Recode Decode: Psychologist Adam Grant

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That's zipperKooter.com. Hi, I'm Karis Wisher, editor at large at Recode. You may know me as someone who believes in the power of give and take. I give the orders of everyone else should take them, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today in the red chair, someone I wanted to have your long time, Dr. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. He co-wrote Option B with Cheryl Sandberg in 2017 and wrote other books before that including Give and Take, Why Helping Others, Drives Our Success and also The Originals, which was a big impact in Silicon Valley for sure. He's also the co-founder of an organization called Give and Take, which helps businesses and other teams work better together.

Adam, welcome to Recode Decode. Thanks, Karis. Well, it's great we passed each other at tech events, all right? Without interacting with the choice of yours.

No, not at all. I'm probably just on my way somewhere else. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, but I've always been intrigued by your books. And what I'd like to do with people is I'd like to get a little background of how they got to where they got.

And you're a professor and you do all kinds of consulting with companies, but how did you get into this zone? Into organizing people's psychology, for example. Well, I co-founded what I think was the first online social network at Harvard in 1999. Facebook, so yeah.

A few years earlier, we had a bunch of us who decided to go, but we were afraid we wouldn't know anyone. And so we started searching AOL profiles to find classmates. Okay. We found a few of you, we can be a little email list.

Okay. And we got to school in the fall. So it's a listserv. Yeah, it was basically a really early stage.

Yeah. When we arrived on campus in the fall, we connected about an eighth of the entering class. Oh, well. It's just any more.

We shut it down. Oh, wow. So you had the idea for Facebook? Not even close.

Not even close. If you had built Facebook, you had built Facebook. As I say. So what prompted you to do that was the idea that you just didn't know anybody or this was a new tool or?

It seemed like I was emailing more and more with my high school friends, and starting to see that there were exciting ways to connect digitally that I'd never thought of before. And so it was the first thing I thought to do when I realized I was going to move from the Midwest to Boston. Right. Right.

And so you wanted to make friends. Basically. Yeah, and I guess a bunch of other people did too. And very quickly it evolved into a bunch of factions.

People hated each other. Clicks were formed. All right. And then you would talk to each other on email list or just email back and forth these mass emails.

We had conversations. We had mass emails. We had meetups in different cities. It was a whole little community.

Wow. That's amazing. It's called an e-group. Oh, wow.

That's another digital company that we never have. Never have. So you just got interested in that. How people organize it.

So I think what happened was I counted myself out as somebody who was too risky for being entrepreneur. And so instead I went and worked for a company and I started out just doing ad sales and then I was promoted to manager and I was still in college at the time. I had a million dollar budget and a whole staff to motivate. And I spent my whole job basically trying to figure out how I could do the people part of it better.

Right. And I didn't care that much about the budget. Right. What I was interested in was the question of hiring and motivating and designing better jobs and shaping culture.

And so I wanted to make that my job. Right. So you just decided this is what you wanted to do instead of the actual business. Yeah.

I was hooked on the fact that I think so many of us spend most of our time working hours at work. And yet very few of us find our jobs really meaningful and motivating. And so I just wanted to make work suck a little bit less. And there have been a lot of history of people trying to do this.

It would organize people and what's the best way to manage. And there's innumerable books. I went home with my cheese. All this other stuff.

How you motivate yourself and how you motivate your workers and things like that. Did you pay attention to any of that? Not a ton. I guess I was drawn to it really from the perspective of social science.

So when I was working first trying to negotiate and persuade and then later managed, I was taking all these psychology classes. And what I found myself relying on was evidence. And I was struck by the fact that there wasn't much of a bridge between the ivory tower and mainstream. But there are all these great studies collecting dust and journals that could actually be applied to make management less horrible.

Right. Right. And so I wanted to try to build that bridge as much as I could. So let's talk about why management is so horrible.

What did you find? Because again, there's been lots of, I can't even tell you how many books I read on the subject. Most of which are useless. Are there any exceptions?

No. Well, I think fiction or, you know, I find more interesting fictional stuff like how people organize themselves or families or things. It depends. I'm going to talk about that because I think one of the tenets you know about how companies like families are more successful without the dysfunctional people in those families.

But what, so how did you come across with your theory? Because you have to have your theories so that you can apply them to what you're doing. Yeah. So I think one of the first things I was struck by is just how disconnected most managers are from the actual work that people do.

So, you know, I think this was long before Undercover Boss. But mostly organizations that I started studying had managers who sat in the corner office, had a contact with their employees, very little interaction with end users or customers. And it made it really hard for them to imagine what the job was actually like or what customers actually needed. Right.

And so I started out doing studies just trying to connect those dots and I ran a little experiment with fundraising callers. And I brought in a scholarship student. This is at a university. So callers are raising money to try to, you know, sort of provide funds for all different outcomes.

But I brought in a scholarship student and there was a little experiment where he said, look, you know, I wanted to come to school here. I couldn't afford it because of the work that you all do. You know, it's possible. And, you know, I tried to convince the managers that was an important way to motivate.

And they said, you know people already know where the money goes. And I said, look, it's one thing to know. It's another thing to actually see a living breathing student who's life you changed. Right.

And I was done to discover that one student coming in to talk about the impact of the job led to a 142% increase in the average caller's weekly phone minutes and a 171% increase in weekly revenue per caller. And it was just, it really made the job more meaningful. And so I started thinking, you know, we don't just need to do this with employees, right? We need to do this with managers too.

Mm-hmm. I think it gives them an idea of what motivates people. Yeah. And help really help them see who's affected by the work they do, which is so many of us are in the dark about.

Right. Or why I'm doing this at all kind of. Yeah. It's not motivating in any way.

It's like, I think I'll quit. Like, I think I'll just, it's bad. No, it's just, no, some of them love it. Yeah.

Thank you for doing what you do. But now with social media has changed, really drastic, because all the noisy people really get a lot of noise here. I think you must get extra fire because as far as I can tell, yeah, I would call you a disagreeable giver. Yes, exactly.

Okay. I want to hear about this. I think I disagreeable. But so you said to meaning was one of the things, but you said to work on figuring out what those things are, which they don't fit in all workplaces, correct, or can there be 20 different kinds of workplaces?

You know, I think there's a pretty big organization in uniqueness bias. And this drives me crazy until it comes to value. Almost every company I've gone into, what I hear is our culture is unique. Right.

And then I ask, how is it unique? And the answers are all the same. Yeah. So what do you think?

Tell me what they say. I just do this too. I mean, yeah, I don't think I've heard anything that you haven't, but I hear, oh, you know, people, people really believe in our values. And you know, they think that we're, we're a cause, right?

So they're so passionate about the mission. Great. So it's pretty much every other company I hear, you know, we give employees unusual flexibility. Right.

We have, you know, we have all sorts of, you know, benefits that no other company offers. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Right. Which are often not applied actually, except for the free stuff. Yeah, which is, I think, kind of a constant these days. Right.

Yeah. It's funny. If you go back, there was a great study that joined Martin Light in the early 80s where she said, look, if you really want to diagnose the culture of a company, instead of asking people what the culture is like, you should ask them to tell stories about something that happened at that organization, but wouldn't happen elsewhere. And so I've been advising my students to do this for years to say, look, you know, if you're going to interview a company, ask everyone you meet there, what's a story about something that happened here that wouldn't anywhere else.

Right. And then when they analyzed the stories, they found that the same stories were told over and over again. Me. Right.

And then they found the same stories. I've got a lot of different cultures. Oh, I have different companies. The same exact stories?

The same kinds of stories. So they were stories about is the big boss human, the little person get to the top and I'm going to get fired. And there were only sort of a few of those kinds of narratives that came over and over again. And so I look at that and I say, look, every culture is about questions of is it safe to work here?

Is it just and fair? Do I have a sense of control? And I think most other companies are saying yes, yes, yes. And then they have these surface ways of claiming that the culture is unique, but beneath, you know, however that looks, they're speaking to the same fundamental values.

Right. So you're establishing no companies different or no companies should be organized differently. So leaders I work with believe their companies cultures are more unique than they really are. I think that closes the door to learning because they basically think, look, nobody else is like us, therefore we can't learn from their practices or their evidence.

Right. So let's talk about some of those practices. Let's talk about what occurs now and then what has to change because I think the workplace, I think the work place that I've done a lot of shows on the work place, whether it's from an HR perspective or diversity perspective. Talk about the modern work place as it is right now.

So I think the theme I hear most in Silicon Valley is we've got to celebrate failure. We want to be able to fail fast culture. Yeah. And I think that's a joke.

Why? Because it's not true. Mostly because it's a lie. You don't failing.

What you do is you don't get responsibility. I think that's what it is for failure. I think that's a huge risk. I also think nobody wants to celebrate failure.

Failure is horrible. Right. I broke up. You know, it's exciting.

Let's have a party. Yeah. Yeah. Once again, my personal relationship failed.

I don't think it's realistic to expect anyone to do that. I think though that we can probably get better at normalizing failure and say, look, it's a natural part of trying hard things and running experiments. Right. And so, you know, let's not freak out.

Let's not have, you know, a witch hunt every time something goes wrong. And I think where I see most tech companies get this wrong is they do accountability around outcomes. So, you know, they measure the results of your product or, yeah, exactly. They're pretty common.

And they want to know, did you succeed or fail? And what I'd like to see is a shift toward process accountability. I'd say, you know, let's look at the decision process that you use to, you know, to bet on this idea. And I'd like to see good processes with bad outcomes rewarded because those are smart experiments.

And bad processes with good outcomes, those should actually be punished. Right. Because that's just luck. Right.

And I don't think we do enough digging around, okay, if you didn't hit your OKRs, why not? And if you had a pretty good plan and it just didn't work out, I'm much more comfortable with that than a bad plan that did work out. All right. Give me an example, though.

The common example that I've seen over and over again is you've got, let's say, an engineering team who has an idea for a new product. And they bet on the new product and it's a smashing success and then they all get promoted. And you find out they didn't really do their homework. They just had an idea and they ran with it and got lucky.

And I think we should be less willing to reward that. I think on the flip side, I've seen lots of engineering teams come up with new product ideas that flop. But, you know, they did a careful analysis. They said, look, here's the likelihood of success.

And they knew why it failed and it was a good learning opportunity for the company. And I think too often that gets dismissed or punished. Right. And because this idea that failure, but then punished, the failure is rewarded, correct?

Well, I think what happens in the examples that are most for me is those people are seen as not going places in the long term. Right. Right. So yeah, maybe they helped us rule something out.

But if they were really stars, they would have figured out how to make this project work. If they only had enough smarts. Yes. I think that's the thing.

I got it. I mean, I think the fail-to-ask culture, I'm not sure where it comes. I'm trying to locate its origins. I mean, a C job sort of has done a lot of damage in that regard.

Like he failed and then he came back. And I find it was really interesting. When I talk about it, I'm like, there wasn't another Steve Jobs. There wasn't a second or a third.

Like he was remarkable by himself. And so people tend to try to pattern map him in weird ways, I think. Yeah, I do think he's a little bit of a Rorschach test. Right.

And the place that drives me craziest is when people say, you have to be ruthless because Steve Jobs was ruthless. And I always want to know, are you sure he succeeded because of those qualities and not in spite of those qualities? Right. Right.

And why did the Steve Jobs who came back to Apple consistently get described as a little bit kinder, a little bit more patient, a little bit more thoughtful toward other people? Maybe he evolved a bit. Yeah, probably. So I want to talk also a little bit about what, so with the modern words, it would fail fast, what else would probably be the problem there?

What else is a problem? I think I've along with some complaints, but one of my other big issues is companies that are all about culture-fed. So mostly tech companies I work with say, when we hire, when we promote, we like skills, we're into star potential, but what matters most of the end of the day is does this person fit the culture? And if you look at the data, there are a couple of studies that make this a pretty scary proposition.

First one is a 15-year study of about 200 tech companies where you look at the founders' blueprints, and it turns out that the founders who are passionate about culture-fed, their companies are less likely to fail, they're more likely to IPO. But then after that, they grow at slower rates. So once they go public, they have slower growth in annual market cap, for example. What happens is if you're founded on a disruptive idea, it's really easy then for culture-fit to buy you people who are passionate about the mission, you can never want to work anywhere else, who are totally aligned on where they're going.

But as you grow, you end up basically attracting the same kinds of people, because culture-fit is a proxy for you similar to me. So I want to hang out with you. And so you end up with this really nice sort of homogeneous group of people who fall into groupthink, and then it's easier for them to get disrupted from the outside, and they have trouble innovating and changing. I think that's a critical issue.

I say this, I actually, recently, bothered to some of the Facebook people about this, they kept talking about how cohesive they are, and that's a problem. As far as I can tell, there's no question. I think cohesion is overstated in some ways. In difficult, when there's difficult questions, because nobody- you're so long so well, nobody says, wait a minute, I don't think this is a good idea.

At times of problems. So I'm not convinced. All right, tell me why. So this goes back to the early 70s.

Irving Janis was a social psychologist who coined the term groupthink, and his big theory was that cohesive groups are the ones who always seek consensus, and they can't criticize each other, they can't have hard discussions. And basically 40 years of research has shown that he's wrong. There's no correlation between cohesion and groupthink. And what looks like a cohesion effect is really driven by two things.

One is overconfidence, and the other is reputational concerns. So when people are just sort of conforming to what the majority wants to hear, what the highest, the most important ones to hear, it's not because they really like each other, it's because they're too confident in their own opinions, often fueled by past success, and also because they're afraid of the political consequences of disagreeing with our approach. Would that be called then? Cohesion's not the word.

I think it's politics, essentially. The people behave like that. Yeah, and so if I were trying to help a group avoid groupthink, I wouldn't say, you should be less cohesive. I would say you need a better job embracing diversity of thought.

And let's figure out then how to find people and create norms that allow to send opinions to be heard of. Let's talk about these books. The originals was a huge big deal when it came out. Talk a little bit about sort of the fallout from that.

I don't mean that, I mean, like what? Let's talk about all the time. No, no, no, no. It was making the premise and then talk about where it is from there.

So I got interested in why so many people fall into the same trap that I did, and saying, look, I don't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur or to be creative. And so then we just don't pursue our original ideas. And I found that most of the time we think it's a lack of creativity that holds people back from doing things that are disruptive or that go against the status quo. And that doesn't seem to be the case.

We have tons of creative people. We all have creative ideas. What happens is we misjudge them. So we're bad at deciding which ideas are good and which ones are bad.

And then we don't know how to champion them effectively. So our ideas fall on deaf ears when we do give them a shot. And so I really wrote original as a sequel to creativity to ask, after you have an idea, how do you judge it? How do you speak up for it?

How do you build a coalition around it? And choose the right time to act? And I guess the most interesting thing for me has been that I've thought it was mostly fear going in when people didn't pursue their ideas because they were terrified. And it turns out that it was a pure killer.

I was. But I think that's a factor. But empirically, futility matters much more. Futility.

Yeah. People just thinking, you know what? Nothing bad is going to happen if I pursue this. But no one's really going to take it seriously.

Or it's not going to make a dent. And so why should I bother? And how do you solve that? How does that change?

I don't know. I just studied this stuff. How has that changed since you made those observations in the originals? I think one place I've seen it change is I've heard from a lot of readers and a bunch of the companies that I've worked with that they were consistently overlooking people who didn't speak loudly for their ideas.

So we often listen to the person who's the most confident instead of the person who's the most confident. What that means concretely is we have more probably more companies. When this goes right, we have more companies doing brain writing. Instead of having a face to face brainstorming meeting, we have everybody generate ideas independently and then submit them for everyone to see.

And very often you find that the person who is least likely to speak up in the meeting actually had the best idea. I think that's encouraging. So people doing that. And what has changed in the way you teach this idea of how people's, every company's looking for creativity and great ideas essentially.

Yeah. I think I've definitely found myself focusing more on the concrete practices that leaders can adopt to stop squashing original ideas. And the sentence that drives me craziest these days is when a leader says, don't bring me blank. Bring me blank.

Okay. So often when I'm standing with an audience, I'll say just shout out, you know, film the blanks out loud if you've ever had a boss say this. And the whole room goes, don't bring me problems. Bring me solutions.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I hate because I do get my leaders say this.

They want people to be constructive. They don't want them to whine and complain. But I think if you create a culture where people can only speak up when they have a solution, you will never hear about the biggest problems, which are too hard for one person to solve. I say so they won't tell you all their various things.

Exactly. So I actually love to work with leaders who are interested in creating a culture where you can voice a problem, even if you have no idea what to do about it. Right. And Warby Parker has a fun solution on this.

Okay. So I'm going to talk about the world. And what they do is anybody who sees a problem. They have to do that.

Yeah. Clearly. You have to brag. Right.

Yeah. Anybody who sees a problem in the company can submit the issue to the Google Doc. But instead of just leaving it sitting there, like in many suggestion boxes, they have senior managers in the company review the Google Doc every week. And then they vote on which problems are important for the company.

And so if you see a tech problem, you want to fix, you can actually make it your job to go and tackle it. You've got to give people a participate in it. Yeah. Which they did initially by creating some small fund awards to say, hey, look, whoever points out the most important problem is going to get some recognition.

And then, you know, over time, people actually saw that some of their best innovations came out of this Google Doc. It's interesting. I was just thinking about how you'd apply that to reporters. It wouldn't work.

Why not? They don't participate. They don't, you ask and ask. What are the shyness people on the planet?

Is it shyness or is it independence? No, they're shy. They won't. When you ask for questions, whenever we've done difficult things, you ask for questions, you don't get questions.

It's so interesting that shyness doesn't describe us as the reporters. What is it? They just don't. They're not interested.

I don't know how else to, but I remember being at the Washington Post many years ago and they tried to bring a consultant to fix the newsroom. And very few people wanted to participate. I think that they just were like, no, I'm not doing a trust ball or no, no. Maybe it is independence or just surliness or something.

I'm kind of fine with the collective and saying, my job here is to do my own reporting. That other stuff is somebody who's talking. Yeah, but then it created a stew of unhappiness. You know what I mean?

The workplace wasn't necessarily a happy place. I can only imagine. You know what I mean? It was just disgruntled with what everybody had in common.

They've changed. They've changed. Workplaces changed like that. What other things?

So another thing that I see a lot of leaders doing that mostly backfires is they say, look, we know we need diversity of thought in this room. And so we don't want everyone to agree with the majority opinion. So we're going to assign a double advocate. And if you look at this, I mean, I thought too, until you read all this research by Charlon and Emma Thi Berkeley, which shows that assigned double advocates rarely convince anyone of anything.

And more often they leave people more convinced the majority of you. Oh, wow. Scary. So two things go wrong.

So Robert DeNiro doesn't work for you. No, no, no, no. The first thing is when you assign a double advocate, that person is just playing a role. So they don't argue for us enough.

And then secondly, everyone knows they're just playing a role. And so they don't take the person seriously enough. What the data suggests is that instead of assigning a double advocate, you want to unearth the double advocate. So find a genuine center and invite that person to voice their views.

And how do you do that? Usually it's announcing, okay, here's the topic before the meeting. I want to make sure we start this arrange a few points on this so everybody can use submit or let me know what your perspective is. And very frequently you have to go to people one on one and find out what they think.

And then I guess the version of this that's in Cheryl DuBudifley at Facebook is she'll start a meeting by saying, here's the topic. I want to go around the room and hear everyone's opinion. And she does that before she voices her view. And that way people can't be biased in favor of what she's favorite.

Well, they could be corrected by everybody else, correct? Yeah, I think that's very possible. And that's why ideally you give people a heads up on what the important decision is and then people have a chance to prepare their thoughts in advance. I see.

And then you can identify the person who disagrees. Yeah. And then the goal is to listen to them even if you think they're wrong. All right.

We're talking about your other book, Give and Take, Helping others drive our success. That should be the way it works. It is not often in more places. That's true.

So I ended up finding that there are these three styles of interaction that exist in pretty much every industry and culture around the world. So I called them, Giving, Taking and Matching. Givers are the people who by default are always asking, what can I do for you? Takeers are the opposite.

It's all about what can you do for me. And most of us kind of hover in the middle in this matching mode of saying, look, I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And I was interested in the success of those styles. So I studied, I looked at data on engineers, productivity, salespeople's revenue and found that the majority of the worst performers were givers.

They were constantly either just doing other people's jobs instead of their own or getting burned by takers. It didn't burn out. And that led me to wonder if the givers were the worst performers who were the best. And I was surprised to discover it wasn't the takers or the matchers.

It was actually the givers again. That the most productive engineers as well as the least productive, the highest revenue producing salespeople as well as the lowest were givers. And so Giving was really about what it takes to be productively generous to help others and succeed. Right.

So what is that? I think it probably boils down into three big questions. So the first question is who do you help? And we see that failed givers are constantly helping takers.

Whereas successful givers are boundaries. And they say, look, if somebody has a history or reputation of selfish behavior, I'm not going to be as generous with them. I'm going to hold them accountable for paying it back or paying it forward. Or maybe I'm just not going to help them as much.

The second is when you help. So failgivers end up dropping everything whenever a request comes in. Successful givers are boundaries. And they said, look, I'm going to have time blocked out to get my own work done.

And then I'm going to be responsive during other windows. And then the third is who do you help? So we see failgivers helping in lots of different ways. They become Jacksonville trades.

They're nice people you can harass whenever you want. Successful givers are people who zoom in and say, look, I want to be a specialist. I'm going to help in these two ways that are aligned with my skills and my expertise and with organizational goals so that I'm giving in ways that make a real contribution. And the matchers are not successful.

So what happens to matchers is they very often create this transactional flavor when they help. It's not like I really cared about your carrows. It's helping because I wanted something for you. They don't get the reputation or dividends.

Other mistakes they make is they only help the people they think can reciprocate. And so they miss out on this calm and silicone valley story of, oh, there's this young entrepreneur who had a request for me. I ignored it because what could that person ever do for me and now that person's a billionaire and I have no relationship with them. Right.

So you, well, that's kind of a Jesus model, right? That you don't know where. You never know where anyone is going to end up. And the interesting thing about successful givers is they don't go around thinking about, okay, I'm going to help because these people are going to go into the community.

They help because these people are going places. They help in ways that they think can benefit others a lot, but they're careful to protect themselves against the cost. Right. And say, look, I'm not going to necessarily spend nine hours with every person who reaches out.

I'm going to help in ways that don't require self-sacrifice. So how do you then set those boundaries? Because I know a lot of managers and they talk about that idea of being packed to death. Just packed to death constantly.

Yeah. You know, it's something I've struggled with. Yeah. Ever since I started sharing my ideas publicly, I've got more and more requests.

Terrible saying no. So you live in Philadelphia because no one told a meeting with you. I was like, oh my God, I'm going to Philadelphia. You know, I think there's something to be said for living a little bit off the beaten path where people are less likely to try to claim your face-to-face time.

Right. And then I try to meet with people more when I travel. Right. But I used to say yes to every person who reached out to me.

Right. And over time, what I found is I need to have some heuristics for what kinds of requests I'll say yes and no to. And I think the same thing works for managers. So it's for me, the first thing I do is I say, okay, family first, student second, colleagues third, everyone else fourth.

And that way, you know, five a choice. I'm willing to accept that my colleagues will see me as less generous than my students do because I didn't become a professor to help other professors. Right. And then the other thing I've done is I've tried to zero in on, you know, what are the ways that I actually add unique value.

And for me, that's sharing knowledge about work in psychology. I love when somebody reaches out and says, have you ever seen a study on? Yeah. Like, wow, I didn't waste all that time reading a journal.

Right. Right. And then the other is I really enjoy making introductions if they're mutually beneficial. And so, you know, I feel like I end up interacting with people in the not saying industries.

You know, very often I know somebody in one field who ought to know somebody in another. Right. I love connecting those dots. Right.

And that creates meaning you're a giver in that way. I try to be, right. Because when somebody reaches out, you know, I get a lot of pecking, right. In ways that aren't related.

What else it is, you know, actually those are not ways that I think I can be particularly helpful. But if I can ever share any ideas with you or connect with anyone, let me know. Sure. So, you know, we know what a disagreeable givers then?

Oh, Yeah. So I went into this assuming that the personality trait that givers have is agreeableness, right? Right. All right.

And friendly, I simply lied. And I've gathered a bunch of data and I found a zero correlation between agreeableness and giving. Mm-hmm. And it turns out that agreeableness is your outer veneer.

Mm-hmm. How pleasant is it to interact with you? Right. Are you interested in harmony?

or your values or motives underneath. So what are your real intentions? So you have to draw the two by two to really evaluate people accurately. And it's easy to spot the agreeable givers who say yes to everything.

The disagreeable takers, you also know those people. You probably describe them more vulgar way. Exactly, those are the worst ones. But we overlook the other two combinations.

So there are agreeable takers. Those are the biggest fakers who do a lot of kissing up and kicking down. And then I think the most undervalued people in just about any workforce are disagreeable givers. All right.

Fantastic. And so I think you're- Fantastic. Here we go. So the disagreeable givers are the people who are gruff and tough, but underneath they're doing it because they have others best interests at heart.

So they're the people who give you the critical feedback that you don't want to hear, but you need to hear. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes.

I was at a dinner party last night. Someone was there from Vice, and they just had a terrible article written about them. You know, you did read it, and you made it sound like a workplace you need to get into. They have a new CEO now, a woman's CEO's going to probably try to change things around.

But when I walked in, I saw this person, and I said, oh, I got that article sucked. How are you feeling? Like, what's the fallout? And literally three people were like, Kara, we didn't mention it.

We didn't want to mention it as a person. Because, you know, well, that's rude. You're like, what? We all read it, right?

I don't know what to say. Like, why not? Obviously, it's on this person's mind. And they then talked about it.

It was interesting. It was interesting. But two people definitely were like, you shouldn't ask about that. I'm like, what?

Why not? It's like saying the cancer. You know what I mean? Like, not acknowledging what's happening.

That's interesting. That is one of the things that I think three book-overs do. Yes. Sometimes it's misperceived as rude, but what you're doing is you're calling out the elephant in the room.

Right. Right. I was like, why would it? I don't know.

It was an interesting disconnect between me and some people. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like Trump some more? Like, whatever.

You know what I mean? I don't know. Before we get to where he was going, option B, what's been the result of that? Do you think?

It was a big hit, obviously, with Cheryl. About the death of Dave, who was a friend of mine. And I don't know if you knew him. Yeah.

Dave actually was the one who introduced me to Cheryl. Oh, wow. I've never met a bigger giver. Yeah, absolutely.

He was not disagreeing. He was not disagreeing. No, not at all. I have an agreeable giver.

Yeah. Yeah. I think when we sat down to write Option B, we thought that it was going to be about really helping people build their own resilience. And overwhelmingly, the questions we've gotten, the feedback we've received is about this book.

It either helped me be a better friend or it gave me new ideas for supporting a family member who was struggling. Or it got me thinking about how I could show up for my team when they were going through hardship. Right. And I think what it said to me is, we have a huge self-help section in bookstores.

And it's crazy to me that we don't have a help other section. And so I guess I would put Option B in the help other sections. I guess what I learned is there are lots of people who want to be helpful and they just don't know how. Yeah.

That was a big theme in that book of people saying nothing around something that was terrible. Nobody would acknowledge it. Which is surprisingly common. Yeah.

And I guess the other thing that's gotten me thinking about is it connected back to something that I was first alert to when I was writing an event take. Which is if you want to build a culture of generosity where people do help each other, the biggest driver of that as far as I can tell is actually the willingness to seek help. That a lot of people just don't ask. They don't want to be vulnerable.

They don't want to be a burden to others. They don't know where to turn. And so if you don't ask, you end up with a lot of frustrated givers who would be happy to help if only they knew what someone needed or who was in need. So I think you mentioned earlier, I was asked to go from this company called Give and Take where we're trying to make it easier for people to both give and receive help in five minutes a day or less.

So we've been running this exercise for about a dozen years where you bring a group of people together and you just have them all make a request for something they want to need but can't get on their own. And then you challenge everybody else in the room to fulfill the request. Oh, wow. It's pretty weird.

So Windbaker and Cheryl Baker first invented it. And one of the early rings, they basically had a guy say I want to see a bangle tiger in the wild. That's what you asked for, really? It's like you don't understand.

It's like a tiger for Halloween every year as a child. And I really want to make that happen. No one in the room is ever set foot in a content where that's possible. But somebody in the room has a connection, makes an introduction, and the guy's able to fly out for a private tour of a game preserve.

Now unfortunately the tiger's got loose. No. He's dead. Very funny.

I've run it in my classroom for years. And the question we always get back is, is there an app to facilitate this so we don't have to just do it live. And that's what we launched in the spring. It's called Give a Toss where you can log in, you can submit a request, you can offer to help other people and I'm hoping it'll be useful.

So it's anybody, anybody. So it works best when it's in our first day. You can try that way. But I think it works best when it's in sort of in tech community.

So you take a group of people who maybe work for the same organization or they're part of the same industry and you create a closed group for them and then they can make requests and offer to help other people. And do they, but people might edit their requests some guessing. It has to be within the context of the workplace or it just could be anything. We've actually found that if you do a personal request around first the professional requests are much more meaningful.

I see. People open up more, you end up with a lot of surprise and gratitude. People can't believe somebody offered to help me and it was safe to ask this group. And then they make much more real requests to the group when it comes time to ask for a work solution or insight.

Oh wow. That's an interesting concept. I once played a game on a Hollywood set, but it was not meant to be nice. I thought the assistants were too assisting and the people abuse their power.

You know what I mean? Those assistants just get to be out of them in Hollywood. And so I was on the set of a show and I was a friend of the director and they said, what would you like for lunch? And I said a shark sandwich please.

And they were like, what? And I said, I like a shark sandwich. And I go, I'm a caaccio obviously with IOLA. Like hello.

You know what I mean? And they were like, oh, okay. And they literally started to go get a shark sandwich. Like, yes.

And I was like, what? I stopped them. Like, are you freaking kidding me? I want to do an efficient sandwich.

I'm like, I'm going to get shark sandwiches for people. And anybody asks you a shark sandwich. And I was trying to show these kids like, yeah. But of course they had to if someone had asked for sharks.

Anyway, so I called them a shark sandwich moment. It was really interesting. It was like a workplace. I don't want to be part of someone who agreed to something.

Clearly. So I'm going to finish talking a little bit about where we're going in the workplace. Because I think most people, even though we're at low employment, feel very disgruntled disturbed. There's something disturbing happening in the workplace.

And where work is going to go. And you have all these ideas that maybe that AI is going to replace us. You know, all these vague worries about automation. They're not vague.

They're actually real robotics. And I think people can feel it. And I think some of the political unrest is about that, about the workplace and how it's conducted. Talk a little bit about where the workplace is going.

And Silicon Valley does try to pioneer workplaces, but it's mostly through having Quonset Hut offices. Or something weird. What do you imagine the most interesting workplace setups are happening? So I actually try to explore this when I started my podcast with Ted to spring.

So the concept is called work life. Right, exactly. And the concept was to find organizations that have mastered something that we all wish we were really good at. And then go and learn from the extreme.

The same way that you might pick up a work out tip from an Olympic athlete. You know, you might not be an Olympian. So there are a couple of places that really change my thinking about this. One is a tomato paste plant called Morningstar.

So they bring in a few hundred million dollars of revenue. They've been profitable for decades. They've never had a single boss. Ever.

And it sounds like a lot of receipts. No bosses. They started the start of the democracy. I think it's a complicated issue.

But I think Morningstar has figured out something that I think every organization could do. Which is they let you design your own job. And they say, look, you know, if the job description that you come in with was not written for you, then it's not going to capture your interests, your strengths, your values. So what if we let you create your own, you can get architect of your work essentially.

And then you can see that you're going to have to have to be a little bit more than the other one that you're going to do. And the question is great. How do you make that work? Because we have an organization to run and we have a mission to achieve.

And the way that they've solved that and so actual is they have every single person every year right where they call it clue, which stands for a colleague letter of understanding. And what that is is a description of how you're going to add value to the mission this year. And you write that out and then you have to take it to the five to ten people that you work most closely with and get their buy-in. And then they have to do the same thing.

And so everyone goes to their colleagues and basically says, look, this is what I want me to job to be. Here's how I think it advanced with the mission. And then if they can get a bunch of people to say that's a good idea, then they get to redesign their own job. So who designs the mission?

So the mission was set by the owner who founded the company. So we want to can this many tomatoes or whatever? Yeah, I think part of the mission though is to do that in a way that preserves self-management and gives people autonomy. So that's sort of baked into the philosophy of the organization.

But then what if everyone wants to do one thing and other people don't want to do the other thing that needs to be done? So it turns out that there are a whole bunch of people who believe so passionately in the mission of the company that they're willing to do whatever it needs to be done in order to make the company successful. And so you end up with just tremendous loyalty and there are multi-generational families now where somebody has worked at Morningstar for their years and then their kids start working there. And I think most unusual organizations, I wouldn't recommend replicating all their practices.

But I think just the idea of saying, look, I'm going to tinker with my job. And I'm going to try to get other people who I work with to agree that that's a good idea. I'd love to see that. It's interesting.

A lot of people think they're used to hierarchical direction. I think that's right, but I don't think they necessarily want it in every part of their job. I think we all have ideas for tasks we'd like to add or drop or people we'd like to avoid or interact with more. I'd like to see more discretion around those kinds of choices.