Episode 344 · 13 October 2026 · 1:07:01
More tech Layoffs, OpenAI Culture Crisis and Small Business Burnout PLUS Should You Chase A-Players?
More tech Layoffs, OpenAI Culture Crisis and Small Business Burnout PLUS Should You Chase A-Players?
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Al ElliottComing up this week in work with friend of the show, Dr. Jake Juba.
Leanne ElliottYay!
Al ElliottHe's back.
Leanne ElliottHe is. Um, probably the wrong energy to bring to what I'm going to say next. Another tech company has announced layoffs.
Al ElliottBoo.
Leanne ElliottUh, but what do we make of the CEO's message to staff? I'll be going through the publicly shared memo and we'll give our verdict on how these layoffs are being managed.
Al ElliottAlso this week, an OpenAI safety employee has resigned, claiming the company's culture is broken. Now, this is like double downs on— there's some concerns by a guy called Jacob Coxon. Funny, that's the guy who thought that AI companies are gambling with our lives. But this is suggesting the problem isn't just the tech, it's the actual environment itself. So I will bring you more of that in a second.
C — REVIEWAnd in Truth or Lie, we'll talk about toxic workers. Should you spend your energy chasing A-players or a Avoid the toxic ones first.
Al ElliottAnd in the Workplace Surgery, one listener asks, what do you do when the business you've built is the very thing that's burning you out? Been there, done that.
Leanne ElliottGood question, friend.
Al ElliottYes, been there. Uh, they're worried about their partner and wanna know how to support them. So we're gonna get Jake's view later in the show.
Leanne ElliottYes, we will, because this is Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Al ElliottMy name is Al. I'm the business owner, and I'm here to ask the questions you might be afraid to.
Leanne ElliottMy name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, and I'm here to answer them. And together with the help of our brilliant guest host, Jake Tuber, we'll help you simplify the science of work and build amazing workplace cultures.
Al ElliottWe'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors. Thank you for, for funding our wine habits. Thank you.
Leanne ElliottPlease continue to do that.
Al ElliottIf you have support tickets in your business, then this is going to sound frighteningly familiar. You open the queue on Monday morning, 200 tickets before even the first sip of coffee. And you already know what's in there. Password reset requests, order updates, the same questions over and over again. Hey, what if that part of the job just handled itself?
Leanne ElliottHubSpot Customer Agent resolves those repeat tickets using your actual CRM data and knowledge base so your team can focus on the conversations that actually need them and your customers get answers faster.
Al ElliottCheck out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Welcome back. Welcome back. Regular people know that, or people, regular listeners will know that Dr. Jake is becoming a piece of furniture here, but a useful piece of furniture, like a, like a chaise longue. Is that, is that a piece of furniture? Yeah. Yeah.
C — REVIEWAn armoire, perhaps. Yes.
Al ElliottOh, should we stick with the French, the French thing? I don't actually, I don't know any more French furniture.
C — REVIEWWhat's the most American piece of furniture you can think of? Ironically, it's probably IKEA, but what is the most American piece of furniture that's out there?
Leanne ElliottOh, I imagine, you know, they're like the La-Z-Boy chairs that are in Friends.
C — REVIEWYes, that's it. 100%. 100%. I can be
Al Elliotteven
C — REVIEWthe recliner from overseas anytime.
Al ElliottBrilliant. So I just need to pull your, pull your handle and you'll lie back and let me mount you. Is that what you're saying?
C — REVIEWThat's exactly what I'm saying, Al.
Leanne ElliottWow.
Al ElliottWell, it starts with me to go on. Christ. Yeah. I am so sorry. Sorry to everyone for everything I said.
C — REVIEWWe're off to a great start. This is gonna go well, as always.
Al ElliottLeanne, have you got news?
Leanne ElliottI've got a couple of things I wanted to share. We've, we've had somebody leave a review that name-checked Jake.
Al ElliottYes.
Leanne ElliottSo it says, hilarious episode from one of my favourite podcasts. I just listened to the Summer Sessions number 4, Am I the Workplace Arsehole episode. Now it's hilarious. Dr. Jake Tuber is an excellent co-host and only adds to Leanne and Al's brilliant on-air chemistry. Really fun episode and still makes me— and still makes you think. Thanks for the Oh,
Al Elliottthat's Pat Elliott. That's my mum.
Leanne ElliottThat was from someone called Natalie. So thank you very much, Natalie.
Al ElliottThat's nice.
Leanne ElliottAnd then the other one I had, it's quite nice how kind of far-reaching our little show has become. I got a LinkedIn message from somebody, um, in Sydney, Australia.
Al ElliottOh,
Leanne Elliottsomebody called Kate— Katie Ward, the head of talent and organisation development at Grant Thornton Australia.
Al ElliottFancy.
Leanne ElliottAnd Katie said, I'm a Fellow org psych based in Sydney, recently found your podcast. Love it. Thank you.
Al ElliottThere you go. Isn't that nice? That's, yes, all you, that. Thank you.
C — REVIEWOh, that's outstanding. And reaching Sydney like that, super cool. Uh, very, very cool. Apologies for the, uh, presence of another non-British Commonwealth country accent here on the show, but you know, I'll do my best.
Al ElliottYou always do. You always do. So what's going on in your world, J.T.?
C — REVIEWWell, it sounds like the review I wrote under my pseudonym Natalie made it to Leanne's ears, so glad to see that. But all going well here in the US. You know, it's a beautiful time of year in the US, fall in the New York area, September, October, just one of the best times of year. So really enjoying that with my kids getting back into school and whatnot. And, uh, of course, as you know, United States now back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back Iran War champions, which is exciting. Yeah. And, uh, let me see what else is going on. Just a busy time of year. A lot of doing a lot of keynotes and talks. Uh, start up a new little, uh, advisory-style coaching program at work that I've got a few executives enrolled in. So for executives who don't just need classic coaching for a fixed duration, but wanna have a monthly, longer recurring check-in meeting with an executive coach who will also be a bit more of an advisor than a classic coach, I've been running that as a new program, which is really exciting. And yeah, just heading into the winter season. It's coming around the corner. It's Halloween. Kids are picking out Halloween costumes here in the US. Is Halloween big anywhere else in the world? This is my ignorance once again talking. Like, is it big where you guys are or no?
Leanne ElliottThe UK is pretty big.
Al ElliottScotland particularly.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Al ElliottIt's like, I'm sure it's based on a Scottish word. It's like, you know, it's something. I mean, you know the etymology of whatever.
C — REVIEWAll Hallows' Eve. Yeah, I do. I could imagine Edinburgh really showing up for Halloween. It's a big holiday here. It's super fun with little kids. It really is wonderful. You know, they tell you what they want to be and you order the costume and then they get it and they're excited. And then 3 days later they hate it and they don't want it and they ask you to return the costume. And then you got to try to decide whether or not you'll keep the costume or let them wear something else. And eventually they wear the costume and then you get the candy and they take all the good candy and you try to steal their good candy. But there's really not that much candy. It's, it's a wonderful tradition.
Al ElliottSo, so you've got Halloween, you've got— what else? What else is going on? You've got your book, obviously, which we're not allowed to talk about. But although, am I right in thinking it is pre-released now? You can buy it now.
C — REVIEWYou can preorder it now. It's, uh, I'm in the final proofing stages, so, uh, you can preorder it now. Leanne, your blurb is, uh, right there on the inside cover. Very kindly, for those of you listening, Leanne wrote a series of very nice blurbs, and then I changed them all to make them better without telling her. But the, the final version is really, really terrific, uh, and it's right in there. So yeah, just, just updated the new cover. Uh, got, uh, actually most exciting about that is the, uh, The little psychometric tool that I built to assess sort of manager tendencies that's on the site. If you go to deliberatemanager.com, you can take the free assessment. Uh, and I vibe coded the whole thing, did the stats behind it and everything. Really cool way to use some of the AI tools to build that. And it sends like every person an individual personalized custom report. Uh, it's pretty neat. So that's fun. That's up and running on deliberatemanager.com.
Al ElliottNice.
Leanne ElliottDefinitely go. I, I did it. Yeah. And it was a really interesting report. And I must say, It's one of those things, isn't it, when, when somebody you know asks you to read their, their book, it's always a bit like, oh God, what part of it should I read?
C — REVIEWOh yeah, I know.
Leanne ElliottSo I was like, oh, so I was very relieved and not at all surprised actually that your book is phenomenal. I don't, I don't think I've read a book about management that so clearly explains how, how you can show up for your teams depending on what, what they need. We hear lots about adaptable leadership and that type of stuff, but it's having something so practical Guiding people through how to do it. It's just brilliant. It's gonna, it's gonna, I think it's gonna be big and you should go and preorder now.
C — REVIEWThat's very nice. That's very, I appreciate that. I'm sure I'll be talking everyone's ears off. In fact, we should chat. There's a possibility of prereleasing an audio version of one chapter that maybe we can release as a special here. There's not gonna be an audiobook right off the bat because as you know, Leanne, there's so many practical tools and stuff. It's not super conducive to an audiobook, but some of those opening chapters about sort of why management is so difficult and the I've heard people asking for an audio version of some of the initial chapters, so maybe we'll do a little release. Maybe we'll figure out something. That'd be fun.
Leanne ElliottYeah, that'd be great.
Al ElliottOkay, we should probably go on to the news, shouldn't we, Lee?
Leanne ElliottYes, let's do it. So yes, another tech company has announced layoffs, um, and I'm curious what you guys think about this CEO's message to staff. It is very recent. I think this, this was maybe yesterday, maybe even this morning actually, that, that it came out. Um, but this is, this is prerecorded, so it'll probably be a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Um, the company involved has shared the memo its CEO sent to employees explaining the decision, and I thought it would be interesting to see what you think about in terms of how they've, they've handled it. I'm not going to tell you the company just yet because I don't want you to— want it to influence your opinion. Okay. I'll give you the details instead. So, this is a major tech company. They've announced they're cutting around 660 jobs. That's approximately 7% of its workforce. The decision was approved by the board on the 1st of October and communicated to employees on the 6th of October. So according to the CEO, the business has spent the past year shifting its strategy away from simply providing software towards delivering customer outcomes using AI.
Al ElliottAI.
Leanne ElliottThat shift, the memo explains, means the company needs to change how it's organised, and there's 3 main changes. The first is that they are reorganising teams around customer outcomes rather than individual products, which basically means instead of separate teams focusing on particular features of the product. They'll have teams responsible for the whole customer journey with clearer accountability for the results. Second, they are flattening the organisation, fewer management layers with decisions made closer to the people actually doing the work. And third, they're creating smaller, more agile teams with clearer ownership and more authority to make decisions. Now, there's a really interesting distinction that the CEO, CEO made about the reasons for the layoffs. They explain that the redundancies are not being driven by AI-related efficiencies. The company does not expect AI to improve productivity, and it plans to continue investing in it. But the explanation given is that the organisation needs to be restructured to deliver its new strategy. They also said that it isn't simply a cost-cutting exercise, and the business has already been growing its headcount more more slowly sorry than revenue, and the intention is to redirect resources towards its biggest opportunities. The company also. They also explained— it was very detailed— the corporate body also explained how they decided which roles would go. So rather than starting with a target number of redundancies, the leadership team says it first designed the organisational structure that it needed and then assessed roles against 6 criteria. That included things like how important the role was to the new strategy, the number of management layers, revenue generation, the capabilities needed for the future, overall capacity, And whether the right leaders were in the right positions. And then they also shared the support being offered to employees who are leaving. So the company says its general package includes 20 weeks of base salary, plus another week for every year of service, capped at 30 weeks. There's also 5 months of health-related support depending on location, 6 months of career transition services as well, and employees can keep their company laptops. And once the business status has been removed, of course. And they can also keep any home working equipment that the company has provided for them. And everyone affected has also been offered a one-to-one conversation with a manager. In terms of communicating the decision, US employees were told they'd receive an email within 15 minutes confirming whether their role was affected, and employees elsewhere, including the UK, would receive information about the process, which does vary according to local employment laws. The CEO has also acknowledged that redundancies affect far more than people's jobs, including their family, their plans, their relationships with colleagues, and they encourage those staying to make space for the fact that they're losing people they've worked alongside for, for in some cases, many, many years. Um, so there you go. What, what do we think? Very detailed. Jake?
C — REVIEWAssuming it's all true, and I have no reason not to assume that that is true, I Generally, really like what I've heard as far as not just messaging but some of the ideas go. There's no perfect way to do something like that. I interpreted this really as an organizational redesign of which layoffs might be part, as opposed to we're just not doing as well with our existing strategy, and so we got to get thinner and therefore lay off. And I love the idea of thinking about how they want to serve their customers, designing and lining up the right org structure around that. And then thinking about what roles are needed for that, and presumably along the way, what management practices, what policies and systems will change too. It seems like something that was designed pretty well. It was more proactive than responsive. Uh, and so the fact that AI is involved but incidental doesn't surprise me because they're not treating AI as this monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey that everything bows before, but really is just another technological tool that's changing some of their strategic directions. And listen, how it actually gets executed on the ground for each person will be different. Overall, pretty impressed by everything that you just said, uh, in terms of what they are doing, especially relative to how other large tech companies generally handle these things. So, uh, I, I give it an A from what I've seen so far. Pretty impressive.
Al ElliottExcellent.
Leanne ElliottNice. Al?
Al ElliottIf this is Meta, I will get my ass outta Mark Zuckerberg's window.
C — REVIEWNo chance. No chance.
Al ElliottThere is no chance this is Meta. With Zuck in his evil lair.
Leanne ElliottI thought it was really interesting, and I thought they seemed to cover quite a lot of the bases in terms of what people worry about when they're made redundant, which is of course runway in terms of salary, it's support in terms of actually going through the process. And I just think it's like being able to keep your laptop. I know when I got made redundant, it was the first time I had to go and buy a laptop because I didn't have one. I just used my work one. So just even Things like that, I think, are quite considerate. But I think my favourite thing about this, if it is true, and we can only take it at face value, like Jake said, how it's executed could change things. What I really liked about it is they're approaching it as an organisational change.
Al ElliottMm-hmm.
Leanne ElliottAnd I hear very few organisations talking about layoffs in that way, because there's so many different aspects to it, isn't there, in terms of teams, in terms of processes, in terms of ops, in terms of customers, in terms of actually the people that That remain, and they— it needs to be very carefully planned, and it sounds like it, it has been.
Al ElliottYeah, and also, I mean, it could just be spin that they've said this, but if they have genuinely gone, this is what we want, and like in terms of the organizational structure, and then gone through each role and gone, okay, who can fill that? And then whoever's left over, you know, when, when the music stops, there's not enough chairs, it's like, I'm really sorry, and this is the best we can do for you, and it's pretty damn decent. So It does seem it's a lot better than than some of the people have handled it.
Leanne ElliottYeah, and I think you're right. I think it would it would hopefully help people to understand that their role has been made redundant, not them as an individual,
Al Elliottwhich is so important,
Leanne ElliottJake, isn't
Al Elliottit? That otherwise you lose. It's like it's a personal attack if you've been made redundant.
C — REVIEWAbsolutely. You often see two organizations when layoffs are taking place use that as an opportunity to get rid of middling talent or talent that they don't really want to invest in, and just kind of sweep it up in the oh we're eliminating your role when reality. Yeah. They're really also like, well, we— I guess we could have kept that role, but we— let's get rid of it. If, you know, if Steve's in this role, I guess we're getting rid of that role. There's often a bit of that. It doesn't seem like that here. It really does seem driven by strategy and structure. And then, okay, so what do we need for that? And then how do we build back up from there in a way that— yeah, I think, Leanne, you put it nicely. It's looking at the layoffs as a type of— if not just consequence, but type of organizational change. Rather than treating layoffs as a necessary business move in which there will be some change involved.
Al ElliottAre you going to reveal?
Leanne ElliottI am going to reveal. So as I said, I deliberately didn't want to tell you which company it is because I didn't— I just wanted to hear your reactions without knowing who was involved. The company is HubSpot.
Al ElliottOh, really?
Leanne ElliottYeah. The memo was sent by CEO Yamini Rangan. Listeners will know HubSpot is our network partner and sponsor of the podcast.
Al ElliottMaybe not
C — REVIEWanymore after this. I was going to say, and this will be our last episode. Yeah,
Leanne Elliottbut why? You know, we've talked about this in a way that we're from our opinions and our expertise and the history of layoffs.
C — REVIEWI just meant more that as HubSpot is looking forward, they're like, yeah, Truth, Lies and Work, that's got to go. That doesn't fit our strategy. Not the freedom of speech issue.
Al ElliottThat was really clever though, because if you'd said it beforehand, and we genuinely didn't know this beforehand, we might have been like, oh, what can we say about it? But we were really honest, and it turned out that actually we Well, if JT approves of it, then—
Leanne ElliottYeah, JT gave it an A. Yeah. Big fan.
C — REVIEWI might apply for a job there.
Leanne ElliottAnd you know what I must say, and it's not because they're our sponsor, because, you know, it's a business transaction, isn't it? As much as we've enjoyed our partnership with them, we have to say that every interaction we've had with HubSpot has always been very, very nice. Our community manager, Marie, shout out to Marie, has always been very supportive and very lovely. And they actually did have some Some layoffs when we first joined the network as well, which, which, yeah, we, we, yeah. So I think it's just interesting, isn't it, when you work with a company but not for a company, when something like this happens, which is very much in our world of what we talk about. I thought it'd be interesting to see what, what people thought. So I really hope that, that, yeah, this is followed through on, that this is what, what it says rather than a very clever marketing spin. But yeah, at face value, I think I agree with Jake. A from me.
Al ElliottExcellent. Brilliant. Do
Leanne Elliottyou like that little twist?
Al ElliottI love that. I love that. We should do more of that. We should. It was brilliant. Right. Let me tell you quickly what I've been seeing. So, you know that I'm a huge AI nerd, which is also such a weird, like, kind of like tension for me to be on the podcast talking about work and stuff and people frightened of AI and that I am just the biggest nerd. But I do follow the news and OpenAI, you did allude to this before, OpenAI and Sam Altman, who I thought was one of the good guys but has turned a bit musky, hasn't he, of late?
Leanne ElliottMm-hmm.
Al ElliottBut so there's a guy from OpenAI called David Robinson. He's been there 3 and a half years and he's just quit. Now, obviously, 3 and a half years in AI terms is like a decade. It's like 2 decades. But what's interesting is he was in charge of writing the safety reports that came out alongside their big product launches. He went public in The Atlantic and he said the company's culture is broken. Now, what his main beef is, is how OpenAI works. So OpenAI, I'm sure everyone knows this, they basically go, they ship something, they see what it breaks and what breaks, and they put the guardrails in place. They call it iterative deployment. Um, his point is that that's fine if you're doing something like a bit of software design or your Basecamp, whatever. If you are one of the 2 people at the, or 3 companies at the absolute tip of AI, and we all know that AI is gonna, gonna kill someone one day or kill all of us, we don't know. He says that the trial and error way of doing it is guarantee you're gonna have failures, but you've not got someone in place who can deal with those kind of failures. His analogy was, uh, if someone dealt with nuclear reactors, for example, and they were like, it was a big high stakes thing. Yeah. They should have that in open air because this is a high stakes thing, but they don't. He points to a recent breach. Just read this: a recent breach of Hugging Face systems by OpenAI agents. In case anyone doesn't know, Hugging Face is basically a marketplace for LLMs. So OpenAI cracked into those, broke into that. Hugging Face was notified, and I think it was all a bit like, oh, isn't this fun? We've got some new powerful agents. But He says there's no— this is no place to grow artificial minds that could end up smarter than us. End up? They're all smarter than us right now. Well,
Leanne Elliottthey're smarter than me.
Al ElliottI was gonna say smarter than definitely 2/3 of us. OpenAI response was, was kind of just predictable. Oh, we are— we're tightening security. We're bringing in more outside testers and improving how they monitor things in real time. I think what's interesting is that Robinson— all right, now to be fair, To be fair, Robinson's also hired a PR person, so he's kind of gone, I'm outta here, but I'm gonna make bank on the way out. So, you know, let's—
Leanne ElliottGet those keynotes booked in.
Al ElliottExactly. Let's take this with a pinch of salt. But he's not just asking for new rules or new laws or whatever. He's saying the culture of this iterative, fuck it, let's try it kind of thing is not good for something as powerful as that. Now, I should say that supposedly they all sat down with someone called— I'm going to say this right— Donald Trump. I'm not sure I'm saying that right. And they created some kind of like agreement that most people are saying was just bullshit. It was just a performative thing. So supposedly they're all going to be careful. But man, I don't know. I mean, I love Anthropic, but I'm pretty sure they're doing a similar kind of thing over there. It's this trial and error thing is his major problem. You can't do trial and error if you've got a nuclear reactor or you've got something like, you've got to build planes. You can't go, I've got a new idea, guys. Why don't we try with just one wing on this plane and see what happens? You need someone there who's going to actually like look after things. JT, what are your thoughts?
C — REVIEWI got to say, I didn't read the article, so maybe he gets into this. I know he probably acknowledges the fact that he's on his way out. I'm getting pretty tired of all of these insiders at the top AI companies Marching out the door right before IPOs when presumably most of their, if not all of their shares have been vested and suddenly pulling the alarm. I'm a little— not to say what they're suggesting or talking about isn't true, but if they had really the moral agency that they're looking to define themselves around, if they're really trying to— I don't know, it just seems like they're trying to distance themselves as culpable by getting out Right before things get really bad so that they can paint a narrative of, see, I told you so. I'm one of the good guys. I was trying to make it work for as long as I could. I held out as long as possible. I don't know. I, I would be really curious. And again, maybe I'm totally wrong here, in which case I will absolutely take the pie in the face. I would love to know whether or not any of these last-minute, look, I can't stand it anymore, I'm leaving guys who keeps leaving. And talking about it. If they are giving up a life-changing amount of money as they walk out the door to do this, because first of all, most of them probably have all of their equity vested. Second of all, even if not all of it's vested, and obviously their jobs pay well too, you know, if you've already got $30 million of equity that's about to boom in an IPO, and yes, technically if you stuck around an extra 3 months, you might get an extra million. Listen, I'm not scoffing at a million dollars, but 1 over 30 is not a life-changing amount of money at that point. So yeah, the, the decision to walk away and paint the picture of you as the, Sort of good guy who's left. I don't know, it, it doesn't make me change how I feel. He's probably right that the culture— I mean, it makes sense to me that is not the kind of culture you want to have building something that by itself could be self-recursive pretty soon. But I, I don't know, it's just hard for me to listen to these guys and want to take them as seriously— and they're mostly guys from what I can tell— and take them as seriously as they like to be taken as these truth tellers who are coming out. Let's see you do this when you'd have to give up a lot more personal sacrifice. And again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the money is in fact life-changing that they're leaving behind, in which case kudos, and we should take him and the argument more seriously. But I don't know, I get kind of pissed off, frankly, as I hear a lot of these folks leaving these big companies when it seems like they've already cashed in.
Al ElliottI like that. Exactly, exactly. I mean, I'll just give you his point of view because they asked him, um, why are you speaking out now? And I'm going to read from it. It says, perhaps I should have stayed and fought for fundamental shifts in our staffing and culture, but I just got a metric fuck ton of money. And so I know he didn't say that. He said, so perhaps I should have stayed I fought for fundamental shifts in my staffing and culture, but in practice, my colleagues and I were so busy sprinting, we seldom had the chance to consider big changes, much less to actually make them.
Leanne ElliottWell, you considered one big change, friend, didn't you?
Al ElliottExactly. Lee, thoughts?
Leanne ElliottUm, I'm with— yeah, I understand Jake's anger on this, and like, it frustrates me as well because it's like, it's like, would— maybe you should have said something a bit sooner, or maybe you should stick around to try and fix it. But coming up this point and going, we're all doomed, it's like, cool, nice one. And also, let's be honest, somebody like this is, is definitely looking at some kind of like speaker career or something, aren't they? Like doing the world about responsible AI, or, or maybe joining a government organization or something. I'm fairly confident that if they're going for the moral high ground, those headlines would include something like, I gave up $30 million of equity to speak the truth about the dangers of AI. I don't think they just let that go as like a— You know, a point of, of, yeah.
C — REVIEWYes. If you made all this money on the back of building this technology and you really want me to believe you have the moral high ground, I would love to see accompanying this article, and here's my pledge to donate 80% of the money I made along the way to AI safety prevention causes. Again, like, I'm not saying he's any, under any obligation to do that, nor am I saying that what he's talking about at the culture isn't true. It's just that like, if you're part of the problem and then you wanna jump out of the way Right before the train hits us all and say, yeah, see, I didn't want to be on board. I'm going to go count my money over here while you're all suffering. It's just hard for me to want to take you seriously from a moral perspective. Again, independent of the point of view, and I'm not suggesting he has an obligation to take the money he made and go do that. Not at all. It's just, you kind of want the best of both worlds, don't you? You want to be able to take all the money that you made putting this thing together that we're all about to suffer from, and then jump off the train before it hits us all saying, yeah, I just didn't want to be part of that catastrophic wreck.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Al ElliottYeah. The tide does seem to be turning a little bit. I mean, I think Anthropic have got probably a slightly better spin doctor on this because they do come across slightly better, but maybe that's because they got kicked in the balls by the US government and US government decided to use OpenAI rather than Anthropic and labeled them a national security risk or something at one point, I think.
C — REVIEWWhat I can tell you from the US perspective, and I have to acknowledge my biases here, I've got a couple of friends in reasonably high positions at both of those organizations. So caveat there. I do think that while Anthropic is certainly continuing to go ahead and deploy and test AI despite all the downside, and they probably should, if not could, but certainly should be doing more to insist on regulation, I do think there's fundamental differences between Dario and Sam in terms of how they view the technology. It does seem like, from what I can tell as an outsider, just a little bit of insider knowledge as well, That it's a bit healthier. But again, they're all sort of on a spectrum. And let's be honest, none of them are as fucked up as Grok. So I think, you know, we can kind of, we can kind of stick that off in a corner by itself, right? I do think there's differences in the moral culpability of each organization as far as what they're doing, but they're all sort of playing in a pool that's a bit of a ring of fire.
Al ElliottYes, I'm just going to chapeau you for the word culpability. Nice, nice, fancy words.
Leanne ElliottMy concern is at the end of the day, it's very egotistical entrepreneurial people in huge positions of power and much resource behind them that in a race to achieve something that they have no real idea of the impact it's going to have on the world. And I'm not sure any amount of people saying to them, maybe you should slow down, maybe It's going to end humanity as we know it. I'm not sure that's going to make a difference to someone like Sam Altman. So just today we were talking to an upcoming guest who said that, and I hadn't heard this, maybe you had, Jake, that he talked about how he sees the culture now there more as a religion in terms of the principles and ethos of the organisation, which for me is like, ooh, red flag.
Al ElliottYeah.
Leanne ElliottRed flag. Yeah, I don't know. It just, it's, it's, it's It's worrying, but equally there's nothing you can do about it, is there? So it's kind of like, I'm with Jake, like nothing I can do about it. So you could have done something about it, but now you're just counting your pennies.
Al ElliottYeah.
C — REVIEWWell, we certainly shouldn't expect these organizations to self-police. I mean, the idea that they're gonna like just in cahoots in both a legal way, uh, in a way that's not collusion, but also reasonably cooperatively self-police to continue to slow down a world-changing historical technology, that's absurd. So the only way this really changes is with People demanding that governments such as the United States government, which of course is democratically accountable, unlike a lot of aspects of Chinese government, which they have a lot of interesting frontier models as well, but that the people of the governments who are overseeing these organizations step in and demand some cooperation restriction. That's the only way it's going to happen. We can't pretend that any degree of self-policing is really going to do enough, especially as this technology begins to get on the verge, as they tell us, of being self-recursive, right? Of being able to improve itself and govern itself. You know, once the sort of human being gets further and further cut out of the loop, it doesn't matter if there's a kill switch. It just changes things, right? So yeah, I think that we're sort of like watching them drive themselves off a cliff, like insisting that they're putting on their safety belts.
Al ElliottYeah, 100%.
Leanne ElliottAnd at the same time, we're all still using it.
Al ElliottWell, of course. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think that's the other thing is we're probably as Part of the problem. Yeah, part of the problem. Probably part of the problem.
C — REVIEWYes. So no, you know, listen, I'm certainly not an AI hater. I use AI technology all the time. It's done a tremendous amount for me. I really enjoy it. I get a lot of value out of it. So I am the last person that's an AI hater. And I also am very much interested in both holding individuals accountable and also hating the game, not the player. I think there's room for both. But, but yeah, these companies need to be handled in a different way, just given the nature of the tech.
Al ElliottYeah, well, let's find out whether AI is going to allow us to go to the break. Can we, uh, can we open the pod doors? I'm afraid I can't do that, Al. Right, we are going to go to a break. And such a niche reference. I'm such a nerd.
C — REVIEWIs that the second 2001: A Space Odyssey reference that we've made on this show?
Al ElliottI think it might be. I think it might be. I love it. And you know, I've never even seen it. Right, we'll be back after the break, uh, with the wonderful JT, Jake Tuber, um, talking about the Truth or Lies. See you in a second. Quick announcement for all listeners. Yeah, I've got a, I've got a new toy on my, on my little deck thing so I can make my voice change. Anyway, sorry.
Leanne ElliottI love it. Do it again.
Al ElliottHello, Leanne.
Leanne ElliottDo another one. Hello. But we didn't interrupt your podcast listening for, uh, for this. We actually interrupted it to tell you about one of our new favorite podcasts. It's called Success Story. It is hosted by Scott D. Clary, and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features question and answer sessions and conversations on sales, marketing, business startups, and entrepreneurship.
Al ElliottOh, and if you like this podcast, then I think you'll love Scott's episode in— back in December, where the infamous Seth Godin talks about empowering Welcome back to Truth or Lie, that time of the week, you know all this, where we take a popular workplace idea and ask if the research really actually backs it up. Have you ever been told, or have you ever heard that the secret to a great team is hiring A-players? I know I have. There was a time when there used to be job roles or job ads where they'd say rockstar and they spell it R-A-W-K, and it was like, get in the fricking bin, you wanker. I remember that. I remember that. I remember that. Anyway, so the idea of this is that a small number of exceptional people, these are the ones who are always gonna consistently outperform everyone else, are worth far more than the rest. So sometimes that's where most of the time money and attention goes, finding them, hiring them, keeping them, fellating them, basically making them very happy.
Leanne ElliottYeah, no, you're right, Al. And much less attention actually does go to the other side of the scale, the people who maybe unintentionally are harming their colleagues or the business instead of helping it. So with that in mind, we need to find out, Al, which one should come first. Jake, truth or lie, the best way to improve your team is to chase A-players.
C — REVIEWConventional wisdom often talks about the disproportionately positive impact of the star players. In other words, if you can take an average performer and turn them into a star, or empower a star to get to the next level, the returns for your organisation can be substantial. However, toxic employees, regardless of whether they're high performers or low performers, are obviously people we don't want in the organization. But is dealing with them really worth the discretionary time and effort? So over the last 20 years, there's been a move towards that strengths-focused development. Take your A-players, make 'em better, focus on A-players. I wanna suggest that the research says that it's more important to weed out the really toxic players. Than it is to just make sure you have A-players. And there's a particular study that I only just discovered recently, despite the fact that it's about 10 years old. Tremendous study looking at toxic behavior and how costly it can be. So this is an archival study, meaning they went back and looked at existing data of over 58,000 employees across something like 100-some-odd different groups across 11 firms. They actually compared The actual economic impact of the star performers on the plus side to that of the cost of the toxic performers. So what do they find? First off, let's define toxic because in the study they define it pretty narrowly, right? Because we often think of toxic, we use that pretty casually, don't we, Leanne, to just talk about like, oh, this is a person we don't like to work with. They're just kind of problematic. In this case, they mean something really specific. This is someone who gets eventually fired. Mm-hmm. Because of something they do wrong. Maybe there's policy violations, fraud, you know, falsifying records and documents. Could be actual harassment or even violence. So this isn't simply just a difficult or unpleasant colleague. These are people whose behavior is serious enough that the organization ultimately had to let them go. And there's actually a couple things that they pull out of this study before they talk about the actual cost, because they do quantify it. So there's actually a couple of predictors of whether or not someone is going to behave toxically. Any guesses at the kind of things that would predict a toxic employee, Al or Leanne?
Al ElliottI would start with saying, is someone very motivated by status? Or perhaps they respond very, very aggressively to targets or something? That would be— that's my first initial thought. What do you think, Lee?
Leanne ElliottUm, I think I'd be intrigued by maybe, maybe Past job patterns, so maybe moving on quite frequently?
C — REVIEWBoth interesting and plausible. The study pulled out a few different things. Al, I would say that I can see your hypothesis about target or status-driven individuals being more likely to engage in particularly fraudulent behavior just to hit or exceed a number. But of course, they're defining toxicity a little bit more broadly. And actually, Leanne, they didn't mention anything about past behavior in terms of how quickly they're turning over to other places. Right. That's a reasonable assumption as well. They saw a couple interesting factors that determine how likely a single person is to be toxic. So one, workers who appeared overconfident, in other words, their claims about their skills actually exceeded their skills, were more likely to become toxic employees, which is pretty interesting. Number 2, looking in particular at sort of assessment data from when people are hired at these organizations and eventually fired, People who, when looking back, they discovered had a low service orientation, meaning they generally are less concerned for other people's needs. Those people are also more likely to be toxic. And then the third one is pretty interesting. It's people who said that rules should always be followed were actually more likely to later be fired for breaking the rules. In other words, the folks who are the stalwarts for rule following often are the ones who transgress. And there's There's a whole host of psychological assumptions we could make there, perhaps an episode for another time. So those are a couple of interesting factors around toxicity. And, and the other thing I'll mention here that the study found beyond just the economics, which I thought was really compelling, was that toxicity has a bit of an emotional contagion effect. In other words, if you are surrounded by other toxic employees, you are much more likely to become toxic yourself. Now, intuitively, this makes sense, right? It's in the water. It's part of the environment. Yeah. But if you look at it statistically, if you were to increase sort of one standard deviation of exposure to other toxic employees, that increased the risk of later toxic behavior and termination resulting that in about something like 46% or almost half. So huge. So being around other toxic people, yeah, the environment's gonna change your behavior. We know it does. It's gonna make you more likely to become toxic yourself. And here's what's tough. Toxic employees were were also often people who could work faster or be more productive than their peers. That's part of why they tended to stick around to the point of toxicity anyway. They can often be decent employees. So it's not just the toxic superstars, but like your toxic average employee too can be a decent performer, which is interesting. So let's get to the economics. This is the most interesting and compelling finding. So in their particular setup of this, the costs associated with a toxic worker absolutely swamp the benefits of a star employee. That's the highlight. That's the headline of this. So when they calculated, if you were to take an average employee and swap them out for someone who's a top performer, we're talking top 1%, they could generate on average a little over $5,300 US of economic value. If you go from an average person
Leanne ElliottIs that over a year, Jake, or—
C — REVIEWI think it's over a year. It's annualized. That's right.
Leanne ElliottRight. Okay.
C — REVIEWBut avoiding a toxic worker in the same period was worth savings of at least about $12,500. So almost 150% more. And that $12,500 savings, by the way, does not include potential litigation, regulatory penalties, Any economic damage you might ascribe to reduced morale or, you know, productivity costs of, you know, hiring and replacing employees. That's all not even included. So it's a relatively conservative estimate that, again, getting rid of a toxic employee will save you about $12,500, whereas bringing in a superstar will net you about $5,000, a little bit more than that. So the takeaway here is that companies devote an enormous amount of time to identifying, hiring, and developing A-players as they should. But it suggests from an economic standpoint, stopping the toxic employees and getting rid of them may be much more economically consequential than maximizing the upside created by the superstar. So the implication obviously is not, oh yeah, you should just ignore your best people going forward. It's that tolerating a destructive employee simply because they're pretty good at their job is often a terrible economic trade-off. And the authors really connect this to a familiar type of employee, right? The person who's delivering on numbers but is damaging the organization around them. So if you're listening to this and you're wondering, am I headed for trouble with somebody who's potentially on the borderline of those things? Ship them out. That is going to save you a lot of money, let alone time and hassle, than taking your average person and dedicating resources to making them an A-player or spending more just to bring in new A-players. You wanna do 'em both, but don't overlook the pure economic value of eliminating toxicity. Leanne, what do you think?
Leanne ElliottI'm blown away. I, I, I always, you know what, I've, I'd never, cuz you shared this study with me, I'll be honest, I'd only read the abstract. I hadn't, I hadn't read the, the full article.
C — REVIEWClassic scientist.
Leanne ElliottI'm, I, I knew you were gonna share it. I wanted to be surprised. I'm blown away by that. figure, because I've always heard of people and researchers talking about the cost of toxic superstars and how you'd need to recruit kind of like, like 4 or 5 people to replace the impact of a toxic superstar. But I've never heard it in terms of, yeah, a toxic employee on the other side of it. That's a staggering amount, isn't it?
Al ElliottI have a question, and I'm not expecting to know the answer to this. I just want to have your thoughts on it. Um, what percentage of A-players are potentially toxic compared to what percentage of just, let's call people B-players, are toxic? Do we know anything about that?
C — REVIEWThat's such a good question. I, and it should get to the heart of where you put your time and attention. I don't know. I, I would assume that as they're defining toxicity, I think it's a reasonable assumption that there's a fairly Standard bell curve distribution across the board in terms of toxicity to performance. But I don't know, because to your point, I could totally see the case that like part of what allows these folks to stick around and eventually kind of do the things or get themselves into trouble is because they're already close to an A or B+ player. You could also imagine that, you know, on the other end of the spectrum, there's people who just are sticking around until they get caught. So I could see that to be the case. Now, I will say this particular study, Part of why they're able to quantify this so specifically in their case is that the roles they were looking at were fairly quantifiable roles. My memory is that for the most part, these are jobs like customer care and sales where some of the metrics for their performance are a bit more identifiable. So if you want to challenge the conclusions I'm drawing from this and saying in a knowledge work environment where the metrics are not as clear-cut, there's not as direct a line of sight between how you spend your time and, you know, direct revenue, or direct savings. Sure, I think that's totally fair. But I do think that, you know, the sample here is really strong, certainly for this kind of population. It generalizes, and I think the conclusions would hold up reasonably. But no, I don't know specifically, Al, whether or not A-players are disproportionately more or less likely to be toxic employees. But I'm curious, like, with that, what's driving that question for you?
Al ElliottI suppose what I'm thinking is that from an— from, from a purely entrepreneurial bottom line thinking, you go, well, yeah, I understand what you're saying there, but is it worth having the A-player in who's gonna contribute? You've got 2 A-players who contribute to 70% of the total revenue of the company, and then you've got 5 people who are B-players. Well, if it's like 3 times more likely that the A-players are toxic, oh, I am kicking myself in the balls there, or I've got a ball kicking further down the line. I know. Yeah. But if it's the same level, I'm like, I've got the same risk with both people. It's just that 2 of them contribute to 70% of my revenue and 5 of them— do you see what I'm— do you see where I'm getting at? I know it's— I know it's not a scientific way of looking at things, but that's the way I would, as a business owner, I'd be looking at it, I think.
C — REVIEWRight. So you're distributing risk across the board. In other words, if it's just as likely to be a low performer who's doing this versus a high performer, you're going to maybe treat those people differently because, or Yeah. Over time, like at the end of the day, you're still gonna have it showing up somewhere. I think there's a sort of interesting way to think about that for sure. What I would add to the puzzle, which makes it a bit trickier too, is remember they're defining toxicity in a particularly specific way, right? These are people who go on to commit infractions that results in involuntary termination. This is not the star player who's a bit of an ass to work for, who's kind of a tough manager, who's not a great colleague, who's a bit of a lone wolf, right? Yeah. This is not the difficult colleague. This is the colleague who does something where they will be terminated. And I imagine there's indicator behaviors beyond just the sort of predilections for being a rule follower or having a low interest in the needs of others. So yeah, this is specific to this particular type of toxicity as they're defining it, which I do think puts some practical constraints on what you can take from this because a lot of what we'd colloquially define as toxic is a little bit more nebulous. It's a little bit more just like shitty behavior. And how much do you tolerate that if someone's really bringing in 70% of your revenue? Like, yeah, if I'm a 10-person company, gosh, I'm probably gonna do everything I can to mitigate it, but I'm probably gonna tolerate it.
Al ElliottInteresting.
Leanne ElliottBrilliant. Well, so, so I think final verdict.
Al ElliottWell, I was gonna say format point. Yeah. We have to, have to ask the question, truth or lie, the best way to improve your team is to chase A-players.
C — REVIEWJT. If I'm being strict about it, I would say no. The best way is to first remove the toxicity, but I think it's a yes-and situation. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. So don't blind yourself just focused on the A-players. Exorcise the toxicity first and then continue to look for A-players along the way. By the way, you're gonna get more A-players once people realize the toxic folks don't stick around.
Al ElliottI like that. Do you know what else I like, Leanne?
Leanne ElliottWhat?
Al ElliottThe world-famous weekly episode where we report your questions to you and Dr. Jake. We've got 3 questions today. Um, I think we'll alternate it. So we'll come to Dr. Jake first, then we'll go to Leanne, then we'll go back to Dr. Jake. First question is around about a— I alluded to it in the, uh, in, in the intro, uh, someone who's running— their partner's running the business and they are basically running out of gas. So this person says, my partner runs a small business. It's just him, makes a decent living, about $50,000 a year, but I'm genuinely worried about him. He's working 60-hour weeks doing pretty physical work, and over the last few months he's been completely exhausted and miserable. Oh, no. He's even started talking about selling up. Last week he took 3 days off. It was his first proper break in 7 years. He asked a friend to cover while he was away, but something went wrong. Uh, now he's convinced he can't ever take time off because everything falls apart without him. Oh man, I can see what this is doing to him, but I honestly don't know what the answer is. Guys, I suppose the question is, is this burning him out? Is this gonna kill this person? Is there anything the partner can do? What the hell do they do, Dr. Jake?
C — REVIEWUp until the bit about the 60-hour work weeks being pretty physical work, I thought this was Leanne anonymously writing this in about you, Al.
Al ElliottI don't want to be too— but $50,000 a year? No, I wouldn't get out of bed for less than $100,000.
C — REVIEWThat was the downfall. It wasn't the physical nature of the work. After all, it's a physically exhausting job for many of us. I get it. As you can tell, my self-image.
Al ElliottYes.
C — REVIEWYes. This is a tough situation. This is a tough situation. You know, it runs the risk of any advice we give being so obvious that certainly they've tried it, right? You know, my first instinct is like, how can you help this person think about redundancy in their business, right? Why is it that they have created a system in which only they can do this, right? What would it take to, you know, lose a little bit of money and maybe Maybe bring in a little bit more support and gradually change that over time. But I imagine that they've considered this. Maybe not. Maybe I'm just projecting here. Maybe not. But the question of like, what do we do in this situation? My first instinct is to spend some time doing a little bit of, you know, whiteboarding around what redundancy would look like. And, you know, there's pretty classic thought exercises of like, hey, you get hit by a truck and laid up. You may not need to worry about money. Well, certainly in the US you would, but maybe elsewhere you don't. Yeah. Yeah. What would you like to happen to the business? How would you go about it then? Right. A little future planning here, because this strikes me as frankly a situation that I see a lot necessarily in these small business contexts. But this idea of like somebody is sort of in that hamster wheel, they are spinning themselves dry, not realizing that, yes, while they profess to hate it and they don't like it, it's clearly doing something for them psychologically more than it's just harming them physically or emotionally. Such that they keep doing it, and so I think as an executive coach, if I was in this situation, I would really want to get under the hood of this person and figure out what is it that continuing to work in this way is really doing for them. However unconsciously, because our brains don't really let us continue to do things that aren't in some sense in our own interest, we just don't always know what those interests actually are. So what internal master is this continued 60-hour physical work? week serving. And also, as an American, I'm wondering, how do you get yourself down to just a 60-hour work week? That sounds lovely. I love that.
Al ElliottCan I just, can I just pop in here for a quick second? Because what you said there was very psychological and very clever and brilliant. It's something that never would have occurred to me. I— there's a lot of language in this email that, as a business owner, makes me slightly concerned about
C — REVIEWit.
Al ElliottSo my partner runs a small Yeah. So not just at a business, a small business. Makes a decent living around $50,000 a year, which, what, about $70,000 US or something? He's working 60 hours a week. All this makes me think this person is not thinking big enough. They are charging too little for their time. If they're getting £1,000 a week, or whatever the maths are exactly, £1,000 a week, and they're working 60 hours, They, they're not getting a great hourly wage. And the, and the, and the simplest lever or lever to, to, to pull if you're in this situation is to double your prices and halve the number of people who, uh, 50% of people will leave. I've done this with, with my drinks delivery service. I literally doubled my prices. 50% of people left, uh, did never order again, but I still made the same amount of money with half as much work. Yeah. So I think, and I'm not, I'm not, I'm, I'm trying really hard not to sound pious here, but I think the biggest problem here is the mindset around the money, thinking that £50,000 is a lot and thinking that, like you've said there, perhaps their parents worked so hard and did 60-hour weeks. So they think that's the way you have to do things. You have to do, put the time in because I couldn't possibly earn £1,000 a week if I didn't do 60 hours. I think it's a mindset thing, Lee.
Leanne ElliottI love that we had like the kind of psychological answer from Jake and the business answer from you. So I'm actually going to go with the, if I was the partner of this person, what would I say? Or what would I advise that person to do in terms of what they can support? Because yeah, you could tell them to put their price, you could tell them to get an executive coach, but you know, it's one of those things, isn't it, where when you're living with somebody in this situation, as you have, my love, It's very hard to help somebody who is drowning. They need to try and figure out a way to help themselves. I think my things would be, my kind of things to latch onto, again, looking at this email, is that he took a first, or they took the first proper break in 7 years. It's no wonder this person is burning out if that was their only proper break. And I know it's unfortunate things went wrong. I'd be wanting to have conversations like things like— Yeah. You know, is there anything you could do in terms of processes or, or getting in some outsourced support that means that you can take a break more frequently without these things going wrong? When now you know what went wrong, is there a way to, to plan against that? I think the biggest clue here though is in the conversations to, to maybe bring up is how they said they've even started talking about selling up. Yeah. My experience of anybody who's in a job or a business that, that they love, that is paying them a wage that they think is is generous, whether, you know, anyone else thinks it is or not. It's such a hard decision. It's such a hard decision, especially when you're in the midst of burnout, to even start to think about stepping away. That's massive. That's massive. So I'd be wanting to have conversations like, tell me about, about— you said selling up. What do you think— going to some of Jake's coaching questions— what do you think life would look like if you did? What would be the hardest point of that? Is there anything you'd miss? Is there anything you'd look forward to? And, and just kind of let them just explore where they, where they're going with it, how they think and feel. In my experience, giving somebody that space and time without your judgment or opinion to just talk about where they're at with things, they'll typically come to their own conclusions. And by the sound of it, I think that conclusion might be it's time to, time to call it a day.
Al ElliottNice, nice. We've got 3 very different opinions there, and I like this. I think One of them is going to be definitely, um, hopefully, hopefully it's going to help. So question number 2, kind of has gone the other way. So it's all about giving your team too much, too much autonomy. So this person says, I'm managing a small team for about 3 years. I've recently got some pretty tough feedback. My team sometimes feel like they are, and they've got the inverted commas, on an island and that I'm not engaged enough in the issues they're dealing with. I do do regular check-ins. I do one-to-ones, but I think I've leant too far into autonomy. Hmm. So if everyone seems busy and the work's getting done, my instinct is fine, crack on with it. It's fine. But looking back, I can see that maybe my check-ins were a bit surface level too. I do want to change, but I'm really careful not to overcorrect and helicopter boss. What do I do? Do we should go to Leanne first?
Leanne ElliottYeah. I mean, I think some really positive things here, first of all, is that you feel able to ask your team for feedback and they've given you very honest feedback. Feedback. That's an excellent sign of your relationship with your, your team, even if they're feeling a bit on, on an island at the minute. The fact that you're responding to this in a really humble way and thinking, how do I improve this? What did I maybe do wrong? Reflecting on that and start to come up with some of your, your own solutions already, that maybe your, your one-to-ones, your check-ins were quite surface level. That in itself is really promising and gives me every every belief that you're going to fix this and turn this around fairly quickly. The thing is, in terms of like you say, you don't want to overcorrect and start hovering over one. The only way you're going to figure out what support they need is by asking them and kind of saying, I'm so glad I now know that I've not been showing up in the way that you feel is the most supportive and effective. I'm going to need your help to understand what I can do differently. And the key question that I always like to use when talking to, talking to teams about this is, if there's one thing I could do today, either make happen or make go away to make your job easier, what would it be? And continue going through that. Okay, great. What else? And inevitably you're going to end up with a list where there's some that you can do nothing about. It's just the way things are. There's some you might be able to have some conversations further up. There's going to be some in there that you can just do. Today? Low-hanging fruit. And it'll be the most— it'll be the strangest things that you never even thought of. I remember talking to one of my team members who was just, you know, just someone's just wired. And I was like, what is it? Like, what, what's going on? What can I do to just make your day easier? And she was like, I just need half an hour in a room on my own to eat my lunch. That's all I need. Like, done. The one-to-one rooms are now booked out for an hour and a half so everyone can have their lunch. And the difference that made immediately. So, I think it's just looking for these opportunities where you can make things quickly, straight away, things that you might be able to tweak over time, and others that maybe you'll just have to explain, this is the way it has to be. But inevitably, it's brilliant that they gave you this feedback. The next job for you is follow-up. Ask them what it is that they need.
C — REVIEWI'm nodding my head in agreement, as I almost always am with everything Leanne said. You've gotta ask them. And I think the key about that is you don't have to be a one-size-fits-all manager. Some people may want more one-on-ones, some people may want less, some people People may want the structure and order of them to be different. Like, you can differentiate for that. Like, I know it seems like extra work, but if not doing that work is not productive, then it's inefficient. So you don't have to do it one size fits all. I'll give you another point of view here, uh, just to kind of shake things up. If you're interested in making sure they don't feel on an island in particular, but also don't want to just then overschedule meetings and be a micromanager, which is great. Get rid of the one-on-ones. Get rid of your standing one-on-ones and have team-only meetings where just about anything that is work-related gets discussed in a team. You might have each one of those meetings be sort of like 2 minutes focused on somebody, 2 minutes focused on somebody else, but make the one-on-one team meetings and certainly make yourself available should they need to schedule any one-on-ones for either specific individual work guidance or for something that you might just not want to talk about in front of the So it's not that I'm saying don't ever have one-on-ones. Get rid of the scheduled one-on-ones and go to team meetings where you discuss everybody's individual work, because in those meetings they will begin to see how one person's work impacts another, how you can reinforce how each thing that they're doing is part of the whole, and they will not feel like they're on an island because there's one, more time for socialization in a healthy, productive way, and two, much more interconnectedness between their work. They might be able to find some new synergies. So if you're looking for a practical strategy, start by eliminating formal scheduled one-on-ones, move to team meetings, and certainly make yourself available for ad hoc one-on-ones. That'd be another way to tackle this in a systematic way. But yeah, ask at the end of the day.
Al ElliottAnd I think also the fact that they've— yeah, it's great. That's— love that. And also the fact that they've got, um, that the psychological safety seems to be pretty good, pretty good here if they can actually say that to their boss.
C — REVIEWYeah.
Al ElliottUh, so yeah, like you said, lean in on that. Get— if they're willing to say that to you, they're probably willing to say all kinds of things in front And you might
Leanne Elliottactually blow their mind by turning around and going, you know what, you might be right. How can, how can I get you off that island? They might not have ever worked for a manager that cares that much before. You might blow their minds.
Al ElliottYeah, exactly. How do I build a bridge?
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Al ElliottYeah. I love it. I love it. Okay. So question number 3. Um, I didn't, I didn't add this one, by the way. Um, even though it's about AI, um, it's asking whether AI made their team better. So this person says, I'm encouraging my team to use AI. There's no question it's made their Making lives easier. them faster, they can research, write, and produce work in a fraction of the time. But I'm starting to wonder whether faster actually means better. Someone still needs to apply judgment, challenge bad assumptions, and take responsibility when the output is wrong. So how do I know when AI is genuinely improving my team's performance? We're gonna go to Dr. Jake.
C — REVIEWHow are you measuring team performance? How you actually are measuring them? I don't think you change the metrics. I think you zoom out. You take a long view, which is. Okay, let's look at this as a pilot. Let's look at this as an opportunity to say, if we use these tools over a certain period of time, are we getting the metrics and results that we need? So you don't need to look at it day to day or week to week. Zoom out and look at it at a quarterly or even annually or beyond basis. But I don't think you actually need to change the way you're measuring performance so much as pick a longer-term time horizon than like, yeah, wow, this week it feels like we did a lot, but did we actually save any time? Did we actually make more money or save more money? I think you can just kind of zoom out and answer those questions. And I would also say too that I'm a little worried about their wording that assumes that just because, at least how I interpret it, right? That's assuming that just because they're using AI, now suddenly they don't feel responsible for its output. Like, you absolutely need to insist that if you're allowing AI to be a tool you use, yeah, go ahead, use it responsibly. Yeah. Just like it's still your responsibility if you spell something wrong in a client deck, you don't get to blame it on Microsoft Word circa 10 years ago. You still gotta get the information right. So I don't see the responsibility should be shifting or diminishing at all because AI is in the mix. And if anything, you're gonna probably see over time that certain people are more capable when AI is at their disposal, while as others, the mistakes they're making don't make up for the efficiencies. So you might just learn a lot, but I actually don't think the metrics have to change. I just think that the right time horizon needs to be set. for measuring whether or not these tools are additive or not.
Leanne ElliottYeah, I agree. I love that analogy with the typo in Word. I think that's—
Al Elliottyeah. Blaming Clippy.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Al ElliottFucking Clippy.
Leanne ElliottNo, it's perfect. It's a technology, isn't it? And it should facilitate the work. It shouldn't replace how necessarily entirely how the work is done and who's taking responsibility for that work. The other thing, the other conversation I'd want to have with the team as well is how they're finding it. Are they finding it helps them be more productive or more effective? Are they finding maybe their work now less fulfilling because they're just putting prompts into Claude or, or ChatGPT? I think there's more to it than just assuming, oh, now we're using AI, performance will go up and, and everything's great. Um, I think it needs a bit of digging, as you would with, as Jake said, with any type of technology and what is essentially an organisational change, an operational change. You're gonna have to review it. But I, yeah, my, the thing that I'm reading about recently, I'm not sure if you have, Jake, but quite a lot of articles kind of reporting that especially our younger colleagues aren't a big fan of AI at work. They're finding it quite bot-sitting, I think is the phrase, isn't it, that they use? They're just sat there watching AI kind of do the work for them. So, I think I'd be also concerned about how they're currently experiencing work with this introduction of AI.
Al ElliottYeah. And I think what you've both done there, I think, is just perfect. You've said that the line is someone still needs to apply judgment, challenge bad assumptions, and take responsibility when it's wrong. Who did that before? If that was the individual contributor, contributor, then that's still your job. Like you said, Dr. J, that's still your job. If that was the manager, it's now the— it's the manager's job. Nothing's really changed. The one thing that you can do with AI, which you couldn't really do that easily with a human, is put evals in place where you say, this is what good looks like, and you test it against that. And you go, what does— what's my output? And you go, actually, do you know what? That is so shit. That it would take me—it takes me twice as long just to just to fix it. The other thing as well, what you said about the younger people not liking AI, is because when you're young at your work, you'll every day you're learning something new because you're doing something and someone comes along goes, "Oh no no no dude, you don't do it that way. You you'd make sure you do it this way." You go, "Oh okay, I've learned something." If you're just sitting there typing stuff in and then just head there's there's the AI stance. Do you do it, Jake? But this is not this is an audio. I always look, when I look over at Leanne and Leanne's just resting her chin on her arm, I know she's waiting for Claude to finish saying what they're gonna say. If you're just doing that all day, then that's just dull as fuck.
C — REVIEWWell, I also think there's probably a fear built in because if your day consists mostly of just talking with AI, your job is going to be on the chopping block soon, right? Like, if there is not a human part of the job, if the only human part of the job right now is like typing in the next task, agentic stuff is coming for you. So I'm sure if you're in that position, part of it is also just feeling the heat of knowing that, like, just like if you're, you know, a tollbooth collector and you see E-ZPass coming along, like, yeah, this is time for me to find something new to do. That's probably there.
Leanne ElliottI would also say to this person, keep an eye on, on the show because we've got an upcoming episode in probably 2 or 3 weeks with somebody called Noel.
Al ElliottYes.
Leanne ElliottSo I never remember. But Noel, he's such a cool guy though. He has just completely transformed his— how his business operates using AI. In the process, had to make one person redundant, but kept the rest of his fairly large team. Um, and talked about how you're using AI to do kind of the grunt work of stuff. Um, and he's found it incredibly, incredibly successful for his team and his business and its performance. But he talks very, very detailed About how to identify the work that AI should be doing, how to put in the checks and processes. And he's massive on that, isn't it? Like having human judgment as part of that, that process to the point where he's saying there's this whole group of things here that I would never even let AI touch. This is what worries me, Leanne.
C — REVIEWThis is what really worries me about some of these businesses that are able to do this, which is, to your point, you absolutely need that human judgment. And that human judgment right now is being applied by people who learn the craft that they're working on. Yeah. Pre-AI, right? For the most part, right? They're, they're people who have developed this. And so they had to come through those junior years of not doing it. So if our entry-level employees, if junior employees don't have to go and learn that because now AI can do that stuff, by the time they're of age, so to speak, or of tenure to take the positions where they need to apply human judgment, they haven't had the aggregate time learning. That is gonna be fascinating to me because you have right now a huge advantage where you have all these people who can Yeah. But weren't dependent only on it to begin with, right? It's like, it's like the people who learned how to like do and run and use statistics before you had SPSS and all these tools that come around and do it on the computer. They still have a way of assessing and knowing that. But now you have all these folks who are coming up through the ranks who don't get exposure to developing the human judgment they're gonna actually need. I'm really curious what's gonna happen when there is just a missing group of folks. folks who, assuming that work continues along in a way where that skill set is needed, and it very well may not, are probably absent there. Very interesting times ahead.
Al ElliottRight. Okay. So with this coming up, that's it. So that's it. It's finished. Don't worry. You can stop listening in a second. We just got to say a couple of quick things. First of all, thank you, JT. Dr. Jake Tuber. Amazing. We love you so much. Love you like a brother. You've got all the links in the show notes. Definitely go and subscribe to your Substack.
Leanne ElliottPre-order his book.
Al ElliottPre-order his book, subscribe to his Substack. We're coming up this Thursday. We have got best names in the business, Hook and Keelock. You like British names, don't you? Matthew Hook and Caroline Keelock.
Leanne ElliottI must admit, I did very much enjoy the nominative— I can never say that word— nominative determination of Matthew's name as a storyteller consultant. His surname is Hook.
Al ElliottYes, love it. And Caroline, yeah, Caroline used to be a locksmith. No, she didn't. And now we've got Matthew and Caroline, they're coming in to talk about story. All right. Yeah, we've talked about story before. No, we have not. Not properly. This is basically if you're a founder, how you, how you, how you take yourself out of the founder story and how you can get your team to assume stories.
Leanne ElliottYou know, understanding when your founder story is no longer serving you and your business.
Al ElliottAnd even if you're not a founder, come on, let's be honest. We all know that the way that we transfer information effectively is through stories around campsites, on cave walls, through books, whatever.
Leanne ElliottThrough podcast.
Al ElliottThrough podcast. This is a masterclass in how to tell stories internally at work predominantly, but also there'll be stuff in there for founders too.
Leanne ElliottYeah, lovely. Um, so yeah, thank you so much, um, for joining us again. Definitely check out Thursday. If you've got time to leave us a review on Apple or leave a comment on Spotify, that'll be wonderful. Jake has actually said that if he gets name-checked another 3 times, he'll give of those people $5,000. I'm not sure where—
C — REVIEWnow I need to set up 3 new burner accounts just to do it myself.
Al ElliottThank you so much. We will see you soon. Bye-bye. Say bye-bye.