Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone!
You're listening to HBS After Hours.
I'm Yang Mi -moon and tonight I'm here with my friend and comrade in arms, Frances Frye.
Hey you! Oh, it's so good to be here with you.
So, Frances and I joined the HBS faculty the very same year.
Many, many years ago.
In fact, we met during faculty orientation.
Do you remember that?
I do, Yang Mi. I also remember that you blew me off in like a...
No! You did. No. You really did.
No! But you know what?
I knew... I think I...
Listen, when somebody says no to me, I just hear, not now.
So I just came back later.
I just came back when you were ready.
No, I think... No, you did.
It's totally fine. The recollection of that meeting was...
I do remember that you liked me immediately.
Yeah. You were my favorite peer.
Alright, so we've been, you know, we've been friends since.
Alright. In the business community among other things, Frances is known for her deep, deep understanding of organizational culture and how to improve it.
She's worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies on this stuff, and about a year ago, she agreed to join, full -time, one of the most high -profile companies in the world, Uber, a company that was very much in the news for having the toxic work environment.
So there were stories of gender discrimination and harassment.
There were stories of executives behaving badly.
There was this idea that you could be a jerk at Uber and get away with it, as long as you were a top -performing jerk.
So my first question is, once you began spending full time there, you know, all your time there, is this what you found?
How toxic was it? How bad was it?
Very. It was very bad.
Very. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I think...
As bad as certainly I've ever seen.
How would you describe the kind of badness?
So I'll give you one example of a kind of badness that...
So almost everyone that had like a serious gripe with the company, it would go back to an interaction that they had recently had with their manager.
There are 3 ,000 managers at Uber, and I have to say a lot of people had a lot of problems with a good majority of these managers.
So it could have been, oh, my gosh, we know how to attract and retain jerks.
We just have all of these bad managers.
But then in spending time with them, to your point, like going deep with them, they weren't bad people.
They just didn't know how to manage or lead.
I came to understand that as no one gave them the secret memos.
You know the secret memos in life?
I never get the secret memos.
You get secret memos all the time about, like, you know how to behave in...
like the informal ways that people communicate, this is how you behave.
So how to... when you go somewhere and everyone is appropriately dressed, but I'm not.
They got the secret memo and I didn't.
That's what I mean.
And if you have a company that's growing, like, at a super high pace, you can't leave it up to informal, like, absorption.
You got to be super systematic about it.
So I'll give you one example, which I think is a clear case of that people just weren't given the secret memo.
When I got there and I would observe managers giving feedback to their direct reports, it was not improvement oriented.
It actually felt pretty harshly evaluative.
And this is intraday, intra -week feedback.
It was almost as if the managers had been told that your job is to keep your employees in line and tell them everything they're doing wrong.
It almost felt mean.
But here's the thing.
That changes in an instant.
Because as soon as you frame to someone, if you're giving somebody feedback, your job is to develop them.
Your feedback has to be improvement oriented.
So the way I'll know if you gave good feedback is whether or not the person got better.
So now you're invested.
So you're being measured against their improvement.
And then I'll say, and you know what?
Here's a secret. If you give people sincere and specific positive reinforcement, that helps them improve.
So if you give a ratio of say five to one, I'm going to give you sincere and specific positive reinforcement.
And then I'm going to give you a little bit of constructive advice on how to change a little to make a big difference.
That is the secret recipe.
But at least at Uber, and I think most of Silicon Valley, they were pretty convinced that positive reinforcement was not real feedback.
Tell me what I'm doing wrong.
And that's actually not how to improve.
So the reason I find this a powerful piece of advice is that oftentimes it's framed as you need a little sugar to help the medicine go down.
In other words, you need to say something positive to help couch the negative.
But in fact, if you do this right, and you identify the right positive behaviors to reinforce, what you're actually doing is you're trying to provide a catalyst for that individual to take the few things that they're doing well.
And do them 10 times better than they're doing.
And so it's not it's not sugar to help the medicine go down.
It's the medicine itself.
And I feel pretty confident that if I had a team where I was only allowed to give positive reinforcement, and I left Uber before I got there to their own, which is probably a one to five ratio, they just gave constructive advice all the time.
I feel sure my team would outperform theirs, because we would improve at such a higher rate.
So the sincere and specific positive reinforcement, but it has to be sincere and specific, it can't be great job.
I'm rooting for you.
I remember you saying this to me many years ago.
And so now when I have to give feedback to someone, I identify in my head the negative behavior that I want to eliminate.
And I actively look for a counter example in their behavior.
Beautiful. And again, it's, it's the medicine, but it's just packaged in a much more.
And I suspect that you end up with deeper relationships with the people that you do that from as opposed to people just want to avoid you.
I got to say it's worked well.
But along those lines, over the years, I have heard you give different kinds of advice to companies on how to improve their culture.
So for example, one of the ones I've heard you say to companies is, you got to begin by being really honest with yourself about how healthy or unhealthy your culture is.
And if there are problems, you have to surface them quickly.
So can you talk a little bit about that as it pertains to Uber, but at other organizations as well?
Yeah. And I think it pertains to individuals too.
Without an accurate diagnosis, it's like super unlikely that even the most clever prescription is going to work.
So we have to have an accurate diagnosis, which means we have to confront reality.
So you know how we walk around and we reveal who we are all day, every day.
Companies reveal their culture all day, every day.
It's just whether or not we have the courage to talk about.
It sounds kind of crazy.
Like why wouldn't we talk about what's obviously going on?
Yeah, but how do you create an environment where it's safe for people to talk about the thing?
Well, I don't think you can say it's safe to say.
And so anyone who says it's like when I say, oh, I have an open door policy.
Here's what I know.
You don't. Right? I mean, if you have to say it.
Yeah. No, I think you have to create the safety.
So what I would do at Uber is I met with, I think in my first month there, 11 ,000 of the 15 ,000 employees, which is kind of incredible.
But I met with, I was like in meaningful interactions.
I was either like in front of the room for a large group or remote on video or working at a table.
And everything about me communicated that it's safe for us to do this because we were trying to get better.
And all of us, myself, I would show when I make mistakes.
Like mistakes aren't a problem.
It's how do we overcome them.
This leads to the next thing I wanted to ask you about, which is I've heard you also offer the advice that people need to be equipped with the tools to deal with different kinds of situations.
So they need to be equipped to deal with situations that are egregiously bad.
But there are also many, many situations that happen on a day to day basis that fall into the gray area.
There are edge cases.
There are subtle things that you can either deal with or you can convince yourself that it's not worth the trouble to make a fuss over these little things.
I think this is the whole thing.
And so how do you, what does it mean to equip people with the tools to deal with that whole range of situations?
So let me give you an example.
I think yes. And let's go through some examples.
I got to Uber and I'm in meetings with the senior team.
And in the meeting, people were using their personal technology device, which you mean they're on their phones.
They're on their phones, which is, you know, bad, but not terribly bad.
But they're distracted.
So they're like, how bad could it be?
And then I find out they're texting one another about the meeting.
That they're in. Yes.
And then... You're kidding me.
So it created this like low level paranoia.
So who's going to be the person that speaks out about it?
So I think that's one edge case.
Like, how do you, how did you do it?
Or I had too many women come to me when I first got there to describe what had happened before I got there.
And they would describe what I now refer to as just kidding moments.
And they would say, I was with a group of colleagues, with a group of men.
And one man said something that felt inappropriate to me.
And then when they sensed it was inappropriate, they said, just kidding.
So I'll give you an example.
It's bad. But I think it will...
I really need to stay late to work on that, on this thing.
Will you help? I will if you sleep with me.
Just kidding. So the number of just kidding moments.
And then you can have this along.
I think that... So now what do you do now to equip someone?
Because imagine you've just received a just kidding comment.
To equip someone to deal with that.
That requires like super new skills and super like specific training to give them the courage and the capacity to do it.
So I think that there are the micro just kidding moments and in the macro just kidding moments.
And here's the problem.
Leaders when they don't address it, they're kind of complicit.
So silence is not an option for those that are genuinely taking responsibility for the culture.
Here's what I struggle with.
In my professional life, I encounter, like you do, like everyone does, these cringe moments all the time.
And I do like to believe I've developed a repertoire of responses to the variety of situations I encounter.
But I'm old. And it has taken a really long time.
And I'm still clumsy at it.
You know, I'm less clumsy than I was 10 years ago.
But I'm still clumsy.
If you're, you know, in your 20s, if you're in your 30s, if you're, you know, if you're just trying to figure out how to navigate an unfamiliar work environment or work.
And, you know, the other thing is that every scenario is idiosyncratic.
So you gave one, but there are hundreds of different ones.
So even if you know how to respond to one.
You're not necessarily prepared to do so.
The JustKidding moment, she's standing there.
What could she have said in the moment?
So I think any reply has to interact with your own personality.
So I'll tell you maybe what I would say, but that doesn't mean that's what you should say, because it's like who I am.
And what you say will probably interact.
And so we have to help people come up with their response to JustKidding moments, but I'd like them to have them in their pockets, so that it doesn't become this.
If you have to create it from scratch and you haven't thought about it before, I think awkward silence or maybe even like laughter that you're super guilty about afterwards would happen.
So we have to people need pockets full of responses.
So here are some responses.
But again, I don't I'm not prescribing them from everyone.
I guess one tactic is you say an even more clever put down, but I think only stand -up comics can do that.
I think it's I prefer to be vulnerable and be like, wow, that felt super inappropriate.
Can we have a do -over?
That's nice. But in retrospect, I always wish I had the clever put down, but I've never done it in real time.
So I'm just exposed, and then I ask for a do -over.
But I do. It's like super inappropriate.
What's interesting about that example is sometimes a student will say something inappropriate in the classroom setting.
So there's an awkward moment in the classroom.
I have to figure out how to deal with it.
And one of the things I'll do is I'll just stop them.
I'll just could you stop for a second?
And I just want you to just pause, think about what you just said, and let's just start over.
Just start over and say it again.
I have the grace involved in that.
So one is I want to equip people with reflexes, but two is I want to set the conditions so that the just kiddings become a shameful act so that people know if they've said the words just kidding, they have just done something that crossed the line.
So we have to educate the whole workforce on the just kidding.
This is now a trigger for doing that.
So if someone who gave a just kidding moment, I would just show up and start talking to them.
And I, you know, that at least felt like there was some accountability.
It wasn't like sending in HR.
I wasn't in HR. It wasn't.
But it was someone who deeply cares.
I just wanted everyone to know that, you know, we care enough to pay attention.
And we're paying attention.
So one of the things I like about what you just said is that you've taken this whole set of behaviors and label them as just kidding behaviors.
It's just that in and of itself.
And because now it's a thing that you can talk to an organization about.
And you can go in and you can have a set of anecdotes that are these just kidding anecdotes.
But you can also begin to send a message that here's why this whole set of behaviors actually degrades the culture in some really pernicious ways.
And then you can begin to address it, right?
Because another piece of advice I've heard you give companies is that you want to separate the truly bad eggs from the people who actually deserve a chance to redeem themselves and improve.
And you have to somehow have some kind of filter to separate those two out.
The truly bad eggs you want to get rid of immediately, but you don't want to conflate the two.
So I have a belief that we're all mortal.
I know I am. And I make mistakes as you and I have joked.
I hit things with my tail all the time.
Like, I make accidental, like, sideswipe things accidentally.
What matters to me is do I learn from it?
And are my intentions good?
And am I like sincerely, like, do I react well?
So I'm not going to condemn someone for their first just kidding moment.
I'm just not. I don't have it in me.
But for their fourth, well, for their next one after they've had a really good intervention, then you get to find out if it's like ingrained or not.
But I don't think we can condemn people for even just kidding moments, at least I don't mean I can't like I don't have the emotional makeup to rule people off the island for that kind of thing.
What are the other things you look for to create the separation between the bad eggs versus the people who you think are worth really trying to invest in?
You know, it's interesting.
And I'm not sure that others have much of a problem identifying the difference.
Like, who is a bad person behaving badly?
And who's a relatively good person behaving badly?
I haven't found that the wisdom to know the difference is in short supply.
And by that, do you mean that our instincts on this stuff tend to converge, if you just put a set of reasonable people together that we tend to converge?
Because you'll see such patterns of behavior and such and attempts at changing, not working.
Like if you see insidious backroom dealing, and it's just like super insidious, and people know it so they hide it more.
That's when you know, you know what, separation is really the only solution.
But if you see someone do something, and then you show them it, and they're like, oh my gosh, I, of course, I now see I can't believe I did it.
Like, thank you, and I want to get better.
And then you see them coaching other people to get better.
You know, we just set the conditions for it to happen.
So I really don't find that the wisdom to know the difference is in short supply.
I think culture can solve the problem of good people behaving badly.
I don't think culture can solve the problem of bad people behaving badly.
I think you need, you know, exorcism for that.
Yeah, when you got to Uber, in what proportion did you find?
Yeah, so I would say 15 ,000 employees, and far less than 100 were bad people behaving badly.
And from reading the newspaper, I thought it sounded like it was going to be far less than 100 were the good people were the good people behaving badly.
Do you think we should have a different standard for the senior most leaders of an organization?
With respect to at what point you hold them accountable, and ask them to exit the organization?
Yes. And I think that's for many reasons, you know, being in Silicon Valley, you get to realize that it's many people's first job, and then their only experiences in this kind of unique culture.
And so the leaders have to, they're the ones who bring a breadth of experiences there.
So yes, I believe in holding leaders far more accountable.
In fact, as you know, my sense of leadership is that it's leadership is about making others better.
If you're not making others better systematically, then I think it's a leadership problem.
So when those 3000 managers were behaving badly, it's not the 3000 managers problem.
It's just not, they didn't know how to give the right feedback.
Now, if you ask me, was it somebody's problem?
Yeah, I think it was.
To what extent is this a function of how fast moving some of these companies are?
And how quickly employees get elevated.
So you can go from running a team of 10 people to running a team of 100 people to running a team of 1000 people in a matter of months, in some of these companies, which means that your responsibilities and what's expected of you as a leader, grows exponentially, perhaps before you're prepared to deal
with it. And with certainty, before you're prepared to deal with it, I think is the only fair thing to say, because you, you're running a team of 10 and then you're running, then your, your direct reports are managers of teams of 10, and then your direct reports are managers of managers.
And so managing individual contributors and managing managers, two completely different skills.
And if you weren't equipped with those skills, and if you rose so quickly.
So I think what we get to see with these extreme examples of our behaviors that frankly, all of us could use, but it certainly shines a really bright light on them.
Yeah. But you know, even having, but having said all of that, if you go to other industries, where people get elevated at a much more gradual and predictable pace, even so for example, in Wall Street, or in the legal profession in medicine, what you often see when you look at the senior most people
in those industries are also a set of leaders who don't quite know how to handle this particular dimension of leadership.
So they might excel on many performance metrics.
And yet on this dimension of building positive, constructive, healthy culture, there's, there's just a vacuum.
I think I think that people have not thought that culture is something we can be educated about.
It's like this mysterious thing, either I'm blessed to have a good culture, or I'm like, darn, the culture is bad, or there'll be one person in the organization who says, I'm the keeper of the culture, which couldn't be heard from the truth.
So it's, it's not this thing.
It's not like, if you don't know how to read a balance sheet, like we, I'll teach you it, right?
And you could take a class for it.
But culture somehow is like is thought of as this thing that's elusive and just out of our sight and out of our control, I find that absolutely untrue.
And so if you, I think we can teach culture the same way, think about how to drive culture the same way we can teach all of these other things.
In fact, I think we can change it faster than many of the other things because there's not infrastructural changes.
So one of the things that you did at Uber with incredible speed is you put in place one of the most ambitious leadership development programs that I have ever seen.
Can you talk a little bit about what you were trying to accomplish?
Yeah, this program.
And I think it's important to say that, oh, that happened in the fall of 2017, after things were on fire, and then we had a summer between CEOs with a board dysfunction in the press every day, which is a weird thing.
And then we get a CEO who I'm so grateful is there, we get a CEO, and now we have a chance to do the real systematic investing.
So it occurred then, and I think it was important for the employees at Uber to feel like they were being invested in, in unprecedented ways.
And I received thousands of emails from employees saying, I didn't know it would be possible to be invested in, in this way.
I think that was important.
And the content we covered, leadership, aka the secret memos, and strategy.
And strategy in Silicon Valley, it turns out is really important to be taught.
And that's also almost, it's an elusive thing.
You really need some fundamentals, because you think about how to think systematically, and how do you think about strategy, because otherwise, people can make really crazy decisions.
You know, I think so many people haven't really thought enough about the link between strategy and culture.
And the truth is, in a large organization, even organizations that have a very set strategy, often the keepers of the strategy are senior management, and you get below a certain level, and no one has a clue as to what the strategy is.
And what that means, then, is that you have an entire workforce that doesn't feel real ownership of the business.
They don't, because they don't know what the company's doing, so they're just kind of doing their job in a very narrow way.
Whereas you walk into organizations where everybody understands the strategy, even, you know, the lowest level person knows the strategy, then that's, you see the ownership everybody feels.
I think it's right.
And when I joined the company, and it was with Travis as the CEO, so my role was the leading leadership end strategy.
And it was really important that we have both of those go together, because those are the things that guide discretionary behavior.
I think that's exactly right.
But I think, well, I guess they're co located in the CEO.
But I think they need to be co located deeper down than that.
There's that beautiful story of when President Kennedy visited NASA, and he's walking through the hallway, and he runs into a janitor.
And he asked the janitor, oh, so what, sir, what do you do?
And the janitor looked at him, he said, Mr.
President, I'm helping put a man on the moon.
You just gave me goosebumps.
It's such a beautiful story.
Yeah. I have to ask you about the somewhat tangential thing.
And that is, I know in a few weeks, you're giving a TED talk.
Yes, you are. How's your preparation going?
Are you going to be talking about this stuff?
So what I didn't know about, I didn't realize how big a deal was, honestly, because, you know, I give a lot of talks to many people, and I prepare, but in my own way, and it's really organic and I feed off of the audience and I go out there.
So for example, I have Francis is kind of trying to say that she makes it up what she's on the stage.
I will admit to is that I never know what I'm going to say in the beginning of the talk.
I think that's what I just said.
Okay. All right. So that's so then so that's that doesn't work for a TED talk.
So I have had to write out all of the words I'm going to say.
This is a requirement to prepare for.
Yeah. And how much your time limit?
What we're going to time?
Well, 12 minutes. OK, 1800 words.
Well, 2000 for me, 1800 for others.
Obviously, and so I didn't realize how big a deal it was.
And until I wrote out the script, and then I did the rehearsal and they were like, yeah, that's good.
And I was like, wow, it's like a lot of it's not that good.
It's not that good.
And so I started working really hard on this script, like crazy hard.
And then you know that Ann and I manage my magnificent wife, and I do all difficult things together.
So it got to a period where I would stay up late at night and write draft.
I would email it to her.
She wakes up very early in the morning.
And with her morning brain, she would work on the draft and then hand send it back to me.
We chat about it during.
And then it gets tighter and tighter.
And then we just cycled back and forth.
It got tighter and tighter and actually also more expansive until I was like, OK, now I have the script.
Now I have to put it away because I can't go on the stage and say something that's memorized.
But it's like a super big deal.
And it's going to be awesome.
They're so lucky to have you.
I'm going to talk about how to build and rebuild trust.
If I had to say like what's the single biggest problem Uber had, it was how to rebuild trust with its many constituencies.
And I've been thinking a lot about how to build and rebuild trust with executives and with organizations for a decade.
And so it's an opportunity to bring all of that together, which is super exciting to me.
It is. I can't wait to hear it.
Me too. Before I let you go, I always like to ask our guests if they have any recommendations for our listeners can be a product.
It can be a book. It can be a movie.
It can be music. It could be anything you've experienced lately that you would recommend.
Oh, great. So I'll share with you my most recent experience with joy.
Wow. Yeah. OK. I had always heard about this brand called Warby Parker.
And all of your listeners, you know, I just joined their board.
I'm now looking at you.
You did not. I did.
I just turned the board.
Oh, it's such a perfect fit.
So I had heard about Warby Parker, but I honestly and I knew it was like kind of hip.
And but I didn't know what it was specifically.
So that's then coincident with my eyesight has been deteriorating for quite a while, but I just have chosen to just like observe people as blurred.
It's a feature. It's not a bug.
It's so good. So it's been a feature, not a bug.
When I stopped commuting back and forth to San Francisco, the future became a bug.
So Anne and I went to the mall to address a whole bunch of features that had become bugs.
But one of them was the eyeglasses.
And so we went into the store, Warby Parker.
And I have since come to know that people know Warby Parker as an online super cool thing.
I have to say it is the best retail experience I have had in a decade.
Walked into the store.
You know, when you walk into a retail store and you have two modes of operating either some like earnest solicitous person comes up to help and they're not helpful.
But you don't want to break it to them.
So like you indulge them, but now you're taking care of them.
And that just seems awkward.
Or you're like, oh, I can't go through that.
So now I'm going to be chilly.
I'm going to send off those.
I'm going to be a version of me I don't really want to be.
But I got to send off signals to stay away from me.
So that's my experience in retail stores.
I walk into Warby Parker.
And first, I don't even notice the people because wow, it's beautiful.
And there's all these classes.
And so I just start going over and I'm trying them on.
And then a super comfortable in their own skin person shows up next to me and just like integrated herself seamlessly into my self -serve experience.
And then it was quickly apparent she knew way more about glasses than I did.
And she could tell what fit my face better.
So I put on a glass of glasses and she'd be like, oh.
That's like super helpful feedback for me.
So I loved the experience beginning to end.
I bought so many glasses.
Their service design is beautiful.
Their brand is hip and they're taking care of people.
You know, that wasn't just for everyone to know that was completely unsolicited.
Completely no, this is unsolicited.
So Francis, I know you're so busy.
Thank you so much for the time.
This is fun. And this is fun.
And it's such a pleasure anytime.
Thanks. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks for listening.
