339: AI Anxiety and Burnout: Brian Elliott, Work Forward CEO, on Building Trust in the Workplace
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It is back to being clear and articulate in what your goals and your outcomes are that you're trying to drive. There's a big aspect of AI that is, you know, productivity theater in some respects, meaning I can generate more emails out, I can automate my SDRs, all the rest of it. But if I'm simply doing more activity, it's not necessarily a net gain.

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're listening. Welcome to AI and the Future of Work. I'm your host, Dan Turchin, CEO of PeopleRain, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service. Our community is growing thanks to you, our loyal listeners. If you're new to the community and you haven't yet signed up for our weekly newsletter, please do. We'll put a link in the show notes. Of course, if you like what we do, please subscribe.

Tell a friend and give us a like and a rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you leave a comment, I may share it in an upcoming episode like this one from Monroe in Vancouver, B.C., who is an I.T. manager at a law firm and listens while walking the dog.

Monroe's favorite episode is that great one with Jim McKenna, the amazing, empathetic CIO of Fenwick and West, a big law firm about the future of technology for lawyers. We will link to that one in the show notes. We learn from AI thought leaders weekly on the show. The added bonus, you get one AI fun fact each week. Today's fun fact comes from a great former podcast guest,

Ashu Garg from Foundation Capital, who writes in his blog, great blog, by the way, go subscribe, B2B, a CEO about NVIDIA's AI factory vision. At the recent NVIDIA GTC Super Bowl of AI, so to speak.

CEO Jensen Wong discussed the new role of compute infrastructure shifting from a cost center to a production system. The inputs to these modern factories are electricity and data. The outputs are tokens, the atomic units of prediction, reasoning, and generation that power AI systems. The new unit of productivity

Productivity is tokens per second per watt, a measure not only of how fast chips are, but of how efficiently intelligence can be produced at scale. Traditional data centers are designed to retrieve pre-written software and execute it deterministically. AI factories are built to generate software on the fly. The logic isn't fixed, it's emergent.

We'll, of course, link to that full blog post from Ashu. My commentary, this is intelligent analysis, as it always is from Ashu. It makes clear why all AI infrastructure vendors are rushing to own the entire stack, from chips to systems and then eventually even software.

GTC announcements were NVIDIA's way of claiming ownership over the stack, but I'd expect similar announcements in the coming months from OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Google. And of course, we'll follow that exciting story in the weeks and months ahead. Now shifting to this week's conversation, Brian Elliott is one of the most recognized future of work thought leaders in

He and I met years back when he was a senior exec at Slack. My company was a partner of Slack, an early partner, I should mention. I've always admired Brian's work. He's currently the CEO of WorkForward, where he advises senior leaders on building better organizations,

He's also the bestselling author of How the Future Works, leading flexible teams to do the best work of their lives. Unbelievable that we haven't had Brian on this podcast sooner. He's been published in Harvard Business Review and Fortune, among others, and his work has been cited in Time as well as Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, and Forbes. Brian received his B.A. in math and econ at Northwestern, go Wildcats, and his M.D.A. from Harvard at

And without further ado, Brian, it's my pleasure to finally welcome you to AI and the Future of Work. Let's get started by having you share a bit more about your background and how you got into the space. Yeah. Thanks, Dan. Great to finally be here with you. Congratulations, man. It is a massive and fantastic body of work.

There's so much more here to dig into. So I started in tech in the late 90s in web 1.0 bubble. So I've been an operator, operating executive for 25 some odd years, did the startup CEO thing for a number of years, wandered around in the wilderness, to be honest, a couple of times, sold a private equity, nothing that ever, it's funny, three of the companies that I worked at or ran are still out there still making money for somebody today.

Jumped into Google, worked for about five years there in product and technology, leading teams. And then Slack, where you and I met, which I joined in 2017 to run the developer platform. The consistent thing that I learned over the course of all of that experience is the old phrase, culture is strategy for breakfast. It was really true. And in 2020, I got an opportunity to do something that was a little different, which is I co-founded a group called Future Forum. We were a think tank backed by Slack.

looking at what was happening over the course of the pandemic and post-pandemic in terms of ways of working technology, flexibility, leadership, connection, culture, all of that, and helping organizations navigate their way through it. And that's what I do today at WorkForward. So it's kind of going coming full circle back to that culture, it's strategy for breakfast and applying like a combination of research and case studies to how do you equip yourself to be successful in the future?

I remember sitting in a workshop for partners that you were hosting at Slack a long, long time ago. And first off, you just lit up the room. I mean, we were all just so enthusiastic about the vision of Slack and just to be a little part of it. It was in the best years at Slack. So you mentioned the culture and strategy. Between that and Google, you've really been a part of, not just embedded in, but you've been a part of creating those two iconic cultures.

What have you learned from those leadership teams? Yeah, I jumped into Google when it was already obviously a very fully formed thing. And in fact, a big part of the reason why I left is it was so big and so fully formed and such a beast and a behemoth by the time that I left that the ability of any leader to really deeply influence the direction was pretty limited, right? But I did learn scaling, right? You think about like my startup experiences, right?

It was all operating at much smaller scale. At Google, the ability to go from zero to 1,000 was pretty fantastic. I was there during what we now would see as the highs of the Zerp era when, in retrospect, actually a big part of the challenge that I faced in a team that I took over was culture issues, but it was also culture issues that existed because the pressures were how do you spend more money faster in some ways?

And that's not always to your net benefit, obviously, as a business. What I learned at Google was that culture still matters a ton. I took over a business that was, in theory, a product problem, right? There was a business that wasn't quite working. The reality was you had people from an operations perspective and engineers literally yelling at each other in the hallway, not listening to one another when it came time to understanding what was actually going on, what was going to drive the business forward.

Slack was a very different experience. The cultures were different to some degree, a lot of similarities, but Slack was hitting its growth curve for sure by the time that I joined. Product-oriented culture as opposed to engineering-oriented culture, but also still had some of the same challenges of like, how do you grow successfully? How do you actually build systems that last? How do you drive engagement in a team successfully?

And the developer platform, which you saw the team that was behind that, even when I came in, had some of the same challenges. You had people who were literally not talking through problems and challenges with one another, and there wasn't a common vision that got them aligned. So the commonality across both of them was growth itself can actually be it can be great, but can also be problematic. And you've got to find a way to align people and systems together.

to deliver successfully against the potential for that growth. And a lot of that comes down to, do you have alignment around what outcomes you're trying to drive? Do you have alignment around what roles people play? And how do you build sort of healthy aspects of culture so that you can hear each other's

often very diverse perspectives on how to get there and move forward. So both culture and finger quotes, good culture are such amorphous terms. Yeah. But I suspect when you've been around enough good and not as good cultures, you kind of know it when you see it. Yeah. What are the attributes when you just maybe walk into a prospective consulting client or long time client for the first time? What are the indicators that you get that it's a healthy culture?

Yeah, a big part of it is if you ask people what problems they're working on, if the problems they're talking about are customer-oriented problems, if they're talking about like, hey, we know our goals here, we understand what we're about, we understand the purpose of the business, we understand what we're trying to deliver for our customers, and we're struggling with problems of delivery, or we're struggling with challenges of growth internationally, that's a good culture because you're focused on the right set of problems.

If instead what you're talking about is those guys over there don't work well with us.

or we really aren't aligned in terms of even understanding what the goals are in the first place. That's where we start getting into problems and challenges. And I see it in a lot of larger organizations that I work with these days where I'll give you just the more concrete examples are, I've got clients where the quarterly business review that they're running in a product and technology team feel like book reports, right? It's like, what did we do last quarter?

And they're not aligned with their go-to-market partners who are frustrated because they don't know what's being delivered and why it's being delivered. They're also feeling whipsawed by their go-to-market partners who are often coming at them with, you know, we must have this now or the customer is going to quit on us.

And there's no alignment around goals and what we're trying to drive. There's no metrics-driven system. And there's no way in which the sort of truth of what's going on is being shown up to management. And that's where you start getting into real challenges because then you end up spending more of your time and energy on internal squabbling than delivery from a customer perspective.

I love that distinction. I haven't heard that before. Are we focused on internal or external problems? Yeah, yeah. And I felt it, to be honest, at Google when I was leaving because I went from the ability to focus with a team on the challenges that we faced as a business, which were very real. Once we started fixing those problems, though, once the business went from being something that bluntly was unattractive to something that was actually performing relatively well,

All of a sudden, it became this contest of which senior executive in Google was going to have their hands on it and their piece on it. And I went from leading and managing a team that was actually doing great work, spending a lot of time triaging between competing concerns at a senior level. And that's just not a healthy place to be because that's when you start feeling like this is getting into corporate behaviors and bureaucracies that we all attribute with like old line firms and

unfortunately, a lot of big tech has found itself in that position these days. Before we start recording, we were talking about a recent conversation with Brian Power, CHRO at Nextdoor. And one of the things we talked about is the changing nature of what employees expect from their employers, kind of in the face of AI, return to work initiatives. It's just, there's a lot changing right now in the workplace. How do you

kind of put all that in perspective. And then I'd love to get your perspective specifically on what do employees expect these days from an employer? Yeah, I think the expectations around things like workplace flexibility have changed pretty fundamentally. They certainly did for me. Like I led what we now call distributed teams for 20 years, right? Like people...

who were working in different offices in different cities in different locations. But they all by and large showed up in an office, you know, even five days a week when I was at Google and for most of Slack's early history as well.

I think all of us sort of had that exposure during the pandemic to, hey, look, I can actually be highly productive working from home, but I still need time together with my team on a regular basis. And the tension that's still out there is largely people who haven't come to grips with there is, you know, the complete individual choice model, which doesn't work. There's the top down one size fits all mandate, which also doesn't work. You actually have to put work into what's the right answer at a team level, right?

And I think that's where you see some of the ongoing resistance and the push-pull between executives and employees. But I also think there's just a more fundamental shift that's happened, and it's probably the most stark in tech, which went from bluntly excessive when it comes to employees. When I went from my startup days to Google, I was

blown away, but honestly not in a good way by, you know, three meals a day and the nap pods and the, and all the rest of what Google had at that point in time. It was in part because they were hoarding talent and holding onto it. And then partly because they bluntly had more money than they knew how to spend at one point in time. And tech's gone from that type of treatment to employees to pretty much the opposite end of the pendulum, right? Which is maybe

midnight layoffs where you don't get to say goodbye to your coworkers that feels highly inhumane. And so compound that with the really dramatic increases in stress on people to do more with less for three years now. We're on the third year of efficiency. And those tensions are, I think, at a boiling point in a lot of different organizations.

Because the pressure on people are very real, the fears of job losses, potentially directly or indirectly caused by generative AI, means there's more tension, I think, than ever between executives and employees. So what does the research say about what it feels like to be an employee at one of these companies?

kind of efficiency driven in one of these efficiency driven cultures, whether it's Meta or JP Morgan or the federal government where, you know, you're kind of asked, hey, you're one of the survivors. You know, you're here to, you know, produce a lot. And if you choose not to, someone else will happily fill your seat. And, you know, the way you win at this organization is by being more productive, driving whatever the outcome is, shareholder value, et cetera. What does the research say about how that is as a motivator?

Not good is the answer quite starkly. Like, let's take what's a commonly termed rank and yank systems that have come back into vogue, right? Like the lowest performing 5% of organizations are going to be pushed out. That sounds great in theory, if you're a CEO, because it sounds like I'm going to just force out the lowest performance in my organization. The challenge is the evidence. If you look back at GE's history, if you look at Microsoft's history says what happens instead is people

People perform to the least common denominator of that metric, meaning if you put in place a monitoring system that says I'm keeping track of how many days a week you're showing up in the office or keystrokes, they will perform to that metric. But you're not going to get additional discretionary effort. What you will get is internal competition. It's back to I don't have to be faster than the bear. I just have to be faster than the next slowest person.

And Microsoft and General Electric are case studies in this. There are literally books that have been written about this, where the dynamic that was created was, how do I outperform? How do I make sure my team outperforms another team, as opposed to being focused on customers?

I also think the relentless focus on efficiency often, too often, does get conditioned around the sort of visual markers of activity, right? Hustle culture. Johnny shows up early, Johnny stays late. Because in too many organizations, executives suck.

at articulating the outcomes they're trying to drive. And it's to some degree on all of us as leaders to figure this out, but the organizations that are doing well are the ones that have put in place systems like OKRs where it actually works, right? Where they've actually taken the time to...

visible, traceable, transparent systems that say, hey, this quarter's goals are X, Y, and Z. Here's the three things that are most important for this team. Here's how we'll measure success. And then holding people accountable to those. If you're doing that, people will align around it a lot more because what you've got then is a level playing field that's on the basis of a clear basis of how you're going to measure success and

as opposed to simply, you know, the show up early, stay late history of hustle. So along comes AI. Yeah. And it's this kind of blunt object and every employee is told, you know, it's going to make you X percent, 20 percent plus more productive. And in a

culture that's efficiency driven, you could see why that's a that blunt object works really effectively for management. Yeah. But if you're trying to create a culture where I'm not trying to pay the witness here, but where, you know, your employees are, let's say, outrunning the hare instead of outrunning the tortoise, so to speak, how should progressive thinking leaders think about ways to incorporate AI?

A big part of this, it is back to being clear and articulate in what your goals and your outcomes are that you're trying to drive. There's a big aspect of AI that is a productivity theater in some respects, meaning you're

I can generate more emails out. I can automate my SDRs, all the rest of it. But if I'm simply doing more activity, it's not necessarily a net gain. There's also the fact that you've got, you know, if you look at like any number of studies out there, what Ethan Mollett calls secret cyborgs, right? People who are getting some productivity gains, but they're hiding it because they fear job loss or feel like or fear that they're going to look like they're a fraud. Because

All they're hearing is the top-down efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, which people fear translates into job loss. What I've seen work in organizations is moving away from talking about efficiency to talking about goals. Again, back to if I can articulate how we're going to grow our business, if I can point to what we're going to do for customers,

then people can align much more easily around what it is we're going to deliver. Startups that I work with have no problems on multiple dimensions adopting these tools because it's really clear what the roadmap is. It's really clear where you're headed. It's also dramatically aided by the fact that I've got, you know, a fairly new code base, right? And a group of people that have a good, consistent rhythm going with one another. That's starkly different when you get into larger scale organizations.

Even, you know, 10, 15 year old tech companies now have millions of lines of code and systems that are intertwined with one another, which make it more complex to make changes. But more importantly, there's also often a lack of consistent direction about what we're going to do to drive the next level of success in this business. So the more that you can articulate that, the more that you can actually be clear about how we're going to grow the business, the more you get people aligned against that.

okay, I do start to believe you that this isn't about job loss. This is about, you're not going to hire as many people going forward. We're going to do more with the people that we've got today because I can see positive goals of business growth as opposed to just translating efficiency into fewer humans. Last point on it is there's just so much evidence that there's a lack of training at the right level. It's a bit of the, you've got to figure it out for yourself and here, go take the individual training program.

when there's now three or four different studies that have shown that the activity that happens at the team level, the manager who actually gets in there with their team and actually is learning the tools side by side with them, that is spending some time in ways that are quote unquote not productive, that is experimenting with these tools,

is going to get a lot further, a lot faster in terms of their progress of adoption, largely because people then trust them because they're able to have a conversation about what's okay, what's acceptable use here. Why are we doing this? What are we going to gain out of it? And so there's an investment that's required on that that is often really dramatically missing, especially in big organizations. So you and I know that one of the things that makes startups both exhilarating and

scary and everything in between is that every day you face an existential threat. And every day you have to be aligned and you have to be efficient because if not, you don't get to see the next day. As a company grows, just

Organically, the natural course of things is that you lose that hyper sense of urgency and there's hopefully not an existential threat daily. You've been part of organizations that have gone from the existential threat phase to being mature and you've seen how that transforms cultures. What are the indicators when you're starting to move beyond that kind of efficiency, productivity

for the purpose of existence as opposed to needing to round out the culture and do things that aren't always existential in nature.

I think the biggest thing to me is, is it really clear who's got accountability for goals? Who is the person that is responsible? I had this conversation actually with a team at Atlassian the other day that does a really good job in part using their own product, but not just of articulating goals, but saying, hey, look, this is the person on this goal who we are going to hold accountable for the delivery of it. Even if the reality is there are three other people who are equally necessary for pulling it together and making it happen,

Somebody being feeling that sense of responsibility goes a long way towards making the system real. And the other is why, you know, do I actually show that myself? Do I show that I'm dependable as a leader as much as as a team member? Because in bigger organizations would start half starts happening is accountability starts getting diffused. And it's a bit of the, you know,

fingers pointing in multiple directions, where do I go to get the answer to X becomes really hard and complicated on policies. But also who's responsible for delivering improvements to the employee experience is a pretty basic and straightforward one that almost never has a good coherent set of answers against it. And being able to more clearly articulate and say who that is and how that happens is

is hard in organizations as you grow and as you scale. But if you don't do it, the alternative is a lot worse because then people feel that like, yes, there's no existential threat, but there's also no real accountability and no sense that people have that, you know, responsibilities being taken seriously at senior levels in the organization. You brought up what I think is maybe the best success story ever with Atlassian, a company that, you know,

Just has really managed to do well by doing good and takes good care of people, you know, empathetic leadership. And they never apologized for the fact that, you know, we're going to take care of people and they'll take care of us. What do you think has worked for Atlassian that has been just really hard to figure out that that magic formula?

I think for them, they've seen the ongoing payback of doing that that helps them not deviate away from it. Right. Even during tough times, even when the business might have been sliding slightly sideways, they had a fundamental belief in the founders that they've continued to back up that, you know, positive engagement for employees gets this thing called discretionary effort out of them. Right. Like there's much more that you get out of people that feel like they can trust their leaders.

Great term. Yeah. That, you know, willingness to go the extra mile is discretionary effort, right? Well, I go the extra mile for a customer when things are going sideways.

Yeah, if I feel like I'm working in an organization that's going to not even necessarily reward me for that, but that's going to treat me decently and that's going to take care of me when I need help. Do I? You know, you can think about this at a team level. Are we both been in teams? I'm sure where you feel like, hey, we've got each other's backs. And if somebody is having a bad week or needs coverage for a problem, I'm going to step in or you're going to step in or someone will step in for me when I need it.

What you want is that to happen at the organizational level, right? That people feel like someone's got your back. But also people take responsibility when needed for, hey, I need you to step in here for a period of time and help out.

That is just so powerful when you're in times that are turbulent or hard. And I think leaders who have gone through that and seen that work and they can keep that kind of culture going, which is what Atlassian's managed to do, build really resilient organizations versus the sort of brittleness of the top-down command and control. You know, we're going to move out the bottom 5%, at which point no one's operating on a basis of trust.

Have you seen any organizations effectively measure discretionary effort? No, I wish I had. I've seen it out of survey instruments. Actually, Slack put out a great piece of research like a year or two ago talking about trust that actually showed that people who feel trust in their leadership are 30% more likely to go the extra mile for a customer. And when you ask the question, two separate questions, and then you go back and relate it, you can kind of see it in places. There's also...

One of my favorites, Institute for Corporate Productivity. And one of the reports that they did was similar. They take companies and they grade them on the basis of productivity, meaning what's your relative growth versus your peers? Are you growing faster, more profitable, blah, blah, blah. The top decile versus the bottom decile, the biggest differential they found was, again, based in trust. Does leadership trust their employees? Do employees feel trust in their leadership?

was like the biggest differential between those, the top decile and the people sitting down at the bottom decile. I can think of kind of just as we were describing it, kind of a heuristic where you could look at, you know, kind of what's expected, maybe based on your OKRs or MBOs versus what you deliver. And if, you know, good managers should make those decisions.

100% subjective, sorry, objective. And, you know, in theory, you'd come out at the end of a period of work and say how much of this was, you know, discretionary or above and beyond what was expected. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And even like delivery of, let's put it this way, even getting to a point where you've got like clearly articulated goals that are measurable, that

The tools that are out there today will also help us with this because honestly, most people stink at smart goals, right? At articulating them and creating them in ways that work. The tools will help you get there. Even just being able to put in place those types of goals will get you a step forward in trust building because then people see something. And if you're sharing it, by the way, broadly where everybody can see what performance looks like.

then you're going to get some benefits out of that. And that's what you need even to build the next level of it, right? Which is great. Now that that's happening, how do I reward people who are not only delivering on their own goals, but that are notably helping other people deliver on theirs? Because that's what makes the system work.

The trust is a little bit of an ambiguous term like culture. I'm thinking back to we both of us were recently at the great HR tech event transform. Yeah. And we create this kind of echo chamber where everyone that was decided to go to that event feels like, you know, the opportunity to infuse AI automation into work is positive for the employee. You know, it's going to eliminate kind of the drudgery of work and celebrate, you know, what we can do when we're kind of unshackled.

And yet the reality is employees often see the incursion of AI in the workplace as more of a threat and maybe a violation of trust, not knowing exactly how it's going to be used for them, against them. So there's a lot of apprehension. When you think about how to create a culture where trust is a strength, how should employers be having a dialogue about AI as friend versus foe?

That's a great question. One of the big things is stop using the word efficiency, or at least stop just continually harping on it. If you really believe that this set of tools are augmentation to people as opposed to replacement, then you need to start using that language and talking about it in that way. By the way, the great study out of Anthropic, like in the last few weeks, that shows even in all of the classes of jobs they've looked at and tasks and everything else,

They have yet to find anything that actually is full out replacement, right? So if you look at the evidence as a leader, you're not going to get there on the basis of rip and replace. So the biggest things that you need to be able to do to show if you really believe in this is we're actually going to put some effort behind training. We're going to actually put some time on the calendar to make space for it. Maybe a really concrete example. I did this at W. Lovitch at BCG, who's been one of my partners and someone you might want to chat with.

talks about how do I make space for this? And the team that's felt the pressure all year long to learn how to use the tools because the backlog of work is so high and the demands on them are huge is never going to get there. One of the ways that you show that you were actually going to stand behind this is you give them space to do it, which in the case of the one company she was working with was amazing.

You know what? In the month of December, the entire backlog gets frozen. All I want you to do in the month of December on this team is spend time in the tools, learning the tools. We're going to do it together. We're going to run some experiments. We're going to see what we can build together. And that's how I'm showing you that I'm actually investing in your learning and skill set and uptick.

Besides the stuff I was talking about earlier in terms of goals and output, I really think that people have much better buy-in if they see that you're willing to actually put time on the calendar and effort behind giving them the skills so that they feel like you're investing in them. They're going to have greater belief in their own longevity and

And it's bluntly what most people want because they get that from a career perspective, this is going to be a big deal. That's certainly one extreme example of what you could do. That's fascinating. And I hope this is Debbie, who is the researcher. Debbie talked about it as a case study. Yeah, fascinating. I would like to talk to her. That's interesting. Yeah. So when we think about.

Bringing AI in and evaluating the right kinds of use cases, I find the most pragmatic way, I don't know if pragmatic is the word, but the best way I've seen to introduce it into workflows is by taking it out of the shadows.

Make it very clear as a culture. We celebrate experimentation. Never get penalized for it. And to champion, you know, bring an employee, you know, out of the shadows into, you know, a company forum each month and just share how you're using AI and let everyone see, you know, we're learning together. Even leadership, you know, we don't have all the answers.

Oh, my God, yeah. Right? Be a little vulnerable, but create a culture of experimentation and innovation. Have you seen that work? Yeah, I'll give you a concrete example. A CIO of actually a big federal government agency, a guy that I happen to know fairly well, this was like a year ago, sat with his team, like top 75 folks in his organization, had them all together for an onsite in D.C., and a big part of it was him sitting there going,

I know that we have rules that say you're not supposed to use any of the tools except for this cone of silence. No one's going to get in trouble. Raise your hand if you're using some of the other tools. And he raised his hand first.

And he had almost everybody in the room raising their hand. He goes, okay, now let's get real. Let's get real about what we're learning, what we need to do in order to get our own internal tools to be as good as the external stuff that I know all of you were using because I've used them too. And that admission on his part, his going first, just opened up a door that otherwise would remain closed, right? You can think about the alternative, which is the extreme of this is,

We've put out a policy. The policy sits in an email that says thou shalt only use this tool over here. And we know that stuff doesn't work because we know that people who want to adopt the tools are going to go find something better on the outside. You're going to have a shadow IT problem on your hands. He was opening up the door to a real conversation about what do we need to do, what's acceptable and not in order to get his team on the same page as him. And he learned a lot coming out of it, too.

So obvious when you hear it that way. It seems so simple, and yet it's uncommon. It's uncommon, and I think it's just hard for a lot of leaders to have that open conversation, right? But it's what's going to be required because it's about the emotional buy-in, right? This is EQ skills at work.

It's a different leadership skill. Absolutely. Then we've been taught in the past. And I think there is kind of a category of emergent leaders that are realizing that it's okay to be humble. It's okay to be vulnerable. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's,

Different processes, different opportunities. Yeah, one of the words I've been using because I have always been fairly open and vulnerable with my team. A lot of executives, if you say vulnerable, they have this adverse reaction, which is, oh, that's soft and hard on your sleeve and revealing your personal turmoil. And I got a therapist for that. And the answer is no. The word fallibility might be a better one, which is, it's a big one. This is a hard one for me to learn over the years too, which is,

It's okay to not have all the answers. In fact, it's good if you say to your team, I don't have all the answers because then you're inviting them into a conversation. Builds trust. Exactly. Exactly. The three magic words, I don't know. And if you can say that to your team, you're asking them to look. It doesn't mean that you don't have high aspirations and goals. You do. And you set those goals and you're really clear and articulate about them, but you're inviting people to help you figure out the path. Brian, this one's flown by, but we've had our time.

But I'm not letting you off the hot seat without answering one last important question for me. Let's do it. So when Brian and Dan are back here and it's 2035, not 2025, and we're having a version of this conversation, how has it changed? Oh, my God. First of all, like what's our 3D version and representation of us and in what world are we doing it? I think that we're in for a massive sea change, not just because of the AI tools that we're used to at the moment, the LLM type of stuff.

But I think the shift away from the written word, which has already been starting to some degree, which I happen to love, towards how are we interacting more through voice and video and interacting even with the tools we use every day through voice and video is one part of it. But I think another side of this is going to be the sort of rise of craftsmanship. I think there's going to be a love for what's the actual human aspect and elements of our work world, of our personnel world,

And we're going to have this odd thing, I think, where what's the digital signature of something that you or I created ourselves that I think is going to have value in a world in which the flood of Gen AI generated content otherwise will become overwhelming. Brilliant.

You and me, maybe in avatar form in a virtual world. Oh, man. With everybody else having an interaction conversation with us. We'll see where we get. But you know what won't have changed, Brian, is the world needs storytellers and problem solvers and people asking the right questions. And that will never go out of style. We have to always remember that AI only knows what we taught it. But the ideas have to come from us. Yeah, absolutely. And we have some great storytellers. Thank you for being one. Oh, thank you. Thank you for...

coming and hanging out with me. This has been such a pleasure. I can't believe it took us so long. Absolutely. But glad we finally did it. Well, okay, now we have an excuse. We're going to quantify discretionary effort. Okay, that's going to be a problem we're going to solve together. How about that? Let's do it. All right. Where can the audience learn more about you and the great work you're doing? You can find me on LinkedIn. I've also got a newsletter, Work Forward on Substack. So check it out and give me a follow. Much appreciated.

Excellent. That's all the time we have for this week on AI and the future of work. As always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin from PeopleRain. And of course, we're back next week with another fascinating guest.