Sue Bethanis hosts Founder of Machine Learning Week, former Columbia professor, and bestselling author, Eric Siegel, Ph.D.

Eric is a leading consultant and former Columbia University professor who helps companies deploy machine learning. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series and its new sister, Generative AI World, the instructor of the acclaimed online course “Machine Learning Leadership and Practice – End-to-End Mastery,” executive editor of The Machine Learning Times, and a frequent keynote speaker. He wrote the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, which has been used in courses at hundreds of universities, as well as his newest book, The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment.

Eric’s interdisciplinary work bridges the stubborn technology/business gap. At Columbia, he won the Distinguished Faculty award when teaching the graduate computer science courses in ML and AI. Later, he served as a business school professor at UVA Darden. Eric also publishes op-eds on analytics and social justice. He has appeared on numerous media channels, including Bloomberg, National Geographic, and NPR, and has published in Fast Company, Forbes, HBR, Newsweek, The New York Times, WSJ, and more.

Sue and Eric dig into his new book, The AI Playbook, and uncover the most vital use cases of machine learning, those designed to improve a wide range of business operations.

Sue Bethanis hosts consumer and marketplace product and technology executive, and author, Yue Zhao.

Yue was the first product manager and Head of Professionals at Thumbtack Inc. for 5 years, where she worked alongside the founders to build and scale a technology leader valued at $3.2B in 2021 with investment from Sequoia, Tiger Global, Capital G, QIA, and more. Then, at Fuzzy Pet Health, she was the Chief Product & Technology officer, helping the team find PMF for its telehealth offering and reach EBITDA positive within 6 months. Previously, she co-founded a wine e-commerce startup called FirstCrush. She spent 4 years at Meta working on Instagram Feed and Profile, Messenger Web and Desktop, and SMB Advertising.

Yue is currently a Venture Partner at LifeX Ventures, a $100M fund actively deploying capital in healthtech, climatech, and the AI space. Her network in the product space, in particular, adds a new dimension to LifeX’s team of ex-founders and operators.

As a seasoned executive career coach and advisor, Yue is passionate about coaching mid-career minority executives and helping the next generation of CEOs and founders hone in on the real pain points to solve for their customers.

She holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Sue and Yue discuss her new book, The Uncommon Executive: Breakthrough to the C-Suite as a Minority, and:

• How to adopt an executive mindset and develop skills that are critical for success
• Ways to demonstrate executive potential and land stretch assignments
• The challenges minorities face — overcoming biases and stereotypes, finding role models, and discovering superpowers
• How to influence luck and create opportunities with sponsorship, networking, and making smart job changes

Sue Bethanis hosts productivity expert, automation enthusiast, and bestselling author Aytekin Tank to discuss his new book, Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff.

Aytekin’s entrepreneurial passion and firm belief in creating tools to make organizations more productive led him to build Jotform, a bootstrapped global SaaS company that provides powerful online forms to tens of millions of users.

In addition to serving as the CEO of Jotform since 2006, Aytekin frequently contributes to Fast Company and Entrepreneur. A developer by trade but a storyteller by heart, he writes about his journey as an entrepreneur, shares advice for other startups, and provides insights on leadership, productivity, and using SaaS technology within workflows.

Sue and Aytekin discuss:

• Why the future of business is no-code, and how you can use an automation-first mindset to unlock your productivity potential
• How to move from busywork to less work and finally have the time you need to accomplish your most important work
• How you can use delegation and automation to achieve “timefulness,” the state of having enough time

In this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts the world’s leading expert in the rapidly growing field of trust repair, Dr. Peter H. Kim.

Dr. Kim is a Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. His research concerns the dynamics of social misperception, with a particular focus on the violation and repair of trust. This research has been published in the world’s leading scientific journals across management and psychology. It has received ten national/international awards from organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the Academy of Management, and the International Association for Conflict Management. This work has also been supported by multiple funding sources, including the National Science Foundation, the State Farm Foundation, and the Kellogg Dispute Resolution Research Center.

Dr. Kim has also drawn on his expertise to develop and teach some of the most highly rated M.B.A. courses and executive training programs at his University. Popular accounts of his research have appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, and National Public Radio. His first book, How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships are Built, Broken, and Repaired, is based on two decades of his original research on trust repair.

Listen to the full episode here:

Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Google

In this episode, Sue and Peter discuss the disposition to trust, its impact on professional relationships, and the crucial role of trust in fostering collaboration and innovation within organizations. Peter explains the fundamental importance of trust and how it affects all our relationships, whether personal or professional. Whether you’re a naturally trusting individual or more skeptical, the evidence presented challenges common assumptions and provides valuable insights into the dynamics of trust.

Some key take-aways from this talk:

• Peter explains how we have a natural predisposition to trust, which is fundamental to building relationships with others, engaging in collaboration, and operating in our society. Being trusting is a positive trait that is associated with happiness and creates a reciprocal effect in others. (3:44 & 9:16)
• A key part of building trust is through communication. Peter suggests offering small gestures of your own trust to others to initiate a cycle of trust-building, especially with those who seem less trusting themselves. (18:35)
• Within the workplace, trust serves as a catalyst for constructive actions and creating a positive and innovative culture. On the other hand, violations of trust within a company can severely impact team morale, productivity, and employee retention. (31:36)
• A violation of trust is incredibly dependent on the individual and the values they perceive to be important. Within the workplace it is vital to effectively communicate intentions and expectations to foster a culture of trust. Aligning expectations between leadership and teams is essential to prevent unnecessary trust violations, particularly during periods of organizational change. (35:16)

Trust is not merely an abstract concept but a powerful tool that can shape your personal and professional relationships. Whether you’re a leader seeking to inspire trust in your team or an individual navigating the nuances of workplace relationships, this talk offers valuable insights into the disposition to trust, its impact on organizational outcomes, and practical strategies for building and repairing trust. As you apply these insights, remember that trust is not just a virtue; it’s a catalyst for positive change and collective success.

“People who are predisposed to trust are generally happier and wind up better off in life, and that’s for a host of reasons….Evidence indicates that actually, when we trust people, their inclination is not to exploit us, but rather to prove us right, to actually treat that trust as a resource that’s precious to preserve for the future.” (3:44)

“Trust is vital to enable cooperation in contexts where people might have an incentive to also look out for themselves to the detriment of the collective.” (7:23)

“There’s research that shows we may have the same set of fundamental values, but we prioritize those values differently. So, in a situation where tough choices have to be made, you might make one set of choices that you think is right in the situation, but other people might make different choices.” (35:16)

Peter H. Kim:
Website | LinkedIn
Book: How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired

Peter Kim 0:14
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Sue.

Sue Bethanis 0:16
Great. Peter is a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. He received his PhD in organizational behavior from Northwestern Kellogg Graduate School. His research concerns the dynamics of social misperception with a particular focus on the violation and repair of trust. I can’t wait to get into this subject. He has received 10 national international awards from organizations including the American Psychological Association, the Academy of Management, and the International Association for Conflict Management. His research has also appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times and Washington Post, The Economist and National Public Radio, his first book, How Trust Works: the Science of How Relationships are Built, Broken and Repaired, is based on two decades of his original research on trust repair. So I’m so excited to talk about this, especially with what we’re in right now, COVID, climate change, all of it. So before we get into some questions, I read your bio, obviously, lots of accolades, based on research, but what prompted you to want to write the book like what was the personal reason?

Peter Kim 1:27
Well, one somewhat unusual feature of my background is that, before I started as a faculty member here at USC, I had moved every four years or less in my life, that includes my early formative years. And that exposed me to this constant need to expose myself to people I had never met before, enter and exit communities, and gain the trust of others. And in those experiences really underscored how often we need to make those judgments in general, and how important those judgments are, and how often we get those judgments wrong. Because as I moved through these different communities, it became quite clear to me that so many of these judgments were made based on superficial aspects of, you know, what, what they saw, first impressions, what I represented, what my parents did for a living, where we lived, and so on. Things that had very little to do with me as a person or how trustworthy I might have been. And I inevitably would do that for others as well. This is a fundamental feature of how we navigate the world, and so that’s what really underscored the importance of this topic to me.

Sue Bethanis 3:05
Interesting, I actually think one of the most interesting things about this subject is that there are certain people that are more trusting of others, I’ll put myself in a category, I tend to be very trusting of others. And they have to really blow it for me to not trust them. So talk to us a little bit about that, in terms of what’s the percentage even and there’s probably some data on this, percentage of people who tend to trust people more, and why is it that we trust, have that sort of feeling of trusting until someone screws up? So talk to us about that a little bit?

Peter Kim 3:44
Well, I don’t have that precise data. That’s sort of the realm of personality psychologists, which is not my area of expertise. But what I can tell you is that there is a disposition to trust that can separate some of us who are more trusting from those that are not. And we might be inclined to infer that that is a bad thing, that it makes us gullible and naive and so on, I would place myself in the category of trusting others, too. But the evidence indicates that it’s actually a good thing. People who are predisposed to trust are generally happier and wind up better off in life, and that’s for a host of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that we assume that it’s better and more prudent to not trust others unless it’s proven. But that’s based on the notion that other people are in general, opportunistic, trying to pull a fast one, and so on. And the evidence indicates that that’s not really the case. So there’s plenty of work based on that assumption, to the extent that that’s true that these are things that you might do to protect yourself. But the evidence indicates that actually, when we trust people, their inclination is not to exploit us, but rather to prove us right, to actually treat that trust as a resource that’s precious to preserve for the future. And, so that makes us more attractive relationship partners, with both trusting and non trusting others. And it also enables more constructive actions. So we’re more willing to engage in these, you know, take advantage of opportunities to collaborate with one another. And others see that and when we trust people, we treat them better. So they are inclined to reciprocate that behavior. So all of that combines to make trust, initial trust in others. A good positive.

Sue Bethanis 6:09
And what’s the relationship between again, this might be out of your area too, but it’s making me think about it. What’s the relationship between confidence in yourself and trusting of others? Is there a relationship with that?

Peter Kim 6:22
I don’t know of any research that’s really looked at that. And so I guess one way of thinking about it is research on people who have positive outlooks on the world in general. And so that then might include yourself, as well as your views of others. And consistent with the findings about trust, the evidence indicates that when you have positive outlooks in general, that is very helpful. There’s even research, looking at the opposite side of the coin, so if you tend to be depressed, you tend to be more accurate. So there’s actually a negative association between accuracy and happiness in that respect.

Sue Bethanis 7:11
Interesting. Okay. This is fascinating to me. Okay. Your books called how trust works. So why do you think it’s important for people to understand how it works? Tell me a little bit about the background on that.

Peter Kim 7:23
Now, if I were to ask you or anyone about the importance of trust in your life, I have no doubt you would say it’s vital. I mean, it is a fundamental ingredient in society. And it’s because social interaction, we can see social interaction is essentially being about how we relate to one another in mixed motive situations, where everyone does have this incentive to look out for themselves. But there is also an incentive to work together, because when we do, things turn out better. And that kind of perspective can help frame, the way we work together, how we treat one another in all sorts of situations. And so trust is vital to enable that kind of cooperation in contexts where people might have an incentive to also look out for themselves to the detriment of the collective. And because that kind of situation is so common in the world, the more we can nurture Trust, the more we can navigate those situations more effectively.

Sue Bethanis 8:43
So outline for us a little bit about how you see trustworthiness, some criteria you address in the book that’s important and how trust works. So let’s go through those.

Peter Kim 8:55
Well, the are you asking about how trust develops? How we make decisions to trust one another?

Sue Bethanis 9:05
Yeah, I mean, there’s three things that you talk about here, built, broken and repaired? So do you want to start with how trust is built to start with that?

Peter Kim 9:16
Sure. So one of the assumptions we tend to have is that trust starts at zero, and only builds gradually over time as we get to know one another. And again, this is consistent with that notion that other people are opportunistic, they’re looking to take advantage of us and so on. So why would we expose ourselves to others if we don’t know more about them? But it turns out that that’s not the case. We trust quite willingly and often in general, and this is not only because of the personality differences that we talked about, but also for other reasons. So, for example, societies have various rules, laws, norms, and institutions that promote trustworthy action. So you may not know the other person, but you may know that there are laws in place such that if they lie, or steal or do something bad, that’ll catch up to them. And so just inferring that they are not so irrational to make themselves worse off or to want to do that will give us enough of a basis to assume that most people on the whole will try to toe the line and do the right thing. And then there are these cues that we referred to earlier, these very quick first impressions that we might have one another. And oftentimes, those first impressions are very helpful, because they allow us to infer that, oh, I don’t know this person, but they seem very articulate and bright and thoughtful, that we know the same people, they went to the same school, all these different cues, can be helpful in terms of elevating the baseline level of trust from zero. And it’s not a perfect signal, as we discussed. But even though it’s not perfect, well, it’s better than the default assumption that everyone’s untrustworthy all the time. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be able to leave our homes.

Sue Bethanis 11:31
Yeah, exactly. Paranoid. Thanks for that, let’s talk about this idea of when trust gets broken and then need to repair, to me that’s about communication. It’s hard to not put trust and communication together, two sides of the same coin. So let’s just talk about behaviorally. Like what do you suggest around once trust is broken, how to repair it?

Peter Kim 11:56
One of the issues with trust violations is that we are so attuned to that happening, that we are inclined to believe any allegation, even unfounded allegations that are coming from a source we don’t know that, you know, allegations that we can’t verify, and so on, just the allegation itself is enough to lower trust. And for this reason, a lot of times trust is broken for unjustified reasons. It’s not warranted this kind of violation. And so part of the communication task, may be to articulate whether or not this actually is warranted or not, right. In some cases, you may articulate that this, in fact, is not true and provide evidence and all that. So that part is straightforward way.

Sue Bethanis 12:57
Harder in PR, yeah. harder if it’s public.

Peter Kim 13:02
Yeah. But the other element of communication stems from the fact that most of the focus of communication is on what is the response, in particular, whether the accused offers an apology or not. And so that sense, you know, sort of dominates a lot of the focus of the media, for example, and so on. And sometimes the accused won’t offer an apology for one reason or another. And so that’s the dominant focus. But just as important, is the question of how the violation is viewed. Because that interpretation of why things happened is just as important. And yet, we often overlook that really critical aspect of the communication. It’s almost like if you’re driving on the road, trying to avoid traffic accidents, and only looking straight ahead, right, ignoring the cross traffic, that cross traffic really matters. And if you ignore it, it can result in the exact same response, sometimes being very effective, and sometimes making things much worse. So then that very narrow approach to communication can really lead to surprises. If you’re not really cognizant of how the situation is being viewed and interpreted.

Sue Bethanis 14:32
You sort of picked up a little bit on social media. Well, you didn’t say social media, but you’re inferring I think, with like believability. I mean, I have a 17 year old and he constantly come up with things and I’m like, where did you get that like, so he’s, well it’s not that he’s gullible, but he’s just like, you know, he’s reading constantly and he’s seen this stuff, and the first thing I ask him, I’m like, Well, Where are you getting that? And I think that, unfortunately, it’s not anything against Facebook, per se, but it’s perpetuated this sort of hive mentality where you pull the hive mindset, where you know you’re seeking out, Facebook itself is you’re seeking out like minded people, that’s kind of what it does, it only allows you to see certain people and it’s tends to like, keep perpetuating the same thing. And that means that there’s more and more polarization. So they’re pleading to polarization and then, you know, then a mistrust of other people. How do we? Oh, gosh, this is a huge question. I mean, how do we coach, teach, parent, I mean, in business? How do we avoid this or diminish it, if you will, this hive mindset?

Peter Kim 15:38
It is a huge question. And it gets to some fundamental aspects of how we process the information. When we’re part of groups, and we’re assessing our own groups and other groups. It also gets to another misconception that we have well, it’s not necessarily a misconception, but it adds a wrinkle to a common view that more heads are better than one, right? When you have more people chiming in about something that it leads to better judgment. The problem is that with things like social media, what it does is it doesn’t allow for the full spectrum of perspectives to allow for that convergence on the appropriate answer. It leads everyone to self select and filter their views to make it easier to spotlight a particular view. And with that being spotlighted. Everyone who is part of that media stream or communication, they believe that well that that must be the correct view. And it exacerbates the confidence in that view that people become more extreme and holding that view and so on. And then there’s this other element, this group dynamic, where we, as human beings are inclined to believe that our own groups are better than other groups. So this classic inter group distinction is important because we would like to believe that those in that particular media stream are like us, we favor them, and we think they’re more likely to be right. And those in other streams are not right. They’re not good. They’re not worthy of having an opinion and so on. And so that exacerbates the problem. So we become more extreme in our views as a result of this unidimensional perspective. And they do as well. And then each side starts pointing fingers.

Sue Bethanis 17:46
Right, right. Yeah, I can see why it can bubble, snowball. So let me take a break for a second. And I want to talk about hybrid. So Deborah, any questions you have, you want to pop in here at all? I’m gonna give you a chance to do that right now.

Deborah 18:02
Yeah, I’m enjoying it immensely. And it’s giving me a lot to think about. I’m thinking particularly about the range of trustworthiness, so to speak, that may or may not be innate, but certainly is pretty characteristic of people. And you talked about the advantages of being more trusting, do you have anything to say about ways to specifically invite people into being at least that much more trusting than they are in any given setting or situation.

Peter Kim 18:35
One way you might go about it, is it comes to mind because they’ve been teaching courses on negotiation here for quite some time, and it really gets to this idea of reciprocity. And so one thing you could do is demonstrate that you trust them, with little gestures. And so I’m reminded of George W. Bush, who, you know, putting politics aside, he had this interesting technique of bringing people into the fold, which is he would share a little secret with them, but not a huge secret, nothing too consequential, but he would include them in his confidence. And that was a way of showing them that they were trusted. And you know, I’m sure it wasn’t 100%, that they will reciprocate by not divulging or so on. But that little gesture can be a way of of starting the cycle. And one another way you might add to that is by asking a question along with after you’ve shared a little bit about yourself. You might ask something about them. And so you are in a way, signaling that, I’d like to start this cycle of trust, and through that, start building it.

Deborah 20:09
Thank you, I definitely fall on the more trusting side of the spectrum so that when I’m working with people who fall pretty far the other way, you know, but you kind of trust people who are like yourself, where you kind of like them, I often don’t know where to start. So those tips are really useful in terms of coaching people, for ways that they may get better outcomes.

Peter Kim 20:32
Sure, you know, it’s funny when I too often encounter people that say something to the effect of I don’t trust anyone, and we might be having a meal together at a restaurant. And I look at their plate. And I think, do you know how many people you’re trusting at this moment by eating off this plate? A lot. So they’re not even thinking about that. And maybe what they mean is that they don’t trust anyone 100% or you know, their thinking about the closest relationships in their lives. But I think part of my goal is to just make clear to people that we’re trusting people all the time, even when you drive to work, that people stay on the right side of the road.

Sue Bethanis 21:24
It is amazing. Like, yeah, there really is a lot of trust. Yeah. True. Deborah do you have a follow up?

Deborah 21:31
No, just that I was thinking before, you mentioned driving on the road, I was thinking I’m actually less trusting on the freeway than I am in most other situations.

Peter Kim 21:42
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that raises is risk, right, our awareness of the risk in these decisions. And that certainly matters, and so we’ll always be calibrating based on our sense of that risk. And sometimes it’s more salient to us than others. Right? I mean, there’s certainly a high level of risk when we eat at restaurants, we’re just not aware of it. You know, I think there’s a recent story in the news about some people dying in Washington state from eating a milkshake. And if I were to share a personal story, I came back from Mexico City earlier this year, when I had been infected with three kinds of E. coli and a norovirus from that trip, I was deathly ill. And you might think that this was a foolish decision to have this orientation to trust others and eat in this country. But if I were to put this in perspective, I have been eating in restaurants all around the world for decades. And this is only the second time this has ever happened in my life, the first time actually happened at home when I was a child. So this is the first time it’s ever happened at a restaurant. And if I were to deny myself, those experiences as a result of not trusting, my world would have been so much smaller. And I think that’s the issue with these trust decisions, there are inevitably going to be times when our trust is violated, but if on the whole decision makes us better off, we can’t preclude ourselves from engaging in that trust. It’s almost like people who don’t invest in their 401 K’s in the stock market, because it goes up and down sometimes, but on the whole in over time, it’s a good move.

Sue Bethanis 23:42
Thanks, Deborah. So let’s talk about corporations. So, Mariposa, we work with mostly tech firms probably 90%. And we don’t have the exact data, because it changes so much, but I’d say that probably like 60 70% of those companies are fully remote. There are lots of companies, though, that aren’t tech companies and some tech companies who are suggesting that either they’re either requiring people to come back, or they’re encouraging. So those are very different. And I’m wondering, in your work, if this idea of requiring is based in a wanting of cooperation and collaboration and engagement, or is it more of a trust issue, or is it both?

Peter Kim 24:34
That’s a good question. I would imagine that this is the fork in the road that a lot of companies are facing and it does stem from this question that you’re raising. And sometimes there is a legitimate need for kind of collaboration, spontaneous conversations in the hallway and so on. In a lab that can be essential for innovation, but a lot of times, it’s the result of the perceived need to monitor the employees. I know so much of HR is about, reducing risk and making sure that people toe the line, and so on. And so many systems are designed to ensure that, and the problem there is that they can become a bureaucratic nightmare and especially as companies grow. And so the question becomes at moments like this, after COVID, when people have had to work at home is how much of that was really necessary or not. I’m reminded of telemedicine that’s emerged after COVID. And suddenly, this has become a much more accepted practice, and it’s made our lives a whole lot better.

Sue Bethanis 25:54
Oh, much easier. Plus, we’re not gonna get sick going into the hospital or the place, like, Oh, good, I’m gonna get sick from going in there.

Peter Kim 26:03
Exactly. And so this is a case of an external shock, forcing a change, and then our realizing, Wait a minute, this is a good thing, you know. And so for some companies, I would imagine that would be the same, to the extent that a lot of this sort of ‘come into the office’ culture was based on the notion that people wouldn’t get work done if they didn’t come into the office, right? If that’s not changing, and maybe that’s changing now, and maybe what needs to change, if there is some sort of sacrifice, is this question of: are the incentives properly aligned now? Do we need to adjust so that we have as much productivity when people are working from home by focusing maybe on the output rather than the hours spent at the office and things like that?

Sue Bethanis 26:59
Which is so hard to do, so hard to figure that out. It’s so hard to measure that, right? Absolutely. So I think that there is some sort of trust. And again, going back to transparency, communication, it seems to me, as a CEO, who’s encouraging or requiring, either one really, they better have some damn good reasons for why they’re bringing people back. And there needs to be some intentionality around when they are bringing them back. You know, what’s happening? Like, oh, we’re gonna bring everybody back and they’re gonna be on Zoom. I mean, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. At least for you know, not the whole day. So I think, again, it’s hard to separate the trust and the communication, because there isn’t enough demonstration of, okay, fine, we’re requiring it, but we need to understand there’s a purpose for that. And because certainly you can, I mean, I can look at it either way, I can certainly make a case for coming back and I can certainly make a case for not coming back. I mean, as long as the case is clear. And I think that that’s what we’re dealing with, with our clients, you gotta make it clear. So I don’t decide which way you’re going and it’d be better if you had a committee that decided rather than you, that would be better. But like, you know, if you’re gonna bring people back once a week, then great, but then have a reason.

Peter Kim 28:22
I think that’s right. And that I think, really touches on how, COVID and that shock, to how we’re getting things done, has required us to reexamine and perhaps renegotiate our contracts with people, you know, not only these formal contracts of how much you get paid, and so on, but how work might get done, and what’s really necessary and what’s important. And maybe that will mean that there will be some misalignment between what the company ultimately decided it needs and what the employees want. So some might leave, but I think you’re right, they need to be clear about what that new contract is going to be, and why they need it so that those who are questioning can make that decision. And I think that would be a good thing to do.

Sue Bethanis 29:20
Yeah, well, we’re seeing as well, similarly is that people that are used to being remote, now have left that job for whatever reason, or they were laid off. And now when they’re looking to get a new job, they’re saying, like, I want to be remote, or I want to have the choice and so then it’s come up again. And so the companies that are requiring people to come in are gonna have a harder time recruiting. Because, once you let people have more freedom, it’s really hard to put it back. I don’t know. I mean, I’ve had the freedom for 30 years as a consultant. So I mean, I get it, I was young when I got to do it. And so it’s like, once you get that freedom to like go the doctor, or go to the store, or whatever you’re doing, walk the dog work out in the middle of the day. I mean, it’s like, why would you want to not do that anymore.

Peter Kim 30:11
Yeah, absolutely. It’s same with faculty.

Sue Bethanis 30:14
Yeah.

Peter Kim 30:17
Right. Yeah. So I think being clear about that, I think is important. And maybe, you know, this is a function of the labor market being so strong and people feeling like they have options and right. So, yeah, so I think that just needs to get sorted through and maybe they’ll come to the realization that some of these employees that, you know, if they can have that freedom, but if it means that 30% cut in pay to go for a job that is less attractive to them, then maybe that’s not worth it. So, I think we’re all sort of readjusting to these expectations.

Sue Bethanis 30:58
And similarly, we have had a lot of layoffs, especially in tech lately. And that certainly contributes to the milieu around trust, especially if a company says we’re not going to do it, and they do it. Although that’s honestly the case, I think that the case has been lately with tech is that, you know, some big companies do it and then other little companies can say that they have like the jurisdiction to do it now. And that erodes trust. I mean, I think it does. So what are some ways that again, people, leaders can be communicative in terms of not eroding trust, keeping morale up, even though people are getting laid off?

Peter Kim 31:36
So this goes back to the issue I raised about how the violation itself is viewed. And so one of the things that I found through my studies is that it makes a big difference, whether you see the incident as a matter of incompetence or integrity. Is it something that wasn’t a mistake, is something that they just could not foresee? Or is it something that really involves an intentional violation of principles we consider important. And to the extent that you allow people to make that latter inference, there’s very little you can do to overcome it. And this gets to things in our mental basements that really lead us to view positive and negative information about incompetence and integrity very differently. So what does this mean? It means that if you’re a company and there are layoffs that are necessary, it really behooves you to make clear that this was not some arbitrary decision on your part, that it was necessary, it’s beyond your control to some extent, that the economy mandates it, the situation mandates it. And so that becomes a task because those who are on the other side, can very easily make the inference that this was not necessary, that this was an arbitrary decision. And when they make that attribution, then the company’s in trouble, suddenly loyalty to the company, or the willingness of those who remain to go the extra mile for the company drops through the floor. And so the company needs to provide signals, so this gets to the communication part, how does the company conveyed these signals that it was not something that they’re doing willfully and arbitrarily. And it reminds me of cases where, you know, many times companies will lay off employees and yet give their executives, big bonuses that year, that is the worst set of signals.

Sue Bethanis 34:01
Yeah, it’s so bad. So bad. Okay. So let’s get into like even a micro level in terms of just, I’ve always felt strongly about – Well, I was doing design thinking way before it was called design thinking and in terms of participatory organizational teaming, we called it many things 30 years ago, but the main thing there is that you’re building trust through empathy and you’re basically assuming that decision making could be at the group level, not at the boss. So whatever you want to call that, I don’t care what you call it. But the basis of that is that you build trust through participation. And, I mean, it’s democracy, I guess at its core, but talk through the research on that mean in terms of just how we can distill that more. It’s really important for the boss to be clear and the boss to be a leader, but at the same time, so much of what they’re doing needs to to ensure that they’re involving people in decisions, involving people in both small and big decisions., and that participation is what builds trust.

Peter Kim 35:16
Yes. So there are a couple of ways in which this is important. First, the first element is that we need a collective understanding of what happened and why things happen before we can overcome these kinds of incidences, if violations occurred. And this requires that we move beyond what people might refer to as personal truth, you know, their own way of seeing the situation, to get to what we might call a social truth, a collective understanding. And because if you don’t do that, then you you’re just gonna be talking past one another. And then the other element that this raises is, but if we were to go back to this concept of integrity, principles that you consider important, well, it turns out that different people prioritize different things. So there’s research that shows we may have the same set of fundamental values, but we prioritize those values differently. So in a situation where tough choices have to be made, you might make one set of choices that you think is right in the situation, but other people might make different choices. And so in a diverse group, with people from different cultures and perspectives, you can easily get into a situation where you believe that what you’ve done is the right thing. And other people believe that, actually, no, you’ve committed an integrity based violation, because you didn’t do exactly what they would have done in that situation, and that gets to the finger pointing and so on. So, this is where that dialogue is so important, so that we can reach that common understanding of how we are all trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation and through this recognition that we may have these different priorities, that can spur a discussion of how to maximize those priorities for everyone, how best to serve these common goals. Because if you don’t do that, then what you are left with is not dialogue, but domination. Right? You are imposing your views on other people, and they’re trying to do the same thing on us.

Sue Bethanis 37:38
Right, right. Well, and I was also referring to, you were talking about what you do after violation, I’m actually talking about before there’s even any violations, how you build a team even. Or how you make a decision on something, on a vision of something or budget, anything, any decision has to be made. The trust that you need of each other to do the right thing, and to be coming out of integrity can be built because the leader isn’t dominating by ensuring everybody has a say, that sounds like so basic, but I mean, this doesn’t happen. I mean, most of what I deal with, with my clients with SVPs, VPS CEOs is this right here, is that the people want to preserve their part of the pie. And to ensure, that can be both monetarily and figuratively, and they don’t invite others to make decisions with them. And then those who do get kind of shit on because they’re doing the right thing. But someone else kind of usurps down. So this is influence right, negotiation. And this is what I talk to people about all the time, and doing the right thing, or someone having the right integrity kind of doesn’t always work, unfortunately.

Peter Kim 39:08
Right, right. And this gets to people’s expectations, the importance of expectations in determining whether or not people believe that their trust has been violated. So doing this before an action is initiated, it’s important to align those expectations, to be aware of what those expectations are. So you’re not unnecessarily violating those expectations, and maybe having a conversations about a conversation about what those expectations should be. Because, you know, otherwise people are making very different assumptions about what should happen.

Sue Bethanis 39:43
Right? For sure, for sure. This has been great. Do you have any last things you want to say? I’m gonna do all your plugs here.

Peter Kim 39:52
Well I think broadly, I would just say that, you know, we’ve touched on a few issues that my book covers. But, you know, the broad point of the book is that we’d like to think that trust is important for us and yet, if it is so important, why are we so bad at managing it. And the book raises a variety of issues that hopefully will help us get better at it. And this is not a quick fix, you know, this will take hard work, and challenging our own assumptions. And so a lot of the book is about those assumptions, and whether they’re right or wrong. But it’s doable, and if you can get that right, you’re gonna reap the benefits of both yourself and for your organization.

Sue Bethanis 40:47
I don’t know if you’ve read David Brooks new article in The Atlantic about why America got mean, have you seen that? I think your book would be an antidote to it. I mean, like, help what he’s trying to say, talking about moral education, and he’s talking about moral education without being too moralistic, which is good. And he can, he can thread that pretty well, he’s pretty moderate in that regard. But there was some amazing stats in there about how 50 I think it was like something like 50% of people don’t have a great friend in their life. And, you know, if that’s what you’re dealing with it’s hard to trust, if you don’t have that. So I think you’d find it interesting. I did, and I think it’s related to what we’ve been talking about.

Peter Kim 41:34
I look forward to reading it, I’m a big fan of his.

Sue Bethanis 41:38
Yeah, totally. So am I. So everybody, this is Dr. Peter Kim. His book is How Trust Works, the Science of How Relationships are Built, Broken and Repaired. Get seeing him on LinkedIn, of course, and then the website, at marshall.usc.edu and you can look him up particularly. I thank you again, so much, Peter, for being with us. I really enjoyed it and I’ve learned a lot so thank you.

Peter Kim 42:05
It was a pleasure chatting with you Sue.

Sue Bethanis 42:07
Aloha, everybody. If you’re listening to this, you’re not seeing me because you’re gonna still have the audio but I’m wearing my Aloha shirt here. Sunny aloha to Maui, and to all of our friends there and hoping that they can recover as quickly as they can. So thanks again, Peter. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

Sue Bethanis, CEO of Mariposa Leadership, hosts Emily Field, co-author of Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work and a partner at McKinsey’s Seattle office. Emily partners with leaders to shape data-driven organizational strategies designed to achieve business objectives, establish talent management as a distinctive advantage, and secure the human resources function as a driver of business value.

Since joining McKinsey in 2017, Emily has worked with companies across industries, leading initiatives to transform the way organizations work. She puts particular emphasis on helping to establish a talent-first approach, instilling a high-performance culture, and adopting effective people-analytics approaches. Emily prepares leaders to manage the workforce of the future.

Passionate about helping others achieve their full potential, Emily volunteers as a mentor to veterans and low-income students through her work with Capital Partners for Education and American Corporate Partners. She holds a BA in government from Georgetown University.

Sue and Emily discuss: 

• Why organizations fail to see middle managers as their “most valuable players”
• How the Great Resignation, the pandemic, and the tech boom contributed to the obfuscation of middle managers’ importance
• What Hybrid work has done to middle managers
• How managers can “rebundle” jobs instead of eliminating them in the current age of AI and fears of job displacement

In this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts leading efficiency expert Nick Sonnenberg. Nick is an entrepreneur, Inc. columnist, guest lecturer at Columbia University, and the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work.

He is the Founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement his CPR® Business Efficiency Framework. This is the culmination of Nick’s unique perspective on the value of time, efficiency, and automation, which stems in part from the eight years he spent working as a high-frequency trader on Wall Street. The CPR (Communication, Planning, and Resources) Framework consistently results in greater output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week in productivity per person—just by using the right tools in the right way, at the right time. Nick and his team have worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries, from high-growth startups to the Fortune 10.

Listen to the full episode here:

Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Google

INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS

Nick provides some amazing insights into how teams can increase productivity and shift their workload through more effective operational tools. His current protocol to rescue company productivity – CPR (Communication, Planning, & Resources) – was developed when trying to save his own company from bankruptcy. He discovered new ways to allocate time and resources which he now shares with others to create more efficient workplaces.

Some of the key take-aways from this talk:

• When looking for areas to focus on, the CPR protocol emphasizes streamlining communication, focusing on planning, and utilizing resources. To establish more efficient practices within a company it all comes down to these three categories and how you operate within them. (6:26)
  Nick breaks down the difference between project management and process management and explains that once projects become reoccurring, it’s time to invest in a process or system to make it run smoothly and effectively each time. Not only for repeatability, but also to save time in the long run. (14:00)
• Whether the company size is 2 or 200, there is always a way to increase productivity within a team. By creating SOP and systems early on and ensuring everyone uses those same practices, everyone will be on the same page and work dynamically. (19:19)
• Nick provides a plethora of resources and tips for both individuals and teams. Whether it’s optimizing your inbox or creating SOPs for the whole department, there are many options that will save time in everyone’s work week. Some of the programs he mentioned include Asana, Process Tree, Slack, Monday, Trello, and specific tricks to optimize programs we already use such as Outlook or Gmail include inbox zero. His book and website offer many more resources, and taking the time to research optimization options will clearly save you and your team time down the road.

FAVORITE QUOTES

“I think a sign of maturity of a company is, as a company matures, the ratio of work should shift more heavily towards process relative to the project.” (14:00)

“Individual productivity is necessary but not sufficient for a team to be productive. It requires collaboration, coordination, and sometimes individuals have to suck it up and sacrifice their own productivity for the greater good of the team.” (19:19)

“Look time is time, you want to save as much time as possible. And it’s not just about saving time you want to optimize time.” (22:3)

“Everything that you do that you that doesn’t tap into your kind of unique zone of genius or give you joy, you should be documenting SOPs and processes for those things. If you do it more than once, the only way to get it off your plate is you have to document it so that when you do hire that person, you have something to make it really easy to hand off to them.” (22:33)

RESOURCES

Nick Sonnenberg:

Website | LinkedIn

Book:Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Sue Bethanis 0:00
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa’s monthly podcast where provide perspective leadership, and today we’re excited to welcome Nick Sonnenberg from New York, Manhattan, particularly Greenwich Village. He’s an entrepreneur, columnist, guest lecturer at Columbia University, and the Wall Street Journal’s best selling author of Come Up For Air: How Teams can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. He is the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement his CPR business efficiency framework. This is a culmination of Nick’s unique perspective on the value of time efficiency and automation, which stems in part from the years he spent working as a high frequency trader on Wall Street. I want to hear about that. The CPR framework consistently results in greater output, less stress, happier employees and the potential to gain an extra full day per week and productivity per person, just by using the right tools the right way at the right time. Nick and his team have worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries from high growth startups to the fortune 10. Welcome. Thanks for being here. And as I always do, we’ve done this for 15 years, and I always ask you to start with a personal story about why you decided to write the book. I read your bio, but I’d like to hear from you a more personal story about why this is important to you.

Nick Sonnenberg 1:19
Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, clearly, I wrote the book for a reason. And I called it Come Up for Air because I know just as well as anyone what it feels like to be drowning in work. My personal story is, when I got out of finance, I was a high frequency trader for about eight years, which if you aren’t familiar with what that is, I was developing algorithms and coding computers to trade stocks at microsecond speeds. Capturing fractions of a penny just purely based off of math knew nothing about the companies. I did that for eight years, I got into startups. And I launched my company Leverage, I had a co-founder at the time, and we grew very quickly. We really tapped into kind of where to get clients. And we did a lot of things quite in a clever way. But we grew to seven figures in the first year 150 people on the team bootstrapped just by leveraging, you know, technology and in smart ways, but also, you know, we got really good at knowing where to go to get clients. But I say all that, which it sounds impressive, but under the hood, we had a lot of ton of mistakes, you know, premature growth can only kill you. For example. It was just the two of us. So the org chart was he was the head of people and I was the head of non-people. And then there was 150 people underneath.

Sue Bethanis 2:44
Non people, love it.

Nick Sonnenberg 2:47
We were losing like half a million dollars a year in profit and had like three quarters of a million dollars in debt. And we were growing at 20% new clients a month, but it was 15% of them left. So we were net only growing at five. So we had good marketing, masking this broken product. And one day he tapped me on the shoulder and he tells me he’s leaving. Not two days, not two weeks, he’s leaving in two minutes. And so I’m sitting there having my coffee with him. And I go white, and I’m thinking like, holy crap, we’re gonna go bankrupt. Yeah, and I had to make a decision. Do I bankrupt the company? Or do I try to turn around and clean it up and it was really tough, like working like 18 hour long days, cashing out my 401k. We lost 40% of revenue in a three month period, my dad’s going into the bank taking out second mortgage on his house to loan money for payroll, you know, like pretty, pretty bad. Yeah, you think it’s like bad pretty much living in your parents basement, like try driving them to the bank for a second on their house. So I had to make this decision, do I stick it out? Or bankrupt it and I decided to stick it out because I saw a path to cleaning things up. And we had many problems. But from an efficiency and productivity standpoint, I didn’t have a free second, like messages. What was eating up my time was nonstop messages. I couldn’t get any work done. Couldn’t find, you know, where did I talk to this person about what? So communication was broken. You know, I had 150 people directly reporting to me. I couldn’t just click a button and know who’s working on what tasks and projects like I had no idea kind of like what people’s priorities or plan was for the week. And then lastly, we had already done a pretty good job at documenting our knowledge or what I call resources. If we didn’t do that, we probably would have gone bankrupt. And so anyway, I started really focusing on the CPR our communication planning and the resources and things started quickly turning around Sue. And what ended up happening randomly is people started reaching out to me asking me to consult them on their efficiency. So people like Tony Robbins reached out or PooPourri, or others, and the same stuff that helped me turn the company around and be more efficient. It worked for all of them too. And so I decided ultimately to pivot the company. And now Leverage is no longer a freelancer marketplace. We do operational efficiency training and consulting, right. And I decided to write a book, I wanted to help more people. And the best way to do that is, you know, spread the message through a book.

Sue Bethanis 4:05
Well, I love that story. And sort of reminds me of Slack, you know, they started out doing I don’t even remember what they were started out doing. But then they ended up developing this process, and then they ended up selling that and look at them now.

Nick Sonnenberg 5:32
They built Slack in order to be able to operate better internally. And then they realized that was the real business.

Sue Bethanis 5:52
So similar. So tell us about this. I love that it’s CPR as well. That’s a great acronym, of course.

Nick Sonnenberg 5:58
Especially with come up for air, right? come up for air, CPR, resuscitate your business, all on brand.

Sue Bethanis 6:04
It’s all coming together. Okay, so talk about CPR. So, let’s break down what you think of. Did you decide to come up with those three things? You were sort of operating in those that you just said, Okay, those are those are great to use so we’ll let’s continue them. I mean, how did you decide to use those three? I mean, they’re pretty generic, but I’m sure you have specifics around them?

Nick Sonnenberg 6:26
Well, I just noticed, like, those were the three buckets that you think about the needs of any company, any size, any industry, like you communicate with people in your company, internally, with your team, and you communicate externally with clients, you need to plan stuff, you have tasks and projects and work that needs to get done. And then you have knowledge, you have SOPs, and you have processes. And you know, within that knowledge bucket, you can also bucket in kind of like your assets like that you might put in Google Drive or Dropbox, you might put like a CRM, like your database, like all of that is kind of resources. So when you think about it, every company, it doesn’t matter what you do, you have to CPR in your business. So I just had this kind of light bulb, like, hey, it actually fits, your operations fits into these buckets. And then there’s different tools that help you be efficient in each of these buckets. And I just had this light bulb moment like, hey, like, it’s no longer the days that it’s just email anymore. Now you’ve got Slack, like you mentioned, and all these other tools. There’s no playbook out there to teach people best practices of how to think about these tools, how to use them, when to use them, and so that was the purpose of my book. I just saw this opportunity that work has fundamentally changed and it’s continuing to change at rapid speeds. And in the last 10 years, there’s all these new ways of working. And there’s books out there on individual productivity, nothing though around team productivity. And so that’s, that’s ultimately what I’m passionate about.

Sue Bethanis 7:58
Could you give us an example on each of these? I think that that probably would be kind of what you started out with your story. I like when people give examples, and I know that our listeners like that a lot too.

Nick Sonnenberg 8:07
Example of like communication and planning and resources?

Sue Bethanis 8:12
Yeah, like a tool.

Nick Sonnenberg 8:13
Yeah, for example, like external communication is what I would say, is the bucket for email. So Gmail, Outlook, things like that, that’s external communication. Email is just an external to do lists that other people can add to. Most people use email incorrectly. And they use it for internal communication with your team, they use it for external, they use it to delegate tasks. You know, different tools are built for different purposes, the purpose of email is external communication. And it’s optimized for that. And then you have tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams for internal communication. And it has specific functionality to make it more robust and more efficient for internal communication. You can create channels, you can have threads, you can have third party integrations. Now, it’s important, though, to understand what is communication versus work management, project management, because a lot of people are delegating tasks and work and communication tools, which is not, that’s not the main purpose of those tools. Right? You can’t just click a button and know you know, what’s everything I need to work on today, or what’s everything I delegated to John that’s past due, you know, communication tools are for communicating like Hey, everyone, welcome Nick to the team. Or, hey, pizza in the side room or notification that you just got a new sign up of something. Right? But if it’s something like hey, can you edit this podcast by Friday, you know, sure, you can hack a communications tool. You could do it in text, WhatsApp, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Gmail, but the best place to do it would be in your work management tool where all the work is where now you have a paper trail of who’s working on what you can click a button did it get done or not get done versus in a communications tool, you could be talking about a million different things. You can’t just click that button and know what’s going on. So you’ve got communication. Then you got these the work management tools like Asana, Clickup, Monday, right, Trello. There’s a whole bunch of them. We prefer Asana. We’re partners with Asana. But they’re all good. Another way of thinking about it in terms of story is, imagine if you were going to take your team camping in the forest together, you would need walkie talkies to communicate with each other. But you would also need a map to navigate out of the forest. And so it’s important within your team that you have a distinction, what’s the walkie talkies we use versus what’s the map. And then lastly, you have your resources. And so every company has static knowledge and dynamic knowledge, static knowledge would be what you would consider to be the use case of a wiki. So somebody like Coda, Notion, Confluence, Guru, those are all wikis, and those answer the questions who, what, when, where, and why. Who’s the CEO? Where’s the office? What’s the org chart? What’s the vision? Why are we here, core values, you know, and then you can link to Dropbox and Google Drive for the assets, you can have like a page for marketing, and link to the branding assets that live in your cloud storage. And then you have dynamic processes that answer the question how, how do you onboard a new team member? How do you produce a podcast? So that’s intellectual property, you’ve invested time, money, money, energy resources into developing best practice of how to do something, that should be captured, and is an asset for your company, if you ever sell, that increases the value of the company, if you ever hire someone, it makes it much easier to get them up to speed, if you ever fire someone or they leave, you aren’t losing everything in their head, the moment they leave the building. Right. So those are the different tools within each of those buckets. Oh, and then for dynamic, we use process tree process.ST is a process documentation tool.

Sue Bethanis 8:14
So there’s a lot of companies who don’t, especially small companies who just don’t do this, so how do they get how does a small company make these decisions, like who should be making these decisions mean a COO or Uber project manager or in terms of like, the distinction between, for example, the internal tools versus internal communication tools and external communication tools.

Nick Sonnenberg 12:23
So in a smaller company, you know, any COO or CEO, you know, if you’re typically say, you know, less than a billion, and then, you know, above a billion, you know, we sometimes start working with CHRO’S, you know, or even senior vice presidents of divisions, you know, when you start getting into the enterprise phase, right. So wherever you’re at, if you’re listening to this, the most important thing, though is it’s clear who makes a decision, and what you don’t want is there to be shadow IT problems where what I mean by that is, different departments or different teams, you know, have their own preference, one likes to use Monday.com and one likes to use Asana. And before you know it, you’re supporting every project management tool, and like, some teams use Microsoft Teams, and some use Slack, and some use Gmail and some use Outlook. You can’t, you’ll piss people off, but it’s the only way to operate. And you need to just pick, pick one and each like buckets. With an exception, like software developers, you’ll probably geras, the most common project management tool for that group, and they’re kind of isolated. So you could make some exceptions like that. But for the most part, as a general principle, you don’t want to have a million tools.

Sue Bethanis 13:47
Right? And how do you see the difference between project management? Like what I was just describing as some sort of Uber project manager who’s overseeing this stuff, versus process management? How do you see the difference between those?

Nick Sonnenberg 14:00
I think a sign of maturity of a company is, as a company matures, the ratio of work should shift more heavily towards process relative to the project. A process means you have invested money and energy and resources to figure out how to do something. And after you figured that out, it’s now a repeatable process. It’s like, when say, Uber launched in its first city, it was a project like it had no it was just guessing what to do and how to do it. And maybe after a few cities, and you figure out okay, this is kind of the order that we need to do things you do this first, this second, you need to hire this person can this license after enough of them. You’ve invested kind of even invested a lot of resources and figuring it out, trial and error. You know, at a certain point, it’s no longer a project. You have a checklist of things and it’s like this is what needs to happen. You’re no longer figuring out stuff from scratch. It’s like this is what needs to happen. So that’s my definition of the two like, it’s a framework. Yeah, if something’s like a one off, like, write my book, like writing my book was a project. If I were to run a book company and try to write books for people, I would develop a book writing process. So then after I’ve done the first few, I can hit like a checklist, run and follow the best practices that I’ve developed.

Sue Bethanis 15:32
Essentially, what you’ve done is you’ve turned your project management into a process.

Nick Sonnenberg 15:36
Well, I keep my projects in my project management tool. And if I do something more than once or twice, and it’s something that’s worth investing in, then I start shifting it out of the project management tool and into our process management tool.

Sue Bethanis 15:55
Right. And what are some process management tools?

Nick Sonnenberg 15:58
Like Process Street, for example, is the one that we use.

Sue Bethanis 16:00
Okay, gotcha. Wow. Okay. So lot’s to think about here. Talk about the pandemic and how the need for collaboration, I mean, there’s a lot of talk about it’s better for people to be in the office to collaborate. I’m not sure if I agree with that. I think it’s better to be in office to connect, I’m not sure if collaboration actually is better in the office. I’m curious what you think in terms of that, in terms of how it’s shifted for you and your team, your group? What do you notice you with your clients?

Nick Sonnenberg 16:32
I mean, we’ve always been remote. Okay, so the pandemic, like, I don’t have an office like, I think that there’s certain industries where being in person is more important than others. Like, if you’re a scientist in a laboratory, you probably need to be with people, right? I think that if you use tools in the right way, which regardless if you’re in person or remote, you should be doing because even if you’re in person, you still don’t want to, it’s still not good to go and tap someone on the shoulder and ask them for something that you could have just found yourself if things were a bit more organized. But I think that being in person, the main benefit is the culture element and getting to know people on a personal level. So I think it’s more for the culture building, which is important. But yeah, I don’t know, I think that the best setup is kind of I know, people talk about four day work weeks, hybrid work, etc. I think that one model that’s really interesting is having a remote, a remote company, but once a quarter for a week you get together, and then people can live wherever they want, and get all those benefits, which is a lot. But you still need to meet at some minimum cadence to keep that culture. And there are some things that in person is, it’s not that everyday you need to be on a whiteboard and doing like a brainstorming session, which you could do in a tool, like Mural anyway. But I think getting together at some cadence is important. But I think it’s almost proven at this point that you don’t need to be in an office in order to have a high performing team. Right.

Sue Bethanis 18:18
Except that, yes, I agree with you. And I think that especially in tech, I don’t think, you know, I don’t think that people generally want to go back. They’re picking not wanting to commute. I think the commute is really at issue here, over connection, because although I think that people want to connect, but they don’t want to commute, and they certainly don’t wanna do it every day. There’s a lot of CEOs, though, who are saying, hey, we need you to come back where that can be in big companies or small companies. But I agree with you. I don’t know if that makes any difference insofar as people will have to, like come to, here’s my productivity tools today. And you know, that’s going to be obviously online, no matter what you’re doing, what your clients are doing, you know, our company does coaching and certainly, part of what we do with people is help them with their individual productivity. Although most of the people we work with are pretty productive. They need to like sort of, you know, slack off, actually, because they’re like they’re just too intensely into pleasing people. How do you grapple with an individual’s need for productivity versus the team? Like, how do you do that with your team? How do you do with other teams?

Nick Sonnenberg 19:19
So individual productivity is necessary but not sufficient for a team to be productive. It requires collaboration, coordination, and sometimes individuals have to suck it up and sacrifice their own productivity for the greater good of the team. Take the 2004 US Olympic basketball team as a perfect example. You have a bunch of individually productive superstars or basketball players you have LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony. I think Tim Duncan, Larry Brown is the only coach in history to win a NCAA and NBA championship and they get blown out by Puerto Rico and game one and end up with the bronze medal. It was the biggest disappointment. How does that happen? Well, you know, they got together like two months before the Olympics to start training together. And they didn’t gel as a team, they were great individually, but they didn’t gel as a team versus a lot of these European teams, maybe you know, you match on a one to one basis, each person, the US is just way better. But they’ve been training together for years and years, and they know the plays, and they know how to work together. And so it’s part of the culture, you know, it has to be clear that you’re trying to optimize for team productivity team performance, you want the company to win, right. And obviously, you want each individual person to be as productive and impactful as possible. But, you know, sometimes, it might mean that, rather than you saving five seconds right now, take pause and put it in the right project in Asana for me, even though it might be five seconds, or 10 seconds faster, for you to text me, put it where it’s easy to find it for me somewhere later. Because what goes around comes around. And when everyone’s doing that, and everyone’s putting it in the right drawer for each person, the five seconds that you spend extra to put things for your colleagues in the right drawers, you’re going to be saving hours a week, because now things are exactly where they should be for you to find. It’s like when you do your laundry, look, individual productivity is necessary, but not sufficient. But also you should be optimizing for retrieval of information versus transfer. So just kind of sticking on this drawer. The fastest way to be done with your laundry would be you take it out of the dryer, and you just throw it in a drawer. But you know, what are you gonna save a minute, instead of that, you separate your socks in one drawer or your underwear in another drawer. And you do that, not because it’s the fastest way to be done. But tomorrow, when you need to put an outfit together, it’s much faster. So you need to be optimizing for the team protocol. You need to be optimizing for the team and you need to be optimizing for retrieval.

Sue Bethanis 22:07
Yeah, that’s really great. So I want to actually, the next question, has to do with like going very, very small, to very, very big. So the first question comes from Katherine, which is any special advice for solopreneurs? Who need to come up for air? So this is more about it is more about the individual. But then I want to talk about like organization. So let’s start with, let’s start with the solopreneurs.

Nick Sonnenberg 22:29
So you still need to learn how to use email properly and get to Inbox Zero, that’ll save you hours, look time is time, you want to save as much time as possible. And it’s not just about saving time you want to optimize time. We could talk a whole hour about optimizing time. But time isn’t linear, 9am on a Monday is way more valuable than 7pm on a Friday after a long week and 100 Zoom calls and you’re tired in the back of an Uber. So you want to be thinking about how much time can you save? But also, how do you time shift? How do you make better use of dead time, and free up time where your brains at higher horsepower and needed for, you know, higher level stuff, right? You can predict at the end of the day, after 10 Zoom calls, you’re gonna be more tired than the first call of the day, after you’ve had a fresh cup of coffee and you worked out. Same thing applies if you have a therapist, you don’t want to be the last appointment of the day, you want to get your therapist first. So when you’re a solopreneur, you still want to be using project management tools like Asana, even if you don’t have other people to delegate it to now, you still want to be able to prioritize your work. And maybe you could do things like create a fake user, or create a project called whatever say you want to hire an assistant next, you could create either an assistant project or you could create a fake user called assistant at company abc.com. And you can start delegating stuff now to that person that’s not urgent that way, when you do hire this person in three months, six months a year, they might have a couple months of work preloaded that you’ve been delegating to this invisible person the whole time. So you still want to be set up with these things. Everything that you do that you that doesn’t tap into your kind of unique zone of genius or give you joy, you should be documenting SOPs and processes for those things. If you do it more than once, the only way to get it off your plate is you have to document it so that when you do hire that person, you have something to make it really easy to hand off to them. And so that still means that you need wiki you need to document process. So all things still apply, you just don’t have a team to also use these with you but you still can establish best practice and that operational efficiency foundation from the very start even if you’re a team of one.

Sue Bethanis 24:58
Or not necessarily from the very start. But like, yeah, it’s midway, let me ask you a question, I’m going to stay with the solopreneur for a second, I have a company of 15. So there’s a lot of handing off. What I find, though is that I don’t do zero on the email, like my inbox has 10,000 emails in it. So I just don’t do what you’re saying. But let’s just what the problem is with it is that I can’t retrieve them. Do you know of, I’m still surprised that there’s not a better way to search email. That there’s not, it’s funny to me that there’s not a better way to find, like the search tools for, like, in our case to Microsoft, is it just can’t find stuff. So, is Gmail better is like, which, which? Where is it? Where are the search email tools that are good?

Nick Sonnenberg 25:50
I mean, I think we could talk through some specific examples of things that you haven’t been able to find. But I think, first making sure that you’re using email for when it should be used. So for example, if right now emails are coming in, that are around your podcast, rather than it being in a Microsoft team’s channel for a podcast, like that’s something they investigate and look into. Right, so. So like being really aware, like, what should even be an email, but you know, email, it’s easy to search by person, by date range, a lot of the things I’m guessing if we were to, if we were to work on your email together, I would want to kind of find some things that are hard to search for, and really know, are these things that really should even have been an email or should it have been inside of Asana? Was this a team member giving you a task? Or something related to a project? Right? You know, because oftentimes, if someone gives me something, I’ll give you a few. So following my reply, archive, differ, say an email, you know that you want it to come back to you the morning of the 24th. Like, today, we’re doing an interview for the podcast. You shouldn’t have to search for that email, let’s say I said something like, Hey, I need this, this and this for the podcast, that could have been deferred, you can snooze emails, and it comes back to the top of your email on the day that you snooze it. So you don’t need to search for it, you know, it’s going to come back. If I write an email, and I asked, you know, can you buy a special headphone for the podcast, you should go and create that task in Asana in your kind of mega to do list. And now, you know, you don’t need to find it in email anymore, because you’ve, you’ve pulled the action item out of it. And, you know, put it into your project. So yeah, it seems it’s a longer question. But I think that the search is probably equivalent in both and, you know, there’s probably some opportunities to improve how, how email can be helpful there.

Sue Bethanis 27:58
And in what’s your thought about all the junk that comes in? I mean, I am shocked by it. How much stuff.

Nick Sonnenberg 28:05
Have you enabled the Focused Inbox in Outlook. No, I would enable that, that filters out a lot of the junk, you could set up rules too anything that has the word unsubscribe or opt out, you could create an optional folder and set up a rule to move anything that contains that to an optional folder that you check once a day. And that’ll get rid of 90% of your, of your crap. There’s a lot of these tips and tricks where there’s like, say, like a dozen, and these aren’t, it’s not rocket science, like we’re not talking about like rocket science here. It’s really just the sum of 12 things that, you know, you’ve just never been taught, you never just stopped to think about that, you know, we’ve spent the time to define these best practices this and literally Inbox Zero within a couple hours, you can get those 10,000 down to zero. And not just that you can going forward, never get back to where you’re at. And just email alone, our email training program is our most popular it saves around three to five hours a week per person in a team. It’s not even just the time savings. It’s the reduction of stress, like it’s stressful to people open their email and see a thousand things. Not only that, it’s not just a stressor and a time waster, it also by not having a grip on it, I’ve seen so many cases where people are literally like burning money. Like I’ve seen so many where we’re going through it. And like the client says, Hey, hang on a second, I just need to deal with this. This is like a $50,000 email that I missed, you know, so there’s like literally money sitting in people’s inbox that yeah, they just missed because they’re flooded, they don’t have a grip on it, and they miss important stuff that sometimes can be substantial.

Sue Bethanis 28:55
Yeah, good point. So let’s zoom out now to something much bigger. So yeah, how would you work with a head of IT that’s trying to change, or head of finance, trying to change their practices? That’s a much bigger company for sure. To be more digitally savvy to be more, you know, less manual labor, essentially. You know, where would a company like that start?

Nick Sonnenberg 30:27
Well, I’m not trying to do like a sales pitch or anything, but like my honest answer would be, I mean, we would have a conversation to understand kind of what the tech stack is and is one that we could support. But we’ve developed kind of like a training support program just for this case, because people learn at different speeds, people have different starting points, people have different tools that they use, etc. And so, you know, our main business is, you know, offering kind of a yearly support package for teams where they could get all of our online training programs, as well as all of the group trainings and, and kind of monthly calls that all lead to and asynchronously be able to ask questions. That’s where I would start with people. For a modest, small yearly fee. Each employee could have the support, they need to know how to use these tools properly and save, you know, a business day a week or gained 20 to 40% poductivity.

Sue Bethanis 31:38
Right? Well, what I’ve really gained from this is this idea of retrieval. That seems so simple, but that’s the great way of looking at it. Yeah, and then this idea of email, external, whatever, internal, whatever you want to use internal. So this has been great. So I want to just make sure that there’s anything else you want to add for this audience.

Nick Sonnenberg 32:01
I would say that a helpful starting point with this stuff is start with my book. It’s a very packed book with a lot of there’s no fluff, there’s a lot of tips and tricks, and we walk you through the process. And if you need more help, you know, there’s the things that I’ve mentioned on this call. But if you go also to comeupforair.com, there’s a bunch of materials, there’s a bunch of bonus materials along with the book that are, we’ve spent so much time they’re really valuable resources. So I would encourage people just to go to that, that website, comeupforair.com

Sue Bethanis 32:35
As a starting point, and then also want to mention your business website, which is getleverage.com. And then you’re on LinkedIn as Nick Sonnenberg, and it’s S O, N, N, E, N, B, E, R, G, and then the book is Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. Thank you so much, Nick, for being with us.

Nick Sonnenberg 32:54
No problem. I mean, if we want to blast people with more, you can go to theoptimizedpodcast.com. I just launched a podcast on where I do live consultations with people. And if you could go and apply if you want to be on and that’s really fun.

Sue Bethanis 33:08
I love it. That’s great. So again, thanks, everybody for being here. Thanks, Nick from New York. Thanks again, everybody. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Nick. Thanks. Bye