Fixable
How to stop your company's size from slowing you down
March 11, 2024
[00:00:00] Anne Morriss:
Good morning, Frances.
[00:00:06] Frances Frei:
Good morning, my love. Let me just begin with, I apologize.
[00:00:09] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. You know that's a much better way to start.
[00:00:11] Frances Frei:
I had this cold first.
[00:00:13] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Listeners might note that your voice is free and clear right now.
[00:00:17] Frances Frei:
Yes. Yeah.
[00:00:18] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Mine a little less so.
[00:00:20] Frances Frei:
Yeah. My apologies.
[00:00:21] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Accepted. I do feel like I'm looking into my future.
[00:00:25] Frances Frei:
You are. You are.
[00:00:26] Anne Morriss:
And it’s a little brighter.
[00:00:26] Frances Frei:
The future is bright. Your future is bright.
[00:00:28] Anne Morriss:
It’s a little brighter. So, I wanna talk about hustle culture.
[00:00:33] Frances Frei:
Oh yeah.
[00:00:34] Anne Morriss:
Before we get started, because I feel like this phenomenon, and then, its bad reputation can sometimes muddy the speed conversation.
[00:00:45] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:00:46] Anne Morriss:
So what is hustle culture, Frances, and how is it different from a sense of urgency or, uh, a sense of moving fast and fixing things.
[00:00:57] Frances Frei:
Yeah. So, hustle culture is, uh, indiscriminate.
[00:01:02] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:01:03] Frances Frei:
Everything has to go fast. And, and I think the famous saying is that if everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. That's hustle culture. It's also, in my experience, an infinite game of addressing symptoms and never addressing the cause.
[00:01:16] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:01:17] Frances Frei:
And, so, hustle culture is just this breathlessness of activity. And, when you look back in retrospect, you haven't really made very much progress, but boy, were you busy along the way?
[00:01:27] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. You were running around, um, in the proverbial circle instead of moving forward.
[00:01:32] Frances Frei:
Yeah. Whereas, a culture of urgency is very discriminant.
[00:01:37] Anne Morriss:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:01:37] Frances Frei:
It's, we're gonna work on these things, not those things. It's really radical prioritization.
[00:01:43] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:01:43] Frances Frei:
Of what we're gonna work on and we should work with most urgency on our most important problems.
[00:01:51] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:01:51] Frances Frei:
Hustle culture doesn't discern between most important and least important.
[00:01:55] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Yeah. I find a tell, uh, that you're getting it right, is that people feel a sense of relief.
[00:02:03] Frances Frei:
Yes.
[00:02:03] Anne Morriss:
Because you're making progress and you're making it clear that the status quo is unacceptable.
[00:02:11] Frances Frei:
So when we think about speed, we always wanna think about prioritization too. And so that's a little tease for today's conversation.
[00:02:20] Anne Morriss:
I'm Anne Morriss. I'm a company builder and leadership coach.
[00:02:23] Frances Frei:
And I'm Frances Frei. I'm a Harvard Business School professor, and I'm Anne's wife.
[00:02:28] Anne Morriss:
This is Fixable from the Ted Audio Collective. On this show, we believe that meaningful change happens fast. Anything is fixable and good solutions are usually just a single, brave conversation away.
[00:02:40] Frances Frei:
Who do we have today, Anne?
[00:02:41] Anne Morriss:
Frances, we have a fantastic caller today. Let's, uh, let's listen to the voicemail.
[00:02:46] Caroline:
Hey Anne and Frances. This is Caroline calling. My question is, how do we go faster, internally, as a business? To back up a bit, we are about a 50 person business. Uh, we more than doubled in size last year.
We're growing at a great rate, but we still think we could go faster, internally. I actually gifted our team your new book as a holiday gift. Would love to talk about this with you if it's of interest.
[00:03:10] Anne Morriss:
First of all, her instincts are excellent.
[00:03:12] Frances Frei:
Oh my gosh. For the gift giving season. I think that's a generalizable lesson.
[00:03:17] Anne Morriss:
Uh, and this is one of our favorite conversations.
I'm, uh, I have some follow up questions around the, the logic of the speed. What are we trying to achieve with it?
[00:03:27] Frances Frei:
Yeah, and the thing I very much like about the question is as we get bigger, how do we go faster?
[00:03:33] Anne Morriss:
Right.
[00:03:34] Frances Frei:
Because in general, when we go get bigger, we add more bureaucracy and we go slower. But those are diseconomies of scale.
[00:03:42] Anne Morriss:
Right.
[00:03:42] Frances Frei:
We want economies of scale. And, so, she really is getting at the, how can we make our size play to our advantage, not our disadvantage. So, I love going after, how can we go faster when we're doubling in size?
[00:03:55] Anne Morriss:
Love it. Let's get into it.
Caroline, welcome to Fixable.
[00:04:13] Caroline:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
[00:04:16] Anne Morriss:
So we listened to your voicemail. And, speed and momentum are issues very, very close to our heart and two variables we think a lot about. Hugely important in any adventure and organizational change. But, before we get there, I wanna make sure that we capture some of the context here so that we can be more helpful. So, let's start with the business itself. Tell us a little bit about what you all are up to.
[00:04:47] Caroline:
We are a software platform that allows companies and organizations to book desks and spaces. So, if you think about…
[00:04:56] Anne Morriss:
Wow.
[00:04:57] Caroline:
…a workplace or a community or an educational space that has more people than desks or spaces that are used for specific venues, we have a software platform that allows people to book those desks and reserve them in advance so that they can maximize the utilization of their resources.
[00:05:14] Anne Morriss:
This is a growing industry in our increasingly hybrid world, I imagine.
[00:05:19] Caroline:
Yes. Hybrid work has been a huge growth lever for this business, and we continue to see people obviously interested in refining their approach to hybrid work, and, so, coming to us as they put in new policies or as they refine existing policies.
[00:05:33] Anne Morriss:
Nice. And what is your role in the machine of this organization?
[00:05:38] Caroline:
I am the VP of People and Operations. So, I lead all things people and talent and think a lot about everything that is the internal workings of the company. How do we make decisions? How do we talk about those decisions? How do we communicate across the team?
[00:05:53] Anne Morriss:
And, how long have you been there?
[00:05:55] Caroline:
Since last June.
[00:05:57] Anne Morriss:
Okay. So that's less than a year.
[00:06:00] Caroline:
Less than a year.
[00:06:01] Anne Morriss:
Okay.
[00:06:01] Caroline:
Yes.
[00:06:02] Anne Morriss:
There's a lot on your plate. How big is your team?
[00:06:04] Caroline:
Uh, I actually just hired my first direct report this week.
[00:06:08] Anne Morriss:
Wow.
[00:06:08] Caroline:
Uh, before that I did it myself, but we currently, across the company, have 56 employees. We're in 14 different countries around the globe and we hired 17 people between the beginning of the fourth quarter and today. So, a lot of that growth has happened in the last year, uh, which I think will, will be an important component of this conversation.
[00:06:32] Anne Morriss:
Yeah, let's start there. How is the company metabolizing that growth and how are you doing with it?
[00:06:38] Caroline:
I did a lot of recruiting in the fourth quarter. I did every first round interview and so I did a lot of calls for us to end up with, uh, with 17 great people joining the team.
The company so far is metabolizing the growth quite well. I think one of the things I've been proud of, especially with where we see a lot of other tech companies right now, is we very much have hired for the growth that we need today.
A lot of times candidates will ask me: “When are you looking for this hire to start?” Right. And my answer is always, “Today, yesterday, as soon as you can be here.” Um, that's obviously a source of pride sort of given, given our growth, but I think it's also something that, that makes every hire very pressing, right? The pressure is certainly on.
[00:07:19] Anne Morriss:
Has revenue grown at a commensurate pace?
[00:07:22] Caroline:
We have been, yeah, really happy with our revenue growth and a lot of the teams that have been added are to further the platform. Right? So to add outta the platform horizontally or to sort of further the, the sales effort of the team.
[00:07:37] Anne Morriss:
Alright, that sounds, sounds like things are going pretty well. So where and why do you wanna go faster?
[00:07:44] Caroline:
We have checked the boxes in a lot of, I don't wanna say the easy ways, because not, it's not that hiring is easy or adding resources to people's teams is easy, whether that's new tools or technology or people.
But, I think we don't necessarily feel the internal human capital flywheel going as fast as we would like it to. And, as I was getting ready for this conversation, I was trying to think of where are the examples if we're still going slow. And, it feels like we're getting faster, but it still doesn't feel as fast as past companies I’ve been a part of.
And, and that's sort of the problem that we're looking to tackle.
[00:08:25] Anne Morriss:
We'll leave it in the, I know it when I feel it category for now. Um, but what, what is the cost of that delta?
[00:08:35] Caroline:
I think for a, from a business perspective, we, we work and, in an increasingly competitive workplace, right? There are other platforms that do what we do and for us to stay, uh, and continue to have the growth that we want, whether it's new products or make decisions quickly, internally, has a real impact on our ability to stay ahead of the competition.
[00:08:57] Anne Morriss:
And it's your sense that people aren't operating with a sense of urgency?
[00:09:02] Caroline:
I don’t know that I would say that as a blanket statement. I definitely know people that have lots of urgency that are here. I think it's more the, how people are working cross-functionally. I don't know that we're there yet…
[00:09:15] Anne Morriss:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:09:15] Caroline:
…In terms of us moving fast and then I was thinking about, you know, if you're an engineer working on our team in Europe, do you feel the momentum that the marketing team in Boston has? Maybe not? Right. If I think about past companies that I've worked at where there was a sense of momentum. A lot of that was in person and in the same office. You could feel the momentum from sales, even if you weren't working in sales, because you would hear the sales gong going all the time, or you would, you would hear about the new logo that they closed the lunch line or something like that.
And you don't have that in a remote setting. And so, my worry is that people don't sense the momentum that others have and, and are losing the ability to be energized by that momentum that is happening across the company, but might not be seen.
[00:10:00] Anne Morriss:
Can you think of an example of when you saw this tension or felt that tension?
[00:10:06] Caroline:
I think there are probably team members that have the perception, they're working so hard and they're the hardest working people on the team, and I think that's easy to say when you're sort of isolated. Right? And you see your own very hard work.
[00:10:20] Anne Morriss:
You don't see your competitors to know how fast they're going.
[00:10:22] Caroline:
Right. You don't see…
[00:10:23] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:10:23] Caroline:
Right. You don't, you don't see how fast others are going or maybe how efficient others are going. Right? It, it might just be showing up in very different ways of sort of how much impact somebody is having. And, that's probably an example where I would see somebody not having the visibility of like, oh, these other teams are actually going really, really fast.
I just don't have visibility into that. Um. And I don't think we're so slow that we're, it's not a catastrophic problem. I think it's more of, look at how exquisite this could be, right?
[00:10:54] Anne Morriss:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:10:54] Caroline:
We've hired all these new, incredibly talented people. We've added more resources across those teams to make them really be able to do the best work of their careers.
And so the detriment isn't necessarily that, oh, I think this company is gonna fail if we don't go faster by tomorrow. I think it's more. If we do go faster, we can achieve so much more in the year or in the next couple of years.
[00:11:16] Anne Morriss:
Got it, got it. So it's, it's really in the opportunity cost right now.
[00:11:20] Caroline:
Yes.
[00:11:20] Anne Morriss:
Do other people around you share this concern?
[00:11:24] Caroline:
So this current concern was brought up by our CEO to the senior leadership team in October, and his challenge to all of us was, you know, how do we go faster? I think we've gotten incrementally faster since then, right? That was a couple months ago, but I still don't think we're, we're sitting and looking around and saying, wow, this is the fastest place I've ever worked.
We are really all, you know, rowing in the same direction, flying the same playbook, whatever analogy you want to use.
[00:11:54] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. So I wanna know what the company has done since the CEO's mandate in October. What you've tried.
[00:12:01] Caroline:
Some of the things that have happened in the past couple of months to give us a greater sense of moving faster has been teams simply doing a better job sharing what they, in some cases, were already doing.
Um, so our marketing team, for example, did a great job of sharing a lot more of the A/B tests that they're running on our website and they're running new A/B tests every week. And so, sharing that, not just the tests that they're running, but also at the end of the week, right? Here's the result. Here's what we're gonna do next week. Here's how we're iterating on that was a great way of showcasing how they're moving faster and how they're iterating faster and I think creating a sense of momentum of what that team is working on.
[00:12:38] Anne Morriss:
Awesome. And what have you done, personally, on your team?
[00:12:42] Caroline:
Uh, I hired 17 people. Um, one of the things that, that we instituted last year that I think continues to have an impact is we, for the first time, had an all company meeting, uh, where we're sharing cross-functionally what each of the departments are working on.
Currently, we do that meeting quarterly, and I think there's an opportunity to potentially share more frequently than that. But, that has been a helpful way obviously to, to witness some of the momentum that other functions are doing is by joining that meeting and sort of seeing what other teams are doing and we see great attendance in that meeting and those that can't attend, watch the recording.
[00:13:20] Anne Morriss:
Great. Alright, Frances, where are we?
[00:13:23] Frances Frei:
A awesome company with an amazing Head of People and Ops. Let me just begin there. That has a lot of the basic blocking and tackling done and wants to go faster. So what we call a very high quality problem. And what you've done since having this as a mandate or is, what we would call, some very standard techniques.
So, one thing you did, I'll just put some language on it, but you added what we call operational transparency. And that is, that's your communication and they're talking about the A/B testing for the websites and just making it visible. What's amazing about operational transparency is you don't have to change the operations. You just be transparent about it and people's perception of it goes up and the speed of it goes up. So operational transparency is, is like a miracle. You just make things visible and all of the metrics get better. So that one's great.
With the hiring, the language we would use for that is that you added resources to the bottleneck function. What I mean by that is, whatever is constraining capacity, whatever is the limiting step, we call it a bottleneck. And, it's the thing that's limiting the flow. And, when you add resources, mistakes organizations make is that they add resources to non-bottleneck steps and then they wonder why nothing got better.
And the only way things get better is if you make that particular bottleneck step wider. So that's the other classic thing you did that makes a lot of sense. There are a bunch of others that I think when we get into the solutions, what we're gonna do is ask you to try them on and see if there aren't a few candidates from the other toolkit, the speed toolkit. But I think that's what we're gonna get to, and it feels like it'll be a very optimistic, uh, exploration.
[00:15:12] Anne Morriss:
Does that sound right, Caroline?
[00:15:14] Caroline:
Yeah, that's great.
[00:15:15] Anne Morriss:
Great. Yeah. So, we're about to get the engines of the Fixable train. I see my, my, my wife's pulse quickening over there. Why don't you keep going?
[00:15:27 ] Frances Frei:
All right.
[00:15:15] Anne Morriss:
Uh, so now where you started.
[00:15:28] Frances Frei:
So, I’m just gonna give you… So I'm just gonna give you some, and you just, you know, snag the ones that you wanna double click on.
[00:15:34] Anne Morriss:
Perfect.
[00:15:35] Frances Frei:
So, in general, when the pace of decision making is slow, we find that too few people have been empowered to make decisions. And, so, the decision maker has become a bottleneck. When the decision maker has become the bottleneck, what we need to do is empower more people. That's a way to add resources to the bottleneck function by just giving more people decision rights. Now, you don't wanna give people decision rights that go beyond their capacity, but that's one thing we have to empower more people to make more decisions.
[00:16:11] Anne Morriss:
Does that ring true for your context?
[00:16:15] Caroline:
It, it rings true, as in I intellectually agree with it. I'm wondering how to implement it in our, in our case.
[00:16:24] Frances Frei:
Here's a, just a quick test. Where are the decisions most maddeningly slow for you, for the organization, like in your observation?
[00:16:33] Caroline:
I think there's a couple pockets where they're conspicuously slow and where giving decision rights to somebody around a specific area could be impactful. The bottleneck probably is, and I'm assuming this is not atypical, but at the senior leadership level, sort of a lot of the decisions are still coming to the top, rather than, now that we've hired some of those mid-level managers, empowering them to make the decisions around their functions.
[00:16:58] Frances Frei:
And you just said the magic word. So if we're gonna give a label to each one of these, this is empowerment. If your organization is like other organizations that are gonna be slow to empower these new folks. And what we would say is that you don't learn very much by going slow. This is a learning-by-doing sport. So,practice with the empowerment and get better at it. Don't wait for this magical seasoning to occur.
[00:17:24] Caroline:
I was actually thinking about the, the new hire that I just hired earlier this week, who's helping me with some of the recruiting projects. We are continuing to hire sort the beginning of this year, and I think there's projects where I could have, instead of asking for her help, given her ownership over some either project or parts of a project more discreetly and letting her run with it and then coming back.
[00:17:45] Frances Frei:
It's…
[00:17:45] Anne Morriss:
Gorgeous example.
[00:17:46] Frances Frei:
It's a gorgeous example because she will be a better, more helpful leader more quickly with the latter. And it's so understandable to wanna go, like, super slow in the process, but it's fast experimentation is what leads to it. So that was a gorgeous example.
[00:18:06] Anne Morriss:
And you can add some safety nets. So, in the future, you'll just say, here's the ball, you know, run. But in this first project, it's, here's the ball. Run a couple feet, circle back, you know, get my input, run a couple more feet, you know, so it's, there's some artificial constraints in this first round, but she's still clearly getting the ball.
And the, the reframing you just offered was really powerful. But this is a moment of reflection for you, Caroline, to think of, okay, what was in the way? What was in the way of me doing this in the first place? Is it just habit? Is it a culture of risk aversion around me? Bringing on a new hire is an awesome time to kind of reflect on your own patterns…
[00:18:47] Frances Frei:
And what's.
[00:18:48] Anne Morriss:
As a manager.
[00:18:48] Frances Frei:
What’s gonna make you an awesome messenger to everyone else as you did it yourself and you get to reflect on it. And, if you give transparency to your reflection, you will accelerate other people doing it.
[00:18:59] Anne Morriss:
Frances, what else is on your magic list?
[00:19:00] Frances Frei:
Yeah, so lemme go. Um, if you are going to empower people, and that's what this one is, it's really important to give people a budget line item. And, so, I'm gonna give you examples for this, but even if the line item is $10, it's amazing how just being able to have a small discretionary budget can make a world of difference.
So, there are high-end hotels who will have, often have employees that will never be able to afford staying at those very, very high-end hotels. And so they don't have any shared experience with which to serve the customers. But they're trained to do anticipatory service, like to really go above and beyond and delight.
And they're given just small budgets to do things. So let me give you one example. A 21-year-old employee saw this very fancy family and one of their children was very sad 'cause he lost his Thomas the Train. And this was at like nine o'clock at night. By seven o'clock the next morning, this 21-year-old employee was not only giving a Thomas the Train to this client, but also had taken photographs of Thomas the Train at the sandwich station, at the pool, and said, oh, Thomas was enjoying his things. Now, he had to go out and buy a Thomas the Train. And if he had to get approval for that, it was overnight, he never would've gotten it. So now their budget, their line item, I think was $15. That was the discretion that people had to spend.
[00:20:44] Anne Morriss:
So, I think. Frances, you were pointing out the power of the line item as an empowerment signal to people.
[00:20:49] Frances Frei:
Yes.
[00:20:50] Anne Morriss:
And the line item, meaning, if I'm get, if I'm getting your point right, you don't just have discretionary control over your time or, like, your focus, but over the resources of the company, which is a really powerful empowerment signal.
So, at the great Ritz Carlton, that number is pretty high. So it's $2000 per employee. Any employee on the Ritz Carlton payroll can spend up to $2,000 to solve any customer problem. So, what we will often challenge companies on on this one is, what's that number for you? 'Cause we'll work with healthcare companies and they're like, look at our margins.
We can't po… That's a ridiculous number. What would $20 mean? What would $2 mean for your employees to be able to buy a family a cup of coffee on the worst fucking day of their lives. And what would it mean to your employees to have this policy on the books, which is to signal, this is the business, sir, and we are in the business of being service to our customers.
And, your job, your mandate, is to do whatever it takes to achieve that mission.
[00:21:57] Frances Frei:
And, it can't be an exception to get reimbursed. You just have to know you can do it and you don't have to get approval for it and whatever that is, then let the creativity soar.
[00:22:07] Caroline:
Yeah. I like the way that it's, I think the point that you made about it not being a, can I get reimbursed, but sort of giving someone the license of just, you can go ahead and make the decision and we will trust that you made the decision.
Yeah, I, I've, I've always admired the, I don't know if they still have it, but the, the former Netflix travel policy was just be responsible and, and it's interesting how it motivated very different behavior than early in my career when I worked in invest in investment banking and you could expense up to $25 for dinner. You could bet that every night we expensed…
[00:22:41] Frances Frei:
$24.99.
[00:22:43] Caroline:
We got very good at that. Exactly.
[00:22:47] Anne Morriss:
Awesome. Alright. What's, uh, what…
[00:22:49] Frances Frei:
Okay, so here's another one.
[00:22:50] Anne Morriss:
Talk us through it, baby.
[00:22:51] Frances Frei:
Um, so what I've talked about is, is how to make it better for all things, like how to increase the pace, but sometimes you wanna make it faster for some things.
And, so, we want a systematic way to fast track projects. And, usually those projects receive names and they almost always have healthcare names is.
[00:23:16] Anne Morriss:
Well, uh, yeah, Etsy called them ambulances.
[00:23:19] Frances Frei:
Yeah, Etsy…
[00:23:19] Anne Morriss:
Which it's an unfortunate metaphor, but it makes the point, like these are the projects that can speed ahead of everyone else because they are more urgent and need attention faster.
[00:23:29] Frances Frei:
And what's important, just similar to the last one, is you don't decide how to put in place an ambulance project. You have it in place. We know that there will sometimes be ambulance projects and we have the process in place, and now, we will simply identify them occasionally. So one thing is if you are in an environment where that's gonna be needed, let's have a well understood process for how to do it.
So create a way to fast track projects.
[00:23:58] Anne Morriss:
Yeah, if you're looking for inspiration on names. I think at Stripe they call them Project Yellow projects. Um…
[00:24:03] Frances Frei:
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay. Here's another one. This one, if we were gonna give the label first, it's ruthless prioritization and the most important part of ruthless prioritization is not just saying what are the things that are most important, it's removing things from the list.
If we looked at all of the work and process of any organization today, we look at all the projects they're doing and we looked at the capacity of their people, they have more projects than people. Every organization does. And, what they think is we're just gonna buckle down and try harder. And, what they really should do is figure out which are the ones that are not important, not that we're gonna do later, that we're not gonna do.
Organizations have to learn to stop doing things and that they were a good idea when we started, but just because we started it doesn't mean it remains a good idea right now. But, the momentum of doing it, the putting it on somebody's to-do list, like the organizational whirlwind around our to-do’s makes it really hard to take one off unless it's been completed.
So ruthless prioritization is what's the most important, but what is so low important and is never gonna be higher importance and it's actually consuming resources to even be in the queue. So let me ask if that has any resonance.
[00:25:31] Caroline:
I, I guess a follow up question.
[00:25:32] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:25:32] Caroline:
I, it does, it does. and I think I, I think about sort of my, uh, never ending to-do list, wishlist list, list for this quarter, list for a day, you know, a future day.
[00:25:43] Anne Morriss:
I count five lists.
[00:25:45] Caroline:
I, I mean, at least, at least I have paper list…
[00:25:47] Anne Morriss:
Minimum.
[00:25:48] Caroline:
I have, I have a lot of lists.
[00:25:49] Anne Morriss:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:25:49] Caroline:
All the, all the dream projects and ideas. Some of which I'm sure would be, especially from the people side, right? There's always…
[00:25:56] Anne Morriss:
Always.
[00:25:56] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:25:56] Caroline:
You know, great things that we could implement internally, culturally that would have an impact. I'm always tempted to put it on the next quarter, next week, uh, you know, wishlist. How do you combat that thinking?
[00:26:08] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:26:09] Caroline:
'Cause that is.
[00:26:10] Frances Frei:
So there is the, so there's the no and there's the not now. And what you just said, and this is why you're gonna be a beautiful messenger once you internalize it to everyone else.
And to your point, it's so much more tempting to just say, I'll do that one later. I'll do it later. I'll do it later. And what we really should do is say no.
So, um, I have a, a friend who's always very busy and she's a very in demand speaker. And, the rule that she says is, “If I'm not willing to go give this talk tomorrow, even if it's being asked for in a year, I'm gonna say no to it.”
Because she keeps having these things. She's like, “I cannot believe I said yes to this.” And it's to your point, it's the, we have some view that there's gonna be a mythical slack filled place in the future that's gonna just have all of this excess time to do these things. The future is going to be at least as grim in terms of demand tomorrow as it is today. At least as grim.
[00:27:07] Caroline:
Right.
[00:27:08] Frances Frei:
So the putting off is actually a fantasy that gets us to not practice ruthless prioritization.
[00:27:18] Caroline:
And, and the mental cue in the back of your mind is still spinning.
[00:27:22] Frances Frei:
Yes. Because here's the thing, there's gonna be new ideas that come up next quarter, and I want you to be able to do those. I don't want you to have to do the, you know, fifth and sixth priority from this quarter. Next quarter, I want you to do one and two, next quarter, of what the, those current contexts brought up.
[00:27:39] Anne Morriss:
Caroline, do you have one of these lists nearby?
[00:27:42 ] Caroline:
I do.
[00:27:43] Anne Morriss:
Let's pull it up. How many things are on the list?
[00:27:48] Frances Frei:
I love this.
[00:27:49] Caroline:
Uh, 11 projects for later this month.
[00:27:53] Anne Morriss:
All right, let's remove, what do you, how many you wanna remove?
[00:27:56] Frances Frei:
Three.
[00:27:56] Anne Morriss:
Let’s start with three.
[00:27:57] Frances Frei:
I think we can do three right now. At least.
[00:27:59] Anne Morriss:
And I'm, and I'm gonna of course push this to five.
[00:28:01] Frances Frei:
And that is why, that is how I married up.
[00:28:05] Anne Morriss:
We're gonna just take five off right now.
[00:28:08] Caroline:
All right. I moved one.
[00:28:09] Frances Frei:
What was it?
[00:28:10] Caroline:
We wanna have a, uh, project to reevaluate our Glassdoor, uh, reviews and sort of take a look at those.
[00:28:17] Frances Frei:
Yeah, it's gone.
[00:28:18] Anne Morriss:
Gone.
[00:28:18] Caroline:
Not urgent.
[00:28:20] Caroline:
Cleaning up employee files.
[00:28:22] Anne Morriss:
Gone.
[00:28:24] Caroline:
Cleaning up our applicant tracking system.
[00:28:26] Anne Morriss:
Gone.
[00:28:28] Caroline:
It’s gone now.
[00:28:28] Anne Morriss:
It's good enough. You just hired 17 people. It's great people in an astonishing amount of time.
[00:28:32] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:28:32] Anne Morriss:
Systems are good enough.
[00:28:34] Caroline:
And I, I'm gonna remove, to the heartbreak of every employee, new swag.
[00:28:39] Anne Morriss:
You're gonna have more time to pay attention to them and give them what they really need.
[00:28:42] Frances Frei:
Yeah.
[00:28:42] Anne Morriss:
Which is your full focus.
[00:28:45] Frances Frei:
So can, that is amazing what you just did. It was amazing. Like, and it took like two minutes. For this last one, let me show you what you might do with that to make it a win-win, which is to take it off the burden of your list. And put it on the benefit of someone else's so...
[00:29:02] Anne Morriss:
Like, I don't know, your new hire?
[00:29:03] Frances Frei:
Or, either your new hire or is there someone in the organization that is just, like, swagalicious?
[00:29:10] Caroline:
It's, it's me. But, but there will be other, there are others.
[00:29:13] Frances Frei:
Yeah… and someone for who…
[00:29:13] Caroline:
Um, and, and she will be a perfect person. And I was thinking about, I can then also give her the budget to say…
[00:29:19] Frances Frei:
Exactly right.
[00:29:20] Caroline:
Here's the budget.
[00:29:21] Frances Frei:
There it is.
[00:29:22] Caroline:
You can own it.
[00:29:22] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:29:22] Frances Frei:
Yes, and so what I, so that one really is a not now. You're gonna wait until there's someone else swaggy. And, this is gonna be an awesome feature, not a bug that they get to do. Now here's the discipline. And again, it's not just discipline for you 'cause you have to be a credible messenger to others. Not let these things creep back on to a future list because you wanna leave time for the really pressing things.
And, I think the calculus that Ann did and, when she said you just hired 17 people. Your system is working fine. We often are looking to perfect systems that are already working fine. We do not have that luxury in, in resource constrained environments. And the cost of perfection is that you're going to be working on less important things, but it will feel tidy.
[00:30:19] Anne Morriss:
And my, my addition to that would be the benefits of imperfection, which is, uh, psychically liberating. But, I also think there's a very tangible benefit here, which is that if you, you remove the tension of this looming list, and you really are, first of all, more present to excel in the things that remain.
You just decided on this list. You took four off and there's seven remaining that were more important, and now they're more likely to get your attention, the attention that they need for you to actually excel, on those, on the remaining seven.
But, you also get that energy back to focus on the humans around you and to be fully present to what they need in order to excel. ‘Cause now you're, you just added plus one, and now your job has become like, how do I create the conditions for this other person to over deliver. And, she's gonna need your help ruthlessly prioritizing her tasks.
[00:31:27] Frances Frei:
Anne has a, a way of summarizing leadership, which is it's a practice of imperfect humans leading imperfect humans, and that is meant to be deeply liberating.
[00:31:37] Caroline:
I love that. So true.
[00:31:40] Anne Morriss:
Caroline, how are you doing? Do you have a plan? Let's talk about what you're gonna do differently when you show up for work next week.
[00:31:48] Caroline:
I do. I, I like the ruthless prioritization. So, uh, in our senior leadership team, we always talk about, you know, what are the top things each executive is gonna tackle this week.
Uh, and it will come to no surprise to you that those lists have gone from being the one thing that was sort of the intention to sort of now being three or four things that everyone's gonna get done this week. And, so, I'm gonna take the ruthless prioritization and, and sort of hold people to just what is the one most critical thing you're gonna get done this week?
And, of course, you're gonna do other things, but, but sort of what is the one like needle mover that's really gonna move the business forward this week.
[00:32:21] Anne Morriss:
Beautiful. I love that one.
[00:32:23] Frances Frei:
Maybe, even get them to articulate what are you gonna abandon?
[00:32:25] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:32:28] Caroline:
Thank you both so much. This was, uh, this was an honor and a pleasure.
[00:32:31] Frances Frei:
Uh, this was an absolute pleasure on our end.
[00:32:34] Anne Morriss:
Thank you, Caroline.
So Frances, we didn't get all the way through our speed tricks. Let's knock 'em out in this debrief.
[00:32:52] Frances Frei:
Yeah. So, there was one final one that was, that's in the hard category. Um, and that is lean into conflict.
[00:32:59] Anne Morriss:
Mm-Hmm. Yes.
[00:33:00] Frances Frei:
And so we think about what's a speed bump in an organization. It's often that there's conflict. It's not the conflict that's the speed bump, it's the avoiding conflict…
[00:33:13] Anne Morriss:
Yeah.
[00:33:13] Frances Frei:
…that is the speed bump. So let me turn it back to you. What are ways to speed through that avoidance?
[00:33:24] Anne Morriss:
The great Liane Davy calls it conflict debt on teams. We all, we all know what, uh, tech debt is. So conflict debt is just, is this tax that comes with you and often slows down communications and progress, and people, who should be resolving issues by picking up the phone, don't or send formal emails.
And, this manifests in a bunch of different ways on teams. The, the case for the very simple discuss the undiscussable as Chris Ardrus would say, or, hey, can we talk, you know, just putting on the line the kind of basics of here's my experience. Like, tell me about yours. It seems like we're getting stuck. Can we figure out a way through this?
And the bar is not to have those conversations fearlessly or to have those conversations without hesitation or to have those conversations super gracefully or skillfully every time. It's literally just to be willing to have those conversations and step into the discomfort as of naming the, the tension or the conflict.
And, you can get 80% of the weight. Now, if you want tactics on how to do that, there's many beautiful, timeless resources out there. I love the whole crucial conversation series. I love Kim Scott's Radical Candor work. You can go and get better at this, but really from where we're sitting, 'cause we see this holding teams back every day really what I wanna say is just go get in there and make progress. And don't overthink the, the kind of skillset required to do this. You, most of us have what we need to move productively through conflict
[00:35:10] Frances Frei:
And, and what I would say on the sort of what the value proposition to, to all of those beautiful words is that I can talk about a relatively small problem now, or I can wait a week and I have to talk about a much bigger problem.
[00:35:25] Anne Morriss:
So the degree of difficulty grows.
[00:35:26] Frances Frei:
Grows. This thing just gets worse when…
[00:35:27] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. It's a great point.
[00:35:28] Frances Frei:
…it's unaided.
[00:35:29] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. It's a, it's a great one.
Thank you for listening. If you wanna figure out your workplace problem with us here at Fixable, send us a message. Email us at fixable@ted.com or call us at 234-fixable. That's 234-349-2253.
[00:35:50] Frances Frei:
We're so grateful to everyone who has written, called, and texted. We couldn't make the show without you. Our team looks at every single submission and even the ones that don't turn into full episodes, they help us uncover the issues that are most pressing in the workforce today. So, to everyone, thanks for being part of the conversation. We look forward to talking with you soon.
[00:36:15] Anne Morriss:
Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.
[00:36:21] Frances Frei:
And me, Frances Frei.
[00:36:23] Anne Morriss:
This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Corey Hajim, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. This episode was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.
[00:36:39] Frances Frei:
If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell a friend to check us out.
[00:36:45] Anne Morriss:
And, one more thing. Remember our episode with Carla Harris on mentorship, sponsors, and advisors. Well, we asked our Spotify listeners which of these relationships they are lacking in their own careers, and we wanted to share the results.
52% said they are in need of a mentor.
[00:37:03] Frances Frei:
And the one that came in second place was the sponsor, which means we're advised up.
[00:37:09] Anne Morriss:
Yeah. Yeah. Forget.
[00:37:11] Frances Frei:
We have enough people giving us advice. We now need the two categories where people are acting in our best interests.
[00:37:17] Anne Morriss:
Yes.
[00:37:18] Frances Frei:
That's what we need to learn how to cultivate.
[00:37:20] Anne Morriss:
Nice.