Dr. David Burkus - Leading From Anywhere

What's hot in the world of teams? Remote work. Virtual leadership. Teaming from a distance. David Burkus' new book Leading From Anywhere explores critical insights about doing this work well.

About David
David Burkus is the best-selling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USAToday, Fast Company, Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, CNN, BBC, NPR, and CBS This Morning. Since 2017, Burkus has ranked as one of the world’s top business thought leaders by Thinkers50. As a sought-after international speaker, his TED Talk has been viewed more than two million times. He’s worked with leaders from organizations across all industries including Google, Stryker, Fidelity, Viacom, and the US Naval Academy. His most recent book is Leading From Anywhere.

David's Publications and Website

• Leading From Anywhere
• The Myths of Creativity
• Under New Management
• Friend of a Friend
• Pick a Fight
• David's Website

Quotes from This Episode

• "I’m trying to drag good ideas out of the ivory tower and drag them over to the corner office."
• "There is one thing that everybody listening to this should do. And that is an exercise I call a Team Working Agreement, which is basically our rules for how we're going to conduct business over the next six months"
• "People don’t want to join a company, they want to join a crusade. They want to join a cause. They want to join something that makes them feel their day to day work is bigger than themselves."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• The Corporate Rebels

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Transcript

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Note: Voice to text transcriptions are about 90% accurate. 

Scott Allen 0:00 
Today on the program, I have a gentleman who I first need to apologize to. Because probably I don't know, Dave, because it might have been like eight years-10 years ago. 2008 I don't even know. But I was supposed to be on your podcast. And this is right, as podcasts were starting. And I think I had something else kind of come up. And I was like, Ah, I'm just not gonna be a part of that podcast. 

David Burkus 0:25 
Yeah. It was 2010. 

Scott Allen 0:32 
Yes. I stood you up!

David Burkus 0:35 
You had a book? Which book was it? 

Scott Allen 0:37 
It was the little book of leadership development. 

David Burkus 0:40 
Yep. Yeah, you had that book. And I reached out to you, because we had we had chatted on Twitter and had this fun, leadership conversations long, long time ago. And you were like, what's podcasting? That's gonna be a thing. And it was...it turned out to be.

Scott Allen 0:57 
You know what, I've missed a couple of them now, Dave. So I was in charge of a team. This is 1996, 97, 98. I was in charge of a team. And one of our team members, it was a brainstorming session, said, "you know, we should get cell phones!" And I looked at, I looked at this team member who's actually been on this podcast, and I said, "why would you ever need a cell phone? You are, You have a calling card, you're good." So I'm a little late to the game. Here. It is, like ten years later. And now I have a podcast, and I just want to say thank you for showing up. But for all of our listeners, Dave Burkus has he's prolific. His work has been featured in HBR, Inc, he's on Forbes Bloomberg, he speaks internationally. And  so I'm going to put a lot of his bio in the show notes. And you'll have access to all of his resources. Really great stuff. I just today received that Read, Watch. Listen, he has a wonderful mailing list. And you can consume his content in so many different ways. I mean, you're just prolific. You really are. I'm gonna take, I'm going to take us through probably your well, your last five books, and I just want to do a little elevator speech. So people have a sense of who you are. That's the bio we'll do. Is that cool? 

David Burkus 2:18 
Yeah, that's cool. I guess we're making up for the lost time. 

Scott Allen 2:20 
Right. Yeah, we got a podcast for ten years. 

David Burkus 2:23 
Now. You know, if I think back to that, by the way, I do think I interviewed your co-author. I did. Yeah, you did. You did. I just didn't show up. Meanwhile, you're interviewing people like Dan Pink, and you know, yes. Right. Smart. Scott. 

Scott Allen 2:39 
So Myths of Creativity. Tell us what's the elevator speech on that book? 

David Burkus 2:44 
Yeah, well, the stories that we tell ourselves are true, even if they're not true, right. The story is the things that we tell ourselves about how the world is supposed to work, how organizations are supposed to work, how leadership is supposed to work, how creativity is supposed to work, affect how we see that right you and I know that as psychology buffs as confirmation bias, but that's the way I like to phrase it right, nice. And in the case of creativity, there are a lot of stories that we tell ourselves, that often we tell ourselves to let ourselves off the hook stories like the Eureka Myth, right that these great ideas come from somewhere and they arrive at us. And we have this eureka moment, which is a way of taking yourself off the hook. Because you don't have the inspiration, you don't have to do anything, right. Or even inside of organizations. There's this I call it the Cohesive Myth, the idea that it's supposed to be fun, and it's supposed to be energetic. And if you're not doing that, while you're brainstorming or ideating or solving a problem as a team, as a team, you're failing in some capacity and, in reality, conflict, right? And a lack of cohesion, a respectful debate, is actually, what makes ideas better, right? So a lot of these stories we tell ourselves, we tell ourselves to let ourselves off the hook, or we think that's how it works. And as a result, we're actually limiting our own creative ability. I don't know that there are many people that are not creative, right? Because I have children. And both of them were in kindergarten at one point. And both of them were incredibly creative. So something else happens as they get older, to exercise the creative muscle in some people and not in others. And I think we can unlearn whatever that was. And so the Myths of Creativity was an attempt to do that, both from an individual but from a team leader perspective, to say these are the things you might be saying about how this is supposed to work in your work. And if we correct them, maybe we can unleash another level of creativity on your team. 

Scott Allen 4:34 
So that's best selling book number one, right? 

David Burkus 4:37 
Sure. Yes. 

Scott Allen 4:37 
Okay. Okay, best selling book number two Under New Management. Yeah, here. 

David Burkus 4:43 
So what's the elevator pitch for that one great leaders don't innovate the product they innovate the factory. Right? So that started hundreds of years ago with the villain in all of our principles of management lectures, Frederick Taylor, right. We don't give him enough credit, though. The man innovated the way factory work was done and unleashed a soul-sucking but much higher level of productivity. And I think that tinkering that experimentation that constantly trying to innovate the way we work shouldn't have ever gone away. But for some reason, it sort of did, right. We dragged industrial management ideas with us from the factory to the office, and a lot of places still haven't left them. So under new management was an attempt to look at some of the cutting-edge movements in terms of how work is organized. See which ones are fads like holacracy and open offices, and which ones are "Hmm, this actually has something to it. And this is probably going to be a new way, we're going to work like remote work," which is, you know, what we're also going to talk about today, or salary transparency, or things that increase levels of trust autonomy in the organization. So that was the idea, right? What are the companies that are doing management a little bit differently? And then is there some psychological science behind how they're doing it that suggests that this isn't a fad, this is where we're moving in the shift from industrial work to what Drucker would have called knowledge work to whatever is coming after that creative work, if you will, whatever we're going to call it, that shift requires that we innovate how we do work, and smart leaders figure that out. And so that was my attempt to kind of shine a spotlight on you should be paying attention to these trends.

Scott Allen 6:18 
Okay. Now there's well, there's TED talks and Google talks on these other two. But Friend of a Friend - tell us about that. But yeah.

David Burkus 6:29 
So, Freind of FreindThere's a TEDx talk in Freind of a Friend. Yeah. And it's really quite fun because it blends stories of like Dana White, and NFL football players and a bunch of stuff. Dana White, by the way, CEO of the UFC. So I find that cool. Other people are like, Who is that guy? anyway? The idea behind a friend of a friend is that most people hate networking like it's, it's, it's a book about networks, but it's a book about how networks work. Because most people don't need a book about how to network, they don't want to do it. Right. Networking makes us feel dirty. Feel sleazy, feels inauthentic. Usually, because we're reading a book written by one person, and then going and trying to apply that one person's advice. And then we feel inauthentic. Well, no wonder you're you're pretending to be Keith Ferrazzi in that moment, not that Keith's wrong or not the Dale Carnegie is wrong. They're just not you. Yeah. So what friend of a friend is is an attempt to teach how networks work through the lens of network science, the people who study how communities form, how you keep people groups together and connected how information flows through communities and through organizations. And then, once you know that, you can come up with a plan for what you need to use the network around you to improve your life or your career, etc. It's really, to be honest with you, it's a book, not only about networking but also about leadership from the standpoint of knowing what's going on in the informal network in your organization. I think most readers thought of it as a networking book, the majority of emails I get from readers are how it helped them find a new job or something like that, which again, is great. But there are chapters about echo chambers in there, and there are chapters that are like that would really help a lot of people avoid some red flags if they paid attention to what diversity in their network was lacking, for example. But yeah, that's the gist of it is an attempt to show how networks work through the lens of network science, but not in that kind of academic way. That's the throughline through all of my work. Yeah, I'm trying to drag good ideas out of the ivory tower and drag them over to the corner office,

Scott Allen 8:24 
which I love, which I absolutely love. Well, and then Pick a Fight.

David Burkus 8:28 
Yeah, pick a fight was a super fun project. I thought it was gonna be my only project in 2020. But you know, I think all of us had different plans for 2020. Yeah. And the gist here is that I was doing a lot of work around teams, and how do you keep teams bonded and motivated and aligned? And what's the role of purpose in teams and in leadership, and really just coming to terms with the fact that people are really failing at the purpose game, right? Like we've known, there's the importance to organizational purpose and vision and mission for a long time. And yet people are just as unengaged as they were two decades before, right? They're just as unable to see the connection between the corporate mission statement on the 10K and their own individual job. And I think that's a problem. And when you look at the teams that do it really well, and the companies that do it really well, most of them don't use this rhetoric. But what I learned is that a good litmus test is if I could walk inside that organization and pull a random person and say, "Hey, here in this company, what are we fighting for?" And they could understand that question and answer it, then that organization has done a great job conveying its purpose. People don't want to join a company, they want to join a crusade, they want to join a cause, they want to join something that makes them feel that their day to day work is bigger than themselves. And most leaders know that I'm not saying anything new there. Yeah, we're most leaders lack how to do it. Yeah. What I did was try and look at the rhetoric and even the research around what inspires people to fight, not always violent fights, although we did look at some interesting research on what causes people to join terrorist cells and that sort of thing. Yeah, but also fight the way you fight for social justice, right? Fight the way that you would stage a protest and try and move the needle on policy fight the way you would for legislative changes fight the way you would to overhaul an industry, fight the way you would to be Rocky trying to prove people wrong, which is we use that as an as a Netflix example of that rocky story versus blockbuster. We use all of those things and really arrive at, there are a couple of different templates you can use. And the current organizational mission probably already meets one of those templates. It's just it needs to be phrased that way, because when it's blah, blah, blah, innovation, blah, blah, blah, shareholder value, blah, blah, blah, integrity. Nobody has a clue what we're doing or why we're doing it.

Scott Allen 10:41 
Yeah. It's not in the heart, not in the soul of the people doing the work, right.

David Burkus 10:45 
Yeah. Yeah. So that was, so that was an audiobook that came out audio-only was a cool project we did with Audible came out in February of 2020. The idea is that more leaders are listening and consuming content via audio on their commute, you know, on their drive-in or the subway ride into work. And so why not put it just in that format that they would love? Yeah. And so we launched it in that format, the last day of February, February 28, actually second to last day, because it was a leap year, February 28. And about a week later, the world ended, and everyone's commute stopped, and nobody listened to audiobooks for like six weeks. So that was a really interesting one to try and market. And as a result, it's become this little like, I don't ever want to compare myself to this, but it's sort of like my Rocky Horror Picture Show, right? It's sort of that little cult thing that there's a much smaller percentage of the readership community has actually read Pick a Fight, but those that love it, right, so you can totally get it and listen to it the whole audiobooks only like two hours long. But for an obvious reason, it didn't really get the rest. That anything else did. Cuz some pretty crazy stuff happened the rest of 2020.

Scott Allen 11:58 
Well, I want to get to 2020 Dave, but what I want to get to first I want, you're prolific, and you have been for decades, right? 

David Burkus 12:07 
Well, decade, let's be fair,

Scott Allen 12:10 
it before that you're earning your PhD, my friend, you know, right. And,  teaching at a university and on faculty. And I mean, it's, it's what's driving you? It's just really interesting, because I watch you from afar, I receive your emails, I follow you on social media. You're just productive. I mean, you are so productive. There are few people as productive as you. 

David Burkus 12:39 
Yeah

Scott Allen 12:39 
You've been dripping that on me for about a decade. Which is brilliant. But talk about that. Talk about your process.

David Burkus 12:48 
Yeah, well, I think it's, I think it's a dash of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a dash of narcissism, and then a heaping tablespoon of wanting to make work not suck. That's actually how I ended pick a fight was like sort of the distillation of why I do all of this work is that I think work is too important to drain as many people as it does. I think the experience of being on a team and going to work is such a huge percentage of our calendar, no matter where we do it. 

Scott Allen 13:18 
Oh, yeah. 

David Burkus 13:19 
It's such a huge percentage of our calendar that and it touches so many other areas of our life that I don't think we can afford to just put up with the idea that like, Meh, you know, only two out of 10 people have jobs that they would label callings and are highly engaging. I don't accept that. I think that's a tragedy. Right? I, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a story. The big distillation of that, for me, happened actually after Pick a Fight. When the world ended. COVID happened. My wife is an ER doctor, okay. And so we were frontlines of all of it. I mean, I remember I remember early March, hearing the reports, I drove to Sam's Club and dropped like $500 on frozen foods because I was convinced that she was gonna get it in the next week, and then we were all gonna get it and self-isolate for like a month, right? Yeah, this is back when we had no idea what quarantine schedules were, or whatever. This is early March.

Scott Allen 14:06 
Yeah, I'm afraid to get my mail.

David Burkus 14:08 
Right. Right. Right. This is, and so she started this routine of coming back from the hospital. And we set up basically like, almost the equivalent of one of those like, disinfection stations you see in like, in movies. Yeah. Right. Like, in our garage and everything gets Lysoled and you know, clothes change outfits change we didn't like drag a washer-dryer to the garage. But we did everything but that. And I had a realization after watching this process for like three weeks that she's doing that to protect the rest of her life from this virus. And if you think about it, and I don't want to over glorify what I do, compared to what she does, because it just it does not compare. But if you think about it, that's actually all of us if you're in a workplace that really drags you down. If you're in an environment, that really I mean, you could spout all you want about work-life balance. But if your job drains you, makes you angry makes you, you bring that home with you. And right unless you get some ritual to truly disinfect yourself from all of that negativity and crap that spills over into your, the rest of your life, no matter how hard you try to balance the two spheres. Yeah. And so that experience of work, we're not going to change it, right. Think about the technological advances we've had in the last 100 years. And then we still work about the same amount of hours every week, right? So clearly, we want to be doing this, we just want to do work. That doesn't suck. Right. And so that's my that would be sort of the why behind all of that productivity. To be fair, though, let's not negate what I said. The first there's a bit of ADHD and a bit of narcissism in there.

Scott Allen 15:51 
Tell me is that can you think of an organization or a few organizations that do a good job if you look at the holistic body of work? Can you think of an organization or a couple of organizations that are doing it well?

David Burkus 16:07 
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, it seems like most organizations don't do it well, forever. Like, I've become really sour on case studies, unless you look at them as snapshots of time, but sure, how many companies in Good to Great aren't even around anymore? You know, much, much less are no longer great. Um, there are a few that I think are fascinating to examine. But I think it's usually easier to look at it through the lens of not a whole company, but a specific leader, right, because that change is different. In the new book, and leading from anywhere, we talked about the Belgian Ministry of Social Security, which had a new leader about over a decade ago, Frank Van Massenhove. And he saw it as I mean, this was that Well, actually, that was probably as inspiring to work at as the American, you know, administration, Social Security Administration, right? Yeah, they're not the most engaging things. It's like working at the DMV, right, or something like that. And he aspired to sort of change that to make the culture a lot better. To make it something that civil servants actually wanted to apply to, right. On average, they were getting like, maybe one or two applications for every opening, which really does not give you the best people to work with if you don't have lots of people to choose from. And so we wanted to turn a lot of that around and realize that it would depend on being forthcoming about trust and autonomy, letting people know what they need to work on, and letting them work on it, and giving them the autonomy to determine how they do that. And what's funny is every policy change flowed out of that. And we can talk about specific policy changes, which is usually what people ask when they say, "Hey, what organization does it right," and you want to say like, "Oh, well, such and such company, because they have this policy of whatever." But I think that's a different thing. I think it takes that shift of flipping towards trust and autonomy. And that that created a largely remote workforce, where it's what I would call "a work from anywhere workforce," where employees are there, maybe 20% of the time, at any given time. It created a more efficient workplace, people weren't gaming the system trying to get every little expense, you know, made it created a more gender-balanced workplace, which they there wasn't even a formal gender balance program. But it became one of the most integrated and inclusive arms of the Belgian government simply because they gave that trust and autonomy, that flexibility. So I like to I usually like to cite that example, not only because it's government rights, which proves you can do it anywhere because you can make it work in government, you can make it work anywhere. But also that's the problem. First, people often come to me and go, because I wrote I did the big TED talk was about salary, transparency, and they go, how transparent should we be in like, well, how trusting are your people now? Like, there's a bigger problem we need to solve first, in almost every case. And now with work from anywhere, people are like, Oh, well, well, you know, what, what spying software should we use? Buddy? If you can't trust your people to do your work? You screwed up a long time ago. And it doesn't matter what software you use to monitor them, right. So I like to use that example. We talked about it and leading from anywhere. There's also there's a great little book by two Danish friends of mine called The Corporate Rebels, these two like 20 somethings that quit their jobs and just went on this. I don't know who bankrolled them on this. By the way. I just went on this world tour of visiting like 100 different companies and organizations that were doing work differently and chronicling their lessons. And that's where I first heard about the Belgian Social Security thing, but the more I researched him and watch this stuff and read his stuff, it's just a fascinating example. 

So pick a fight came out, we're excited to talk and start working with organizations about, you know, finding a better way to frame their purpose and mission and finding ways to teach job crafting as Amy Wrzesniewski, would put it, and then obviously, COVID happens and the world doesn't need that, right. Like what the world needs is how do we just survive? How do I get? How do I make sure my people have a decent internet connection? and all this sort of stuff. And I was already thinking about and digesting a lot of research furthering pick a fight around teams. And you know, the line I use now is one of my other goals. Besides the corporate office to the from the ivory tower to the corporate offices, I'm trying to help teams do their best work ever. So I was already looking at what makes a great team, I put out a video before COVID, about this idea that they are intellectually diverse, psychologically safe, and then have a cause worth fighting for, right? And you need all three of those things. Because what good is a diversity of people don't feel safe enough to speak up. And then and then what good is having all of that if there's no purpose to sort of inspire them? And so I was looking at those sorts of things. And then I got an email from my publisher. And they said, Hey, we were in an editor's meeting, and we were talking about COVID. And the response and what do companies need to know? And as we started throwing out names of companies as templates, we realized that half of them you profiled and Under New Management, have you studied this remote work trend? Would you be interested in writing a book about remote work trends and all that sort of stuff? And I said, Can I have the weekend, and so they because they emailed me on like a Friday afternoon. And I thought about it, and it was Memorial Day weekend, too. So I actually vividly remember I was at the pool attached to our gym outdoors, more of the weekend. First time anybody's like out at the gym pool. And as we're talking to old friends, so many of them bring up that they're managing this, and they're having now they went remote. And I was like, I felt awful. I felt like an investigative reporter because I was like, stop what you're doing and talk to me. Don't swim with your kids. I don't care that he can do the slide on his own, like talk to me. And what I realized, looking at what books were already available, there are already some great books about remote work, Jason Fried and David Hansson, but that's sort of a manifesto for how to make your whole company remote. Right? And then I was looking at what's coming, because you can search on Amazon for like forthcoming books and see who in the space like there's a couple different researchers that study remote companies that are later in the year coming out with their here are the trends about remote work. But I said that my conversations that day, and then also my gut instinct based on the hole in the market, is that there isn't a manual for I'm a mid-level manager at a 1000 person organization that just went remote. What the heck do I do? There was here's how to run your whole company remote. And then here's how remote work will shape the economy. But none of that is useful if you're, you know, a senior regional sales director of 11 people, and you're just trying to figure out how to get that team to feel like a team again, even though they're not in the same person. So I wrote them back on Monday morning, or Tuesday morning because we were there and I said that that's the book I'd be interested in writing. And they said, "Great, how soon can you write it?" And I, and I, and I said, Well, no, I said, I said, it was Memorial Day weekend. I said, you know if I canceled everything, and I just really harmed it and focused on this. I could probably get you the first draft by Labor Day. Wow. And they said, Great. And then they sent a contract. And in the email with the contract, they said, "Hey, by the way, do you think you could make it August 31 instead of Labor day, so they move it up by a week!

My goal here wasn't to have all the answers. Right, it was to give some of the answers based on where people are right now. Yeah. Right. And so I normally like to spend like a year researching a question that will become the book, right, yeah. And I didn't really get to do that here. But I already had relationships with a lot of thriving remote companies, I have been working mostly from home for the last decade of my own life. And I'm, like, well aware of the research on thriving teams, both in-person and remote. And so I felt like, Okay, we've got enough here to put something together that I think would be useful and helpful. And in reality, as I started writing the book, a bigger realization came to mind where I didn't feel pressure to write the I mean, I call it the Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams. But the big title is leading from anywhere, because I think that's where we're headed. And that realization came in July, late June, early July, as I was writing the book is that we're going back to the office, but not all of us, and not all at once. And so what's actually going to be happening here is a greater level of trust and autonomy. There's those words, again, a greater level of trust and autonomy, and how we lead our teams and manage our teams, and greater intentionality and how we keep them bonded. And that was sort of like, Oh, well, that's a great answer to a much smaller question. But a much more pressing question. For most people, right? If you're the mid-level manager at Frito Lay, we got you now. And I think the existing literature didn't, and I didn't see it in a lot of the other books that I knew were coming because they were looking at sort of that macro. We call it the Essential Guide, I actually wanted to call it the "Survival Guide," but they wouldn't let me. But that's sort of the goal, right? Is that here's your we're basically even if you're at the office now, or going back to the office, your whole team is not they're not going to be there all of the time. You know, everybody needs to learn the lessons that we learn from great remote teams and great remote companies, even if you get to see your people once or twice a week. But everybody should probably consider themselves remote leaders, to some extent, because that's where we're headed.

Scott Allen 27:38 
So what were a couple of insights, what were a couple of things that stood out for you that we can expose people to some of the content but not give it all away? What what's

David Burkus 27:51 
I'll give you one of the biggest ones. And it leads off, it leads off the book, because I think it's one of the biggest problems is that, and this is actually from research that was conducted bc before Corona, around virtual teams, and where the biggest breakdowns are. And then and then so I read that study and then got to watch it happen throughout the whole world. And that is that virtual teams that thrive or virtual teams that fail to thrive. They either find a way to adopt shared understanding and shared identity, or they don't. And that makes all the difference. And I'll define those terms real quick. Create shared understanding; understanding is about how we think of each other. It is...Do I understand the knowledge, skills, and abilities of each person on the team? Do I understand their work preferences, their new work preferences based on their new environment, I mean, that the only nice thing about the Monday through Friday, nine to five environment is that it would guarantee that you're probably going to see that person, right. This means lots of stuff happens accidentally, and you don't have to be intentional about a lot of stuff. Shared understanding also means do I like do I know their calendar? Do I know how they want to receive feedback? Do I know? Do I know how they want how they normally ask for help. Some people are not very specific about putting out calls for help. And as a result, they feel like no one's helping them. Because no one knows they're asking for help. Right? Shared understanding speaks to all of that. In the short term, we saw this the biggest lack of shared understanding for a lot of organizations happen from a shared understanding of the context people were working in, right. So think back to June, July of 2020, or maybe even April and May of 2020. I'm lucky enough to be recording this and working most days from about a 10 by 10 room in the basement of my house. It's quiet, even though my kids just came home from school. I heard them you didn't hear them, right? I'm lucky in that regard. Yeah. Other people bought a folding screen at Home Depot and pulled it across the corner of their dining room, and that's been their office for nine months. As a team leader, I have two very different expectations of those two different. And as a member of that team, I have two very different expectations. And if I just take the time to understand the context, the whole relationship becomes more effective. Right? So shared understanding is that big one that I think a lot of organizations struggled with and still do in the early days. 

Scott Allen 30:15 
Okay

David Burkus 30:16 
Shared identity speaks to how well I feel like the team that I'm currently serving on is my real team. Right? How I how well I identify with their purpose with their mission, I feel like that's my team. And in a world of sort of cross-functional, and multi matrix and all that me consultants make billions of dollars building matrix organizations just so other consulting firms can make billions tearing them back apart, right? But what that creates, is really a lack of an idea of identity. And actually, I got to get personal here, because I remembered I never thought of it as a remote work job. But in between college and graduate school, I worked as a sales rep as a, as a traveling salesman. I didn't die like in the book. But yeah. But I realized in that moment that I had three or four reps that were also in my city. And then I had a manager who was not in my city, and who had a team of people, none of whom were in my city. So which ones my team? Is my team, the people that report to my manager, whereas my team, the two people that live in the same city as me, so I know if I need help, they're the ones that will help me right. shared identity sort of speaks to that idea. And I think this is where we're headed. This is the big pitfall we're headed for in 2021. As people start to come back to the office at different paces, is we always talked about "us versus them" in silos and politics and turf wars, but it was often functional. I think we're headed for a world if we're not paying attention to it and are deliberate about building community and identity, we're headed for a world of sort of us versus them co-located versus remoters, right. And the more CO located you are, the more you feel like those are the real employees, and these were motors or something else. And that's going to be a huge problem, not only because top talent doesn't want to be at the office from nine to five, Monday through Friday anymore, but also just because things will break down. So that shared identity piece is I think the future thing to look out for how are you going to make sure that no matter where your team is, they feel like this is the team, and it doesn't matter where we're located. We're all working together alone.

Scott Allen 32:15 
And that's an adaptive challenge, right? 

David Burkus 32:26 
Yeah, I agree. And you know, in the book, we throw out a bunch of different activities that work from a bunch of different companies. So there are small things that you can do, right? Little stuff, like adding buffer time, at the beginning or end of a meeting for people to have socialization time. I don't think anybody wants to do another like, zoom, happy hour, I think we're hungover from Zoom happy hours. But little buffers of time, at the beginning of the meeting ended meeting where people talk about their debt, the stuff that would have happened in a co-located office, right? Even things like and I'm seeing this more and more even things like little rituals, the things that your team does that no other team does, right? Maybe it's a random chant, or an inside joke that we always share on the Slack channel on Monday, right? Or like one team I, I worked with, they ignore all of the little emojis that zoom and Microsoft Teams have now but they recreate them while they're on mute. Right? So you might be talking, and somebody really likes your point. So you're just gonna see jazz hands from that little corner. And it's awesome, right? Because everybody knows what it means. So it creates this sense of community around that it's much more little stuff like that. I mean, you know this because you know, the literature, the ropes courses in the trust, fall stuff never really built teams anyway. Yeah, it was much more about the habits and the regular rituals and things. It's just an a co-located team. Those happened organically. Now we need to be a bit more deliberate about it. But there is no one prescription, do this, and your team will feel like a team. There are a bunch of different things you have to fill out. Actually, let me correct myself. Because there is one thing that probably everybody listening to this if you lead a team should do. And that is an exercise that I call a team working agreement, which is basically our it's sort of like our rules for how we're going to conduct business over the next six months or whatever. And this is, most teams have this or can flush this out when they're co-located non verbally. But now we need to be much more deliberate about it because we can't rely on that storming, norming, forming, stuff that Tuckman always wrote about. So we need to have the conversation upfront. Hey, what topics are for email? What topics warrant a simultaneous conversation like a zoom call? Hey, how do we want to give each other feedback? How do we want to make requests for help? What's a reasonable amount of time to wait for a response to an email before you call someone? And all of those little things that are often unstated, if they're left unstated, everyone's going to develop their own little rules. Yes, and it's much better to have that conversation. And what I encourage people to do is, as the leader, do that as a series of questions like what I just listed out, but when the team arrives at an answer, write it in the affirmative. So we agree that 24 hours is a reasonable amount of time to wait for an email, right? And then you have your working agreement, or as I sometimes when I'm feeling a little too patriotic, I call it the "Declaration of Interdependence." But, but it's the same idea, right? These are our rules. And that can become a great document for not only just helping people not feel like they're out on their own, or feel alienated for a reason that was really just misreading of someone's communication. It helps onboarding when a new member of the team comes on, hey, these are our rules of the road. This is how we interact, right? It helps conflict resolution, it helps all sorts of stuff. So I would say that's the one thing I would tell you, I don't care what company you work for, what team you're on, do that. And you do after that to build a team, it's probably gonna depend on the team.

Scott Allen 35:44 
Well, I love it, because so much of our work in the presentation book, online presentations by design, you're exactly right. So many of the norms are new. People be on camera, what's the expectation? What should I be wearing? And all of that was unspoken. And I've spoken with leaders who say, well, gosh, you know, 40% of my people aren't even on camera. Well, you have you had the conversation? Yeah, you have you set forth that contract is the what word? Can people be on a walk while they're listening to the zoom? Is that okay? Or should I feel bad about that? And all of those norms, and those expectations that we took for granted, now have to be and I love the word - In our book, we're using the word "design." But I love the word intentionality as well, because we have to be intentional about designing how it's going to work for us. So I love what you're saying. I love it. 

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you, I love it to?

David Burkus 36:40 
I'm curious, actually, what did you decide on the video camera thing? Because in leading from anywhere, I basically came up with the rule of everyone on camera, or no one on camera. In other words, there are times in the meeting, like when we're discussing, which should be the primary reason for the meeting anyway, not just the delivery of information that could have been an email or a video recording, right. But when we're discussing, everybody should be on camera. But there are times where nobody needs to be on camera, except like the presenter. And again, it's an intentionality thing. But that became sort of my rule. Because the worst thing that can happen is a discussion. We're only half the people are on camera, because you'll see the nonverbals of like, you even told me before we started, if I do this, it means I'm going to jump in. I if you're not on camera, I can't see that. And especially like if you're not on camera, and you're accidentally on mute, I can't hear you speak up either. So in the discussion times, everyone, but that that ended up being my rule, it's like everybody or nobody, I also came up I also and I stole this from Basecamp, and Jason Freed. And I think I stole it straight from the remote book, because it's brilliant. Yeah, it was the idea that in a meeting, and I think this is especially important, as we move to this work from anywhere future, either the meeting is 100% in person, or it's 100%. Virtual, it's no longer Okay, for people in a conference room around one of those little like, looks like a tarantula. Yeah. Used to sound, you know, you don't I don't even know what that's called...speakerphone doesn't quite cover its level of intimidating this. But you know, we used to do that right? every round with one No, right? If one person can't make it to the meeting, everybody go back to your office and jump on your computer, because we want a level playing field for the discussion. Otherwise, power dynamics come into play. People self-censor, we don't even hear certain ideas, our meeting is worse off. It's great if we can have 100% people in the meeting. But the second-best thing is everyone on video, not half and half. That's actually the worst of the three possible options. 

Scott Allen 38:41 
Well, it makes me think of high flex the model in higher education right now where you have four people in the room and seven people on zoom. And it's it's intense. And we didn't come up with a hard and fast rule. We just said, Look, have the conversation, figure out what is applicable to your culture, and what the norm is going to be. And have that be the norm. And I've had leaders say, "look, I really value everyone being on full time, and I've had leaders say, look, I don't care if you're in a sweatshirt and your dogs in your lap. Just be on camera. I want you on camera. I don't care. So it's interesting, because all of these new ways of being really, we have to be intentional. We have to design how we're gonna work moving forward. And I love your phrasing of to make work not suck. Right? 

David Burkus 39:31 
Yeah. 

Scott Allen 39:32 
That's the goal!

David Burkus 39:34 
I mean, if fundamentally, so here's the interesting thing about work, right? Fundamentally, I sometimes get to work with nonprofit leaders, right? And it's always really interesting because they say, oh, but it's so different because everyone here is a volunteer. And I always tell them the same thing, which is everyone in for-profits, a volunteer to write like I whatever our exchange is an annual salary for my knowledge, right amount of time for my presence. Whatever our exchange is, I opted in to that exchange. You didn't force it on me. Yeah, that's been illegal for like 100 years, thank god, 100 plus. So everyone is still that volunteer. And so I fundamentally believe that everybody who takes a job, a new job shows up excited to do that job. Yeah. And the role of a leader is don't screw that up. Yeah, though, and if you work in a sucky organization, then your job is human shield so that you protect those people from the rest of it. Right? But it's too important to what we do and what we opted in for to suck for so many people.

Scott Allen 40:37 
Yeah, two out of 10. Two out of 10?

David Burkus 40:40 
Yeah. So I mean, that's, that's using the Gallup engagement figures, you and I could have a super nerdy conversation about what engagement metric is best Gallup's versus other ones. It's actually probably three out of 10 in the United States, but worldwide, it's two out of 10. And the interesting thing is it hasn't budged for 20 years. And the reason I pick on Gallup, it goes back to pick a fight is that one of the questions in their inventory is "does the mission and vision of the company make me feel my job is important?" So for as long as Gallup has been asking that question, presumably organizations have been learning -"Hmm, our engagement numbers are low, therefore, we should work on this, this item." And whether they have or they haven't, it hasn't moved the needle, which tells me that whatever work they're doing, not working all that well.

Scott Allen 41:26 
Yeah. Any other real quick, because we're close on time. Any other insights that you want to leave listeners with before we close down for the day, Dave?

David Burkus 41:35 
Yeah, I mean, I think we were talking about intentionality. And I think the other big hurdle that a lot of remote organizations, whether you consider yourself one or not, congratulations, you are right, you are a work from anywhere organization at the least. I think one of the things a lot of people are gonna struggle with is how do you build a team? How do you bond a team, we talked a bit about team identity. But I think one of the things we probably didn't talk about is the intentionality behind the physical meeting itself, because physical meetings are coming back. But you're going to have to make sure that they're not like, people, it used to be okay to walk out of a meeting and be like, oh, that whole thing used to be an email. I mean, it wasn't okay, don't get me wrong, it wasn't okay, then what we put up with it, because presumably, everyone in the meeting was already in the office. So what's the difference? Yeah, right. Now, if you're calling everyone together, you need to be much more intentional about that, not only because that's your time where information is presented and ideas are discussed. That's your only time for bonding that team together as well. Yeah, everything you need to do is respect that as well. I am bullish on the idea that, and I hope it's sooner rather than later. I'm not going to predict when it is, but whenever it happens, that everybody who wants a vaccine gets a vaccine in the world can open back up again. When that happens, I am bullish on gatherings, right, I think people are going to want to gather, I think people are going to be excited about coming back to the office for a short period of time, they're going to be I mean, imagine taking that same 90-minute commute from 2019. But being excited about it, because it's the one time a week, you're going to see everyone. And just like the first day at the job, the job of a leader is don't screw that up, because people are going to have excitement about that. But if we just go back to the normal drudgery of those meetings, the lack of intentionality of those meetings, the lack of respect for the fact that those are where people bond and develop non-verbal forms of communication that translate over into 

Scott Allen 43:30 
the poor design of those meetings.

David Burkus 43:34 
If we're not intentional about that, then people are gonna love even coming to the 20% of the time they have to be at the office.

Scott Allen 43:41 
Yeah. Anyway. Such a beautiful puzzle, man. It's a beautiful puzzle. And it's an important puzzle. Because I, I would hope that people would have great passion and joy in their work. And it's it's sad. I mean, it's an opportunity for people like you and me to do work to try and help figure out how to make those numbers shift. But it's a fascinating puzzle. It just, is...

David Burkus 44:12 
and it's one of those things where like, I'm not a naive optimist. I don't know that we'll get to 10 out of 10 ever. No. But the bar is so low. That think about the gains if you go from 20% to 30%. Oh, right. 50% gain on engagement. What does that mean for productivity for the organization for you and your level of stress as a leader like so? Yeah, it just takes some level of intentionality. And I think it's, foolish to assume that we didn't need to be intentional about the last nine months. And some people think this, that we didn't need to be intentional because eventually, we're all going back. That's done that's over with you do not send 70 million people to home to work for nine months and then just be like, come on back. It doesn't happen. You said the word puzzled before I mean, right. That's what we've all done with our calendars with our lives. It used to be we had work right at the center of the puzzle, and then we fit little stuff around the margins. Well, now it's much for most people, for most knowledge workers, at least it's much more integrated. It's much more like a puzzle than ever before. They're not going to let you smash that and put your company back at the center of it most of your specialty your top talent, but most of your talent is not going to willingly go back to that chain. So it takes some intentionality we got to do that puzzle. Everybody should be considering themselves remote leaders now, even if you're lucky enough to get to see your people every week.

Scott Allen 45:33 
Yeah, I love it. So tell me what you're listening to real quickly. What are you? What are you streaming? Listening to what content has you in awe right now? And it doesn't have to do with it doesn't have anything to it doesn't have to be leadership or teaming. It could just be something you're watching on Netflix that you've loved.

David Burkus 45:50 
Yeah, so I have an eight-year-old and a six-year-old so I don't I mean, I have Netflix, but I don't have Netflix. We only went through really one hard one where we where I live. But during it in the spring, we decided to move forward the age of recommendation on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, sorry, just throwing them in order. And we're about halfway through, and I'm trying to come up with a plan for how to explain to my eight year old my six-year-old at Tony Stark died. Spoiler alert, but come on, if you're watching this, I gave you like three years. So that I actually just I just finished listening to...so Audible who I'm you know, obliged to endorse because they did the whole Pick a Fight thing has these audio plays that they do so essentially, rather than just one person read a book, they get a whole cast of people and write a screenplay, but it's just it's sort of like old-timey radio, right? Like, wow, yeah, two episodes and that sort of stuff. And I'm loving those. I listened to a treasure island one A while back. I just finished listening to the audio play of Ender's Game, which is a sci-fi book that they told me that if I liked Ready Player One I would like Ender's Game. I don't actually know that they're equivalent, but they're both fascinating. So yeah, yeah, that would be what I at least listening to consuming via non-text. I still consume a lot of information with my eyes. Yeah, I'm old school like that. I still read with my eyes a lot.

Scott Allen 47:22 
You print it up journal articles in such Dave? 

David Burkus 47:25 
I actually, I should show you the piles. I kill a lot of trees. I write a book and I feel bad about it. But I figured that the process of writing them still doesn't kill as many trees as publishing the book. So I'm okay right now. I print them all out. I'm actually so I love books so much that I think writing in them is defacing them. So what I actually do is I read with I can show it to you, I'm sure got it. I read with a little post-it note pad. And when I want to make a note, I stick that on. And then when I'm done with the book, I photocopy the page that I stuck this on, and then I write the note on the photocopy version. And then I file the photocopy version away.

Scott Allen 48:20 
See? That's right. I know it's crazy. 

David Burkus 48:23 
But it does end up killing a lot of trees, and I do feel bad about that. But I don't know how to change it.

Scott Allen 48:30 
Oh, man. I'm gonna call this episode, "Thanks for Showing Up." So I'm just real thankful for the work that you do. Dave, I love your energy. I love your enthusiasm. I love your curiosity. And thanks. Thanks for doing what you do, man. It's making a difference in the world and, and keep working to make work not suck. That's a great mission.

David Burkus 49:04 
That's your fight too. So I appreciate it. Thanks for you. Thanks for having me on. 

Scott Allen 49:07 
Thanks so much, Dave. Take care be well. 

David Burkus 49:10 
You too.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai