Lessons from sh*tty moments (and bosses) [Uncensored Renegades]

0:00Kory:Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Uncensored Renegades. This is the 20-minute podcast where Corey, Marchesoto and myself tackle one big question every week. I hope you enjoy this. Now, if you are enjoying it, I've got one request to make. We're putting this out on the current Uncensored feed for a limited time only. So if you're enjoying it, go over to Uncensored Renegades, hit subscribe and never miss an episode. Anyway, without further ado, let's get into it. kboss we're back what's up what's up now one of the things i when when we were like thinking about this show yeah you said something which was let's have the conversations that no one else is having i love that and that should be our bar shouldn't it and then it almost immediately after was there we we said why don't we talk about shitty moments

0:49Jon:shitty moments brought to you by shitty bosses exactly right this seemed to be the immediate

0:56Kory:thing we went to after we said that so why don't we do it right let's bring on the this might be

1:01Jon:an hour john i don't know i know we keep attempting this 15 minute who's 15 minute this is gonna have to be a multi-part series because the shitty moments are a giant pile

1:13Kory:they are a pile they are a pile and we're gonna attempt to count down our top threes here this is gonna be interesting yeah why don't you go first go on give us your we're gonna count understand in order are we or just in any particular order i'll go first it was my first

1:27Jon:corporate job so imagine a bright-eyed bushy-tailed i went out and bought a beautiful pantsuit from zara this is my the moment i've been waiting for my entire life and i get into the office and they show me the way to my cubicle i meet the women who are going to train me i'm in sales operations at LVMH and life could not be better. And then all of a sudden I hear this. Ladies, ladies, front and center, front and center. And it felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. I was like, what is that? So I walk next door to the two girls who are training me. And I'm like, what, what, what, what, what is happening?

2:20Jon:Somebody tell me what's happening. Like, oh, that's the boss calling us into his office. And I was like, I spent my whole life driving to this moment so I could be called in like cattle to J.R. Ewing's office. And I will call him J.R. Ewing for those of you who've seen Dallas. He was definitely a Texan. And when we walked into his office, I shit you not, he leaned back on his chair, put his hands behind his head, put his feet up on the desk like this, and started barking orders at us. I wanted to quit. Every fiber of my being went, you know, fight or flight mode. This was flight just get out of this situation this is absolutely how is this humanly possible and somebody asked me about this story not that long ago like a couple of years ago and they they said what would you say to jr ewing now and it's the same two words and you know what they are?

3:34Jon:Thank you. That moment gave me fire. It gave me all the fire I needed to say, you know what? I'm going to go as far as I can, as fast as I can to be in the highest position I can get to. So women like me will never get treated like this on my watch. And that fire is really important because you can turn it into passion, which can drive progress. And that's exactly what I did. So J.R. Ewing, if you're out there and you know who you are, thank you.

4:10Kory:Wow. That is, I don't think many people would have that response to it, but you're right. You know, use it, use that to make change and be, be the change you want to see, right? Yeah. So I've got quite a long list, but I'll try and narrow it down. yeah um but one of the um just to pivot slightly to inspiring bosses just before i get into the one of my favorite bosses i'll give me a little name check he does listen paul ford one of my very very early bosses he had this phrase uh which i learned which was always challenge in private but support in public because we used to turn up to meetings and like even if i was wrong he would support me and then he would give me the feedback in private i love that as a value and i discovered the opposite of it where years years later i got to kind of senior position i was managing a big energy brand in the uk and we had this awful scenario where we reformulated it spectacularly backfired we lost about 20 of the business you know pretty much overnight everyone's missing bonuses it was so bad that i think the tokyo stock exchange it had to be announced you know it was a disaster and the thing i remember was we had made the decision together as an executive i was the marketing director so i was the public face right of the project right but as an executive from the supply chain through to hr through to finance through sales etc we had i remember the meeting i remember literally he'd said right if you want if you agree with this decision go and stand there if you disagree go and stand there and if you're not sure stand there everyone was huddled over the yes we're doing this so it was one of those hold hands we're all going to jump together right yeah until it went wrong and when it went wrong the very first all company all hands company meeting my boss stood on stage and I will never forget the words he used he said to everybody we have a marketing problem now interestingly I sort of know what he means because you know it is a marketing problem right the fact that you've reformulated and people are rejecting it and the fact that we need to win them back and we need to engage with them and all that sort of thing he's right and to some extent he's right but that's not what people heard what people heard is this is on john that's literally what everyone heard they went wow he is literally named and shamed now this also by the way was before we'd done the investigation to find out what had gone wrong and when we did the investigation we actually identified that the thing that had gone wrong in the project turned out to be something to do with the factory and quality control and that kind of thing where we they weren't making to the spec that we had signed off so if you wanted to find the problem that's where it was but unfortunately because publicly it was it was kind of merchandised as this is a marketing problem and it was just the opposite of that you know supporting public challenge and private moment now you heard this is on john

7:06Jon:and you felt named and shamed, but did everybody hear that? And was that the intention?

7:14Kory:I don't, honestly, no. I don't think I've ever had that conversation with him. Because sometimes we hear, right?

7:20Jon:It passes through the filter of our mind. You are obviously insecure and sensitive about this moment because this thing went wrong and nobody loves when things go wrong. So it could be that you heard that, but perhaps everybody didn't hear that. and perhaps he actually wasn't naming and shaming. And I think it's important to actually have the conversation. So when those kind of moments arise to go to said individual after and say, could we talk about this for a minute? I heard this. Is that actually what you meant?

7:57Kory:That's a very, very, very, very good point. And the other element to it, which is interesting, is in all the investigation we were doing, he almost said right that they are available options to you to investigate and those options are not open to you so it was there was such control over how the communication of what went wrong was going to be you know how the story was going to be told which i thought was interesting so rather than just because actually there's another lesson i've learned in my career is that when something goes wrong you have to keep your mind open to the possibility of absolutely i mean i had a prior crisis a couple of years before this one where um a new juice brand had fails and actually we ended up making i remember the number 96 different lessons right we've done this massive investigation yeah and what we hypothesized at the beginning compared to what we actually learned by the time we've gone through the proper process was completely different and the same thing was happening here i knew that that point that when we did the investigation there were manner of possibilities as to what had gone wrong but to name it from the beginning but again i mean look i mean being generous i could say everything's marketing so yes we have a marketing challenge even if you just said a marketing challenge might sound different to it might even be the words that were used that you know shamed it but i it just set a kind of i don't know it just set an atmosphere of blame blame and and publicly so yeah to the extent that everybody was going you're getting fired i'm i did nine months later i did but it took nine months i'm like geez that was like you know but but there was literally you know

9:28Jon:there was a there was a i was not expecting that there was a mark on my back for nine months i

9:34Kory:I mean, interestingly, in terms of actually back to your first point, I chose in that moment to decide, you know what? I can either let this get to me or I can go, do you know what? I'm going to do the best ever relaunch of this brand and put everything I've got into it. So if I get fired, when I get fired, it will not be down to marketing competence. And I remember I remember then setting group KPIs for everybody and being very transparent about it and literally telling everyone, right, we're going to do this by then. I'm going to do that and that. And do we all agree that this is the way out of this crisis?

10:04Kory:Yes, we do. Okay, right. So that by the end of it, if you fire me, you're not firing me for performance. You have to find another reason.

10:11Jon:Well, part of creating the cultural conditions necessary for innovation of any type to thrive is mutual accountability. If you're working in a company, you are by definition on a team. If you're an entrepreneur by yourself in your closet, in your home office, it's all on you. There's one person to blame it yourself, right? If you're in a company, by definition, you're part of a team. And if an organization doesn't have mutual accountability, and if it starts to get into blame, John, this is your fault, then people take that around them and then they become afraid to make a mistake. And then you start to see the decay set in or the rust set in.

10:52Jon:So I think what's really important as leaders is to recognize, first of all, own it, right? Like I do this all the time. I'll be like, I totally screwed this up. This is on me. Let me tell you how that happened, what I learned from it and what I'm going to do about it. And that's the kind of accountability we take for ourselves. And then as a group, we all know none of us are making decisions in a vacuum. I have a similar story in one of my shitty moments, which was a boss of mine. He was French. I was American. We were working in the US division of Shiseido. And he came over to my office with a body language that felt very negative.

11:34Jon:His facial expression was dark. His body language was, and he was holding a group of paper in his hands. And he walks over to my office and he just stood there, said nothing. Talk about human torture. I'm like, man, am I about to get fired? I have no idea what's going to come out of this guy's mouth. So I'm just waiting for him to say something because his body language is telling me that the tornado has arrived in doomsday. And he finally picks his head up, takes the paper and throws it at me. And he said, in a very heavy French accent, the marketing in this newsletter is poor. And he said poor in such a harsh French way, that like, like he spit and I'm sitting at my desk.

12:32Jon:Here we go again. What happens to you in those moments, fight or flight. And you have to learn how to override that because I could feel the fight or flight set in, I wanted to get up and leave the room. How dare you tell me my work is poor is what's happening in my head. You son of a bitch, like all that, all that's happening in my head. Right. But instead of feeding into that, I took a deep breath and I looked at him and I said, why don't you have a seat? And he came in and he sat down and I said, poor doesn't help me. What specifically are you not happy about with my work? And then we had a very productive conversation.

13:21Jon:So what started as this really horrible moment through a very simple act of de-escalation, like, let me invite you in, have a seat. and it was actually a really incredible moment and he he's one of my favorite bosses so this was a shitty moment with with a great boss is he understood very clearly that his feedback wasn't helpful when you say to somebody your work is poor yeah what do you want me to do with that i can't do anything with that if you would like me to do better work i need to know specifically what it is that you're not happy about and then i can work to make it better in the end he was right it was shitty work and what he was actually upset about was that he knew i could do better so this moment actually became this positive moment between him and i where he didn't know how to express it so he basically was pissed off that i would turn in this kind of work because

14:27Kory:his expectation of me was so much higher i love that i i've had similar actually it's funny isn't that sometimes when someone's clearly not capable you actually try and encourage them because because they got a confidence gap or whatever and then someone who's really good and they usually have a star standards and they slip to an a you tend to get upset because you're counting on them because you knew that you just i'm going to cory because i know it's going to be gold dust right and then when it's just the gold not the dust if that's even a phrase you know it's true isn't it it's Tell me how that all comes back to expectations.

15:03Jon:Expectations are a dangerous thing.

15:04Kory:They are. I love the presence of mind you had, though, because in you quite rightly could feel emotional, upset, anger at that point. But to have the presence of mind to turn that into, and I'm going to learn here, you tell me what it is, is really, it's a good tool to have in the toolkit.

15:19Jon:The tool is the de-escalation. And there's a very simple phrase, don't feed hostility. Do not feed hostility. So if you are being faced with a hostile moment like that, you have to use the tools in your toolbox to deescalate. There's many ways to deescalate. Kindness, humor, pattern disruption. You have to find a way to switch out of this particular channel you're on in that moment. and again that means first fighting against your own instinct if i had given into my instinct him and i would have been at war we would have been screaming at each other and where was that going to get us so i think that taking that first moment to recognize what your actual instinct is and then working against it with the tools in your toolbox is the key takeaway here that's that's so helpful

16:12Kory:I'm personally going to take a lot away from that because I think that particular tool is is really helpful in defusing situations and also getting to what the insight is. Because sometimes it's surprising. It's not what you think. And you also don't know how they're feeling and what's going on for them as well.

16:28Jon:What's the second one on your list?

16:30Kory:Well, the next one is going to be actually. So I was at BrewDog for about three months before getting fired. So you get the pattern.

16:40Jon:I'm sensing a pattern. There is a pattern.

16:41Kory:I know, I know, I know. and um i have to say in the spirit because i because he's coming on the show soon so and you know i'm sure i'm sure i have this conversation that's great he's equally the most brilliant person i've worked for and equally the most challenging person i've worked for he had this phrase which i loved which is like this will only work if dot dot dot right so he said it will say this will only work if we can produce a beer 10 times quicker than anybody else this will only work if we can create a digital platform that is you know is reaches more people than anybody else you know but basically all the time he's kind of setting these impossible and unreasonable expectations now to the extent that which impossible unreasonable expectations drive you to do things you never thought possible great but then there's this line that tips into the consequences of not meeting that then basically get fired right so the moment i didn't deliver on the impossible and unreasonable expectation i got fired because he took it literally right he said you've got you've got to do this yeah in three weeks if you don't you're out right and he was as simple as that but what i noticed about that is uh for him i have his conversation with him is that he was able to forgive himself when he didn't meet those standards but he wasn't able to forgive other people when they didn't meet those standards so i even wrote a presentation for him the day i got fired which was our relationship will only work if and i'd actually thought through the permission to fail the the fact that i could learn from it that you know responsibility taking ownership for things etc etc but yeah the ability to draw the line between the unreasonable expectation that drives thinking and action and and and performance but there is a line that you have to draw between then what is unrealistic and puts too much pressure and too much stress on the system that it actually collapses and i think that balance can be hard

18:33Jon:so i can listen to this episode when you have him on who who are we referring who should i be looking

18:39Kory:for in the uncensored no exactly so look out for james watt who as i was saying is is just i mean what he's probably created actually from a uk point of view probably the standout startup scaled up at the last decade i think valued at over two billion a global uh craft beer brand insanely successful but the the pace of growth to achieve that just leaves so many so many people burnt you know and it's this i always found the challenge within was this balance between incredible ambition to move 10 times quicker break things do things amazingly but when things break there's zero opportunity for a second chance so you just get you just basically burn people all the time and i mean i think he went through an entire leadership team i was gonna say that

19:26Jon:doesn't sound like a place where you're gonna have longevity yeah exactly yeah and i think

19:30Kory:there's there's got to be some kind of balance between being able to learn from failure put in place the right approach and then and then build sustainably rather than just going right i'm going to put an impossible you know task right the moment it doesn't go boom you're out that

19:44Jon:That feels a bit like a fear tactic. If people are walking around on eggshells, if I don't deliver this in the unreasonable expectation in an unreasonable amount of time, I'm going to get fired. That doesn't sound like the conditions are quite ripe for long range success. And again, if you go back to what needs to be true, what are the conditions that need to be true for innovation to thrive in a long run that is going to allow companies to thrive? I wouldn't put fear in that bucket. Nothing good happens when fear is in the driver's seat. People are not going to perform at their best. The organization is not going to be in thrival mode.

20:25Jon:It's just going to create that really intense environment where people are just waiting for the shoe to drop. And that takes energy. You want people's energy focused on great work. so as leaders we have to figure out how do i make sure the energy field is inviting people to deliver their best work you're not going to do that if you're afraid of getting fired or afraid of failing

20:51Kory:100 right that's a perfect place to wait no i have another story so we're gonna have to push it

20:56Jon:we're gonna go for the third we're gonna do it all right all right we're gonna do it okay we're So I have a really shitty moment. So I was at Shiseido for about 15 years when I got an incredible proposition from another company. And I got courted by the CEO of an incredible company with this big, beautiful, sexy offer. and it was really tough because, you know, I grew up in Shiseido. I loved this job. I love this company. I love this people. And there was so much more that I wanted to do. And it was a really tough moment for me where I was actually contemplating leaving for the first time. I'd been propositioned before, but I'd never contemplated leaving.

21:42Jon:I really contemplated leaving. And I thought about it. I thought about it. I thought about it. I walked into my boss's office on Friday morning and I resigned and I accepted the job off, called the other CEO, accepted the job offer. My boss at the current job went into an absolute panic storm. For the rest of the day, it was like meetings with HR, what can we do? How can we counter? You can't leave, trying to convince all the things, right? So end of day Friday, I am now schizophrenic. I have no idea that I make the right choice. Did I not make the right choice? What the hell am I supposed to do?

22:23Jon:I never felt so lost. So I was like, listen, it's Friday end of day. I really appreciate how much work you're putting in to trying to get me to stay here. Just give me the weekend to think about it. By Monday morning, we have to be done here. So now I can't sleep this whole weekend. And I am just in a crazy spiral in my mind about what am I doing? What's the right choice? And there is no right or wrong answer, which is really the hardest part. So I called somebody on my personal board of directors and said, I really need advice. And she said one line to me that stopped me in my tracks. And that line was, so far, all I've heard is your head talking.