I don’t think anyone wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box.
—PEGGY OLSEN, MAD MEN, 2007
“HAVE IT ON MY DESK BY 3:00 P.M. SHARP!”
Whether you’ve experienced him firsthand, or you’ve only heard about him through testimony and tales, you know who we’re talking about when we say the phrase Old School Boss. (We use the pronouns “he” and “him” because he was usually male, but not always.) This leader of the twentieth-century American workforce didn’t have to care too much about the various people who worked for him. In fact, the goals, needs, and personality traits of his team members were mostly perceived as an interruption.
However, the Old School Boss wasn’t always merely being a jerk.
He had been given a mission—to put the company first, at all costs.
In the context of his age, it was a system that functioned. If the Old School Boss wanted your report on his desk by 3:00 p.m., he would administer the demand with impunity, and woe to the employee who didn’t break a sweat trying to deliver the goods. If the Old School Boss expected you to be present for a dreary, thumb-twirling meeting that had absolutely nothing to do with your actual duties, you showed up with a smile on your face. Most of all, you knew where the Old School Boss stood on your personal aspirations. Without a word on the matter, he assumed you would keep your own desires, dreams, ideas, and expectations in a kind of muted stranglehold while in his presence. You were there to serve him and, by extension, the company, with the same deep sense of self-sacrifice that he did. The trade-off was this: If you kept serving with loyalty and selflessness, the company would keep you employed for the duration of your career, and it might even hand you a gold watch at your retirement party.
In a hilarious but grim article titled “7 Signs Your Boss Is Old School—And How to Deal with It,” published on the productivity website Knote,1 writer Eryn Paul lists a grab bag of red flags indicating that your boss may be a member of what she describes as “The Old Boys Club”: He won’t allow telecommuting; work/life balance is a foreign concept to him; leaving at 5:00 p.m. is frowned upon; his body language communicates superiority; you’re expected to drop what you’re doing if called upon, even for superfluous personal requests; taking vacation days, even when you’ve accrued the time, is an issue; and worst of all, your input is not taken seriously, and when it is, your boss takes credit. Paul concludes by writing that “Old school bosses don’t like to change, especially if the change wasn’t their idea.”
Sound like fun?
The television show Mad Men was wildly popular, in part, because it dramatized the very first chinks in the armor of this deeply entrenched style of conducting business, just as the second half of the twentieth century began to dismantle the mores of the first half. Company owners Roger Sterling and Bertram Cooper didn’t think of their employees as equals—that notion would have been absurd to them. Even their top talent were expected to behave with a certain amount of deference. Meanwhile, 10xers Don Draper and Peggy Olson saved the company from ruin by employing a modern sensibility and an open-minded work ethic that was foreign to the bosses, and as they won, the balance of power began to shift.
Mad Men beautifully foreshadowed where the modern workplace was headed.
Fifty years later than the era depicted by Mad Men, corporate America still isn’t quite ready to adopt the Silicon Valley’s workplace innovations, but increasingly, it has no choice. The millennials have grabbed the ball and they’re running with it, drawing from start-up culture, which in many ways acts as a kind of counterculture, redressing staid values. Today, just try barking demands at a 10xer (or any Millennial) and see where it gets you. You might risk undermining your whole company from the ground up. Or try pigeonholing the super talents, and watch your tech bog down and your company crumble as your best and brightest start looking for the exit. In a future that has already arrived, not only can you no longer treat your top talent like cogs—you actually have to have their buy-in for all big decisions that affect them.
In fact, the modern iteration of widely used S.M.A.R.T. goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) helps teams clarify consensus for initiatives. The A in S.M.A.R.T. sometimes stands for “Agreed Upon.”
Buy-in isn’t required for only short-term project goals. 10xers, like most successful smart people, are forward-looking. As strategic thinkers, they spend a good amount of time focusing and planning ahead. Naturally, one of the topics they have top of mind is where their career is headed. 10xers and millennials need to know that their boss is doing the same, quite literally optimizing their future. Noted generational speaker Anna Liotta calls it a fundamental principle of working with millennials. On her website, she lists it as one of the three mandatory factors in addressing what millennials “want, desire, and in fact demand”: #3 That their BOSS is actively interested in their success and, in fact, is rooting for it.
Liotta says, “Growing up with coaches, advisors, and mentors as the adult role models in schools, sports teams, and home, millennials are not willing to suffer for eight to twelve hours a day in an authoritarian culture.”
Buy-in is the new normal.
So how do you get buy-in and full participation from talented individuals if you can no longer tell them what to do?
The answer is simple: First you have to get to know the Whole Person.
BESPOKE BOSS IN ACTION, PART 1 |
|
0x Manager |
Barks orders and hopes people will comply. |
5x Manager |
Considers that people have personal lives. |
10x Leader |
Knows enough about those personal lives to make considerations when managing them, and in the process, yields superior results. |
GETTING TO KNOW THE REAL YOU
The New School Boss puts one question front and center: What truly drives the individual talents at my disposal? How can they be motivated—especially to conquer hurdles that they themselves fear? How can they be helped to achieve project goals from the inside out, in a way that feels natural and holistic to them? It isn’t just a matter of incentivizing the top brass. A smart team leader has a vested interest in these questions for every one of their main players. Just as a coach must know their top athletes inside-out, finding the best ways to get the most out of your talent is now the central job of the 10x manager.
The fact is, nowadays you can’t even get the 10xers on-board without upholding a custom open-spirited atmosphere. As Dr. John Sullivan at leading recruiting news website ERE2 recently put it, a majority of companies “don’t even know the attraction factors that excite top talent. . .. If you closely examine your job postings, your careers website, and your recruitment marketing, you will find that in almost all firms they emphasize ‘paycheck job’ factors like benefits and the skills and capabilities that are needed.”
Dr. Sullivan recommends getting past all this, to the heart of what the best candidates really care about—exciting work, a chance to make a difference, rapid growth, and great managers and coworkers. “Assuming the top performers want the same things as the average worker is a common but deadly mistake.”
Courting the best tech talent is not different conceptually from getting the best athlete for a pro team. You don’t just assess prospects’ skills and cut them a check. It’s on you to make them feel that they can live the life of their dreams while in your employ. This can never come from a one-size-fits-all offer.
Customization is the new normal.
A-Plan Coaching, an optimized, scalable coaching start-up we advise and participate in, has a rule that we love. When it provides coaching services to a company’s employees, they require that the company set a maximum of 60 percent of the employee’s goals, while the remaining 40 percent have to be personally identified by the employee themself. In order to optimize your workers’ work life, you’ve got to give them the opportunity to optimize their whole life.
It’s a level of respect that turns the very concept of boss on its head. Your destiny is in your hands, and your buy-in is mandatory. We like this thinking so much that we adopted a version of it, and now, at our own weekly company goal-setting meetings, we ask our employees to set three personal goals for every six professional ones.
Personalization is the new normal.
In fact, with the tech talent we represent, we strive to know them on every level. Our interview process is a sometimes thrilling, sometimes jarring labyrinth, whereby we vet for EQ and problem-solving skills just as vigilantly as for technical savvy. We know, from trial and error, that out there in the real world, the ability to communicate with and relate to others is every bit as important as coding chops, or any other talent for that matter. An A+ developer, engineer, etc. with even B- communication skills will have rough engagements every time.
When we represent executives about to enter a high-level job negotiation as part of our 10x Ascend service, our compensation advisory company, we take our inquiries a step further. One of the first things we do is have prospective clients fill out what we call a Lifestyle Calculator, where they evaluate preferences for themselves (often for the first time) and share with us what is most important in myriad arenas. The Calculator includes twenty-four attributes across which each applicant spreads a hundred points. This very process of self-examination forces prioritization and helps us begin to see who they really are and what is most important to them.
You get to take a firsthand crack at the 10x Lifestyle Calculator here: https://10xascend.com/calculator/. We’re willing to bet you learn some new things about yourself. But whether or not you take the tests, what’s important to note is that the Lifestyle Calculator reveals time and again is that no two talents are alike. A free-spirited, single twenty-seven-year-old engineer is not looking for the same things as a thirty-two-year-old with a spouse and a child. Even two talents who share surface traits often differ wildly in their wants and needs.
The Lifestyle Calculator is just one of a whole flock of new tools cropping up to help managers get to know people beyond their skill sets and work histories. Just as the tech culture is proving to be a game changer for the workplace, new tech itself is now driving a multidirectional renaissance in management tools. Fortune3 recently reported on a giant leap in performance-management system algorithms that are quickly being used by team builders looking to up communication and productivity. As Bryan Hancock, a McKinsey partner in Washington, D. C., puts it, “Managers and employees alike see the old annual-review approach as too subjective, too bureaucratic, and too backward-looking.” These new digital assessment systems deliver up-to-the-minute info about workers, their skills, their goals, and their preferences, so that, as Hancock puts it, managers can concentrate on “coaching people rather than rating them.”
Many of these algorithms even make finely tuned recommendations, and if the process sounds like cold data, it isn’t. Advice should always be custom, always personalized. Marc Wangel, a twenty-five-year IBM veteran who leads a twelve-person strategy and tech team, says of these new tools: “It actually makes me a better manager. I have more time to meet with my team members for coaching conversations.”
Bespoke is the new normal.
BESPOKE BOSS IN ACTION, PART 2 |
|
0x Manager: |
Gives criticism liberally and rarely balances that criticism with constructive or positive feedback. |
5x Manager: |
Gives feedback once or twice a year in accordance with HR policies, citing how a worker can do their job better. They occasionally throw in some positive feedback. |
10x Leader: |
Gives real-time feedback with an emphasis on how the worker can grow and become better at their job and in their career, in addition to formal reviews in accordance with HR policies. They focus on balancing positive and negative feedback at a ratio that makes sense for the individual. |
FLEXOLOGY
Nobody understands the fast rate of change in the workplace more than Jesse Lee, an entrepreneur who has spent the last decade reinventing the way brands speak to the young, via his Dub Frequency Media company. Tastemaker mag LA Canvas4 calls Lee “The Magician” and asks readers, “How do you explain how the media mogul handles so many projects without even lifting a finger?” Bloomberg.com is no less wowed—Sheila Marikar’s 2017 exposé on Lee is titled “LA’s New Hype King Has Cracked How millennials Spend.”5
Needless to say, Lee is not your Old School Boss.
A young and spirited leader, at turns ebullient and dead serious, Lee dresses in hip-hop high style and runs his buzzing Culver City office with great command. With thirty-five employees between L.A. and New York, and more projects and clients than we can count, Lee has had to learn his management lessons at hyperspeed.
“It’s all about finding the right motivation,” he explains. “Especially when you’re working in a quote unquote ‘creative environment’. The only benefit or enticement for strong people to join you is their ability to make an impact. That’s what you have to give them.”
The key weapon in Lee’s arsenal is his ability to create the space for a completely malleable engagement with work. “Two of our newest directors left agencies that work with blue-chip clients to be here, right? Top firms that handle Google, Apple, Nike, to name a few. Because we give them this unique opportunity . . . to flex, to do multiple things, in their own way.” Lee has also created a practice of finding the right resource for the right job—whether that be a W2 hire or a remote freelancer. He understands that a blended workforce gives his operation a competitive advantage.
Flexibility is the name of the game.
It’s a very contemporary way of approaching the daily workload, the polar opposite of specialization. Lee’s conglomeration of companies includes everything from red hot PR agency Dub Frequency Media to lifestyle site westwoodwestwood.com to a new high-end retail marketplace app, Basic Space. We first met Jesse when he turned to us for a 10x programmer that could manifest Basic Space’s enormous potential. At the time, we had no idea how many projects he was juggling. Lee’s got his hands in an uncountable number of start-ups, restaurants, and clothing lines. His outfit is especially known for throwing sponsored parties and unusual events, jam-packed with A-list celebs. Lee is the guy Victoria’s Secret calls when it wants to make a splash at Coachella.
“Literally, everyone here works on half a dozen to two dozen projects at any given time,” he explains. “Imagine a new employee. You go from working on one account at a big agency for two years straight, and then you come here and we get you to help us with Basic Space, with dFm, the tech start-ups, with everything we handle. And we move really fast, fast to a point where some people can’t handle it. But as a company, we have to flex various muscles at various times, and learn from the mix.”
As someone who has cut his teeth marketing to the young, Lee grasps the drive toward personalization as few do. His entire staff is between ages twenty-two and forty, and every two weeks he holds a special workshop for the twenty-seven-and-under set, where they discuss topics of their choice—everything from the art of negotiation to networking, work/life balance, and everyday survival. He also hosts dinners and retreats that place far-flung employees of all levels side by side, just to see what kind of synergy arises. Lee is especially insistent on seeking out the right kind of people to bring onboard.
“When I say I’m looking for a cultural fit,” Lee explains, “I’m not talking about the way you dress, the type of music you listen to, external things. That stuff is a given, right? I’m also not talking about the skillset and interests that align you with the rest of the team. That’s easy enough to figure out, too. What I’m looking for is what I like to call the growth mindset.”
Lee has pared down this term to represent three factors that he puts in front of any new hire, large or small. Even potential interns have to be scrutinized for the growth mindset. First, he seeks people who are multidimensional thinkers. “When you see a door, what do you do? Do you break it down, kick it open? Or do you go under it, over it? I need people who consider every possibility, who can’t just look at a thing for what it usually is. They find strategic solutions from every angle. If you can’t do that, then you’re the kind of person that gets stuck, and I don’t have time to help you when you do.”
The second element Lee looks for is creativity, and by creativity he doesn’t mean pretty design. “I know a person is creative when they can make it happen, get the thing done with no budget and no resources in half the time anybody else would.” Juxtapose Lee’s statement with the Old School Boss, who would mandate a budget cut and expect the moon from people with no ability to make that happen. By contrast, Lee finds people who will self-impose the biggest challenges, because they have aligned motivation (or what we call skin in the game, our subject in Chapter 6). It’s another great illustration of how the bespoke boss is always working with the whole person from the inside out.
The last characteristic is the one Lee claims is most important, the one he believes is hardest to teach. “Do you like to exceed your own expectations?” he asks. “Because that’s the personality I want working with me—people who want to be successful and perform well for their own reasons.”
It’s a strong description of what makes 10xers 10x, this drive to exceed expectations and change the game, and you can feel it in the air when walking around the dFm offices. Plain as day, you see the open camaraderie, idea-sharing, and sense of lateral equality that has put the company at the forefront of their field. Lee knows that Old School Bossing just won’t play with this crowd, and he constantly works to improve his skills as a leader. He’s recently begun a coaching program with Berkeley’s resident leadership maven John Danner, and he’s enthused about the sessions. One of Danner’s practices has been to coach Lee through getting his ideas extrapolated on whiteboard, to connect the dots to convey meaning to his crew.
“John talks to me about being a better translator, right? It’s one thing to broadcast a message, another thing to pay attention to whether or not people are understanding it the way I intend.”
New School Bosses, if they have the slightest chance at leading 10xers, are as dedicated to self-improvement as they want their team to be. “It’s kind of like with coaches and the best players on a team, right?” Lee says. “The best coaches sleep four hours a night, like Bill Belichick or whoever. And then they know that the LeBron Jameses and Kobe Bryants will be out there practicing when nobody else wants to.”
BESPOKE BOSS IN ACTION, PART 3 |
|
0x Manager: |
Wants to do well but only cares about the team as it relates to their own outcome. |
5x Manager: |
Cares deeply about how the team performs at the job. |
10x Leader: |
Cares deeply about how the team performs in life and in their career, even beyond the current project or job, often resulting in a team that would follow that leader anywhere and goes above and beyond expectations. |
TAKE COMPASSION TO THE BANK
It’s no surprise that a digitally charged set of businesses like the kind Jesse Lee runs will tend to gravitate toward bespoke management practices. What’s more remarkable is how this new approach is seeping into even the most old guard industries, albeit at a much slower pace. In fact, that slow rate of change is one of the main reasons we wrote this book.
Just like Old School Bosses, old school companies have an uncanny ability to get in their own way. To cite one frustrating example, we recently had to spend more than a month to negotiate a bloated hundred-page master services agreement down to eighteen pages to be able to provide a giant corporation with a seamless conduit to our roster of tech geniuses that they need access to in order to save their hides. Was the agreement really that important to their urgent needs? The hours upon hours of manpower they spent defending it will never surface once our guys get to work. (That said, we give credit to the procurement team at this company for taking the time to trim the fat off the contract. Massive contracts are a major impediment to the ongoing success of a company.)
To cite another, more common example, how come so many companies still have payment terms for individual contractors that are ninety-plus days out? Why would the best and the brightest, who can pull upward of $750 an hour with a flick of the wrist, accept these kinds of terms?
Another example: A forward-thinking executive we work with was recently in the process of setting up a consulting engagement to help a Fortune 100 company be more agile. When they tried to address payment terms in his consulting agreement, they attempted to change the terms to ninety days (their typical pay timeline.) As the executive put it: “That will not work for us. The irony of you hiring me to teach you how to be more agile but telling us that it will take ninety days to pay is distinctly not agile!” The engagement happened with better payment terms.
Fortunately, there are some executives in conventional positions who get that a workplace revolution is underway and unavoidable.
Shelley Seifert, the new CEO of First Bank as of this writing, couldn’t run a company more different than Jesse Lee’s, and yet she’s witnessing the same upheavals and facing some of the same challenges firsthand. As Seifert puts it: “In my lifetime, I’ve never seen things change so fast. It feels like each season we’re at a different level technologically, and the implications are massive.”
Started in 1910 with home offices in St. Louis, First Bank is as traditional as it gets, with a hundred-year-plus history of independent, family ownership that uniquely positions it to address the needs and challenges of family owned and other privately held companies. But as the twenty-first century deepens, even First Bank has had to recognize the new state of employer-employee relations.
“Two things keep me up at night,” Seifert says. “First is the creation of an infrastructure that supports strong management. And second is the training to make it work. You could have the best, most bespoke manager in the universe, right? But if the system shuts them down in every way, at every turn, then you probably won’t keep them for long, because they’ll either be pulled to a new environment or get up and choose to go elsewhere. You can’t go out and say ‘Go ahead and tailor everything’ . . . and then the first time you see something that looks funny or new, say, ‘Wait, what?’ You have to create environments where the change is supported.”
Seifert is the epitome of a New School Bespoke Boss, highly tuned to the satisfaction levels of her employees. It isn’t easy. Her main accountability is to the board and the shareholders, of course, and her days are slammed with high-level strategy and execution. Still, she makes it a point to meet with the bank’s front lines at every level, with special care paid to the tech professionals, from college interns to data security specialists. Often, they’re younger and they expect a different kind of stewardship.
“The traditional motivators have changed,” Seifert explains, echoing Jesse Lee. “When I entered the workforce, it was, you know, ‘How much are you making, can you get a bigger office.’ Pretty materialistic. Today, those kinds of incentives just aren’t as important. The younger people I deal with are cause-driven, they want to feel part of something. Something that’s advancing our environment, something purposeful. Even our deepest tech—they really want to be doing things that help humanity. And you have to address that.”
Concurrent with these attitudinal shifts, the banking field now has a whole new level of competition, with personalized banking and fintech services cropping up all over. Seifert says that bankers trained on the twentieth-century model can sometimes be heard lamenting the passing of “the good old days,” before every individual expected custom treatment round the clock.
Seifert herself is inspired by the change.
“What I love about the newer generations is that they appreciate local—they go to farmers markets to get value-added advice on vegetables. They don’t want or need someone to help them with routine tasks, but they’re inherently learners. And these kids are not going to be running family owned businesses in twenty years—they’re going to be running things next year. As a bank, how do you help them take those steps?”
Seifert sees a tremendous opportunity to advance the art of management from within this maelstrom of customization. “Whoever manages an individual has a huge impact on their world, so we try to mandate that. We try to hire managers who are open and listen and respond to the needs of individuals. In a perfect world, every manager gets up in the morning and says, ‘How can I create an environment where the people who work for me can do their best possible work?’”
This move toward a more holistic style of management is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous in the digital sphere. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, is a vanguard player in the move toward compassionate management. As he recently put it on Oprah’s SuperSoul series, “Compassionate leadership begins with the connection between individuals, and a company is comprised of people, that’s all it is.” Weiner knows that any CEO can pay lip service to humane concepts, but he doesn’t believe in empty platitudes. “We’re trying to connect with folks, put ourselves in the shoes of others and understand what they’re going through, what they’re experiencing . . . We’re trying to walk the walk.”
No surprise that he recently received a 100 percent approval rating from his employees.
100 percent.
This model of compassion at the executive level may be newer for banking than for some other industries, but First Bank’s Shelley Seifert embraces it, and wholeheartedly agrees that 10x leadership comes down to a desire to be invested in the fate of others. “It’s true that we’re asking more of our managers than we used to,” she says. “But what’s the point of even being a manager if you’re not worried about helping others? A manager has to value individuality. It’s not about being your worker’s best friend, but it’s about valuing who they are, and understanding that your job is to support them to be successful. You don’t give them anything they want, of course, ’cause that’s not gonna help them be successful. But you do work to understand their wants and needs and hopes and dreams as people.”
Unsurprisingly, Seifert’s bespoke vision sometimes gets snagged by the old system. “The regulatory environment, the whole corporate infrastructure works against the individual, because it’s set for a common solution. But that doesn’t always lead to the best work. It’s not our job to judge what helps a person be the best in their role—we can’t be the judge and jury of that. We can only judge the results, and ask, ‘What will truly help this person’s career?’”
She believes one of the most challenging changes has been cultivating an atmosphere where failure and mistakes can be exposed without negative repercussions—an idea straight out of the Silicon Valley playbook, known best as fail often and fail fast. “If the environment is such that issues can’t get escalated, that’s a hard fail. And often, an individual who is really good at doing something will try to compensate for issues, to keep them from escalating. A bespoke manager needs an environment where problems come to the surface as fast as possible. You can’t fix things you don’t know about, and you put the whole company at risk.”
In banking culture, creating a sense of freedom for the individual is not the first thing on anybody’s agenda, especially at the executive level. “There’s a classic problem when great employees, great individual contributors become managers,” Seifert explains. “It’s like you’re a spectacular downhill skier but becoming a manager means having to learn to take a sharp curve. People fall back on what they know and that’s dangerous.”
And how does Seifert identify the at-risk manager?
“I can see where the major passion is. There are those who are interested in the development of others and those who are really more focused on developing their own careers—a certain rigidity has set in. I look for people who like people.”
BESPOKE BOSS IN ACTION, PART 4 |
|
0x Manager: |
Wants the work done their way and ASAP. |
5x Manager:. |
Knows that people sometimes work better under certain work circumstances, with regard to hours and locations. |
10x Leader: |
Works hard to make sure each person is provided the optimal work environment for productivity. |
BESPOKE BOSS IN ACTION, PART 5 |
|
0x Manager: |
Worries about their own compensation and only sees the team as a means to that end. |
5x Manager: |
Gets the team raises at regular intervals. |
10x Leader: |
Fights like hell to make sure the team feels well taken-care of and explains what he or she can and cannot get for the team and why. |
TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 2
• The Old School Boss, who could make demands of his employees without seeking their buy-in, is a figure of the past.
• The bespoke boss works to understand the whole person—the needs, desires, aspirations, and more.
• This is especially true for bespoke bosses working with 10xers, who require a refined level of focus, flexibility, and understanding.
• New digital tools are helping to advance the management revolution by bringing bespoke, real-time data into the conversation. This advancement is turning the manager into a coach, with a vested interest in each employee’s success.
• To reach both 10xers and younger generations, the bespoke boss must appeal to their sense of values and their drive to be a part of some cause that will change the world for the better. In that same vein, employees need to know where their future is in the eyes of their manager.
• Most of all, the bespoke boss requires high EQ and a strong desire to help people achieve what they want, incentivizing from the inside out. Gratitude and compassion are cornerstones of this.
• Overall, to get the best from your team, employees need more coaching and less bossing.