Life in the Corporate Blender: Why Change is Making Work Worse with Ashley Goodall
52:11 Share

If you need three new reasons to love Jack wraps at Jack in the Box even more, here they are. Chicken fajita, chicken Caesar, and delicious, starting at $3. Coincidentally, those are the same three reasons you should come to Jack in the Box right now. At Jack, every bite's a big deal.

The NFL playoffs are better with FanDuel because right now new customers can bet $5 and get $300 in bonus bets if you win. That's $300 in bonus bets if you win your first $5 bet. FanDuel, an official sportsbook partner of the NFL. 21 plus and present in select states. First online real money wager only. $5 first deposit required. Bonus issued as non-withdrawable bonus bets which expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions

Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. This is Smart People Podcast. A podcast for smart people, where we talk to smart people, but not necessarily done by smart people. Hello and welcome to Smart People Podcast, conversations that satisfy your curious mind. Chris Stemp here. Thanks so much for tuning in.

Our guests this week caught my eye when they wrote a New York Times opinion piece titled Mass Tech Layoffs? Just Another Day in the Corporate Blender. Corporate Blender. I don't know about you, but when I hear it, it rings true without knowing the details. How many of you feel like you go to work day in and day out and just get tossed around by constant bombardment of

Corporate speak, change initiatives, to-dos, and confusing deliverables.

In fact, I'm more amazed at the amount of people don't wonder what the heck is going on every day when they go into work and experience the state of what is. And by the way, the working world has never treated me poorly. It's not that it's a bad place. And by no means are we complaining about it by the fact that we're discussing if it could be done better.

So this week on the show, we're talking about two primary concepts. One is the constant push towards efficiency and excess profitability. In addition to, and perhaps more importantly, the notion of constant change. This idea, this mindset that in order to earn your paycheck, specifically as a leader, you have to change things. You have to shake it up.

And if I can offer you one mind-changing insight that I took away from this, it is the fact that innovation primarily comes from stability and not change. And we get into much more.

This week on the show, I am interviewing Ashley Goodall on his brand new book, The Problem with Change in the Essential Nature of Human Performance. Ashley is a leadership expert who spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside, most recently as an executive at Cisco. Co-author of Nine Lies About Work, he also spent 14 years at Deloitte as a consultant and as the chief learning officer for leadership and professional development. We'll

We are at smartpeoplepodcast.com. You can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com. Let's get into it. Our conversation with Ashley Goodall as we talk about his brand new book, The Problem with Change and the Essential Nature of Human Performance. Enjoy. I saw an opinion piece you wrote in the Times, and it was about unnecessary layoffs. And just that headline caught me.

Because recently I have been amazed at how the most profitable companies have tricked us all, convincing us that they're not profitable. We're overly profitable, that we are an expense and expendable. Tell us a little bit more about the trend of unnecessary layoffs, how you came across that, what it meant to you to write about it. I mean, the point I was making in that piece was a very simple one.

I think if you aren't paying close attention to the business world and you hear that a company is doing layoffs, you might imagine that it is losing money or that it is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy or that some very bad stuff is happening and a layoff is a last resort. And I was the sort of way in to the article was

The point that I was making is these companies are perfectly profitable, judged by whatever standard you care to apply. They might not be profitable enough for their investors or their leaders, but they're not losing money. And so they are engaged in layoffs for different reasons than the survival that those of us looking might imagine. They're not at death's door.

And so it's, pick your adjective, interesting or curious or depressing to find that...

showing large numbers of people the door is now not a survival technique, but a management technique or even a leadership technique, which, you know, and to call it a leadership technique, I think makes you wince a little bit. Now, the broader, the even broader way of thinking about this is it's one way in which everybody likes, everybody seems to be addicted to change. And a layoff is usually...

in terms of some sort of restructuring or we need to pivot the business or we've got the wrong set of skills in our workforce and so we need to make room to hire a bunch of people with the right sort of skills so we're going to say goodbye to all the people with the wrong sort of skills. There's usually some broader change or transformation agenda and the argument that I've been trying to make

for the last little while now is that actually this doesn't help nearly as often as people think it does because it leads people into uncertainty and learned helplessness and severs a lot of things that people need to do their jobs. And so if your leadership technique is making it harder for people to do their jobs, I could argue it's not a very good leadership technique.

And amongst those are these layoffs that people have done. Certainly at the beginning of the year in tech, there were a large number of people, hundreds of thousands of people laid off from companies that were profitable companies.

And so it does just give you pause and make you question, I think, some of the assumptions that you might have about what corporate leadership is all about and what's really going on here. Yeah, I mean, with that idea of corporate leadership and what's driving it, how much of it do you think is just managing to quarterly revenues? Well, one of the ways to test that is

is there are some companies that don't have quarterly numbers to hit and don't have annual numbers to hit, and they're called private companies. It is, and by the way, you know, a really interesting place in the private company world to look is professional services organizations, because those are generally run by the people who are advising all the public companies, right? So there's an interesting sort of connection there.

Professional services, you know, the big four accounting and consulting firms are run by people who are very business savvy. And so what do they do? There have been some cases of layoffs in professional services this year, but a tiny fraction of the scale of the layoffs that have been going on in public companies. So I don't know. I can't read the mind of leaders in public companies, but it does seem that

that when you take away the public nature of the results and the public ownership, and by the way, public ownership is a thing. Now, I used to work in professional services. I spent 14 years at Deloitte. And you tend to think there's an interesting contradiction here or a paradox. But

In public companies, we go, well, we've got to understand what the shareholders want. And we think we know what the shareholders want. And they want the stock price to go up for the long term. And they want the dividend to increase. And so that's what shareholders want. But we don't actually know the names of the shareholders. We don't know who these people are. They're just out there so we can presume what they want. In private company land, particularly in private partnerships...

You don't know that the shareholders want increased earnings in anything like the same way, but you know all of their names because they're the partners. And if they don't like what you're doing, they call you up and say, we don't like what you're doing. So weirdly, in a private company, the ownership accountability is much tighter and much more in your face as a leader.

And I used to watch the leaders at Deloitte do a very astute and attentive job to making sure that they understood what the will of the partners was and try to shape that, of course, and try to lead in the direction that they thought was right, but never to get too far out ahead of the skis and never to tack in a direction that the partners didn't want to go. It's, I think, another... It's why...

All the professional services firms who tried to spin off their consulting businesses again.

But like the nth time in the last couple of years failed to do that because ultimately the partners don't, the partners look at the business proposition and go, that's a bad business proposition. Don't do it. They look at layoffs and go, for the most part, that's a bad idea. We'll hire them all back again in a few years time. We'll pay to have them leave and then we'll pay to have them come back. In many cases, it'd be the exact same people. That's a bad idea. Don't do it.

In public companies, the calculus seems to be a different one. You just put forth the equation that I have always struggled with, which is we're dealing with relatively the same worker profile, the same pool of employees. We're just trading them. What is it about a public company that they are unable to see that equation, perhaps, as clearly as maybe a private company?

Having a stock price is kind of a sobering thing. And in the back of your mind is the fact that if it goes too low, then you will not only not have a high stock price, you will also not have a job. And so for better or worse, if you're in a public company, there's this big scorecard number that's out there.

And generally, when the number goes up, your life gets a lot better and people tell you you're doing a really good job. These are nice things. And when it goes down, your life gets more miserable and people start wondering whether they've backed the right horse in you. So there is something there.

for better or worse, very sobering about having a big number out there that purports to reflect your ability as a leader. And then every three months, you release earnings and the number goes up or down. It's a real thing. It is a real thing. Now,

The question actually is not so much is quarterly earnings helpful, but is any of this stuff helping make better companies? That's the, you know, you can sort of go back to a startup in the days when there wasn't quite so much private financing of all of these things, but you can go back to

you know, rewind your mind in history a little bit and go, okay, I've got an idea. I've got a little startup. Now I need some capital to grow my business. I can go and get equity investors. And you can argue that without equity investors who bear a lot of risk, you don't get businesses. That's a big, important mechanism. Again, these days it's slightly different because of private equity and

venture capital and so on and so forth but there are plenty of businesses in this world that wouldn't exist without without public financing but then at what point does that outlive its usefulness um you can't you know it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to take all of these companies private again so you sort of it's a weird it's a weird i guess i'm saying it's a weird thing

I would like companies to go, public companies to say to themselves, we are here to maximize the long-term returns to our shareholders. And in the long-term, our shareholders' interests and our employees' interests are very well aligned. We want to be a great place to work so that our employees are most productive, so that they produce great things and ideas and products and innovations and

because then our customers will benefit and then ultimately our shareholders will benefit. And if you stretch that timeline out beyond three months, please stretch it out to five years, to 10 years, everything lines up. But the public nurse of having a stock price, I think drags you to the short term. And it is massively hard for leaders to resist that. It's a, you know, you're, you're sort of standing on the, standing on the shore and commanding the tide not to come in.

It's a very, very hard thing to do. Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life. At Capella University, our game-changing FlexPath learning format lets you set your own deadlines so you can learn at a time and pace that works for you.

It's an education you can tailor to your schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to pursue your professional goals. Instead, enjoy learning your way and earning a degree without missing a beat. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. This episode is brought to you by Indeed.

We're driven by the search for better, but when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search, match with Indeed. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash SBO. Terms and conditions apply. Do you think we're at...

a type of precipice, a type of tipping point, not just with AI and all the things, but the complexity of the business environment now, the pace, the rate of change, which we're jumping into here. But it just seems like post-COVID, it was like we made it through this big disruptor. And now the bar is reset. And it got reset into some seemingly normal

illogical base point that I just wonder like who is pulling these strings and who is setting these arbitrary rules and the complexities which really aren't seeming to serve most people. Well, I think so. I think that last bit is a big real thing. Yeah, I get the sense that there are a lot of people who like the employment deal isn't working for me.

anymore. And, you know, again, we could take a historical view and go, listen, there are things called unions, because for many, many, many years, the employment deal wasn't working brilliantly well for a whole segment of the workforce. But I think what's happening is that now, all of a sudden, white collar jobs are feeling, okay, well, I'm only as valuable as

I'm only worth keeping around until I'm not worth keeping around. I'm going to be replaced by a chat bot. And what is this whole, what is this all, what is this? What is this? I don't know what this is anymore. I think there are questions in people's minds about this.

what the future of white collar work in large organizations is actually going to be like. It's hard for me to separate that from where I'm at in my career, having spent 20 years at work.

Is it just that I'm all jaded and pissed off now? I hope not. I hope I'm fundamentally still an optimist about how all this stuff could be better. It might not be true for people my son's age just entering the workforce that they see this the way that you and I seem to. But you can line up the hammer blows to the psyche of the white-collar worker.

And you can go, well, okay, so there was a pandemic and then there was AI. What's the next one? And I think people are, well, here's the thing that's missing. I don't see a whole bunch of folks excited about going to work. So whether people are as upset about some of these things as I'm imagining, I'm not sure.

But I don't see people going, work can be great, which is a shame because actually in the real world, work can be great. We just need to figure out how to find our way back to that. I often talk about this, but I remember I got into the workforce in 2005.

And there were no smartphones. I mean, a few lucky people and lucky I put in quotes, I think had Blackberries. That was about it. I remember when I was sick, I did not work from home. I just, you know, didn't work. And like every three years since then, there has been something that seems to make it more all consuming and less rewarding. And then,

Even if you look at like the, the flexibility and the hybrid work environment, which for me was a huge win. I mean, like just at something for years I had been saying we could do. And now they're clawing that back. Is this all just a chess game where the, the,

kings and queens that are located in the back of the chessboard are moving things to their benefit and sending the pawns out into the world. I mean, really just an ability to make more money and what's in it for me on the vast, vast majority. I think it's actually much more complicated than that. For a start, we have a system that encourages people to make more money and promotes the people who are good at that and

holds back the people who aren't good at that. So it should not be surprising that the people who rise to the top of organizations are good at figuring out ways to make more money. That's kind of what the system is selecting for. And there is some good in society for having successful businesses. So we've got to be slightly careful how much we tilt at windmills on some of this stuff. I think someone will write a history in a few years' time

of the total impact of smartphones on humanity. And I can't wait to read it. And at the same time, I'm not sure it's going to be particularly happy reading. And I don't mean just on kids, by the way, and people have written a lot about that. But I mean, on the boundaries of work, on the sanity of workers, on the fact that

we've created a medium through which people can get us addicted to things. You know, those addictions range from, I don't know, a fairly harmless addiction to whatever social feed to being addicted to lies and untruth and conspiracy theories. And, you know, so there's a whole angle there.

there. But the funny thing is, if you go and if you say to somebody, tell me about the best time you ever had at work, nine times out of 10, they will go, oh, I was on this team and dot dot dot, the one time out of 10 that they don't go, I was on this team. And they will go, I had this leader and, and they will describe an experience of being with a small group of humans and

when all of a sudden things seem to matter and things seem to happen. Now,

Those experiences are not incompatible with profit-seeking. They are not incompatible with increasing the stock price. I would argue, in fact, that the more of those experiences of really great teamwork on really great teams you can provide, the better your stock price will do. All of these arrows will point in the same direction. I just think that we've lost sight of the human experience of work, that we are not putting that...

in the center of our conception of an organization. If you were to coach a kids sports team, you would very quickly, you would show up and go, listen, to the extent that we can support one another in playing the sport, A, we're going to have a better time and B, we're going to win more matches.

And both of those things will point in the same direction. We don't bring that thinking to work. If we brought that thinking to work, we wouldn't turn all the teams upside down in the name of restructuring to meet the quarterly numbers. So we can go back and forth on the diagnosis for why work doesn't feel like it used to. But mine actually would be, I don't need to know about some of the big things

What I want people to seize a hold of is the fact that doing great work is a thing that small groups of people do together.

And we need to be much more focused on that and much more intelligent about how we go about providing that for people. More focused on the doing of the good work. Yeah, more focused on what's a great team like. What is it like to have somebody who knows what you're good at, who's a peer of yours, who can ask you to do more of the thing that you're good at, and then to offer to take the work that you suck at off your plate because they like doing that. How great is that? How great is it?

To have a group of people so that when you do something, they can tell you that it had an impact because they saw it had an impact on them and it had an impact on some people they're in contact with that you might not be in contact with. So how great is it to have a visceral sense of the effect of something you tried hard to do?

That's a beautiful thing. How fun is it to have a group of people to share stories with? And you go back a little bit. And so remember the time when this, and we can laugh about that. And remember that thing that happened. And remember this person who used to, how great is it to have a shared history of work, of experience at work? So there are all these super precious things and we don't have names for them. We barely have names for the teams.

We just look at headcount. We don't look at team count. There's no company apart from Cisco where I instituted it so we could tell you how many teams we had on a given day. But most companies can't give you a team count. But I could argue teams are more important than individuals because without team, individual is limited by their skills. But as soon as you put my skills together with your skills, then we get two plus two equals five and a half.

So I'm arguing for whatever your diagnosis is of the weight today of the world of work, whether it's post-pandemic or whether it's AI or whether it's layoffs or whether it's cynical capitalism or whether it's cynical politicians or whatever. Pick your poison or pick a different one. Here's the thing that would work.

to be the antidote to those things. Build great teams. Start now. Figure out how to build great teams. Everybody will benefit. How much does the environment impact the team? Like if you could take your dream team, but you put it into the structures of most corporations these days, would you say on the whole they're misaligned?

A good team, one of the reasons a good team is a good team is it's actually a little bit of an insulation against the environment because it creates its own environment. And its own environment is much more immediate and much more real for the people in the team than the corporate environment, which is a very weird and abstract thing. There's actually a slightly different...

version of your question. When you look at what happens when you move somebody from a bad team to a good team, you find interesting things happen. And you find that they're, weirdly, their sense of the corporate environment, which you haven't changed in moving from a good team to a bad team, their sense of the corporate environment improves.

So the team refracts everything. The team is the prism through which we experience ourselves, our teammates, our company. And, you know, so that's the sort of research reason why I think we should focus much more on teams, team leadership. There's also, you know, an experiential reason too that we were talking about a moment ago.

And how does this I mean, you know, so that's how I that's how I found you and then became aware of the book you wrote, The Problem with Change and the Essential Nature of Human Performance. One of the first books I've read that really talks about this recognition that it feels like change is the way you get paid. The expectation is change.

And that incentive then erodes a lot of what you're talking about. Let's say when change comes in, one of the first things to be impacted is the team. What made you come to this realization, not that change is hard, but that change actually, for the most part, might be unnecessary or useless or detrimental? Well, in a way, it's very straightforward.

It occurred to me, and I'm not sure quite why it took me so long, frankly, but it occurred to me that on the one hand, you were having a whole bunch of leaders going, change is great. Love change. Bring me the more change. Happy, happy change.

And on the other hand, you had a whole bunch of employers who were going, not again. And whenever you have something where there is such a dichotomy between the leaders and the lead, I think it demands attention. And so here's a dichotomy. Leaders are taught and rewarded and encouraged and applauded for making change. And then what happens is the employees go, I'm not so sure.

And then a bunch of consultants come in, and you and I are both familiar with this, a bunch of consultants come in and go, oh, they're called change-resistant, those employees. They're resisting change. And that's a fault with the employees. That's a problem.

but we can remedy it. What we'll do is we'll mark them on a little spreadsheet as the change resistors, and then we'll talk at them an awful lot until we wear them down. Now, I look at that and go, I've got a different name for change resistor. My name is human. Humans resist change because change is a really psychologically difficult thing to live through.

And that's not a problem to be fixed. That's a human characteristic to be understood. And if you approach the workplace, which is my specialty, but I think there are many other walks of life in which this could equally well apply. But if you approach the workplace with the idea that a good workplace will be one in which it is easier to work, then I think you have to go constant change is not a good thing.

It's not a good thing. And that's a really interesting conversation to get into because at the moment it's on a pedestal as the best of all the good things. And so I'm trying to just, A, I'm trying to take it off the pedestal and say, listen, it's slightly more complicated than this, folks. But B, I'm trying to encourage people to think through the lens of the people in the workforce, not through the lens of the latest business leadership.

Fad, because I think our duty as leaders is to think through the lens of the people we purport to lead. That's the job. There's no other.

When you need mealtime inspiration, it's worth shopping fries for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus, extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings. Fries, fresh for everyone. Fuel restrictions apply.

You made a statement I love. I just wrote it down and make work easier. And I like it because your intent is not make work easier. It's the easier you make it to work, the better, the better performance, the better human, the better team, all the things that come from it. It's not we're not going to go and be taking naps. It's make it more. Make it more frictionless. Frictionless. There you go. I like that. Oh, man. So I have a team.

And I love this idea. I actually try to do it all the time. However, this is the second Monday in a row that I was having a team meeting and I, the last one I canceled and this one I almost canceled because I was going to say to them, Hey, look, we, we know where we're going. We know how we're getting there. We know who's doing what. I don't know why we need to meet. And then there was this voice in my head, like, but that is not what the organization would want to hear.

Because if it's business as usual, then you are not innovating. You are not progressing. You are stagnating. That has been the long-term argument for change. Sure. What does innovation look like? Change. It's got to be different. Oh, that's an outcome. What is the social structure that produces innovation? Stability. Stability.

stability is there? Maybe not social structure. What is the environmental characteristic? So I don't know. Let's invent powered flight, shall we? You and I, let's go and invent powered flight. So I'll give you option A and option B. Option, and we're imagining powered flight doesn't exist and it's 19 ought, whatever it was. Okay.

So option A is we're going to try it one way this year and then we're going to reorg ourselves. And then we're going to have a new mission statement and a new strategy and we're going to start over for next year. OK, that's option A. Option B is every summer we're going to go and test a plane on a beach in North Carolina and measure very carefully how things go.

And then we're going to go back to Dayton, Ohio, and we're going to make adjustments based on what we learned last time. And then next summer, we're going to crate our machine up and take it back to the beach in North Carolina and test it again. And it's the same two of us, and we're not going to have a reorg, and we're not going to have a change in strategy. And we're going to rinse and repeat that deliberate process until we've learned how to get the thing to stay in the air. And it'll take three years. That's option B.

Which option do you want? The reason we have planes is that the Wright brothers chose option B. So that's what innovation looks like. And by the way, there's a huge amount of innovation in the world today that looks like that. Smart people, hard problems stay the course. And by the way, don't mess up that innovation.

with a change of this and a change of this and a change of this and a change of this and a change of this. The modern version of this, again, it's creating planes, it's the skunk works. You know, what is the iconic skunk

hub of innovation. It is the skunkworks. What's the skunkworks? This is Lockheed Martin. We need to invent a thing that no one's ever thought of anymore. What's the best way to do it? The best way to do it is to remove engineers from the corporate environment because the corporate environment doesn't

create innovation. We need to take them out of us. We are the problem. We need to put them over there in a special building with a budget and leave them alone. That's innovation. So what's change for then?

Change is an attempt, sure, to create innovation. But a lot of it betrays a weird set of ideas about where real innovation actually comes from. So I actually think, you know, innovation is the name of the game. Innovation comes from stability of environment and comes from staying the course. I have so many things to say.

These, this, this moment, every like now and again in a podcast, I'm like, damn it. You're going to be a bad podcast host here because my brain just gets really excited. First, I got to reiterate this statement. Stability creates innovation. Stability is the environment for innovation. That is a really, really excellent statement that needs to be shouted from the rooftops. And we'll get into that.

However, I think first we have to explain the difference in your mind between change and progress. Let's use your flight analogy. Somebody could say, but there is change involved in that. Every time you fly, you're going to go back to your quote unquote lab and you're going to say, what do we change? So how can we better understand the difference between

the outcome of change or the idea that change is occurring as opposed to the input of change? I think a lot of it comes down to who makes the decisions. So I think you could go to most teams, let's go teams again, in large companies today and go, could you write a list of 10 things that would make your team's work better? And teams will go, yeah, hang on a second.

And they come back four minutes later and go, here are 10 things. Those 10 things would all be changes. They would also all be improvements in the eyes of that team. But then what happens is rather than doing that,

We go, senior leaders have decided what your 10 things are without particularly asking you. And they've decided that some of the things will make things better because they'll make things better for you. And some of the things will make things better because they'll make things worse for you. Tough. And here we go. And that's change that doesn't necessarily lead to improvement. Listening to you ask the question, it occurs to me that one of the things that change, large scale change might change

might lead to is efficiency. Um, and I'm not sure efficiency and an improvement efficiency is kind of short-term financial improvement, I suppose, but I don't think it's the innovation thing that we're actually, we're actually talking about. And I think a lot of change actually merely satisfies the need to be looking like you are creating change because everyone says change is a good thing. Um, but anyway, the locus of control is super, super important. Um,

I interviewed people around the world when I put this book together, and people would say, constant change makes my life miserable and hard at work. And I would go, and they would tell big, long stories about this. I would listen to the stories. And at the end of the stories, I would go, so what do you think of change? Is change a good thing or change a bad thing? You've just spent 20 minutes telling me horror stories about change.

What do you think? And they would go, oh, no, I believe in change. Change is good. I believe in possibility. I believe in potential. I believe in a hopeful future. So what do you make of that? I think what you make of it is that all improvement is change, but not all change is improvement. And so what people were really saying is there's this category of stuff that makes my life miserable. And it goes under the moniker large scale corporate change.

But that doesn't mean that I reject the idea of improvement in the world. I just think that it's a different thing from the large scale corporate change that I'm asked to live in every day at work. So this is actually a really good point of clarification, almost like big C, little c change. I wrote the book here at this desk. This is my writing desk as well as my

podcast desk and my video desk. If I lean out and look through the window here, I can see into the corner of a garden. And next door to me is a garden here in Montclair. And it used to be a stately home. It used to be a private home. It has a beautiful garden surrounding it. And now it's a public, it's a foundation and you can go and walk around the garden. And as I was writing the book, I thought, you know what? I want to talk to a gardener. I think gardeners...

will have an interesting lens on all of this stuff. And so I went next door and introduced myself to the gardener. And she's called Laura. And we sat and talked. And I asked Laura to describe her job to me. And Laura said, I'm paraphrasing greatly, Laura said, "I have to create an environment in which the plants can flourish, but I can't command them to flourish."

I can't tell them to grow. Or at least, I actually could do both of those things, but it would have no effect at all because plants don't listen to humans telling them to flourish or ordering them to thrive or instructing them which direction to grow in. So what I have to do as a gardener is create an environment. The art of gardening is the creation of environment.

an environment in which a certain set of organisms will flourish. I think leadership is the same thing. It is the task of creating an environment in which humans flourish. I think the job of leaders is to create the environment, and the job of humans is to do the flourishing. And if you get those confused, a bunch of weird stuff happens, none of which is particularly interesting.

productive. I can't command you to innovate. I can't tell you to have a great idea. I can't incentivize you to have a great idea, but I can put you with a group of smart people and give you a bit of space. And maybe once in a while, you'll come up with something that changes the world. Completely agree with the analogy of the garden. I have leveraged a similar one myself. And so, and then I put myself in the position of leader and I, and I ask,

What if though I'm gardening? Okay. I hired, I hired a tomato plant and I've created a perfect environment, but now people aren't buying tomatoes anymore. I need that tomato plant to be a cucumber plant. And I come in and I say, tomato plant, you are now a cucumber plant because that is what is profitable and shareholder value, et cetera, et cetera. That's what we do.

Well, that's what we're asked to do. By the way, hallelujah, that's fine. But here's Ashley's problem. And by the way, we're almost at the limit of my knowledge of gardening. So at some point, I'm going to create a gardening sin. And so gardeners of the world, forgive me.

But we don't actually do that. We don't go, we've got a mature tomato plant that's growing. And by the way, tomato, tomato, I'm a Brit. We've got a mature, now we need to switch to cucumbers. But that was fine. We stayed the course with the tomatoes while the tomato market was strong. We go, well, we've got a tomato seedling.

And we haven't changed all the seedlings in the garden in 15 minutes. So let's rip them up and put some cucumber seedlings in instead because three months have gone by and we haven't done anything new recently. So I don't, you know, I'm not arguing and we're straining the metaphor here. We really are. I'm not arguing that there is only one set of plants that can ever be grown in a garden and no one can ever change the set of plants in a garden.

I am saying that if you want to grow healthy plants, you need to understand what a healthy plant demands. And a healthy plant demands a degree of stability so that the root structure can develop and it takes time to do that. Okay, a healthy human demands a degree of stability so that they can be productive. I don't know what the timeframe is and sooner or later, the tomato humans, you might want some cucumber humans instead. Okay, fine, all well and good.

Understand that while you are trying to be in the tomato business, there's a good way, which is give the plants what they need to grow. And there's a shitty way, which is cut them down every year for six months or whatever. That's the one thing. The employee is trying to execute. They have a day to day and trying to innovate and trying to enjoy. How much of the challenge is that

Our people are just trying to do the job. That in and of itself is hard enough. And as soon as they get good enough at doing it, or as soon as they figure out what it is, we change in the name of we have to be doing something better. How does it change without a structural change?

Well, I tried to change it by writing a book that says all of these things. So that was my proffer is let's get some thoughts into the world and let's get the debate going. And I don't know whether I think structural change makes it sound all big and foreboding. I think one can very helpfully help leaders understand that some of their instincts are very good instincts.

and that looking after people in general is a good bet, and give them a bit of how. Looking after people is not only a question of compensation and benefits, that you could consider the pace of change in your organization as a lever by which you can change how well you're looking after people. Okay, there's an interesting thought. So I actually think it's not so much structural change, it is leader toolkit, right?

which starts by helping people understand that the constant change the whole time is not the only gear that we can imagine other ways of driving the car.

than the way that we drive it sort of as a default now. And if you're interested in some of the other ways, they will involve an intelligent approach to stability, not stasis, stability. And here are some things you can do. Look after the teams, help people understand their history, help people get really good at what they do.

empower your HR organization to be the advocate for people on the front lines, insist that your HR organization be doing that the whole time. So there's a list of things that you can do that hopefully are at the intersection of

um, human stability and organizational improvement. I love that. And I think it's a great place to wrap in the, in this is how I'm hearing it, which is I have a model that I've used throughout my career and I use it in so many workshops. I just love it. It's the see, do get model. I learned it from Franklin Covey, but if you can change the way you see things without trying, you will change what you do. And the only way you change the results you get is by changing what you do.

I think what you helped reframe for me right there is perhaps it doesn't have to be structural, but if every leader, myself included, came into role and recognized that what they're paid for and the value they can add is in multiple areas. And one of them is we don't have to force change to show how big and bad and action oriented we are. There's that's progress. That's it. I can get behind that.

Ashley, I really appreciate it. Excellent discussion. The book is The Problem with Change and the Essential Nature of Human Performance. Where else are you? I saw you writing in the Times. What else are you up to these days? Where can people find you? People can find a big long list of all the places that I've been writing on my website at ashleygoodall.com and also find me on LinkedIn. Love it. We will link to those. Ashley, thank you so much for your time. Chris, thanks for having me.

A thank you to this week's guest, Ashley Goodall. The episode was hosted as always by Chris Stemp and produced by yours truly, John Rojas. Ashley's book, The Problem with Change and the Essential Nature of Human Performance is available wherever books are sold.

All right, let's jump into the quick housekeeping items. If you'd ever like to reach out to the show, you can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com or message us on Twitter at smartpeoplepod. And of course, you can head over to smartpeoplepodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter if you're interested in all things Smart People Podcast. All right, that's it for us this week. Make sure you stay tuned because we've got a lot of great interviews coming up.

And we'll see you all next episode.