Why Most People Don’t Know What They Stand For and How to Build it. - Robert Glazer

0:00Let's just pretend health has become a value for you. And maybe that's because you had a health scare or you had a parent die young. And so this is just a priority for you. Well, if you live in Newcastle, England, this probably isn't the right place for you where everyone starts going to the bar at 2 o 'clock. Or let's just say you live in a town where the primary social activity is drinking every night.

0:30What 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.

1:03Okay. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal, and I'm your host. I'm still minus Patty. We miss you, Patty. Come back. We love you. But we have an old friend of the family. He's been on the show before. His name is Robert Glazer. He has a new book that we're going to talk about. But many of you probably know the book we talked about last time, which was The Two-Week Notice, which, by the way, Robert, ever since I read that book and we had that conversation, I have, cause I go in, I advise companies, I coach them. I'm like, can you just, can you just start out doing this?

1:37Like make it normal, make it easy to say goodbye. Like, I don't know why we make it so hard anyways, but that's not why you're here. You know, the line that since that book, the line that's sort of codified for me is that we treat the end of a professional relationship, like more like a romantic relationship than a sports contract where, you know, it's just a two year deal and it's, it's over and people want to do different things and that's totally fine. I know. I mean, at Netflix, we were like, we're a sports team. You're going to, you know, at some point you get traded. We need better offense than we do defense.

2:12Look, there's an argument that some relationships would work better to say after three years, be like, do we want to, do we want to resign the next agreement or not? Or are we just going forward because we're going forward? Yes. We had a woman on the show, a while ago, Joanne Lublis. And she and her husband, like back in the 70s, did a contract. Like, you know, we'll do this for your career. We'll do this for my career. And I was like, that's brilliant. I don't know why I didn't think about some of those things, but too late for me. Yeah. I'm 18 years in. You know? You've signed the lifetime agreement.

2:46Yeah. That's right. That's right. Okay. Well, listen. Okay. Tell us, remind everybody who you are and what you do. And then let's get into the new book and tell us the title and tell us how it all came about. I'm excited about it because this one, it's similar. There's like elements from two-week notice that are in this, but I'm excited to kind of unpack the differences. Sure. So I have started a few different companies, the largest of which is called Acceleration Partners. It's a global partner marketing agency, over 300 people. I've since moved into the board and executive chairman role. I spent a lot of time.

3:24Yeah. Was that the case last time? Yeah. Yeah. That was the case last time too. So yeah, I've promoted my number two to CEO years ago. We did a investment with a private equity firm and I've been growing the business. And over the years I got passionate about figuring out some of the things that we had done differently in the business. We had won over 30 best places to work awards and some glass store awards. And I started realizing that, you know, if I, you know, I was communicating these things and they were helping other people in other organizations. And now kind of that's where I spend a lot of my time.

3:58Probably the biggest transition for me and my career in leadership was actually figuring out my personal core values and realigning my life and leadership around that. And it was kind of an odyssey between figuring that out, building a program at our company to help other people figure that out. Then people asking for that information and then turning it into a course. And then having a lot of people say that this course was super impactful on me. And actually, I've made different decisions now. And then thinking, okay, well, how do I get this to more people? Because a lot of people just don't do courses.

4:32And I thought about writing a book. And I had this vision or this nightmare of this book called On Values in Barnes and Nobles. And everyone walks by it and no one wants to read a book on values. But the way that we were doing this and this notion of, yes, family and integrity and these things that you've been saying don't actually work as core values, just like they don't work in a company for different reasons. You need core values that can help you make a decision and understand where they come from. And they need to be really distinct. And the opposite of it needs to make you uncomfortable.

5:05And anyone that I walked through that or gave a presentation to was like, oh, this is different. So I was like, how do I show this to people rather than tell them? And that's when the sort of concept of a parable came up to me. And I said, actually, if I can create a compelling story about this character going through some conflicts with what I call the big three, which is your partner, your community, and your vocation, and that are all kind of core value-based and he's kind of wrestling with this, I think if people see this, they'll be like, this is different, or I resonate with this, and then I can explain the framework and how to do it.

5:41And so far, that does seem to be resonating because it's a fun and easy and relatable story and it's about 70 minutes. But at the end, it lays it all out. Like if you want to do the work, here's what you just saw this character go through. Well, tell us, you know, I know the title, but tell everybody the title of the book. So the book's called The Compass Within, a little story about the values that guide us. And it's a story about an up-and-coming 20-year-old named Jamie Hines, who seems to have everything going his way. He's engaged. He's got a great job. He has a promotion opportunity following his lap.

6:16He and his fiance are living in this upward, mobilely gentrified sort of upwardly mobile town that they want to potentially buy a house in. But below the surface, he's having some questions about his work and his relationship and his community. And he ends up connecting with a mentor who really helps him understand what he values when he, and then for most people, what they've always valued, we all have this compass. And some of us are running into walls and going, ow, and then walking the other way. And other people know where the walls are and avoid it. Having talked to a lot of people about this book and this concept and find their values, I found that most people have found a way to organize things in their life around their values, but they don't actually know what they are or can articulate it, but they've naturally, but there's a huge difference being able to say like electric fence there.

7:10Like don't, you know, who would want to take three jobs that don't align with their values and then the one that does, right? So I find a lot of people get there, they just take a lot of wrong turns. And when you can put some words and phrases and themes behind this and understand it, you just, you make ultimately the whole thing is about making better decisions and and the most important decision. Yeah, it's all so true. So this character that you have in the book now, is that a fictional character? Is that you? Where did you draw this from? Interesting. I actually did my own podcast with my co-host for our launch on Tuesday, in which I actually haven't really talked about the characters because a lot of times people want to talk about the framework and we were talking about some of this.

7:56So this will be the second time but i've been accused of being jamie who's the protagonist in the story and i'd be accused of being jack who's the who's the mentor in the story i i think i'm somewhere in the middle okay but you're like you drew you like you drew from personal experience i drew right they're not my experiences but i drew from a bunch of personal experiences and kind of an amalgamating them particularly with jack i think he's sort of like he would be like my perfect mentor if I was like, how would I like someone to be? What's so perfect about Jack? Let's talk about Jack. What's so perfect about him?

8:32He's kind of smart, but humble. He's challenging. He's a little Socratic, you know, in it. And he's someone kind of who's doing what he's teaching. I think those are the qualities that I've sort of always looked for, you know, in a mentor. And And again, he's just very unassuming, even though he's successful. And some very values-oriented decisions in his own life. Yeah, I think everyone has been a little bit of Jamie in their 20s, you know, when they're chasing the big goal and getting all excited. I always tell people there's a lot of the town that he lives in. I mean, it's not real. There's almost truth that's like irrelevant sometimes in the stories.

9:15Like all my kids are in the story as small parts and there's little bits of truth. Each character has been kind of designed to really make the clear point. In fact, we were talking about how in some of the earlier drafts, like Jamie's boss is mad. He's complicated, I think, in the final. But he was more of a real jerk in the first draft. And that actually made it, in order to understand the nuances of this, it has to be more complicated. him being a jerk yeah it has to be more subtle yeah where you're like i kind of like this guy but but i don't like this guy yeah because you know we've had the bother you're like no i think they're gonna do the right thing but they're not you know if they're just out there flamingly horrible like it's really easy to be like no like this is not me so he got a little more subtle over time well i just find that so interesting because it's just a different way to write one of these books, right?

10:14Like generally, yeah, like generally it's like, here's the lessons and here's, you know, here's the framework. And so you kind of built out this whole story, which I think, I think that's how a lot of people, well, at least, I don't know if it's a lot of people, but me myself. And then when, when I thought about learning at Netflix, we never did like traditional learning and development stuff we we did like case studies and like like people learned through the case studies like working through it and like i think that's like what you're trying to get people to do like through that character they're trying to work through it and kind of say like what would you do right yeah so where's your life i'm a big fan of like pat lincione's books i've loved them i've read them all in a day bob bird's book even the most famous book on operations the goal is a parable, which is, and when all of us, I remember all the lessons in the theory of constraints and the whole thing from it.

11:11So what is interesting is obviously I've had, I've had like, there's a lot of early copies that go out to people and a lot of the notes that I've gotten. And that's why I said, Jamie's a mirror. I had a, such a similar thing or five years ago, I was in this situation or, you know, they're probably not calling to tell me about the relationship struggles that it highlighted. This book probably will be responsible for some breakups, which I'm not sure I'm ready to deal with yet. I already had someone come up after a presentation and talk to me that they realized that their kid had an opposite value of them and it was a real problem.

11:45I was just like, yeah, that's hard. I wasn't... That wasn't your goal. Yeah. No. Well, I'm just not ready to provide therapy in that. But there's some deep truths in this. But basically, that's what I keep hearing, is that whether there's a story or an interaction or there's a funny thing, one of the things in the book is there's a two-weeks notice. Of course. The thing in there. His boss, one of the, this won't give away anything, but one of the things that happens with his boss is that he is a very loyal person on his team who gives him several months notice that she's going back to business school right in in in june and he's like great thank you for letting me know like you should work here till then and his boss finds out and was like that's not how we do things here if she doesn't want to be here she should leave and he's like she doesn't want to be here she's going back to business school and she's doing great work and and and there's this dialogue around that and jamie had talks about this ted talk that he saw so again little little little meta in there yeah i think i think that's what i've heard the most is that whether it was a relationship or actually someone even last week, there was a group that had read the book and they had done the course.

12:59And then they asked me to kind of do an hour coaching thing with them, a company. And I was kind of walking them through it. And I could this woman like zoned in on the community. I tell that she had the epiphany that she did not live in the right place. Like you could just see it on her face that she was like, I am not in the right community for me. Yeah. But I think, you know, even that concept of like community as well as professional, right? Like those all matter, personal, professional, community. I think people, I always say, I think the community and it's defined a few different ways, right?

13:33It could be your town. It could be your neighborhood. It could be the organizations where you spend the most time, right? The people around you. You're the average of the five people, you spend the most time with. I think it's the one people forget the most where if you're constantly asked to do things that, let's just pretend health has become a value for you. And maybe that's because you had a health scare or you had a parent die young. And so this is just a priority for you. Well, if you live in Newcastle, England, this probably isn't the right place for you where everyone starts going to the bar at two o 'clock.

14:09Or let's just say you live in a town where the primary social activity is drinking every night, right? You are either going to, there's two, three choices or sort of two, but you're either going to go and drink and feel bad about yourself or not drink and be like, why am I at the bar? Like, I don't want to be here. Or you're not going to go and feel on the outside of whatever kind of the activity is. If that's really important to you, you know, you should move to Boulder where all night you can do things and play around and socialization has nothing to do with things that are unhealthy. Similarly, if you're someone who has a value of include all perspectives and you like talking to different people and hearing different things, you probably don't want to live in one of these towns where you can tell as it comes out to voting, you better have one sign or another in your yard.

15:00That's not a great place for a centrist or someone who doesn't want to be really entrenched in different political viewpoints. So these communities, like operating outside of the things that you want to be doing is inherently energy draining, right? So I think a lot of us sort of, that's the one we forget about the most. Like, are we spending time with people who share our values and are doing the same sort of things that we want to be doing? Yeah, so how did you come up with the framework? How did you come up with the framework? How did you, I mean, obviously there's the story and how you get people there.

15:38But how did you know this? So yeah, this is a 10-year odyssey. Okay. So in 2013, I went to a pretty intensive leadership program where I thought, and I was right at the right inflection point for my company. Is it like Austin? No, it was done by EO with like 25 people from around the world, but modeled after, it was like a five-day pretty intensive leadership training with like 25 people from all around the world. And I thought, great, I'm going to learn all these tactics and how to be a better leader. And I described the first couple of days as a big mirror, Jessica, like, like, who is Jessica?

16:13What do you care about? What do you value? And how are you going to like figure out how to lead from that authentically? And what I came away from that realizing was I think I have pretty deeply held core values. And I think it's probably why I'm frustrated about some of the things I'm doing. But I really totally can't articulate what they are other than I'd probably do the things everyone else does. Integrity, family. And we can talk about why those are not good core values later. Okay, yeah. And so after this retreat, I became pretty determined to figure this out. I went online, I did some research, and there's just a bunch of crap.

16:50Like most things, programs or whatever, give you a list of keywords and tell you to pick them. And I just didn't find that super helpful. And so I ended up building a process. I came up with five, what I thought were pretty differentiated core values that were very kind of action oriented. And those were to find a better way, health and vitality, self-reliance, respectful authenticity, which directly led to the two weeks notice work, and then long-term orientation. Again, they don't sound like anything. They're distinct. They're different. You could make decisions on them. The opposite of them are very frustrating to me.

17:26And I kind of started aligning my life around them. and I just saw a ton of changes. We started basically, our company was growing really fast and we started kind of a leadership academy program on our company where we would take 10 of our up and coming leaders every year. And I was like, I'm gonna do this core value thing with them. We did the why and the core value and they're like, what? They thought we were gonna do company core value stuff. And I was like, look, I don't think you can be a level five kind of Jim Collins, like authentic leader if you're not clear about yourself. And the more I talked to people and the more I did this work, I found that, well, where does that come from?

18:01It's always deep. It's deep, formative childhood experiences that people are either doubling down on something that was really meaningful to them, or they more often than not, they're running in the other direction. Yeah, they're shoving something down deep inside them. And this is like their operating system as a 40-year-old. So we did five or six classes of 10 people. We'd help them figure out their values. They would go back to their teams. They would communicate it. And it was like great outcomes. And about the same time I wrote my first kind of non-marketing book, Elevate. And I talked about spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional capacity.

18:36And spiritual capacity was about figuring out your core values. So at the time, people were like, well, great. I want to do that. And I'd be like, well, you could check out this website or this keyword. I'm like, you can't take the program that I'm teaching my company. It's not really – I don't know how to give it to you. And so people wanted the quick checklist. Right. And unfortunately, maybe there's an assessment at some point, but there's not an assessment right now. And so I was like, I was like, why don't I turn this into a course? We've now done five or six classes that works pretty well.

19:09And I had figured out some formulas and frameworks to both figure out the core value, test it, and then make sure. And part of the testing was like, can you make a decision on it? Do we understand where it came from? Can we connect to kind of where it's from? Because they don't come out of nowhere. And that helps you know that it's important. And a couple thousand people took the course and have had great results. And so that gets me kind of to the beginning of, I was like, oh, I want to get this to more people. A lot of people won't go to a course, so I want to write a book. But I'm just not sure anyone's going to want to read a book on values.

19:42So I need a different angle. Well, I think you found it. I mean, that's, I don't know. I think it's really different and exciting. And I think all the things that you put in the book are super helpful and useful. You know, at Netflix, we used to send, and the reason why I mentioned Aspen is we used to send all of our executives to Aspen Institute. And we did that, we started doing that because we believed if we could better the person from a values-based perspective, not get them better, you know, at the strategic basis. You're singing my song. Yeah, holistically better. the business benefits and then they're better parents and kids and spouses and yeah yeah yeah and so then we ended up building out we hired the person that ran the haspen institute and then we built it at netflix but i mean you know we were we were reading things that really had you grapple with where your line was what where are you on that line right of ethics and society and you know we're reading like, you know, the letter of Birmingham jail and, you know, Margaret Thatcher and, and, um, and you really had to think, and it wasn't thinking about Netflix.

21:01It was thinking about your values and, um, people, my answer now is that people lead from their values. The difference is whether they're driving the steering wheel or the person who's doing driver's ed has the steering wheel and is driving the car all over the road. And you're like, why is it, Why is it going here? So here's an example I like to give a lot and how it plays out in different situations. Let's say you have a core value that incorporates trust, like build trusting relationships. I've done this work for like 10 years now. I can tell you if you told me that or was coming up, I'd say, Jessica, I'm going to ask you a question.

21:37You don't have to answer and tell me what, but was there a violation of trust at some point in your life and when you were younger. Nine and a half out of 10 times, that person will have a tear well up or turn a little ashen or otherwise, because that's a very specific thing. I've seen the 0.5 where they grew up in a house where trust was such a positive thing that they carried it forward. But for most people, they had this huge violation of trust. Some parent walked out unannounced, no clues when they were 14 years old. Well, they're now 40 years old in the workplace, and this is carried with them.

22:12And so they assess, they have a small group of friends that's very hard to get into, and they've been with them for a while. By the way, if those friends, and you've asked these people, if someone violates your trust, does it matter what they did, or are they dead to you? These people will be like, they're dead to me, right? And I always say, like, if their partner cheats on them, like, there's no coming back. Well, what happens in the workplace with this sort of person? This can be a great quality. But what I've seen, and I've actually seen it, is that the people who don't know it, they just sort people on their team into can I trust them or can I not trust them?

22:45And so when they're five minutes late for a meeting or they can't be found in the afternoon or they don't hit a deadline, it sends these very visceral signals like Jessica cannot be trusted. She is going to hurt me. She cannot be trusted. And Jessica gets put in a penalty box with the key thrown out and she doesn't even know it. It's so true. It's so true that that happens. She's not being staffed on projects. I even had an HR person, we did a debrief over one of these situations, be like, I couldn't understand that manager. Every quarter, she's telling me these people need to be promoted and these people need a pip.

23:17And then the next quarter, it's like the opposite list. Yeah. And because this is just kind of how they do it. So this is a real problem for the leader and their team if this is going on and no one can explain it or otherwise. Now, let's imagine Jessica's done this work. She knows this. She identifies with this. She's not going into therapy or talking about dad, but she understands that this is a protective mechanism that has some really positive things. She's a trusting person, and you can trust. I mean, that's a great quality. The difference is she hires her team, and she says, Jessica says, so, Bob, welcome to my team.

23:54I just want you to know, and this is one example, but trust is really important to me. And here are the ways that it gets broken. When it gets broken, it's really hard to get back. So if you find that I'm being kind of distant or indifferent or otherwise, there probably has been a break in trust and you should come to me and we should talk about it. It's a totally different scenario. Can you imagine if just 40 % of managers did that? So the people at our company who figured out their four core values like that would actually go back and deliver a presentation to their team. And they said, look, I just spent a lot of time in this leadership training.

24:36And I learned that these four things are really important to me. So we had someone for whom I can't remember what the actual core value was. I did the work with her. And it was like, but it was something around like, you must bring fact. Like things need to be based in evidence, right? Mm-hmm. And so if you were on her team, if you were on her team and you kind of brought a theory or a hunch or something like that, it just didn't work. She was like, no. No. And so I got this person to get into this story. Now, why do you think someone who needs things to be proven and evidence-based would have that orientation?

25:16Just throw a guess out there. Trust, I guess. Similar. Yeah. Yes. Similar. That's my guess. She had a parent who was basically a conspiracy theorist. There you go. They don't trust anybody. Trust would be like the person broke my trust. But in this case, it wasn't trust because they didn't necessarily lie to them. They said a lot of things in their life that when they got old enough, they realized they weren't true. And so what sets in the quick create at that point is I'm not going to believe things unless there is like evidence based. Yeah. That's fascinating. Oh, my God. So imagine the difference between someone who's always getting frustrated at their team and doesn't know why and someone who can articulate that and say to their team, look, I'm here to support you and I'm here to support your new idea and stuff.

26:09But like I need data and facts. Yeah. I mean, but it's so it's so healthy. I learned in my leadership career to tell people about me, right? Like, here's how I work. Here's how I like to work. Here's what you can expect from me. And here's what I would like from you. But let me know those things that are uncomfortable for you. Let me know what, you know. And it was just always so much better because we were both clear on what we were going to do. There wasn't that sort of like, oh, I have to put them in a penalty box for a week because they pissed me off about X, Y, Z. And you didn't even know you were doing it.