667: The Way to Handle Oblivious Leadership, with Robert Sutton

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
We’ve all worked with someone who seemed just a bit oblivious. None of us wanna be that kind of leader. In this episode, Bob Sutton and I discuss key strategies for how to stop oblivion and also prevent it. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 667. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:35]:
Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations.Boy, if you’ve had any experience like I have had in my career, you’ve certainly had a lot of moments where you’ve seen oblivious leadership, other leaders doing things that you wonder, what on earth are they doing or thinking? And if you’re anything like me, you have caught yourself being a being oblivious more times than you care to admit. It’s one of the challenges of leadership. How do we help ourselves? How do we help others from falling into that trap of oblivion, and when we do find ourselves there, how do we step out of it more quickly? Today, I’m so glad to have a guest on who’s gonna help us to do this so much more effectively. Robert Sutton is an organizational psychologist and professor of management science in engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. He has given keynote speeches to more than 200 groups in 20 countries and served on numerous scholarly editorial boards.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:37]:
Bob’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Business Week, The Atlantic, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. He’s a frequent guest on various television and radio programs and has written 7 books and 2 edited volumes, including the bestsellers, The No A-hole Rule, Good Boss, Bad Boss, and Scaling Up Excellence. He is the coauthor with Huggy Rao of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Bob, what a pleasure to have you on.

Robert Sutton [00:02:09]:
It’s great to talk to you, Dave. I’m looking forward to it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:11]:
Me too. Bob, I have seen your name and your work reference so many times over the last decade or so. Thank you for everything you’ve done to help us to be better leaders and to challenge us to to do better and think better. And, boy, this is a topic that I think is One we all see in our experience, and we all see in ourselves too. At least, I think those of us who care a lot about leadership. When we look at the lens we do of ourselves, we say, okay, I need to get better at this. And you and Huggy write:

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:43]:
I”f you are more powerful than your colleagues or customers, you are at risk of being clueless about their friction troubles and of how you add to their misery.” It is a trap of leadership, isn’t it?

Robert Sutton [00:02:56]:
Yeah. So I would describe it as sort of a risk, and we call it a trap. But but the way that that we think about it in terms of friction is that all of us, whether We’re a frontline employee, we lead a small team, we’re a large company, we all have what we call sort of a cone of friction that our behaviors, our decisions can make things harder or easier for people, and good leaders are aware of that and they’re trustees of others’ time. And so so, yes, if you look at I mean, there’s a large body of behavioral science research that shows that when people begin to have power over others, or feel powerful over others, they’ve got to be careful because among other things, they can waste other people’s time and just be oblivious about it. And so, it’s not like a life sentence.

Robert Sutton [00:03:47]:
It’s not like a death sentence. Good leaders overcome it, but it’s a risk they’ve gotta be aware of. And when we can talk about why it happens, there’s so much behavioral science research that shows us this risk. It’s ridiculous.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:57]:
Yeah. Indeed. And I I’d love to dive in on on some of those details because I think there’s a ton there to for us to really be aware of some of these symptoms. One of the things that you write is because you are a powerful and connected insider, you automatically know everything that matters about your organization. This is a fallacy. Right? And it yet it is one that a lot of people fall into.

Robert Sutton [00:04:20]:
Yeah. It it is it is a it is a classic fallacy. And and if you just sort of do the math, I mean, just forget the notion that when people are in positions of power, that they sort of become more oblivious in part because one of the things that comes with leadership is privilege, so you are protected from some of the hassles that the little people suffer from. I mean, in the extreme case, you in in some of the big banks in New York City, the executives get their own private parking space, their own driver, their own elevator. That’s the extreme. But even when people get little privileges, it it’s sort of a problem. And I think it’s kinda best to start out with the assumption that you don’t quite know what’s going on in your organization, and it’s just the math. What if if you’re just a leader of 15 people, there’s so much going on.

Robert Sutton [00:05:06]:
You can’t know everything that’s happening. And if you’re leaving a large complex organization, well, it’s impossible for you to know what’s going on and all the nuances. So I think that’s a reasonable starting point.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:17]:
Yeah. And we’re gonna look at some of the antidotes to this too. But, you know, I think it’s really helpful to know that that’s just a- if you find yourself falling into that trap, that symptom a bit, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad leader.

Robert Sutton [00:05:30]:
No. No. I think it means you’re a leader. I I think I think I think it’s just I think it’s just a risk, and and, I mean, let’s let’s talk about antidotes because, I mean, I we have endless lists of bad news and but one of the things about our our book, The Friction Project, is we started out sort of pessimistic, oh, there’s all these problems in organizations and things like- and we joke with executives. Who’s the leader in your organization? The most powerful person? The person who wastes our the most of our time when we get pessimistic.

Robert Sutton [00:06:00]:
But then when we started digging in, there’s actually all sorts of antidotes. And maybe I’ll start with 1, which is that if you simply sort of get down with, where the work’s actually done, this is what the famous Todd Park who fixed the Obamacare website says he calls this the L6 strategy, that if you In his his hypothesis, if you go down 6 levels in an organization, you find the people actually know how it works. It doesn’t have to be l six necessarily. But one of my favorite examples of this is that years ago, I was on a a committee where we, it was a K-12 education, which is really difficult, of course, anywhere in the world, especially United States, and we had a New York City high school principal who was always angry at her students because they’re always late for class. She was always mad at them, and so what she did though was she spent a week just shadowing students, just as as they as they move from one class to another to sort of, you know, do the gotchas on them, and she figured out that actually it wasn’t the student’s fault, and I remember the story. She said, so I followed this woman, and we had a 7 story building in New York City. Her class was in the basement, and she had to go up 7 flights of stairs in 5 minutes. Her teacher kept her 2 minutes late, so that means she only had 3 minutes, and there was no way she was gonna make it to class between the class.

Robert Sutton [00:07:24]:
And that was something that she sort of had the awareness that this person really, if you will, was facing all sorts of friction, and the 5 minutes was an unreasonable period of time. And so she extended it to 7 minutes, and then she started instead of, sorta harping and cracking down on the students. She cracked down on the faculty members to end their classes on time so students could go from 1 class to another. And that to me is just a little microcosm. There’s lots of examples of that, but but actually understanding how the work happens in an organization is to me where it starts.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:59]:
One of the areas you caution us is places where privilege as leaders spares us from hassles. And there’s several examples in the book on this. One of the key ones is a program at General Motors which allows their employees or executive, that you can share a little bit more of exactly who, but to get access to vehicles, but to do it in a way that really side Steps a lot of the buying process that typical customers have. Right?

Robert Sutton [00:08:28]:
Yeah. And and so I I first learned this about this is 15 years ago. We had a project with General Motors, those of us at Stanford, pretty large project, and then we would go to Warren, Michigan, which is where they have their R&D operations, And and and they were always so proud of in those days, it was like the Hummer and and and things like that and the new Silverado that they had, And and we figured out they had this program, and it depend how senior and executive who you were, but they went down fairly low on the organization to middle managers that between every 3 6 months, they’d give you a new car at a very nominal amount, And they you just fill out a form and they take your old car, they bring you a new one. And also the other part about this, and I just fact checked this 2 years ago. It was still in place 2 years ago. They would gas the car for you. They would maintain the car for you. So if you think about it, this idea of privilege and this absence of inconvenience that leaders sometimes have, it protected them from all of this sort of hassles.

Robert Sutton [00:09:28]:
There things about Teslas I’m not wild about, but one thing about I know about my friends who work for Tesla is there are none of those privileges for executives who work at at Tesla. At least in the past, there have not been. So this idea of sort of isolating managers and executives from the hassles that their customers and other employees have is is something that is one of the cause of obliviousness that that I worry about.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:52]:
Yeah. And and, you know, like, that kind of a benefit, access to a car and all that, like, it’s great if you’re not running a car company and it’s less of an issue, but when that’s the work the organization’s doing, those folks having a really different experience. And I think the, you know, it is a trap a bit. And I think, like, one of the things I’m reminded of reading your work, thinking about this conversation is that A lot of times we think about privilege is a good thing, and sometimes there is a cost though.

Robert Sutton [00:10:16]:
Yes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:16]:
That that we don’t often see immediately, but the cost can be a bit of obliviousness of the leader or the leadership team of not really having the same experience that everyone else is having.

Robert Sutton [00:10:27]:
Yeah. So there’s that, and that I think it’s absolutely true. Another thing I think to keep in mind that and especially for the people who listen to your program, we’re relatively new to leadership. I think one thing and even like, talking to new CEOs, I’ll give you an example of one of them. Years ago, about 10 years ago, I had actually had surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, wonderful institution. And the then CEO, Toby Cosgrove, He went from sort of leading a small group of heart surgeons, just 8 or 9 heart surgeons to running well, they’re actually The largest private employer in the state of Ohio, the Cleveland Clinic. And and he said, everywhere I looked, people were watching me. My jokes got funnier.

Robert Sutton [00:11:11]:
They would comment more in my clothes. There was there was all this sort of attention, and so they’re watching so one of the one of the problems is they’re watching you more closely. And even though a lot of times leaders worry about resistance to change, they’re trying to bring in programs, there’s another sort of risk that when you’re a leader, and this is another thing that happens that leads to the wasting of time, is when you sort of give signals that are just offhand, they get magnified. And we have lots of examples in the book, but my favorite example is the blueberry muffin example, and this was the CEO of a Fortune 10 company who some years ago that I met, so very large company. And what happened was when he was new to the job, he made an offhand comment at a breakfast meeting. He said, where’s the blueberry muffins? It’s just a, you know, a social comment, and then somebody put in the notes, loves blueberry muffins. Everywhere he went, for years, there was big piles of blueberry muffins, and he couldn’t even figure out why. So that’s one of the things and and this happens, by the way, whether we’re we’re humans or people who study baboon troops.

Robert Sutton [00:12:16]:
They have evidence that the average member of the troop looks up at the alpha male every 30 or 40 seconds. So when so when you’re in a leadership position, yes, there’s a privilege, There’s also this magnification thing where you gotta be careful that the people have less power than you are watching you more closely than you are watching them because it’s adaptive for survival.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:36]:
Yeah. And the the leaders I know that I I feel like I watch and I’m so impressed by have accepted a lot of this and made peace with it. And they’ve just put that, and they said, okay. I understand that this is how the world works. I may not like it. I may not agree with it. I may think it’s silly, but I I know a bit about the research, and I understand that this is an obstacle and that it is likely causing me a bit of obliviousness. And so it’s one of the reasons I love the anecdotes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:06]:
There’s such practical things. I mean, one, we can look at this through the lens of, like, what are things we can do better ourselves? But also how can we think about inviting the organization, colleagues, peers, depending on your role to do a bit more of this? And one of the antidotes is something you call less transmission, more reception. Tell me about that.

Robert Sutton [00:13:26]:
Oh, sure. So this this comes from one day, my coauthor, Huggy Rao, who is so clever, he and he’s also talks about analogy. He was talking about he said, so if you’re a leader, you should be a elephant, not a hippo. What the heck are you talking about? And he said, well, you know, a hippo has little ears and a huge mouth, and an elephant has a small mouth and huge ears, so you should listen more. But then as we got into it and we did some research related to this. We started coming up with the hypothesis that the best leaders, they ask more questions, they make fewer statements. They limit their talking time. And so we started doing work actually with, with CEOs of startups, local startups in Silicon Valley, and we had, there was 8 of them.

Robert Sutton [00:14:14]:
And what we had our students do was they go to the meetings and they count talking time of the CEO versus other people on the team. These were sort of 8 to 15 person teams where they had meetings, and then the talking time and then the proportion of questions versus statements, and then our students gave the feedback to the CEOs, and these were all first time CEOs. For better or worse, this is what happens in a world where there’s venture capital. And there was 1 in particular I remember, he was talking almost the entire time and asked almost no questions. But once he got the feedback, he got better. And and to me, that’s something that you can maybe calculate for yourself as a leader or have somebody you trust just calculate is how much talking time do I have, what do what percentage of questions do I ask versus, statements, and then I love that analogy, think of yourself as an elephant, not a hippo.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:09]:
Yeah. It’s such a great analogy, and I love the fact that Hippo has that double entendre of a highest paid person’s opinion. Right? Like, that a lot of people refer to to

Robert Sutton [00:15:19]:
And, I mean, you really do need to be sort of, careful with that sort of challenge.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is such a practical thing because almost any of us can do it. I mean, I think particularly in the digital space. I mean, obviously, we need to be mindful of things like privacy, but, I mean, you could, with permission, record a session, record a meeting Yep. Run a transcript, and boy, you would see really quickly what is the percentage of time I’m talking versus what is percentage of time someone else is talking or have someone else calculate that really easily. And then I love the invitation too of what’s the ratio of the time that you’re making statements versus asking questions? And just starting that and knowing what those two numbers are for all of us would be so helpful and being able to, like, okay, how do I get better? And being able to eventually measure how you get better too.

Robert Sutton [00:16:08]:
So I love that. And there’s another method which I’ve written about several times. So one of one of my heroes and somebody who’s had a big effect on my life, but personally, is a guy named David Kelly. David, is cofounder of the Of the famous design firm design consulting firm called IDEO, and then more direct it would I was a fellow at for years. And and and at Stanford, we’re colleagues, and he started something called and I’m a cofounder, but it’s really his leadership effort, something called the design school or the Hostile Plattner Institute of Design. And one thing I noticed because I first met David when I was, like, an ethnographer studying him, and he did this thing that we eventually called management by walking out of the room. And I saw him do it over and over again, and what he would do is he would convene, let’s just say, a client and a design team and bring them together, And then he kinda tell everybody in the room a little bit about one another and why they should work together, and then he walked to the back of the room and watch them go and then he’d walk out. And so I called this management by walking out of the room.

Robert Sutton [00:17:09]:
By the way, president John Kennedy also did this during the Cuban Missile Crisis to remove his presence. And the reason I thought that was brilliant by David Kelly is in addition to the fact it was a more efficient use of his time, he was aware that his presence could stifle conversation. And if he said things, people would’ve paid too much attention to him, so he’d walk out of the room. So to me, that’s the ultimate management act is to get yourself out of the way at the right times, and he was very skilled at that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:37]:
Yeah. I’m so glad you mentioned this because one of the other version of that that people are more familiar with and I hear about reflected to me from listeners all the time is management by walking around, of going out, talking to people. And you call that out in the book and say, okay. Yeah. For some things, maybe, but for a lot of things actually cannot be helpful. What is it that gets in our way of maybe doing that as a practice?

Robert Sutton [00:18:00]:
Well, so management by walking around, which was, really started by, Hewlett Packard, and I actually had some conversation with the the 90 something year old executive who named the term Management by Walking Around. In fact, if you get it, it’s MBWA. And he said I want more MBWA management by walking around and less MBA, because he was worried that Hewlett Packard was being ruined by MBAs. And and he noticed that David Packard in particular would sort of wander around and talk to people. And so that was sort of a cool thing, but I think it just got taken too far. And there was actually a really interesting experiment that was done led by a woman named Sarah Singer who who studied management by walking around and and did a sort of a controlled experiment in hospitals. And what her research found was on the whole, as you’re saying, that management by walking around was a negative, but it wasn’t always a negative.

Robert Sutton [00:18:53]:
If the leaders at the hospital walked around and they found small problems, I mean, just things like, removing a step in the electronic health record system or something, that was good. But when it came to big problems, it actually led employees to be frustrated because what would happen was that they just see the boss sort of wandering around and asking same questions over and over again. And as one of them said, I talked to Sarah about this just recently, is one of them said to her, Why does he keep wandering us around and asking the same questions over and over again? He knows what the problems are. Why doesn’t he just fix them? So that’s where management by walking around didn’t work. But, yes, in this controlled experiment and Tom Peters didn’t like this. I know Tom Peters, he got mad when I sent him the When I sent him the the the research because he’s just a huge fan of management, by walking around. But but to me, the message there is not so much that management by walking around is bad.

Robert Sutton [00:19:50]:
The message there is that if it’s just viewed as a symbolic activity, That’s a substitute for fixing the problem.. And and we talk about this more in the book in terms of sham participation too.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:01]:
Yeah.

Robert Sutton [00:20:02]:
That’s where you’re getting in trouble with your employees. And , of course, I won’t swear, but great employees always have very, very sensitive nose, and often they know much more about their leaders than their leaders know about themselves. So you gotta be careful with that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:15]:
I’m hearing a lot of intention in that. And I think about the different things you just mentioned as far as, like, kind of that more general management by walking around the symbolic thing that some leaders do versus the management by walking out of the room. But then there’s the other side of this too. And the invitation you make is ride along, help, and do the work.

Robert Sutton [00:20:35]:
Right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:35]:
And what’s the distinction between doing that, like riding along, getting into the work versus a kind of a management by walking around?

Robert Sutton [00:20:43]:
Well, we’ve been talking about this notion that that it’s symbolic versus not. And one of the examples I use in the book is from Disney World. I have a pretty good example there. So so one of the I eventually got in touch with a son named, Dan Cockrell, who was a senior Disney executive, and one of his jobs a lot of very senior jobs. He actually started out in the front lines of the park and worked his way up. So he ran something called the All Star Resort, which has some incredible numbers, like 3 or 4000 rooms in Florida. And, housekeeping’s really important there. Right? Just think about having high quality efficient housekeeping.

Robert Sutton [00:21:21]:
So what he did was he worked alongside The best housekeepers for 2 weeks because they figured out who the best housekeepers were, and he figured out that one of the things that they did Once they would kinda specialize, like, just for example, 1 group, they would clean the mirrors not in the bathrooms. They have to clean those after every guest leaves, but just sort of like the mirror that’s sort of, like, outside in the hall or something, like, every 3 days, they would sort of specialize in those. And he identified a whole bunch of other best practices, and then he started spreading those best practices to the other housekeepers. And he actually worked alongside them, making beds, cleaning those mirrors, vacuuming, and so forth to understand what the job felt like. And to me, that’s a lot different Then sort of like the fly by where you pretend to talk to people for a few minutes, and that that’s sort of extreme. And, obviously, that’s not something you can do with heart surgery if you’re a a leader in a health care organization and you’re not qualified to do a heart surgery, I don’t want you touching me. But, I’m sort of understanding the work sort of deeply enough And then coming up with things that are actionable are useful.

Robert Sutton [00:22:29]:
But this guy, Dan Cockrell, I really admired the stuff that he did.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:33]:
Yeah. It’s really, I love the invitation to, like, okay. Either stay out of the way. Right? Or if you’re gonna get into it, like, really get into it. And this term ride along, you know, as you were saying that, I was thinking when I was in high school, I volunteered for our local police department, and we, as part of that, got the privilege to go on ride alongs with police officers who are on patrol. And it was a 4 hour ride along that they would do. And Wow. Boy, you learn a lot about what it’s like to be a police officer, when you spend 4 hours in a patrol car and just watch the daily stuff, and it was fascinating how much more you would get than just by casual interactions.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:13]:
And I hear the same thing echoed from sales managers often who go and ride along and go to meetings with sales associates and actually spend a full day or go and spend an entire day inside of a location. There’s something about that that is just you can’t get if you’re just having casual interactions. If you really get into that depth, it makes such a big difference on how much you understand about the work and goes going back to that elephant analogy. Right? Having those ears open.

Robert Sutton [00:23:43]:
Well, so so one thing I would add to this since I know that, many of your listeners are leaders of all kinds. Is that at least every leader I’ve ever known has sort of gone through this this process where when you don’t have a leadership position, you tend to think it’s a lot easier than it actually is until you get it. And I I’ve seen a whole including CEOs that I work with, they go through this process where they see somebody else doing the job and they oh, that person is terrible. Then they get the job, and the job’s really, really hard, and they eventually reach the conclusion, I only wish I could do as good a job as the person I criticized for years. So to me, in addition to we’re talking about how leaders should have empathy for people on the front lines and for customers. And, yes, that’s really important to be aware of their cone of friction. But for those of us, almost all of us work in something resembling a hierarchy, and we tend to at least I would include myself, tend to be critical of people in leadership positions. So to me, I guess I’m of 2 minds for the leaders in your podcast, which is yes.

Robert Sutton [00:24:51]:
Yes. You should be aware of what it feels like to be on the front lines or to be a customer or something in your organization, and that’s important for reducing friction. But at the same time, boy, I really admire the work you do and how hard it is to do, and I think that sometimes leaders don’t get enough credit or at least enough enough empathy for how hard their jobs are sometimes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:11]:
Mhmm. Boy, indeed. You said the word hierarchy a moment ago, and there’s an invitation in the book to do something you call flex the hierarchy. Tell me about that and what that means.

Robert Sutton [00:25:23]:
Oh, that’s great. So this comes from To give credit where credit is due, and and and I was a coauthor of a Harvard Business Review article about this about a year ago, but it’s her research. There’s a woman named Lindy Greer. She’s at University of Michigan, and she has been studying this idea of flexing the hierarchy or sometimes she talks about the idea of activating the hierarchy versus flattening it and so forth. And the question she asked is is while we we think of that there is sort of being a pecking order and some bosses being sort of more authoritarian and some delegating more, her argument, and she’s got great research for from large samples and also now from case studies of 10 start up CEOs, that the best leaders, the answer is is are they sort of commanding control or do they delegate? The answer is yes. So what the best leaders do is they figure out the times when it’s time to flatten the hierarchy. So that means let’s brainstorm. Let’s have a constructive argument.

Robert Sutton [00:26:28]:
Maybe they’ll call on 2 or 3 sort of, if you will, less powerful people on the team to make a presentation, and even in in some cases that that I know of for acquisitions, one example was when eBay acquired PayPal, a famous acquisition in Silicon Valley history, they have appointed a black hat and a white hat. They appointed 2 fairly high level executives, I’m talking about the CEO, to make a board presentation about whether we should acquire PayPal or not, so they have the they have the argument and that sort of flattening the hierarchy. But then when it comes to making the decision that the best bosses say, okay. So here’s my decision. And another thing that great leaders do, which we’ve all seen is when you get to that point where the team degenerates and everybody starts squabbling, that’s where a good leader sort of steps suppin gently tells them to stop it and to sort of be these are not our norms. We need behavior that’s better than this. So the short statement is what Lindy Greer’s research has shown is that the best leader is really skilled at knowing when to flatten the hierarchy, knowing when to invite people in to make decisions, maybe to have an argument, and then to making a decision or intervening when it’s kind of their job to do it. And and and and that’s one of the key arts of leadership is knowing when to flex.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:47]:
You’ve been working on the friction project for several years, you and Huggy have been obviously in in this book and getting the message out in the world, doing tons of speaking, helping organizations. One of the things I’m curious about is as you’ve done that, as you’ve gotten into this and gotten this workout in the world, to look back over the last couple years, what’s one thing you’ve changed your mind on?

Robert Sutton [00:28:08]:
That’s a good question. So I there’s about 75 things, but I’m gonna hit the headline, which is that when we started this book project, we started this book project because we were frustrated in our own organizations, the organizations we worked with, with how hard it was to get things done. But the good news was, and I’m not an overly optimistic person, I kept getting more and more optimistic because so many leaders in so many organizations I ran into actually found ways to make things better. And so to me, I guess that’s the optimism that I’ve seen, and and I’m gonna give you an example that still surprises me to this day, and we’re working on it, is the organization that that and we’re getting to know them better that has done the friction fixing that has impressed me perhaps the most is- you’re in Orange County. Is the Department of Motor Vehicles in the state of California? And I have an example in the book where I went to the local part of the motor vehicles in Redwood City, California, and I had a complicated transaction with my mother had passed away, and she had a Toyota. And there was this kind of a complicated transaction. I got line. There were 60 people in line at 7:30.

Robert Sutton [00:29:15]:
It was, oh, heck. I am going to be here till 11 o’clock. It’s like going to no appointment. And at 7:40, this gentleman walks down the line with a bunch of forms and pencils in his hands and asks each of us why we were there. Some people, he explained that they couldn’t do the transaction. They’re like getting a passport. Other people gave him the form to fill out so he wouldn’t even have to go to a window. In my case, he gave me the form to fill out, told me what window to go to, and I was out of there by 8:15 and I was in a state of confusion because it was so well ran and I, we had such a negative stereotype at the DMV, and now Huggy Rao, and I were in conversation with the senior leadership of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and they’re doing a whole bunch of things with technology, with culture, with redesign of customer journey to sort of reduce the burden on us citizens, residents of the state of California.

Robert Sutton [00:30:07]:
And so my perspective is and I even said this honestly to name the company to a Google executive last week, and Google is having some serious friction problems. If the Department of Motor Vehicles can do it, you can do it. So that’s my motto. So I’ve become more optimistic, believe it or not.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:25]:
I love it. Bob Sutton is coauthor of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the rRght Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Bob, thank you and Huggy you so much for your work.

Robert Sutton [00:30:35]:
Oh, thanks, Dave. It’s a joy to talk to you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:44]:
If this conversation was helpful for you, Four related episodes I’d recommend. One of them is with Dacher Keltner episode 254, Use Power for Good and Not Evil. We talk about his research that finds that the more power you have, the less empathy you tend to have for others. A good compliment to this conversation, episode 254, some ways to prevent that.Also recommended episode 454, How to Ask Better Questions. David Marquet was my guest on that episode, Thinking about David because of his principle called the coefficient of conversation that he highlights in his work, looking at how much does the leader talk versus how much do other people on the team talk, a key indicator for communication and avoiding oblivion. A A good compliment as well. Episode 454 for that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:32]:
I’d also recommend the conversation with Megan Reitz on episode 597, How to Help People Speak Truth to Power? Avoiding oblivion means that people do need to tell you the truth, and we talk in that episode exactly how to begin that process, what to do, what to say, the behaviors to exhibit in your organization to help people speak truth more consistently. Again, that’s episode 597.And then finally, I recommend the recent conversation with Cujo Teschner on episode 660, How to Prevent A Team from Repeating Mistakes? Cujo headed up the debriefing program for the US Air Force for a number of years, and that conversation walks us through the importance of debriefing, learning lessons, not repeating the same lessons, a very helpful way to surface what’s most important. Episode 660 for that.All of those episodes, of course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website, and I’m inviting you to set up your Free membership today at coachingforleaders.com. Setting up your free membership means you get access to a whole bunch of things Each week, one of them is the weekly guide that comes to you on email with resources, links, the key points from every episode, and also a link to my book and interview notes. I prepare a PDF almost every week with almost every episode with some of my key notes from the interview and also, key quotes from the book. I’ve grabbed 6 or 7 key quotes that I think you need to know from Bob and Huggy’s book that I think is are most important for you. Those are included in the PDF as are they for almost every episode.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:06]:
And if you have your free membership set up, you can just hit that link on any of the episode notes or when you see it in the weekly guide. Or if you don’t have it, your free membership set up, then just go over to coachingforleaders.com. It takes about 20 seconds. Set up your free membership, and you’ll have access to all of that ongoing all available to you for free. And if you’re looking for a bit more, I’d invite you to learn about Coaching for Leaders Plus. I’ve made a change to Coaching for Leaders Plus in the recent past and announced that instead of writing monthly long form articles that I received some Great input from our members saying, hey. I really like that format and would love you to do some things more often in a shorter format. So I have been writing weekly journal articles now, much shorter format, coming to our members each week.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:53]:
Our plus members already have been receiving those. If you’d like to jump in on that too, hear from me more often and in a much more concise format, Coaching for Leaders Plus It’s something you may want to check out. It’s one of the key benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. You can discover more by going to coachingforleaders.plus. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I am welcoming Jacqueline Lane and Scott Osmond to the show. We’re gonna be having a conversation on how to begin with an executive coach.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:30]:
If that’s something you’ve been considering, join us for that conversation where we’ll talk about some of the logistics, but also the thinking behind it. Join me for that conversation with them, and I’ll see you back on Monday.