digest
There's this concept of quiet quitting where people are coming to work and they're just doing the minimum, doing their hours, doing their job, not volunteering or raising their hands or going the extra mile, and that's it. And that raises the question: is that bad? I'm a great believer that it's all about expectation management. I get asked about Amazon a lot, like do I disagree with how Amazon has run? My answer is always the same, which is that they never lied. They didn't tell you it's a magical place to work where it's all Kumbaya and we all hang out with unicorns every day. It's very aggressive and very rough and very competitive, and they're very open about that. Even the people who love it only last two years because they burn out. So because they don't lie, you know what you're going to get if you go work there. If you like that kind of culture, go work there. If you don't, don't take the job and then say you didn't know. Look at Apple. People say Steve Jobs used to drive his people really hard, but ask the people who loved working there and they will tell you yes, it was hard and there was a lot of pressure, but they did the best work of their lives and they're glad they worked there because they never would have been able to work to that standard if they hadn't worked at Apple back in the day.
So the important thing is that companies are honest about the kinds of cultures they have. It's the lying, the "look how everything's Kumbaya" framing that's the problem. No culture is perfect. Even good ones have problems, and even bad ones have advantages. It's about managing expectations, and I think it's okay for somebody to say of themselves: look, I'm not a careerist. I am okay with the fact that I will never be an owner or a senior manager. I want to be paid fairly and I want to do decent work, but I want work to fit neatly into my life and not overwhelm it, and I'm going to look for a job where that is possible. I don't think we're at the point where we have total honesty on both sides yet. I hope we can get there, because there's still stigma. Older generations like you and me, if somebody said to us, "I only want to work 40 hours, I'm willing to push my boundaries occasionally, but really this is what I want," we would be like, well, you're not working here. So it hasn't normalized yet. But I think it's just a question of being honest with oneself. And you're allowed to change your mind as well. I've decided I do want to be a little harder driving, and I have more ambition than I thought, or less. It's just about honesty. This point of view is as true in personal relationships as it is in our professional relationships.
I recently had a conversation with someone I found absolutely fascinating. She is polyamorous, she has four boyfriends, and she's very open about it. One of the things she explained is that you have to be very honest with everybody so that everybody knows what the deal is. I think what a lot of people do is date somebody new and casual while also dating someone else who's new and casual, but they don't tell them about each other. So they both think they're more special than they are, or they're both driving towards something that may or may not be true. You're dating two or three people and waiting to see which one works out. In the polyamorous world, what I'm learning is that you tell everybody everything, so everybody knows. It's very open and honest, and everybody knows where they stand. You can say, "I'm not into this," or "I want to be the one," or "I'm okay with this," and maybe something will develop or maybe it won't, but the point is it's on the table. I admire that level of communication. What I'm hoping is that we do the same thing in our professional lives. You sort of have poly work, if you will: I have two full-time jobs, I have three things going, or I only want this kind of relationship. It works if both parties are really open and honest, because it's all about managing expectations.
Hold on, I thought you were going to give me all of your attention and all of your effort and all of your ambition, and now you're telling me you only want to work and you want to treat my job as a casual job. Just replace relationship with job: all the same rules seem to apply. But if I had known that, I would have been fine with it. I would have given you a different job and had different expectations. I wouldn't have pushed you really hard. I would have given that work to someone else, because I'm assuming you want to live your career the way I live mine. I assume that I'm getting into this relationship and you're getting into it for the same reasons as me, but we never had a conversation. We are nowhere near that in terms of social acceptance for that kind of conversation, but I aspire to it: somebody sits down and says, as part of your CV and your interview, "What kind of work-life balance do you aspire to, and how do you view work, even if you change your mind?" And then, if expectations are managed, what's the problem?
You've answered one of the actual number one questions I wanted to ask you today, because when I read your book, The Infinite Game, one of the big things that changed in my life was... I remember I was on a plane, I read the book, started writing some stuff, came back to our office in the UK, and I did a big presentation to all my teams about how we create a sustainable company. Because if what you're talking about in the book is true, and we're not playing a finite game here, how do we redesign the business from the ground up so that it is fundamentally sustainable?
Yep. I came up with this thing called W3, which is the three reasons why we exist. We made 2020 goals, so this was in 2019, 2020 goals before 2020, for each of these areas. I'm thinking about it again a lot now, which is: if I were to design my business in a way where my team members would stay working here forever, how would I go about that? You've just answered it by saying the point about honesty. Expectations. Sitting them down and saying, what do you want from your life? Because I've never asked that.
Yeah. As you quite rightly identified, I'm presuming they want what I want.
Exactly. So honestly, I've written it here as a question to ask you: how do I get my employees to stay forever?
Okay, so why would you be like a dictator? That sounds awful.
I understand. But why shouldn't... you want to create a place in which people want to stay. It'll be an enjoyable place where they can make a career and grow within the organization. For some people who don't have aspirations for leadership, they can come and do good work every day and get fair raises on a regular basis, cost-of-living adjustments and so on, so that they want to stay there even if it's a middle-level role. Not everybody aspires to be a hard-driving owner. I think it's about making it a conversation. We never treated work like a conversation. We treated it like a speech: this is how it's going to be. One of the good things coming out of COVID and young people is that they're asking questions about why work has to be that way, and employers are rebelling against it, because it doesn't fit the way we grew up and doesn't fit our understanding of relationships. It's just a conversation. By being honest up front, you can say, "I don't think this is going to be a good fit for us, I don't think you'll enjoy working here." If I employ you knowing what I know now, we'll both get frustrated, and I'll either ask you to leave or you'll tell me you're going to leave. That's how it will end, because of misaligned expectations. So being honest about what you want, who you are, and what your ambitions are, even if they change in the middle, is key. You can knock on the door and say, "I've changed my mind. I think I want to stay here forever. I told you I didn't, but I really love it here."
I know this from the military. Some people join because it's a steady job in a bad economy, or because the military will pay for a college education that they couldn't otherwise afford. Then, once they're there, they fall in love with it. They never came in for the service, but they discovered the service and the brotherhood and sisterhood and decided to stay. Some people come in for the service and realize it isn't for them. Work should be the same. But I think there needs to be honest conversation. I've had debates even with my work partners. When they say, "If we're paying them a full salary and giving them benefits, they shouldn't have another job," my question is, why not, as long as our work product doesn't suffer as a result? If they're phoning it in and missing all the meetings, then yes, absolutely. We're paying for a certain expectation of performance, but not necessarily for when they get it done. So why shouldn't they have two jobs? Again, there has to be honesty. We have an expectation of X, and somebody says, "I don't want to meet that expectation because I want to have two jobs." You can adjust for salary that way. You can say, "All right, then how about we pay you less and you can have all the freedom you want." Again, it's a conversation. We don't make these things conversations; we make them one-way. And that goes from employee to employer too.
Somebody asked me recently how to ask their boss for a raise. I said the problem with the way most people ask is: "I want a 20% raise. I did my research, the average salary for my job is X, my friend gets paid X, I know somebody I work with who is doing the same work, so I want to be compensated equally, and I want a 20% raise." They're positioning the question so the employer has no choice but to say yes or no. Even if the answer is "I can help you get that, but you'll have to hit certain targets," it still comes across as a no, because the request was binary. The advice I gave this person was: stop thinking of your job as an event and think of it as a career. Think of your job as a continuum, and go to your boss in the middle of that continuum. Say, "I've worked here for two and a half years. I've been here through high times and low times. I'm loyal, and my aspiration is to stay here and grow with the organization. Can you help me figure out a path that gets me to this salary?" It's not a yes or no. It's: "Absolutely, I can give it to you today, no path necessary," or "Absolutely, I can. We're going to set some target goals, and if you hit them, you'll work toward that salary." It's allowing for conversation, and recognizing that you view your own career with the organization as a continuum: I've been here and I want to continue to be here. So can you invest in me? Can you take a bet on me, rather than meet my demands? I think a lot of these things fail because they're poorly presented.
Amen. This goes back to the younger generation, who seem to lack the skills for coping with stress. They're not very good at asking for help and they're very confrontation-avoidant. As I said, they're sometimes so afraid to ask the boss, "Can I have a raise?" that they would rather just quit, and it's often done with an email that says, "You don't appreciate me, you don't pay me enough." I'm like, what? You just had to ask me. I would have given you a raise. Part of it is that when somebody is anxious about something, they present poorly and make things binary, because there's fear, anxiety, stress, or fear of rejection. What if my boss says no? Can I handle that? All of these things come into these very binary, aggressive approaches. I always equate these challenges at work to personal relationships. You can't go to the person you love and say, "I demand this." It's just not going to go well. But you can present a situation and say, "I want us to move through this. How do we work through this together?" I think that's how difficult work conversations need to happen. A work relationship is a relationship like any other. There's trust, anger, care, good days and bad days, and all the same messiness as in our personal relationships. There are slightly different standards of professionalism and emotional maturity, but in terms of it being a relationship, it's like any other, so you have to treat it like one.
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