Ep. 11: The Ones Who Care The Most Will Leave You First
About this episode:
Original Air Date: May 27 2024In the nearly five years since launching this podcast, our inbox has received one type of question more than any other: “If I’m trying to change a system that just doesn’t want to change, how do I keep going? When should I admit defeat and leave?” As people who function as “professional resistance” in organizations all over the world, this questions always hits us hard—because change itself is hard and often can lead to burnout.
So we’re finally having this conversation out in the open to tackle why the people who care the most are the ones who leave. Rodney and Sam dig into why burnout is so common among change agents, how to identify signs of meaningful progress, and when individuals and leaders should see the writing on the wall and throw in the towel.
Oh, and we're on Instagram now! Come party with us! https://www.instagram.com/atworkwiththeready/
Mentioned in this episode:
”wasta”
"emotional labor of change": AWWTR Ep. 6
“Mission-Based Team”: FoHR Ep. 1
”the yips”
“Basecamp scandal”: BNW Ep. 71
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
It would take more than one hand to count the number of situations I have been in with a friend or a coaching client where they have resigned themselves to, "I'm just going to keep my head down and live with it and get a paycheck for reasons." They can't do it forever.
[Intro music]
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I'm Rodney Evans, and that is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Hello, Rodney Evans, Sam Spurlin reporting for duty.
Rodney Evans:
In his ready sweatshirt, like the good corporate citizen that he is. I love it. Welcome back to At Work With The Ready. This is a podcast about modernizing organizations as the future of work meets the present moment.
Sam Spurlin:
And as you know, each episode we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern that we think is worth digging into. We pull it apart like cheesy bread and then, we propose solutions for what to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
Did you know my favorite food of all foods is mozzarella sticks?
Sam Spurlin:
Mozzarella sticks are pretty great.
Rodney Evans:
This week we're going to talk about something else. I'm going to just think about that food.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, you're welcome.
Rodney Evans:
While we're talking about...what we are talking about? We're talking about why people leave. We never talk about turnover on this show. We just assume that everybody stays everywhere forever, but actually, we know from our clients who are not us, that they worry a lot about talent and retention and turnover and great people leaving. And we also know that the work that we do can sometimes provoke people to have epiphanies about their lives and purpose. And so we thought it would be really fun to chat about that today.
Sam Spurlin:
I was wondering if we were going to talk about that thing that you just said at the end at some point, and you just front loaded it, which I think is great, and I've started contracting with clients around this. It's a thing to be aware of, as we embark on this work that you are going to awaken things inside of your best people and if you cannot help them fulfill their dreams at work, they may leave.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, once they wake up, they're going to be cranky, like how everyone is when they get woken up and they're going to be looking around and then you're going to have to do something to settle them.
Sam Spurlin:
Exactly.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
All right.
Rodney Evans:
Before we do all that, let us check in.
Sam Spurlin:
Let's check-in. Let's check-in, and we're going to do a truly orthogonal check-in, nothing related to the topic, but I've enjoyed it today. How do you visualize-
Rodney Evans:
Did you just do that so that you could use the word orthogonal?
Sam Spurlin:
No, I just thought of that in the moment because I'm a wordsmith. How do you visualize the shape of a year?
Rodney Evans:
For some reason I was like, I want to call you a word pirate now. The shape of the year, I think of the shape of the year as being a loop, an oval loop where January is at the top and July is at the bottom and spring is coming down the right side of the oval and fall is going up the left side of the oval, like a cycle.
Sam Spurlin:
Holy shit.
Rodney Evans:
That's how everybody does it, right?
Sam Spurlin:
I'm holding up almost exactly what Rodney drew-
Rodney Evans:
It's almost exactly like that, but it's a pear.
Sam Spurlin:
Mine is more of a teardrop shape, where things are more accelerated and kind of the winter months are kind of around the top, but the summer is more spacious at the bottom, but it's basically what you just described there, which is pretty wild, right?
Rodney Evans:
That's wild. Wait, unless this is just how everyone thinks about-
Sam Spurlin:
Well, no, I have data for you, because I've used this check-in question two other times today. In both situations it was a group of three in which I was one of the three. And in both meetings, we had the exact same pattern, which is one person said oval, one person said something about a line, and one person, me, had the thing that I just showed about the teardrop being kind of oval-shaped. Yeah, so you and I are the same on this, I think.
Rodney Evans:
Interesting. That's such a good check-in question. I love it. I have random asides, but I'm not going to do them right now.
Sam Spurlin:
No, we're going to do it. We're focused.
Rodney Evans:
What I am going to do is ask our listeners for a review please on Apple Podcast, five stars only. We really appreciate it. A lot of you have been doing it. I'm too scared to read them, but Sam and Jack do and it's really, really nice when you guys leave us reviews.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, and in this week the review, you should leave your answer to the question of, well, how do you visualize a year so that we know after which episode you left a review? That'd be fun, right?
Rodney Evans:
That would be so fun. Also, this isn't in the notes because Jack is slacking off. We're on Instagram now. I don't know our handle, but I bet Jack will put it in the show notes. Perfect. Fun fact, on Saturday morning, Sam's wife posted a story about the podcast and I turned to my husband and I was like, so Emily is winning at spousing, get your shit together. To which he responded, "What's the name of your podcast?" I was like, "Thanks. I'll see myself out." Anyway, we're over there and you can ... maybe we'll start asking questions there or something. I don't know, I just like talking to the people who listen to this podcast.
The Pattern: Change-makers burn out and leave because fighting for change is exhausting
Sam Spurlin:
Absolutely. All right, should we dive into the pattern?
Rodney Evans:
Let's do it. I'm excited for this one.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, cool. So as we said at the top, the pattern that we want to pull apart like cheesy bread today is that those who want to disrupt an organization get burnt out and often leave because of the resistance they face within those organizations and it keeps the org stuck and full of folks who accept the status quo.
Rodney Evans:
Woof.
Sam Spurlin:
Woof.
Rodney Evans:
So true.
Sam Spurlin:
What is worth saying about this pattern?
Rodney Evans:
I mean, we encounter these people a lot. So the people who are not satisfied with the way that their operating system is at present, are often the people who we meet in client organizations and also in the world because they are our kindred who are like, "Let's do things differently." And they also tend to be the ones who are not just quietly grudgingly, curmudgeonly, dissatisfied, but who care enough to try.
Sam Spurlin:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
They're the people who not only are principally aligned but sort of have the wasta to do something about it. And that's how we get to know them.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And it's like these people are so essential. This archetype is so essential as a provocation in any system to keep it from just getting stuck in a rut and yet, being the provoker in any kind of system, large or small of any kind. And we should talk more about this, because there is no utopia even at The Ready, is exhausting. Sharan's mom, I was having dinner with Sharan, one of our colleagues recently, and her mom is a therapist and her mom said to her very succinctly recently, "Oh, what you do is professional resistance." And I was like, "Bro, that is what we do." And she was just saying how burnout in jobs that are situated that way is incredibly high and it's incredibly tiring.
And for us, we have a place to go outside of the organization that we're trying to disrupt, but for the people inside of it, they just live there. That's just in their house where they're trying to do things and sometimes it changes and it works, and sometimes those people tap out. And I have known more than one executive in my career who has gone to be a professional disruptor more than once, and either the body has rejected the organ and they've gotten pushed out for being too much of an irritant or they've given up and left, and I think that that's we see that.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when I think about this topic, I think there's two different angles to approach it. One is as the individual who is trying to improve the system, like viewing yourself as instrument, as the tool that is actually, changing the system. And I think there's one way to look at that, which is really an entire episode that we did a few weeks ago around the emotional labor of change work. So this is an addendum to that, but we may talk more about individual focused approaches to this or the other angle is as a leader or somebody in a position of power in these organizations. And having avenues to change OSs in I guess in a more dramatic way than sometimes folks who are not as close to the top have available to them.
So I wonder if we can play with both of those lenses as we're talking about this topic, position of power, changing things so these folks don't leave being one of those folks who is trying to change things and feeling like you might want to leave as well. And obviously, those groups can also be the same. Senior leaders often are the ones leaving.
Why burnout from fighting for change happens at every level, including leadership
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I'm curious to ask you more about that because having worked at the top of a lot of houses, I am often surprised by how constrained people who have a lot of explicit authority still feel.
Sam Spurlin:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
And so because you brought up the idea of these two lenses, how do you see that lens being different, if you're the leader who theoretically holds the keys to a lot of the OS, what's your damage?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I think what I'm realizing is that the person who I'm picturing in my head as the individual in the thing that I said is somebody quite low in the organization or doesn't have a lot of explicit positional power, we get those questions all the time. How do I start changing things? I don't have control over anything, I can't tell anybody what to do. I don't have a team. So those folks, those are often some of the most engaged with us when we come in and do work because I think they see something they can latch onto and-
Rodney Evans:
They see a life raft.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, exactly. A life raft, and by one of us coming into an organization, we have a position of authority, because someone has hired us and we are a voice that is being paid to exist within an organization. So people do kind of latch onto that, but yeah, the individual can also exist at that most senior level, as you said, and where you would assume that there's a lot of degrees of freedom for those folks. In many cases, there are not, everybody has a boss, even your boss.
Rodney Evans:
Everybody has a boss, and a lot of times, I think at the very top of the house, the boss is the board and the share price and meeting forecasts, which can be, I think, a lot harder to negotiate within some ways, than if you are a little, quote-unquote, lower in the organization and you can say to a reasonable boss who's bought into the idea of shaking up the status quo, "Well, this might take an extra quarter or look at all of the signals of progress that we've made so far, we need to keep pouring gas on this thing because it's really working," you can't really talk to Wall Street and be like-
Sam Spurlin:
Wall Street don't care.
Rodney Evans:
"We're going slow to go fast guys." Wall Street is not listening.
Why your best employees are often the ones pushing hardest for change
Sam Spurlin:
No. Yeah, no. I think that's very true. Another thing worth talking about with this pattern is I think some of the characteristics that makes somebody want to change an organization is also just the characteristics that you want in an employee.
Rodney Evans:
That's so true.
Sam Spurlin:
Someone who gives a shit, about how things are going, about the customer experience, about being intolerant of just stupid stuff that's getting in the way. You don't have to necessarily have those characteristics to be directed at an organization's operating system. You can just have those characteristics and be an awesome product manager or awesome marketer or awesome tech, software developer tech. Tech is the role that I just landed on.
Rodney Evans:
Tech can.
Sam Spurlin:
Tech. Tech roles. So the reason I bring that up is that those are the same folks who they're going to be looking for the exits. If it seems like they are not able to just do their job well ... so it's not even about keep your org design nerds happy, because they're going to leave, it's like keep your highly motivated people who give a shit happy because they will leave and often, they are the same people who care about the OS.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think that's such a good point Sam and the people who are dissatisfied with the status quo and are willing to engage are the people who are paying attention to how things are getting done and who are applying critical thinking. And often ... in my experience, are often the people who are reading about macro trends and paying attention to what other organizations are doing and are a little bit more concerned with the broader environment than just like I show up, I sit in eight hours of meetings, I go home, I forget that that place exists. And to your point, it's like aren't those people that we want to keep around?
Why leaders need to develop a tolerance for healthy dissatisfaction
Rodney Evans:
And as someone who is in a leadership role and is around a lot of leaders, it takes real work on your own ego to listen to people who are perpetually dissatisfied. And I want to talk a little bit about what I think the move is there, but a lot of times what I see is you have someone who is quite lit up, who is quite informed, who is quite engaged, and who is quite vocal. And I was this person in a big company and year after year after year, they try to shake things up through influence and sheer force of will and eventually, they just give up and leave. And the move as a leader is not to be like, "Tell me about your ideas, and I'll just really actively listen."
Because any smart person who's paying attention knows you're full of shit. And the idea also for leaders is not to explain to them why they're wrong. The idea is really to figure out how to channel that energy and that interest into work that they can do themselves rather than just lobbing you problems for you to solve. That is predicated on our ability as leaders to not shut down or be irritated by or be worn out by constant dissatisfaction. And this is something like ... I'm going to talk a little bit about my own moves. This is something that I've done a lot of work on for myself in my role at The Ready because when one leads an organization full of org designers-
Sam Spurlin:
Some people call that hell.
Rodney Evans:
Everybody is an optimizer. Yeah, it's a fresh Sisyphean hell. It's an organization full of optimizers who are constantly noticing what tensions are present, what could be done differently, what experiments could be done, why haven't they been, and when they are running, then it's like, "Well, what is the strategy about these experiments? Are we missing?" It's a very critically thinking kind of company, and it can be exhausting because it doesn't feel like there will ever ... It's not that it doesn't feel like that ... There will literally never be enough ... we will never do enough for people to go. The OS is dialed.
I said to a client I was talking to last night, "Hi, Mike!", that I feel like my job is getting to the top of a hill," and being like, I am worn out and realizing that from there, I can just see a taller hill and be like, "Cool, cool, cool. Next hill."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And we're very comfortable telling clients that I have said many times, there's not an end state that we're getting to. We're just adopting this muscle and this is just how we are now, but I sometimes think we lose that when we look at ourselves and we're like, we are not there yet. We have not become the thing yet. As if there is a thing for us to become.
Rodney Evans:
As if there is a point at which people will be satisfied, which the genetic material of people who are as motivated and smart and curious as everyone who works at a place like The Ready and everyone we're talking about in our client organizations is they'll never be satisfied.
Sam Spurlin:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
My husband jokes ... have I ever told you Ed's tagline for The Ready?
Sam Spurlin:
No.
Rodney Evans:
Whenever I'm complaining about something, he goes, "The Ready where everything is fine and nobody's happy."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, there's a lot of accuracy in that.
Rodney Evans:
But like that is the DNA, and that's how these people are going to show up in your organization as people who are a little pokey, a little dissatisfied, a little provocative, a little judgy, but also, really invested and engaged and curious and thoughtful and willing to help. And if you want to have an organization that evolves, you got to take both of those energies together. You don't get to pick just one of them.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, you need that injection of energy. Otherwise, I think organizations kind of follow the same path as any other system that doesn't have injections of energy, which is entropy just increases. And if entropy just increases forever, you eventually get the heat death of the universe or in this case, of an organization. There's no variation in the ability to be able to do any work. So we need that injection in order to continue evolving as an organization. Otherwise, we just become static.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I mean, it's that whole, like I've talked to and reference the articles about the maze and the mouse and how the maze becomes part of the mouse 1 million times, but when you don't have the kind of talent that continues to think critically and question formal structures and hierarchical decisions, you end up with mediocrity. You end up with a lot of people whose entire role is maintaining things the way that they are and without an eye toward whether that's good. Without an eye toward whether this status quo is good or not.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, exactly. It's not about status quo being good or bad, it's about comfort. It's about not being pulled or pushed too far in any direction outside of equilibrium.
How to recognize when change isn't possible, and when to leave
Sam Spurlin:
I'm wondering ... so does this mean then that for someone who is listening to this episode and that they are self-identifying as that type of person, does that mean that you just fight that fight forever or how do you know, I guess, when you have hit the point of I can't stay here and continue to do this, I'm seeing enough signals that I am just going to continue pushing this boulder up the hill or hitting my head against this rock. What are you looking for there? How do you think about that?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I mean I have the same question for you. I had a conversation with a client who was no longer my client at the time last summer that I remember very clearly. She was saying to me, you should write a whole book that's just telling leaders when to give up.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And we had this very interesting conversation about what the markers are in an organization that you lead a part of that the conditions are there to keep on keeping on and when you should either shut up in color or get the fuck out of there.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And I think when you're in it, it's very hard to tell. I think it's very hard to tell, and I know from one million client projects that it always feels worse before it gets better, and there is often a tipping point. And I find that tipping point quite difficult to predict in a group, but often, there's just a week that you show up to a client project and all of a sudden, the resistance is down. And it's like, I don't know if you all did ayahuasca over the weekend or what happened here, but you were like this on Friday and now, it's Monday and it seems like a whole new bag. What's the deal?
So it's like I often don't find the progress to be linear or predictable or gradual in any way. And if you don't see some of those tipping points, you can't just keep going forever.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, yeah. There's no easy answers here because there's so much individual variance in toleration for pain or I kind of keep doing the same thing. I mean, even just life situation, how much do you need that paycheck? Who is relying on you? I think your tolerance for bullshit probably goes way up when you've got folks who are relying on you to not lose your job, because you got mad at your boss because the OS isn't changing enough.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
How to recognize signs of real progress
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, it's a really interesting thought experiment. I mean, where my head is going is there's a difference between continually coming up against these same problem versus continually coming up against problems of equal or greater frustration, but at least, they are different because we are either making progress on the other stuff or we can acknowledge that that is a thing and also, let's work on this other thing. As long as there is movement in that way, I think I personally would be more inclined to stick around because I would feel like we are uncovering more and new things and not just me bringing the same thing every week and being remember this thing and just being told to go color.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that there's two things that I'd be looking for if I was an individual change agent or a leader trying to shift things in my organization. One would be are we continually finding ourselves with a higher class of problems? There will always be problems. You will never be done, but I notice both internally and in client projects, usually, the way that I measure progress is, is this a better problem than the problem we were solving this time last year? And I see this in client projects like a project that I'm involved in right now, when it began, there was so little role clarity in a very large cross-functional team that the idea of real prioritization when there wasn't even clarity of who actually owned what bits of work was the focus.
Now, they've got a whole prioritization thing that needs to be sorted out, but I'm like, this is a better class of problem for you to have than the one that you had in January.
Sam Spurlin:
I'm trying to come up with what is that? How do you tell is a problem better or not? Is it like, there's more complexity to the problem or it's like, I don't know. Do you have a criteria in mind for deciding whether or not we're getting to better levels of problem?
Rodney Evans:
I think the simplest thing is do we have an issue now because we solved something else? So did we do work that was the prerequisite to this.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, so we had to do step zero before we could do step one and step one before we could get to step four, and we're on step four now-
Rodney Evans:
That's great.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, as opposed to doing a bunch of step zero stuff that never progresses to step one or beyond.
Rodney Evans:
That's a good way to think about it because we see that too. And I think we used to fall victim to this at The Ready. I've seen it in clients where it's scattershot, where it's just like we're going to do 100 experiments and hope for the best and hope one of them pops and then we scale it. I prefer the land of org design where it is a little bit more concerted like we are building on past progress and we are addressing the new tensions that we have created based on actual impact.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Warning signs leaders should watch for
Rodney Evans:
And then, the other thing that I was going to say in terms of signal for particularly leaders, because I've known a few who have left things, and when I did executive coaching, I had a couple of clients who knew each other, start to call me the black widow because they were like, if you work with her, you'll quit your job, which is not great marketing incidentally if the company is paying you, but I wasn't convincing them to leave their jobs. I was just doing the job of holding up the mirror and being like, "What do you want here, man?" Anyway, the point being, the thing that I see often before somebody great who's a leader quits is their boss being unwilling to really engage in the specifics of the conversation.
So there are other signals, like if they stop trying to fund things or giving you headcount or giving you the authority or giving you the freedom or asking for too many status reports. There's a bunch of other stuff, but what I have seen when a layer up in a big transformation loses interest or loses conviction is that they also, stop really engaging in what the work is and start to get very hand wavy. And when our client who's a leader is going to them to say, "Okay, well we would need to make these kind of structural changes, or we really need to look at this method of budgeting this year, if we want these cross-functional things to happen."
And they're kind of like, I don't really think that we need to change that, can't you just keep it going. You can see when somebody's eyes glaze over, and when they start to zone out. And if you are the person with the transformation agenda and that person with the glazed over eyes is your boss, you might have a problem.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. Yeah. It's basically the lack of curiosity because a curiosity that is, if you're really engaging with your curiosity, you can still be critical. You can still be skeptical and still retain this base of open-mindedness. And I think when that glimmer of curiosity starts to fade from people who have positional authority over you, that's when my alarm bells would be going off.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, that's when we're in trouble. And you even wrote a note here about how working in the worst case scenarios actually working on the organization is seen as a distraction. When I see the air cover disengage, they start to say things like that, how much more of this stuff do we really need to do or how long is this org design work going to go on? And they're not talking about The Ready, they're not talking about our engagement. They're talking about how long is this leader going to be distracted from their day job by trying to get their organization working properly?
Sam Spurlin:
Right. Yeah, and that is just-
Rodney Evans:
That's not a good sign.
Sam Spurlin:
Not a good sign because that is a true bifurcation of working on the org and working in the org. Sometimes we create that bifurcation to make it clear what we are doing, but ultimately, they need to be united and yeah, that's a bad sign.
When to leave versus tolerate a broken operating system
Rodney Evans:
It's a bad sign. Yeah. Is there anything we didn't talk about in terms of this pattern of people trying to climb the hill and then ultimately, tapping out and walking back to base camp?
Sam Spurlin:
I'll say this part out loud that it is often easier to operate within a bad operating system than it is to fundamentally change it. Obviously, you are expending a lot of energy and frustration, existing within a bad OS, especially if you have kind of woken up to the fact that it is a bad OS, because you see the frustrations everywhere in a new and fun way, fun in air quotes there. Even in that case, it can be easier to just exist there than actually fundamentally change it. And I think that's another one of those signs too, that if you feel like you have lost the will to kind of push up against the things that you have seen that could just obviously be better, that is definitely maybe the ultimate sign that I can either ...
Because actually the decision is not to leave or not. It's, I can decide to leave or I should just decide to stay and be okay within that reality.
Rodney Evans:
Do you think that people can really do that?
Sam Spurlin:
I don't want to speak for ... I don't think I could do that. I think that there are contextual reasons why somebody may decide that, you know what? I actually don't need to have certain needs fulfilled by my job. I'm going to seek that in other places. This is stable, this pays me well and I'm good with that and I'm going to stay in my lane and just kind of do that and seek meaning and autonomy and those other things that we know human beings really want in other places. And I really try to keep an open mind around that because it's not me. I would never do that, but I also don't want to center my own preferences in conversations like this that kind of erases that way of being within organizations too.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I totally take your point and probably my data set is really skewed because if you're working with me as a coach back when I did that all the time, you're probably a high performer.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And I ask you that question because it would take more than one hand to count the number of situations I have been in with a friend or a coaching client where they have resigned themselves to, I'm just going to keep my head down and live with it and get a paycheck for reasons.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And they can't do it forever. They get to a point in the conversation where they, quote-unquote, give up and then, it's not that many months before they're all fired up again.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
And I'm just not sure that people who are the kind of people who see what needs to change and feel really motivated to make that change can then also, stay in a place where they can't do it. I don't know. I actually don't know the answer to this. And again, limited data set, but it's almost like I don't know if once people can see through The Matrix, they can just ignore it forever?
Sam Spurlin:
I think you're probably right for most folks. Definitely for me,
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I don't know, maybe this'll be an Instagram conversation for us, because I want to hear from someone who's made the decision to just stop caring who actually was able to.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah, that would be interesting.
Rodney Evans:
I don't know. I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure they're out there.
Tip 1: How to use a Mission-Based Team to direct your energy
Rodney Evans:
Okay, so we've talked about the pattern of people who really want to shake things up, not being able to, and then, what happens to them? What ideas do you have for those people? Particularly because I would say in the years that I've been doing this podcast, the number one theme of the questions we get is, "How do I? I'm a person on the beach screaming at the ocean. How do I stay here without getting washed away?" So what you got for 'em, Sam?
Sam Spurlin:
All right, so the first thing that I have is this is particularly from a sort of leader POV. And when I say leader, I mean like positional leader. Someone who has the authority to put money against something, because really nice thing about this is that super talented people, like the folks that we've been talking about, they're actually really easy to engage. You give them a problem to go pursue and solve and the autonomy to actually do it. So the first place that I would recommend is can we use the idea of a mission-based team to give folks who fall within this demographic, the sandbox to go solve some of the things that they are seeing?
So spinning up a team, pointing them in a direction, I think goes a long way to giving people ways to create their engagement in the work.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, and just giving them a space where they can behave in the way that they would the rest of the organization to behave, can be really refreshing.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, totally, and there's obviously, ways to do this poorly. One would be giving them a sandbox that is not connected to the other parts of the organization like, "Hey, you disruptive people, go play with your blocks over here."
Rodney Evans:
You go outside.
Sam Spurlin:
You go do a thing and maybe write a report and give it to us.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
Instead, obviously, the better way forward would be having the work that they do and then boutiques, actually show up and be metabolized by the organization itself, but there's lots of different ways for that to look.
Rodney Evans:
I love that.
Sam Spurlin:
What do you got?
Tip 2: How to practice the self-care you actually need right now
Rodney Evans:
My first idea is going to speak more to the individual change agents out there, and I would include in this, all of the practitioners who listen to this show who are anyone who is doing resistance work professionally inside an organization or for other organizations, I think you have to take your self-care quite seriously. And I am a little eye-rolly to be frank about the way that self-care is discussed in the popular culture and, but for people who do what we do, you can quite easily not only burn out, but I think it's quite easy to start to lose one's connection to values, to identity, to self-confidence. I've seen a lot of people who do this work, and I am included in this, really, get the yips at some points in their career where they're like, "Do I even know what I'm doing?" Because effectively you're signing up to be professionally gas lit every day of your life. You are signing up to go to a place where people tell you that you're crazy and that's the job. So if we don't have ways of re-centering, re-anchoring to our own identity and not to our rightness, but just to re-ground ourselves, it's quite challenging to be stalwart in systems that are pushing back.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
So I'm not a big proponent or fan of prescriptions around what kind of self-care is necessary. And I've also learned from myself through a lot of experimentation over time, that what's the most important is paying attention to what I need right now. And for this period of time, I used to really fall into the trap of like, I need to learn to meditate and meditate every day until I'm a hundred like Rick Rubin, who ... PS Rick Rubin. I'm obsessed with you. What I've learned is that there are periods in my life where what is more important is that I am focused on playing music or what is more important, last year I went through a very intense arc of EMDR therapy.
I was like, there is a thing that I need to get through and this is the way. I say these things. I've worked with various coaches at various points I've gotten super serious about yoga or other things at different times. And the idea here isn't just try everything and the idea isn't you will not be consistent. I will not be consistent. None of us are consistent as instruments in this work of resistance, which means the things that we need to keep our instrument tuned and playable are going to shift over time. So I think the work that we all have to do is to pay attention to what we need now and do it.
And then, also to not have the whatever self-care methods become another thing, that is ours to maintain rather than something that is supportive of the work we're trying to do in the world.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. Yeah, you should be very aware of whether you feel like you're doing your self-care wrong and at that point, it probably has lost the self-care kind of angle and has just become another requirement, another commitment.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly. So jobs to be done in order to resist, think about them, experiment with them and don't have it be another thing you have to do.
Tip 3: How to find small fixes with outsized impact
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I love that. All right, I got another one here. I think this is kind of a mix of individual and leader point of view, which is just this idea that small annoyances fixed consistently can give folks the ones we are talking about, what they are looking for and actually, make huge impact on an organization. So I'm talking about friction points in the employee experience that are really easy to ignore or just say, "Well, I only have to do that once a year so I'm not going to worry about that." These types of things are actually perfect for improving and is a really productive channel for that energy to go. Because I think sometimes folks like us, let's say you and I are an incredibly bureaucratic organization seeing how everything is broken.
It's not a matter of being, I guess, experienced or not, but if we decide, "Hey, structure, our structure is whack or this huge big authority thing needs to be rethought, or there are big moves that are obvious, that folks will latch onto as the thing we need to go do." And as we know in this work, very rarely if ever do we start with something like structure, because it's messy and incredibly visible and creates a bunch of swirl, but internal folks don't necessarily know that. So if I am in a leadership position and I'm noticing that there's a bunch of this energy in the organization, I would be directing people to smaller things that will actually improve their day-to-day life at the organization.
And the example that I'm sitting with is something from a client project from a couple of years ago where everybody who was not on the C-suite in this organization had really crappy computers that were slow and horrible to use. And everybody was always just complaining about how bad their tools were. Everybody on the C-suite had a MacBook Pro. And the idea that their computers might be getting in the way of people doing the best work of their lives had not even crossed their mind. And I think they poo-pooed it when they heard kind of rumblings of that, because they didn't even really realize that they were using a tool that was far and away better than everybody else's.
So maybe that's actually an example of a big thing. I don't know, but it is an example of a little friction that can be addressed over time.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. I mean an example like that is such a good one, where it's just these small things, but they signal something really important to people, which is like it doesn't matter to you leader that I don't have the tools I need to do my job properly, and you do.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, totally, and maybe, yeah, I think there's something here like the move to get everybody a MacBook Pro, that's probably not it, but if I'm a leader on that C-suite, give me the same laptop that everybody else has and I will start putting things in through the customer help desk to get help with things, I bet you things will start to improve at least a little bit.
Rodney Evans:
It won't be long.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Tip 4: Steer into tensions instead of avoiding them
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I love that. That's so cool. My last one is more focused on the leader thing, and this is advice that I have given people who work with me on source as well, which is if you are doing impactful OS work, 50% of the people will be mad 100% of the time. And it's just like if you are doing org design and you are making real change to any part of the operating system, the easiest thing to do is something down the line that everybody can sign up for and it's not the best thing to do. So I really try and I really encourage my clients to try to sink into the work itself, the craft itself. If you're redesigning performance management, which we have a couple of clients going through right now, engage with the problem space.
Engage with the possibilities. Engage with the practices, and with the writing about it and with the talking about it, stay in the local present tension rather than orienting to the future macro tension because it's very easy when you're trying to do provocative org design and any modern org design, I should just say will be provocative because it is provoking 100 years of broken-esque tradition, so it's all provocative, even if it's not the edgiest stuff ever. When you are trying to do that kind of design, it's super, super easy to start to think about how people are likely to respond, what the possible downsides will be, who is going to be upset, whose cheese is going to get moved and is going to give you a hard time.
And spending a lot of time, I'm not saying don't consider consequences, but in spending a lot of time in the anxiety of the worst case scenario is a really surefire way to lose motivation in terms of trying to make healthy change. And the truth is that even though 50% of the people will be mad 100% of the time, 100% of them will get over it. And that's just the truth. Every major change that I've seen any organization make, sometimes you look at a Basecamp moment or a couple of these big moments where there has been scandal. And sure, sometimes some people leave and there's a big catastrophe like that, but those are pretty edge casey. Most of the time when there is a new change to the operating system, you don't see mass exodus.
A lot of times there is some noise for a period of time as people learn about the new reality and then once they settle into it and realize their life hasn't materially changed, the sky hasn't fallen, et cetera, et cetera, people get over it?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
So I'm like, stay in the work, stay in the job to be done rather than the surrounding forces or you'll never get the job done.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I like that a lot. The phrase that's coming to mind for me as I listen to you is time is an underrated ally in this work, often. Things get-
Rodney Evans:
It's so true.
Sam Spurlin:
Things tend to be less intense over time. So if you're willing to sit in the intensity in the short term, that's often where the real value is.
Rodney and Sam’s key takeaways
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think that's such a good place to close. Sam, closing around question, what did you notice today?
Sam Spurlin:
With every topic that we talk about, we start with something that seems very simple. And when you threw out the idea a couple of days ago, I was like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. I know my three talking points for that. And inevitably, it opens in a fractal way, in a complex way to conversations that I did not even think we were going to have today. So just appreciating that as my noticing.
Rodney Evans:
Nice. I think for me, when I was reading the research that Jack put together, so much of it was about employees sense of purpose and alignment to purpose and living their purpose is how you keep people. And I really felt myself as we were having this conversation, put that to the side and be like, I think the way we engage people is by engaging them in work and in craft and in mastery and in their ability to do something impactful. And maybe that has to do with purpose, but I think it's actually a little bit different. I think it's more contribution flavored than organizational purpose flavored. To me that feels more resonant as a change agent anywhere trying to stick in it.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I really appreciate you saying that because it makes something a little bit clear that I think I was sitting with, which is, it's not really about purpose necessarily. I think people just want to be a part of systems that work. They want to feel like they are contributing to a thing that actually functions and not just pouring energy into some sort of bureaucracy black hole. That is the truly most meaningless experience that I think people are trying to avoid and then, reacting against when they start to sense it happening.
Rodney Evans:
So true.
Sam Spurlin:
Org design, it matters more than you think.
Rodney Evans:
Look at us go. It's like we can make a whole podcast about it.
Sam Spurlin:
We sure can. We're always looking for new topics for the show. So if you have an organizational pattern that you're having trouble changing, shoot us a note at podcast [at] theready [dot] com. DM us on Instagram, maybe. There's so many places to give us ideas.
Rodney Evans:
Find us and follow us and also review us and smash that like button. This show was engineered by Taylor Marvin and produced by the wonderful Jack Van Amburg. At Work With The Ready is created by The Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you for listening to us.