Why Confidence is the Secret to Transformation - Rosabeth Moss Kanter

0:00I don't like to hear a lot of whining and complaining. I mean, if there's something wrong, of course, we have to know about it and we have to fix it. But we really need that can-do attitude.

0:18What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty-gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:54Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal and Patty McCourt is still out. We miss you, Patty. Come back. But I'm so, so, so, so thrilled today because we have this amazing woman. And if you've read her books or seen her talks, I know you were inspired. I know you learned something. And I just think you're one of these people who, Rosabeth, is after sort of, I don't know, I guess we have a kinship because I think you are trying to impact and make work better. And that's what I'm passionate about as well. But we have today, Rosabeth Moss Cantor. And many of you probably have heard of her.

1:41A professor at Harvard Business School. I'm sure people have heard of that. She has her H hat on for those of you that are listening and not watching. and she's just done so much work around pushing companies around innovation pushing companies around gender and diversity she's the books that she's written I mean this book that you wrote your first book I think it's your first book but it was in 1977 you wrote men and women of the corporation wasn't wasn't my first was it not okay what was your first book it was called Commitment and Community. And it was later used as a model for corporate culture, but I was looking at other kinds of organizations.

2:25Yes, but I think to have written this book, Men and Women of the Corporation, at the time that you did, that was probably pretty trailblazer move and not something that folks were really talking a lot about. So I want to dig into that. But you've also written and many other books that just challenge the way that companies think and organizations work. And so I just want to unpack it all. Rosabeth, thank you so much for being here. We're so excited to have you. Thank you very much, Chan. I apologize for correcting you, which is what one should never do as a guest to the host. Listen, correct me all day long.

3:06I thought that was your first book because you look so young, so it had to have been. Well, that's very flattering. And it's amazing how old that book is. Yes, it did. I feel it did open up a way of thinking. And the way of thinking was you don't blame the people who are stuck. You look at the system around them. So it was, again, about corporate culture, about how you build an empowering workplace. Nice. So take me back to that time, because I don't even know, like, at what year women could get credit cards in the United States. Like, didn't you like have to have in the 70s, early 70s, have your husband still sign it for you or, you know, but you're writing this book in 1977.

3:56Was there something that like happened or was there like an aha that you had? Was there story behind what really propelled you to write it? Well, there was a big wave of writing about feminism and equity and the advancement of women that had been going on for a while. But a lot of the work was all kind of blame the victim. It had to do with women don't do this well, women fear success, women drop out, you can't count on them, women don't handle power well, no one wants a woman boss. And I was starting out in my career and I didn't agree with any of that. I didn't fear success. I wanted to be a good leader of people.

4:42I wasn't going to drop out no matter what. So I was very committed. And so I was not working on that specifically, but then I just had to do it. I had to counter those arguments. And at the same time, I was consulting to a major industrial corporation in New York. And I learned about what was then the three martini lunch. I didn't drink much because first of all, I learned that I couldn't function for the rest of the day. I learned about the male environment and the different roles women were cast in. And I got a chance to interview the first women to enter a major technical sales force. And so I learned a lot about being the only, being the first.

5:33And I had access to a lot of data. I kept the company anonymous for a lot of reasons. One was that it resembled so many other companies at the time that it was great fun to have people say, well, was this our company? Were you writing about us? Everybody thought it was them. I somehow managed to find those universal experiences of bureaucracy and hierarchy and very homogeneous groups at the top, same ethnicity, all men, and then all these different roles that were played in the company. And so it was great to have an anonymous company, but believe me, a real company. And it really suffered because it did not know how to take advantage of all of the talent of their workforce.

6:25Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking because as you said that, you know, I've been the only. I've been a first. Right. And that wasn't many years ago that I became these things. So since you wrote this book, how much have things changed for us women in the workforce? What a great question. I mean, partly what happened was that the issue of being the first kept moving up the hierarchy. We still haven't had our first woman president of the United States, but I got to know the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate in her own right, Barbara Mikulski, became a good friend. I mean, it just, we started opening up more and more pathways.

7:17And yet, there are still circumstances in which I go to meetings and I sometimes look around and said, where are we? But now, and there are some things that have not improved. One is the pay gap. It's improved a little, but not a lot. And I have a lot of hypotheses for why and what else hasn't improved. Companies still don't know how to see talent and not the image of the person first, but that's changed a lot because actually we have a lot of companies that have large numbers of women at the top. And there were some, even during all these years, that were pathbreaking. Xerox, which appointed their HR executive as CEO to lead a turnaround.

8:04And her successor was a black woman. I mean, very pathbreaking. And so it didn't look unusual in Xerox. In my home state of Massachusetts, we have a woman governor, a woman lieutenant governor, a woman attorney general, and a high proportion of the cabinet is women. And they are incredibly competent and have a lot of support. So that has changed. Yes, I think things have changed. I mean, obviously, there's many more of us at the top still need to get more of us at that CEO level. But let's go back to the pay gap for a second, because you said you have some hypotheses on why it hasn't changed. So what are those?

8:49Well, so around the same time that I was doing men and women, I wrote a policy book called Work and Family in the United States. And it was partly the family issue, partly. And it's not that women can't balance. But first of all, one of the things that has not changed in all these years is the household division of labor. It's still in women's hands. And I was speaking at a conference sometime years ago, maybe, and it was about maybe less, but it was about what men can do to advance women's leadership. Well, in my own contrarian way, I thought, God, that's kind of paternalistic. I said, you know, I wanted to say just get out of the way.

9:38But of course, there are things that men can do to help. But when asked that question, my answer was the laundry. And that got quoted in the New York Times. Sheryl Sandberg quoted it in her book, Lean In. She was an HBS alum. So we talked about it when she came to campus. That was it. If we could do something to provide the support systems, then maybe there would be a set of different choices. And way back then, I talked about flexible work hours. There was a whole movement about flexible work hours. Well, we started to get that with the COVID pandemic. Remote work, choose your own hours, save the commute.

10:27I remember writing a blog years ago that said, you know, we could work on traffic congestion, which is a huge problem many places. if everybody just picked their day and one day a week they stayed home. Okay, we can do that. COVID proved it, and yet we're going the other way. And the evidence now is showing that because of that, if you have a choice, a lot of women are saying, child care, I can't afford it. It doesn't exist. His job pays more, so therefore I'll stay at home with the kids. That's not always the case. And I love it when I know many instances of the man who takes the flexibility.

11:09And in one case of the husband who had a very well-paid tech job, but his wife also was working in investments and he's staying home with the kids. So there are a lot of structural things and personal things that make it hard. And I think if we want better corporate cultures and we want more opportunity, not just for women, but also people who have found it harder to move up, including people from lower income backgrounds. We would work on big system things like transportation. I honestly, in all these years, corporate culture, but I wrote a book on transportation. So important. And child care.

11:54We are one of the few advanced industrial companies, countries that don't invest in great resources for child care. Yeah, it's so true. Now, I had a gentleman on the show who's a CEO of an industrial company, and he was trying to figure it out for his company and community. And it's just so hard to figure out. There's no support from really the government at all. Yeah. And it's expensive. His employees couldn't afford it. But, you know, even as a company, they were trying to have it be internal. And from an insurance perspective, from a cost perspective, it just wasn't possible. Yes. Well, a number of my women leader friends and I, the Women in Power group, we started certain network organizations, part of national and global, and we talked to one another.

12:47And one of them was the CEO of a major retailer. And she modeled a lot. She brought her kids to the office. And you know, they can sometimes be a nuisance. They can also be a delight. And I think, by the way, a lot of reasons people often want to stay home with their families. Margaret Mead once said it. She said, it's not because babies cry and they need to be taken care of. It's because babies smile and they're such a source of joy and delight. Well, anyway, so that company tried on-site child care, and that can work to a certain extent, but then we get to the transportation issue. What if people have a two-hour commute, as they do in some cities?

13:32Right. So we have to do things on a policy basis, city by city, state by state, but we also have to do it nationally, or we're not going to solve these problems. So I want to say that corporate culture, workplace culture is a part of it, but so is national policy. And policies have to be family friendly. And that does not mean that you go back to one income because then we also lose productivity. We lose talent. And a lot of companies now, AI won't replace at all. And a lot of companies now are finding that particularly in high human contact jobs, they're losing people that they can't replace.

14:20No, it's so true. It's so true. Yeah. I mean, you know, I do, I do agree with you on, on the childcare and policy. I mean, there, there really has to be something done there. And this gentleman that the CEO that I mentioned, he's been trying to do that in his state and in his, in his community and is just having the toughest time and tried to ban like get together and ban with um the other CEOs from the other companies around around town and none of them would do it right and it I don't know it's just it's hard but you look at other countries that have it and it can be solved yes like yes you can do stuff it is doable and yeah that isn't my current my current campaign but I support it greatly.

15:06If we're talking about, you focus on workplace culture and not just opportunity, workplace culture is improved if people don't feel stress from their personal lives. You know, workplaces in part, companies are greedy. They want to consume all of the person. And we don't have to go to the other extreme, which by the way, some of the people who are fans of your podcast might not like my saying, but as somebody who has people work for me and students and so forth, I also don't like to hear all the time about schedules because the birthday party comes first. I mean, yes, take your time off if you need it, but I don't need to hear in excruciating detail that you don't care about the work.

15:57No, it's so true. It's so true. I believe that we should make the work interesting, enjoyable, and flexible so that people can, in fact, have choices. Yeah, no. And I think, you know, one of the things that resonated with me about your books and the things that you've been pushing organizations on, it was very much what we did at Netflix. So we hired people under this construct of freedom and responsibility, right? And that was the foundation that our culture was built on. And, you know, culture to us, you know, I think that That word is just used very broadly. But culture to us was our operating model, right?

16:35How we got alignment, how we made decisions, who we hired, who we let go. And, you know, when we were hiring, we always sort of set out to say we want the best people. We want the very best. And we're going to give them all this freedom, but we're also going to give them all this responsibility. And what I've learned over time is if you hire great people and you get out of their way and you empower them to do the work and you trust them to do the work, they do amazing things. And there's just so many companies who I think it's stuck in this. And I want to get your thoughts on this, but I've always thought about it as like as a company is growing and scaling.

17:17They put in these processes and ways of working to de-risk things. Right. So like we have to have approval for who's going to be able to hire. And so then that becomes like 10 people approving or we have to have an approval process for how much people are going to spend. And then that becomes, you know, I was working with a company where it took them 60 people to sign off on one contractor, which is just like, you know, so but I think that when these things are happening, it's well intended. Right. But companies are trying to kind of control the chaos. Right. And then they start managing to, you know, one percent of things that might happen versus like, how do you amplify the ninety nine percent of people who are going to make the right choices?

18:01well it does come down to trust and and clarity about the goals you're setting and expecting the results but not necessarily micromanaging every step of the process and to go back and give you the other side of what i said about not wanting to hear in detail about people's personal lives i do feel that people should bring their whole self to work and that if you trust them then they can have the flexibility to get the time they need and balance everything and figure out how to get the work done. And yes, this issue of micromanaging at work, it's beginning to be a theme even on a national policy level that we have too many rules and regulations that are stopping good things from happening.

18:52So trust and training. If you don't have really good training and really good information systems, then how can you really trust people? They're not born knowing how to do your accounting job. They have to learn it and they have to learn your systems. So training is a really big part of it. And that is not, people don't love it. I have to say a lot of HR processes people don't love. So they have to be people friendly and they have to all be done not to make sure that people conform, but to make sure people understand the tasks, the goals, the technology, the customers. And training is often very narrow and often very process focused.

19:44And I think when people know the whole picture, they're in much better shape to make good decisions for themselves. Yeah. Now we always thought about it at Netflix as not necessarily training, but context that, you know, our jobs as leaders and as the company were to give people as much context as possible about the business, about the culture, about their role, about their team, about other teams, about how we operate, how we make decisions. And we, we over communicated in a way that, you know, when you were doing it, you were like, oh my gosh, this is so much work. But the result was that people were able to move faster.

20:27They had the information to make decisions and make calls. They had the trust. They had the empowerment. And, you know, our job was not to micromanage. Our job was to set the context. Right. And it really amplified the speed in which we were able to get stuff done. Absolutely. That makes so much sense. In fact, I once did a piece that said everybody in a company has two jobs. One is their own job and the other is to be assistant CEO. To know what the CEO is preoccupied with, what are the big problems, the big issues, what's happening in the marketplace, and to think about that when they're doing their own job.

21:11And also, of course, think about what ideas they can contribute beyond their job. So maybe that's a third job, which is to look around for places you could help out, for things you could do to make a difference that you haven't been asked to do. But in a lot of companies, nobody... That doesn't happen. Yeah, companies, people don't care enough. I would say I have a... I come from an organization that really tries hard. And at least certain levels, people do look around to say, what needs to be done and how can I help? And when you ask for help, people are very, very responsive. And I attribute that to a couple of things, including an incredible amount of communication.

21:56In fact, people are communicated to all the time. We're inundated with cheery emails, ice cream socials, opportunities to connect. That's only in the summer in Boston. But opportunities to connect, meditation classes, therapy dogs. I mean, it's just wonderful that they're so much interested in people's well-being. But that as a context does make people feel they want to contribute. They care about what's happening. And you know, with my Harvard hat on right now, Harvard has been in the news recently. We care about the fate of Harvard. And that tends to be from, as I look around campus, pretty universal.

22:40Yeah. Yes, the culture, right? Yeah. That they built. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the DNA now. Because I think if you're really intentional like that, it becomes pervasive and it becomes a behavior that's really hard to not have. Right. It doesn't go away because everybody's doing it. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, it's also a culture that a positive culture spreads. And we have to work very hard to spread positivity because negativity is so powerful. And there are studies that show it takes five positives to overcome one negative. And so I personally look for people who are cheerful and positive. I don't like to hear a lot of whining and complaining.

23:26I mean, if there's something wrong, of course, we have to know about it. We have to fix it. But we really need that can-do attitude. And I can make a difference. I can take action. And that action will contribute and somebody will notice. And maybe even if they don't notice, I feel energized by action. And when I did my book Confidence, I learned that when people felt empowered, absenteeism went down because they had the energy and would sometimes come into work on days when otherwise they might have said, well, I'm a little low. I'm not feeling that great. I'll stay out of work. Well, you know, I was just thinking about what you said, because I don't like the whining and complaining either.

24:14I like action. And I like, you know, when people would come to me and say, you know, we got a problem with blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do? Are you bringing it to me? Like, go do something about it. You have the empowerment to do it. If you see a problem, go attack it. If you don't know how, ask the question. I'll help you, you know. But I think that there's a lot of employees out there that, and I do think the environment has something to do with it, but there are people who are less motivated than others and who are happy to kind of sit on the sidelines.

24:49I was never, those people didn't last long on my team. Yeah, well, they might, those people might not have made it at Netflix. They didn't. They won't make it at, you know, fast moving, high powered organizations. and but you know there's room for them too and it's amazing that when you provide the opportunity I mean in all my books I've written about that too when you provide the opportunity and something catches because that was something that the person was really interested in but no one had asked them all these years or nothing had triggered it that suddenly even the people who seem to be sitting on the sidelines can jump in.

25:33And so the more you find out what people are really interested in, this is now for the leaders of teams. It's really, now we go back to outside of work. So what are people really interested in? What do they go home and really want to do? And it might be the kids, it might be sports, it might be a hobby, it might be entertainment. I was very struck by when a large tech company worried about motivation because so many people were not coming into the office. They were a big pioneer in remote work a while ago. And so in order to gather people and build a unified culture where people would want to contribute, they started having events where they showed off people's talents.

26:20You could bring in, we're doing that at Harvard too. You can bring in your artwork. You can bring in a music video. You can entertain. And there was a company I had worked with. I think it was a Brazilian company, very interested in diversity, but realized that diversity was not just a matter of race or gender or ethnicity. It was a matter of interest. And so they also did talent shows once a month and they discovered people who played in amateur orchestras. And people discovered so much about each other and also felt they could express it at work. Yeah, I love that. Those are great examples. Do a talent show.

27:01It's a great advice. Let's talk about innovation for a little bit, because you've spent a lot of your research digging into innovation and why it kind of stalls out in companies. Talk to us a little bit about that? What have you found? Well, I wrote in my book, The Change Masters, a chapter on rules for stifling innovation. And those 10 rules got copied and got used by a lot of companies in training, but they didn't necessarily stop them. One of the things that interferes is hierarchy, the idea that you know the best at the top. Well, we now live in a world where people at the top don't actually know more necessarily.

27:44They may know the key customers' first names, but they don't know about a lot of new developments. And so one thing important is for people at the top to acknowledge that they still have things to learn and invite new generation people in to teach them. And also to be on task forces and project teams that come up with totally new ideas. And to be open to that, the worst thing you can do for innovation, I used to joke about this, I'd be asked by a company, come and tell us about innovation. Then they would say, okay, we want to hear about innovation. We just don't want to be the first. So that's one killer.

28:27You have to be willing to risk novelty. The other was they would say, we want more innovation. Who else is doing it? Same thing. They want the safety of knowing that you're not the first and that it's been tried and true, tried before. When that happens, of course, you're no longer innovative. You're just following the crowd. Well, you're copying, you know. That's what gets me so frustrated sometimes with companies is that they are looking for another example from another company who did it. If Google did it, we'll do it. If Facebook did it, meta, sorry, we'll do it. I still can't call them meta for some reason.

29:11It just comes off Facebook. But anywho, if Microsoft did it, it worked for them, then we can do it. No, these businesses, some of them just don't think uniquely about their businesses. And there's a safety aspect for sure. And I think where I've seen a lot of businesses, I guess, not make that next S curve is that the thing that made them kind of profitable, successful in the first place, it's too risky to jeopardize any of that. So they're like holding on to that thing. And then they're like, oh, this other new stuff, we can't do that. It's too risky. Well, there's actually, though, some truth to that, which is that your major customers sometimes don't want change.