a leader it's nonsense and i i agree with you jake i'm so glad you called that out and i think if if listen if if this is obviously protect identities if it is a woman i would i would be very much questioning is this what executive presence looks like in this organization because in a more diverse organization perhaps or maybe a more female-led organization executive presence is it might look very very different so I'd take from this what actual tangible skills as Jake said leadership skills you can develop that we know are just generally universally great so in terms of critical thinking connecting the dots that's really really great um there's a lot of communication things here emotional regulation seems like a big thing here as well in terms of not being defensive when challenged being comfortable with ambiguity my thought would be take this feedback and expand it to the world of just leadership skills things like critical thinking communication skills emotional regulation and yeah work on them if there's channels in internally to be able to do that do it get a coach to work on that type of thing go on a leadership course but pin down the skills that are going to be useful regardless of the organization because as jake said this executive presence doesn't really have a have a agreed definition and it's going to depend very much from organization to organization particularly depending on your um your demographics and how the organization sees them so i would say take this feedback expand it into general leadership skills and develop them.

1:11:30Lovely. Dr. Jake, any closing thoughts?

1:11:32Dr. Jake Tuber:You know, there is some value in the play acting part of executive presence if it does mean something in your organization. I have no problem with you playing a fool's game if that's what's required to be successful. And so one thing that I've advised people to do is to sort of almost have fun with a lot of this as well. Like if you think that executive presence is about, you know, holding your hands in a way that suggests you're being very contemplative. You can't see me here, but I'm doing this on the screen in front of Al and Leanne or, you know, saying stupid corporate phrases like, well, I think we should just circle back on this.

1:12:05Dr. Jake Tuber:You know, that is often the funny stuff around executive presence. And I would say as a concrete thing you can do is pick one or two meetings a week where there's various stakeholders and try to approach showing up in that meeting as if you are a stoic Nobel Prize winner trying to add value. And just imagine whatever you think that person, how would they sit? How would they react to different statements? How would they look around the room? How would they show up in different ways? Don't do this every single meeting every day. You're going to be exhausted. That's going to require way too much cognitive load and emotional labor for you.

1:12:41Dr. Jake Tuber:But have fun with it. Imagine that you're going to show up like the the veteran, smartest person in the room who's trying not to be obnoxious about it, trying to be thoughtful, that stoic Nobel Prize winner, how would they show up for this? And if you can imagine that in those big one or two meetings where there's a little bit more at stake, you might find that people start treating you as if you're the person that you've been promoting. Love that. Love that. Thanks. Fabulous. Thank you so, so much. Now, that's the end of our episode our bumper episode by looking at the time episode 300 episode 300 thank you so much dr j for coming along and yeah we need to we need to do more of these i love these i love these next thursday or this thursday actually we're joined by rosina bakari uh she is going to tell us all about why intelligence could be a huge obstacle to an entrepreneurship now she's done both fun fact i went to see um i believe the black the guy who started yo sushi about 20 years ago, about to seem to speak.

1:13:41And he said, if you can spell entrepreneur, you're not one. Anyway, she's done both. And the question we're going to answer is, can you be too clever to be rich? In the meantime, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you go over and check out Dr. Jake at workwise.substack.com. Is that right?

1:13:57Dr. Jake Tuber:Thank you, Al. And yes, I will say that I've often said it's my intelligence that's been preventing me from getting rich all these years. I very much look forward to this. Very much look forward to this upcoming episode. And also look out For the deliberate manager, the eight postures that make management conversations work, which is released in February next year, which is a long time to wait, but just go and join the Substack right now. Check out the show notes. All the links are in there. Leanne, say goodbye.

1:14:19Leanne:Goodbye. Dr. Jake, say goodbye. Goodbye. Oh, that was a very sad goodbye. And thank you again for joining us. Not you, Dr. Jake. I very thank you for you, listener. And we'll see you very, very soon. Bye-bye. Say bye, Jake.

1:14:33Dr. Jake Tuber:Say bye. Bye, Jake.

1:14:38Bye.