Jacob Morgan is a futurist and leading authority on the future of work, the employee experience and leadership. He is the bestselling author of five books, including his latest, Leading With Vulnerability, which was released in October 2023. He is a TED Speaker and the host of the podcast Great Leadership with Jacob Morgan.
Jacob joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about vulnerability in leadership, company culture, and much more.
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Jacob Morgan On Leading With Vulnerability
Our quote for today is from Brené Brown “Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen.” Our guest, Jacob Morgan, is constantly thinking about the future. He’s a futurist and leading author on The Future of Work, the employee experience, and leadership. He is the best-selling author of five books, including his latest, Leading with Vulnerability, which was released in October 2023. Jacob is a TED speaker and the host of the podcast Great Leadership with Jacob Morgan. Jacob, welcome back to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Jacob Morgan’s Life And Work Passions
We talked about your background, your work, and your first appearance on the show, which is Episode 103, way back in 2000. How about 300 something, 350? I want to reintroduce you to readers who joined since then by asking what is it that you focus on. What are you most passionate about in your life and work?
My life and work are two different things. Life-wise, I have two little kids. I have two dogs. I have a wife. I have a great community of friends. That, for me, is number one. My family doesn’t live too far away from me, my mom and dad. That’s number one for me and sometimes I have to remind myself that’s number one because, like you, it’s very easy to get bogged down with work and to get stressed out by not finishing things but it’s a good reminder for me.
Work-wise, you alluded to the three areas that I focus on leadership, employee experience, and the future of work. I had a new book come out called Leading with Vulnerability. I have a book coming out on employee experience. I get a lot of fun from speaking, writing, creating content, doing podcasts like this, and helping people get insights on how the world of work is changing and what that means for all of us.
In your previous appearance, we were in the thick of the pandemic. There was a lot of stuff that we were talking about. It seemed like remote work was here to stay. Everyone was transitioning, trying to figure it out. Now, return-to-office is a pretty hot strategy. I always say there’s always an equal and opposite reaction, especially in large companies and legacy industries.
Reflections On Remote And Hybrid Work
If I asked you now, that we’ve had the peak and maybe the pullback? What do you think is the future of remote and hybrid work? Where does it fit in, and where does it not fit in?
I’m a big believer in flexible work in general. It’s something I talked about even when my book The Future of Work came out in 2014. I’m a big believer in flexible working. What I mean by that is, that there should be a presence in the office, but there should also be certain times when you don’t need a presence in the office. The big challenge I have is when we have rigid rules one way or the other, whether somebody says, “2 days in the office, 3 days from home,” or vice versa.
Whether it’s, “We are coming in every day,” or “Don’t come in at all.” Every organization needs to do what makes sense for them. I have always believed in the idea of flexible work, which is let’s assume that you need to be in the office but if you can’t come in at a certain time because you have a doctor’s appointment, or you’re booked up with meetings, or you talk to your manager and they say you’re cool to be at home, that’s fine. If you’re able to come in for a few hours and finish up work later, that’s fine.
It’s having that level of flexibility. I still see tremendous value in in-person work. A lot of organizations, honestly, that I’m talking to are wanting their employees back to the office but it’s not back to the office five days a week, Monday through Friday. It’s back to the office in the sense of, like, let’s assume that, yes, this is the company that you work for. You should be here every day at some point. You can come in when it makes sense for you and leave when it makes sense for you.
If there are certain days you can’t come in because you have other commitments, that’s fine, but let’s go under the assumption that you are working in this location, in this building, for a certain amount of time every day. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Again, it’s not 9:00 to 5:00. Maybe it’s a few hours here, a few hours there, but it’s having that level of flexibility. I honestly think that that’s the best approach for most organizations.
There are a lot of studies that have come out in terms of productivity. For example, one by Nicholas Bloom over at Stanford, published in Nature magazine, found that employees who are working at home two days a week experience no decrease in productivity. There’s a reduction in employees who want to leave an organization and things like that. Those numbers and stats are fine, but we have to remember that there’s a lot of stuff that does not get accounted for in those things. Productivity alone means you’re going to go out of business later. Companies don’t want just productivity. They want employees who are willing to go above and beyond. They want to train better leaders and solve complex problems.
Companies don’t just want productivity. They want employers who are willing to go above and beyond, want to train better leaders, and want to solve complex problems.
A lot of people measure productivity by mouse movements. Let’s be honest, that’s how a lot of companies do it. It’s funny because as I’m interviewing people for my new book, I talked to some organizations who say, “Yes, we are remote-first. We don’t have any policies for employees to come back to the office. They can do what they want.” I’m like, “Okay, cool. If that works for you, that’s fine.” Then I talked to other companies, whether it’s Northrop Grumman or UPS. They say, “We are an in-office culture first. We want employees here five days a week. They don’t have to be here from 9:00 to 5:00, but we want them in the office.”
I also talked to companies that are somewhere in the middle. It comes down to doing what makes sense for your company. If I’m a leader of a business and I believe, perceive, and see that when my employees are working from home all the time, we struggle with collaboration. It’s harder for me as a leader to get a sense of what’s going on, we are falling behind deadlines, and we are not training leaders the way that we should be, then yes, I have every right to say, “Come back to the office,” because it is impacting our team, our culture, and our business. If I’m a leader and I say, “Everyone’s working from home. It’s cool. We have no problems. We are doing better than we were before,” then by all means, stay working from home. Having these rigid rules that every company should do this or that is not the right approach.
I was going to ask you about that. There’s some nuance between every company doing the same thing versus the company being clear on its standards. There are four tracks I wanted to take out of what you said. The first is one of the things you and I agree on. Too many of these decisions have been about power and authority rather than the work. It’s like a parent exerting their authority over a kid. “You need to be back in the office because I said so,” versus focusing on the work.
I have often used the example of an investment bank. If we are pitching for a $50 million deal, you are not showing up on Zoom. We are at the table, we are breaking bread, we are going to dinner. This is what we do. This is what’s required. As you said, it should be about the work where it makes sense and where it doesn’t make sense.
Even in that example, let’s take that negative scenario where a company says, “I want you back in the office,” and a leader says, “It’s because I said so.” Does the company not have that right? This is a company. They are paying your salary for your benefits.
You have the right not to work there if you don’t see it, that’s the point.
That’s the point. A lot of people get upset when they say, “I can’t believe this company is saying that,” but you also have a choice to not be at that company.
This goes to the other thing that a lot of people and Steve Jobs, if he were here, probably would agree that most people don’t know what’s good for them. After the pandemic, I agree, that people wanted flexibility, but they were saying, “I want to work when I want, on what I want, and how I want it.” That’s not teamwork. You have everyone saying they don’t want to go back to the office, and then you have record numbers of people saying they feel lonely and isolated.
They are not connecting these two. I found it funny. For younger workers too, older people tend to have more diversity in terms of their life and what they can do. They have a bigger house and not a 400-square-foot apartment, in terms of using that flexibility but humans need to be around humans, and because it’s convenient not to get dressed and stuff doesn’t mean it’s always the right thing to do.
The Debate Around Workplace Productivity
It’s funny because if you look at Gallup they do their Q12 and this is replicated in several other studies. Gallup does their Q12 where they look at these twelve criteria across all sorts of organizations. These are things like Are you doing your best work? Does somebody care about you at work? Do your opinions count at work? Are you connected to the purpose and vision of the organization?
If you look at virtually every single metric, including even things like learning and growing, you’ll see that over the past few years, we are pretty much at an all-time low for every single metric. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say, “I don’t want to come into the office, but I’m lonely and disengaged.” You can’t say, “I don’t want to come into the office. Why am I not getting promoted into a leadership role?” You can’t say, “I don’t want to come into the office. Why am I not getting more responsibility?” It doesn’t make sense.
There are two parties here. As an employee, you need to decide what you care about and what you value. One of the things that we don’t talk about is there’s a tremendous opportunity out there for employees who are willing to come into the office. If you have aspirations for leadership, to learn and grow, and to move up inside the organization it used to be very hard to do that because everybody would be in the office.
People wanted face time with their manager.
Everybody is there. Now you have a lot of your peers who are saying, “No, I don’t want to come into the office,” which means that if you are still that employee who wants to get promoted and get into a leadership role, you’ve got to be the one that says, “That’s cool. You stay at home. I’m happy to go up to the office.”
It’s a unique opportunity for those types of leaders because what happens is you get face time with your leaders. You get to see firsthand how your leaders operate in certain situations and environments. You’ll get better training and leadership one-on-one time. It’s a benefit for you. Let your peers stay at home, but at the same time, there are a lot of employees out there who say, “I’m good. I don’t want to get promoted. I’m comfortable in my role.”
For people, “I’m an individual contributor, and I want to do my thing.” Companies have to also decide if that’s part of their culture or not. I remember talking to someone. He was asking me for advice on that. I was like, “You got to decide. Do you want a bunch of individual contributors who don’t want to be part?” I don’t know. That could be the right answer. You could build a business model around it, or you have to say, “This isn’t who we are.”
The problem is that the leaders are trying to appeal to too many people. As you said before, I misunderstood the first time, but then what you were saying was, that there’s no right answer across companies but companies need to have standards and we agree. Flexibility, if there’s an exception but when initially, when people were doing hybrids, my advice was, “Whatever you are doing, reinforce it.” Then people kept saying, “What’s the best?” There were multiple versions of hybrid. “Which hybrid?”
There was a hybrid coming three days a week. There’s a hybrid that comes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and there is a hybrid “Do whatever you want.” When people asked me, “Which one if you had to pick?” I thought about it, and I was like, “The one that is the least valuable is hybrid do whatever you want because if you are trying to get people to come into the office, and they are coming in when other people aren’t there, you are not getting any of the value of being in the office.”
That’s a terrible approach. I’m not sure what the point of that is. Anyway, having these standards and saying, “If you are sick or whatever, but as the rule, we need you to be here X hours or X days because this is what we are looking for. We are looking for connections in these meetings. We are looking for creativity. This is how we are going to do training.” Like you said, you have to respect that or go somewhere else.
If you want to go somewhere else, that’s fine. I talked to, for example, several companies. I mentioned Northrop Grumman and UPS, and I talked to both of these companies. They were both things that did well that during the pandemic, they kept reinforcing, “We are an in-office culture first. We know that we are going through a pandemic, and during this time, we are temporarily allowing employees to work where they want but once we get through this, a reminder we are an in-office culture first.” Those are the companies that did it well. Those are the smart companies. Where a lot of companies got into trouble is they tried to appease everyone. “We are remote first.” Work where you want. We don’t care about the office anymore.” A couple of years go by. Everybody is used to that. The pandemic is over.
Then the person moves two hours away, and then they find out they are called back into the office. Now they live in New Hampshire.
You are like, “Wait a minute. You told me that we are remote first.” A lot of companies were very scared. They were trying to appease everybody.
Leaders did not want to put a stake in the ground. They were trying to make everyone happy. This is my advice to any company leader, particularly a university leader. Trying to make everyone happy makes no one happy.
I saw some of your posts about universities. We can get into that too but it’s funny because I wrote a Substack post saying that now, more than ever before, we need strong leaders. If you look at, the pandemic, and ost-pandemic, leaders collectively have become weak. I don’t know how else to put it.
I feel bad for college students because I don’t think they know what good leadership looks like. They are not able to understand that this is very poor leadership. The mayor of New York has been incredible. I saw him give a speech. He had advocated for a principle that I have said all along, which is, to hold the same standard but clearly state your values and he said, “These people. They have a right to free speech. It’s morally apprehensive and wrong what they are saying.” It’s like, “This isn’t that hard to do.” You don’t change the standards and rules, but you can point out where you don’t think the outcome is something that you approve of.
For a lot of leaders out there, they were scared to say what’s okay and what’s not okay. They are scared to talk about values coming into the office, not coming into the office, talking about certain topics, not talking about certain topics. Leaders have collectively gotten so scared of everything.
Trying to make everyone happy.
Yes, because look at what’s happening in the world. If you get accused of anything, you make a mistake, you say the wrong thing, and everyone is quick to chop your head off.
Google did learn from their mistakes on this. When they had the people start taking over, they got into some situations instead of taking over the offices and stuff and they were like, no. You violated all the agreements you signed and all the rules we have. We are not doing that. They probably agreed with some of the things that the people were advocating for, but they were like, this violates our rules, so you broke the rules. It seems like pretty straightforward leadership that’s very hard for people to do these days.
It’s very similar to parenting.
I have used the same example over and over. You tell the kid, here’s the red line, and you move it you are dead as a parent.
My wife and I constantly battle with this because when I travel, we both are speakers on different topics. Whenever my wife is traveling and I’m home with the kids, things run like clockwork. We have no issues because if I make a threat and I tell my kids, “If you act like this, TV’s gone. You act like this, we are not doing this.” They know that I mean it and there’s no BSing. My wife has a little bit of a harder time sticking to the rules. She might say something like, “If you do this, I might have to put you on time-out or whatever,” and he’ll say, “No, I won’t do it again.” She’ll say, “Okay, fine. I won’t put you on time-out.” Then five minutes later, he throws something, and it’s like, “What did I tell you?” They push the boundary.
The same thing is true inside of our organizations. You need to be very clear with what the rules are and the boundaries are, and not, in most cases, bending those rules. The second thing is, that companies are also partially our fault. We have created these environments where we are creating, like, Pinocchio’s Island for employees. The way that we think about parenting, a lot of parents who coddle their kids, a lot of Gen Z parents who go to the interviews with their kids, we are so, “Can we do this for you? Can we do that for you? What can we do for you here? Are you unhappy?” This and that. The same thing’s happening inside our organizations.
You are removing the organic cause and effect that you need to learn it.
Here’s a big emphasis on things like employee engagement, wellbeing programs, and things like that, where if you show up to work, you have access to a therapist, free food, and a gym. Your employees don’t give a bleep about that. Pay them well. Give them a great leader, learning and development opportunities, and room for growth.
Otherwise, what happens is, you have an employee. They don’t take care of themselves. They sit at home. They do nothing, and then they show up and they say, “I’m disengaged. It’s your job to fix this for me.” That’s the environment that we have created because we have all these programs. “You are disengaged, you are unhappy. Come into our office. Spend a couple of hours talking to me with therapists. Get a snack. We hope you are okay.”
It’s like, give me a break. You need to teach employees that they are responsible for their engagement too. What are you doing in your personal life to look after your engagement? Are you exercising? Are you eating healthy? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you making time for friends? Why is it the organization’s responsibility to be anything and everything for you? It’s completely bunkers. It makes no sense.
Shifts In The Concept Of Hard Work
It’s all been extrinsic for them. I was going to ask you about that article you wrote. That was a perfect transition. I have this weird theory. I think people want to be held accountable, and they are not getting it. I have a friend who did an experiment this year in teaching because he was fed up with the parents and all the school, whatever. He made his class harder. He raised the expectations. He went the opposite way, frequent tasks, constant tests, all the things people were asking to get out of. He did the opposite. He said the outcome’s been so much better. The kids like it, and they are more engaged, like people have high expectations of them.
He said it’s been a fascinating experiment. We have a generation where the leaders in people’s lives until they are eighteen are mostly their teachers and their parents, and, as you said, there has been no accountability. It shouldn’t be a surprise when these people show up in the workplace and are super surprised when there’s accountability. In this article you read you said that employees need to be responsible for their engagement. This would be news to a lot of people I have met.
It’s crazy. There’s also some data that the team over at work sent me, where they looked at, I believe, hundreds of thousands of pieces of data on engagement and when employees drop off. We keep talking about employees getting burned out. They’re getting stressed out, this and that but the work they analyzed showed that it’s not that employees are working too much, it’s that they are not getting enough challenging work. Burnout and stress happen because employees are doing drone work. They are doing garbage work.
If you create an environment where there is no challenge, employees are going to be complacent and then drop off.
It’s not that employees are overworked, it’s that they are not getting enough challenging work. If you create an environment where there is no challenge, when employees show up, you’re going to create complacency, and employees are going to drop off. One CHR that I talked to and I won’t mention her company name. She told me during the pandemic, they created this environment where employees were getting $1,500 a year to spend on whatever they wanted. Ninety-something percent of employees were getting salary increases regardless of performance. You could work from home. She described it as a culture for children.
Then the company took a step back, and they were like, “We are losing money. It’s impacting our bottom line. We’ve got to stop this.” Now she’s in the process of creating a corporate culture not for children but for adults teaching people to be accountable and saying, “You show up to work you are not automatically getting a raise anymore. Performance matters. How you do matters. How you show up everyday matters.” We need to get back to that because, in the past few years, we have collectively lost it.
This might be a divergence, but I have an opinion on this, and I’m carefully going to write something on this soon, but I will pressure test it here. There are two mental health crises going on in the workplace. One is that there are a lot of mental health issues, but they are issues happening outside of the workplace that are being brought into the workplace for which the workplace is responsible. Two, I keep hearing, particularly with employees under 30, that anytime there is a performance issue or a discussion or a problem with the work or other, there is an invocation of mental health.
There’s going to be an overreaction to this soon. If we start describing everything as a mental health issue that’s uncomfortable, you’re going to have people asking for waivers and stuff like that. As you said, we were talking before about the therapist. The organization’s job is to make sure it’s not the cause of mental health problems, and its leaders are not the cause of mental health problems, but I’m not sure what organizations are supposed to do when people are bringing those problems into the workplace.
Why are you, as an employee, not responsible for your mental health? I don’t understand. If you have employees who work, I’m not saying you create a toxic environment and, like, “I don’t care. You are an idiot.” Nothing like that.
That to me is, “You’re causing the problem.” That’s bad.
For example, there’s this crazy video that I saw that was trending on X or someplace of an employee who made a video, and she was complaining about her mental health. She was trying to remember the exact phrasing that she did, but she was always late to things. She described her mental health as I don’t know exactly the terminology, but it was an excuse for why she’s always late because she perceives time differently than everybody else. She said, “I don’t know why my company is not willing to accommodate me because I have this issue where I don’t see time like everybody else.” I’m sitting there, like removing my head from the wall after running through it. It’s gotten so extreme.
This is postmodernism. If we don’t have any objective truths that we agree to, that is a problem because your doctor for your appointment probably perceives the 12:00 is 12:00. For those things you are going to need to conform.
Life is hard. Work is hard. Leadership is hard. Everything is hard.
Life is hard. Work is hard. Leadership is hard. Everything is hard. But that’s okay. It’s how we grow.
Tough feedback is hard, but it’s a gift.
For immigrant parents. They came from the Republic of Georgia. They came here with nothing. They were poor and they didn’t speak the language. For me, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for anybody because when I would complain about things, my parents would look at me and say, “What’s the problem?” I’d say, “This happened, I got beat up at school. I can’t do this.” They’d be like, “Go solve your problem. What do you want us to do about it?” We don’t have that anymore, where we have taken away accountability for employees. It’s like you are a human being and an adult in this world.
That’s accurate. We have taken it away because they are coming from an environment that’s never held them to it and when they find it in the workplace for the first time, it is jarring for them so people back off. A lot of leaders, and young employees are finding themselves, probably learning to parent before they even have kids.
I’m not discounting the fact that it’s hard, but yes. Everything is hard. Finding a job is hard. When I was first looking for a job, I got turned down. I sent out hundreds of cover letters and hundreds of resumes. I got turned down by every single company that I applied for. I got turned down from being a bank teller. I got turned down from working at Best Buy. I was losing my mind until, finally, I got the opportunity to go work at a clothing store, making above minimum wage, selling t-shirts, and stuff like that with a college degree.
In my spare time, I was learning about search engine optimization, online marketing, and affiliate marketing, and tried to build up something. Yes, everything is hard but what do you want? Do you want it to be easy? I don’t understand. I don’t know maybe it’s how I was raised, maybe it’s my mentality but I do not understand the idea of like it should be easy. The way that I raise my kids is that life is going to be hard.
For history, the world has not been easy but somehow, in the last generation, we have told everyone it should be easy, and so their expectations are out of whack with reality. If you think it’s going to be hard and it’s a little easier, then you feel good. Objectively, I don’t think things are harder or easier. It’s a function of expectation.
It’s also how you are raised. I have friends who raise their kids very differently than I raise my kids. They do everything and anything for them. These kids have never struggled. They have never had hardship. They have never had anything and we are good friends with them, and we talk about this sometimes but I imagine, as they progress in life and they get into more difficult situations, they are not going to know how to cope. If you look at the CEO of Nvidia, he did some interviews, and he said, “I want you to struggle. I want you to have it hard.”
I wrote about that. He went to Stanford and he was like, “I wouldn’t hire any of you. You’ve all had it too easy.”
The thing is, that is a real and honest perspective but if you say that, people get mad at you. If you talk about hard work, if you talk about making sacrifices, if you talk about going above and beyond, God forbid you talk about any of these things, people look at you like, “How dare you tell me to make sacrifices and go above and beyond?”
This is a true story. I was on a podcast, and I won’t mention the podcast. She was asking me questions about how people can be successful executives but not have to work hard. That’s what the podcast was about. It was like, working parents want to be C-level executives and want to have this great balance, and it should be easy, and this and that.
I got onto her podcast, and I’m like, “I gotta be honest with you. That’s not accurate.” I have interviewed a lot of CEOs who have worked so incredibly hard. Randy Parker, whose podcast was released, told me that there were times when he was working internationally and would have to have 10:00 PM meetings and then 6:00 AM meetings. There were periods of his life when he worked so hard that he had to live separately from his family because he was working so much, and the company was going through a tough time but now, he’s a CEO there.
Frank Blake, the former CEO of The Home Depot, told me he would give up all of his Sundays to write handwritten note cards for all of his employees. Every single Sunday and then, he would give them to employees when he showed up to the office. I did this podcast with this lady, and in the middle of it, she’s like, “We have to stop. I don’t think I can hear this.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” She’s like, “This is against the message I’m trying to give to my audience.”
Which is the truth. The message is the truth.
I was like, “I’m happy to talk about some strategies that people can use, but you need to be honest with the people who are listening to your show. If you have aspirations to get into senior leadership roles, and if you think you are not going to work harder and care more than everybody else around you, I don’t know what planet you are living on.”
It’s important to understand that it doesn’t have to be an aspiration or success. You can have anything you desire, as long as you are willing to do what’s required. I always liked that quote. There are a lot of people for whom those jobs are immense sacrifices and they regret it but that’s a decision to make. This is why companies are having a hard time getting people up to lead. A global organization, that’s real-time 24/7. These are hard jobs that take over all of your life. You don’t have to want that. You need the want not, need not thing, but the problem is, if you have all the needs but you don’t want to do the work, then that’s where the problem is.
I don’t think anybody has any vision of working for any of Elon Musk’s companies thinking they are going to have an easy time. Nobody applies to work at Tesla or SpaceX or X thinking, “I’m going to have this great work-life balance, I’m going to chill.” Anybody who goes to work for Elon Musk knows, “I’m going to work like a crazy person. I’m probably going to get paid well. I’m going to learn so much, and I get to learn from Elon, potentially. I’m all in. I will do whatever it takes.” Nobody goes there having these different aspirations. The message is not confusing for Elon.
Then there are probably other organizations. If you work for a company like Microsoft under Satya Nadella, you might say, “I will probably work hard, but there’s much more of an emphasis on these other types of things well-being, health, and balance.” You need to pick and choose the type of company that you want to work with and for, and you need to decide, “Do I want to be in leadership or not?”
If you have goals like, “I want to solve complex and big problems. I want to be paid well. I want to get into an executive role at some point in my career,” then your expectation of what is required to do that should be aligned with the output you are expecting to receive. Somewhere in life, these two things got thrown out of balance, where people were like, “I could probably work 35 to 40 hours a week and still become a top executive.” Find me an executive on planet Earth at a normal-sized organization who is in that leadership role and works 35 to 40 hours. They don’t exist.
A couple of times a year, I circle our industry, and I read Glassdoor reviews to get a sample of the temperature in the agency world. Since post-COVID, there’s been exhaustion, but I regularly see things like, “This company expects that you will work more than 35 hours a week regularly or 40.” These are agencies that are in your twenties.
I’m not someone who at all believes in hours for hours’ sake. I’m much more work-smart, but my friend was explaining to me this problem with doctors and the restrictions on their hours. With their training, they are not getting the same amount of experience. When they were working 100-hour week shifts, they were getting a ton of exposure. If there’s a cap of 50 and they are doing the same 3-year residency, they are seeing a lot fewer patients.
Your twenties is the time for learning. It’s like a sponge. It’s not working for the point but it’s fascinating to me where it would be. You know that when people say they are working 60-hour weeks, they are working 50, and they say 50, 40 but the baseline expectation is the horror of working over 40 hours a week. Let’s be honest, the 40-hour work week is 9:00 to 5:00 with an hour lunch break. No one is killing themselves in White-collar work.
Similarly, does anybody on planet Earth think that if you are going to become a doctor or a surgeon, you are not going to work like a sociopath? My father-in-law’s a doctor. He told me the amount of hours he would put in, and how much coffee he would be drinking. It’s like you have to be realistic here with what’s required. To your point, the thing is, there’s also nothing wrong with that. We get a lot of purpose, meaning, joy, and fulfillment from the work that we do. If you are doing something that you hate and you are being forced to work 67 hours a week, that’s different.
If you are on the path to mastery or the path to 10,000 hours, you should be like a sponge and engage in it.
For me, for example, I’m sure it’s probably the same for you. I love what I do. I work more than 40 or 50 hours a week. Probably, in some situations, 60 hours a week. I’m working whenever I can because I genuinely enjoy the work that I’m doing, and I get fulfillment from it. I get connections from it, my wife talking about it. We have great conversations and discussions about it, but that all plays a role. I’m trying to write books, create a speaking career, and build a business. I know if I want to do these things and be successful at it, I’m going to have to put in a lot of time. I’m under no reservations. I don’t have any misconstrued expectations that I can chill and then all these things are going to be on autopilot. People need a healthy dose of reality in this world and to also understand that there’s nothing wrong with these things. There’s nothing wrong with hard work. You, at the end of the day, have a choice. I’m working too hard. This company is not for me. That’s great. Go work for another organization. All good.
People need a healthy dose of reality in today’s world and to also understand that there’s nothing wrong with hard work.
There are two things that are also harder, usually foraging for food every day or sustenance or running your own business. Which, fundamentally, are the other options at the end of the day.
You can grow your farm.
Leading With Vulnerability
Take it in perspective. I’m interested. This dovetails nicely because I want to talk about the new book Leading with Vulnerability and this accountability and vulnerability, which people would think are counterintuitive. Talk about how they fit together. The first question is, why is being vulnerable and leading with vulnerability different things, as you say?
They are different things and probably counter to what a lot of people think. I always tell everybody, “Don’t be honorable at work.” Instead, lead with vulnerability. This idea of exposing or sharing a gap that you have. The classic example I always use is you are a leader, you’re given a project to do, you screw up, and now you have to come clean about it. You have to go through this very vulnerable experience where you go to your manager and say, “I’m sorry I made a mistake. I screwed this up. It probably cost us money. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry.”
The problem with doing that, in the context of work, is that no leader is going to look at you and say, “It’s all good. Thank you for telling me.” Your leader’s going to look at you and say, “I’m glad you told me about the mistake that you made, but the problem is still there. We still didn’t meet our numbers. Customers are still not happy. The project is still not done. The alignment has still not been met.” As much as it’s great that you have the psychological safety that you need to come and tell me that you made that mistake, now I need you to figure out what you’re going to do to fix it.
Leading with vulnerability is not talking about the gap that you have, but demonstrating what you are trying to do to close the gap. Instead of saying, “I’m sorry I made a mistake,” you say, “I’m sorry I made a mistake. Here’s what I learned from that mistake. Here’s what I’m going to do to make sure that mistake never happens again.” That is being vulnerable and also adding the leadership piece How I’m closing that gap.
We have spent a lot of time on the vulnerability piece, and the psychological safety piece. Even Dr. Peter Cappelli, I believe, wrote an article for Wharton where he was talking about how we can have too much psychological safety inside of our organizations. At that point, too much psychological safety means that you show up to work and you can do no wrong. Everything you do is okay. There’s no such thing as a bad question. You can say what you want, and do what you want. If you make a mistake, it’s okay. His argument, which I agree with, is that yes, you can have too much psychological safety. You can create an environment where people are almost too comfortable with everything. His argument was, that you need the right amount of psychological safety. You need a little bit. You don’t need to go crazy with it, and I fully believe in that mentality.
“I screwed this up.” You do you is not the right answer.
It’s not. You want to have that level of psychological safety where people can come forward, but you also want people to be accountable and responsible. As I mentioned during the past few years, we have over-indexed on the vulnerability piece, the feelings piece, the “Come forward and share what you want, how are you doing,” piece, but we forget that we are at work. You are being paid. You have customers. You have projects. You have deadlines. Where is the leadership piece, competence piece, confidence piece, motivation, and getting better? What happened to all of that?
Some people need a firewall. It’s great that you can tell us about the problems you’ve had with your babysitter bailing on you and helping you out, but after two weeks of hearing that, people don’t want to hear it anymore. They don’t want it to be an excuse.
Did you solve your problem? If you keep bringing your problems and making them everybody else’s problems, how is that helpful?
I have said this a lot. I like your take on this. I’m a big believer in leading with vulnerability and being able to say the tough stuff, but also reminding everyone why we are here and what we are doing this sounds like tough love, but the employees who can’t firewall certain things, are not trusted. “I don’t know. Am I going to get Jacob?” There’s a place for emotions and vulnerability in the workplace, particularly when something’s going on. It’s an exception or otherwise, but like everything, if you overuse it, I’m not sure which Jacob I’m going to get.
Whether he’s going to show up and be great or fall apart and tell me about the problems in his relationship for the 7th time in 2 weeks, the truth is, as a leader, I stopped trusting Jacob. I stopped assigning him my important projects. I stopped giving him the work because I didn’t know which Jacob was going to show up every day.
The Pratfall Effect: Competence And Vulnerability
There’s a concept in psychology called the pratfall effect, which states that if you are competent and very good at your job and then you are vulnerable, people view you as being even more capable, and more talented, and you get a little bit of a 1 plus 1 equals 3 effect. The reason for that is that you’ve already demonstrated that you are highly competent, and now when you are vulnerable, people view you as being human. It’s like, “So and so is good at their job. They made a mistake too. I see you as a human being now,” so you get that boost.
The flip side of this is also true, and I interviewed Elliot Aronson, who developed this. He’s one of the people I interviewed for the book on Leading with Vulnerability. He told me the flip side of this is also true. If you are not good at your job and you’re vulnerable, what it does is it reinforces your mediocrity. In other words, what happens is people look at you and they say, “I get why you are struggling. I get why you are not getting promoted because you keep talking about the gaps that you have.” “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”
You have no confidence, which is why you are probably struggling.
If you only talk about your gaps when you show up to work, people will look at you and say, “You get crystallized in that or mediocrity.” If you talk about what you are doing to solve your problems, “I’m going through a tough time, but I hired this leadership coach,” or, “Here’s what I’m doing here.” Now, people look at you and they say, “Now you have a different aura around you.” You have like, “This person is trying to get better. They are taking me seriously. I like the initiative and the accountability.” You get viewed differently. Competence and vulnerability do have a very important relationship with each other.
That’s super interesting, and I had not heard of that before, but that explains so much. I have always chalked it up a little more to emotional intelligence. The exception of the rule. Jacob is having a rough day and he told us his mom is sick. Is this the first time I have ever heard him talk about this or is this every other week? There is a difference, and it sounds callous. Try to explain to people that there is a difference. I have talked to so many leaders, and again, in that second example you describe, they start taking away opportunities from other people because they don’t trust their confidence.
I had somebody on my team many years ago that I worked with, who, every time we would get on the meetings, would say, “I’m having a tough time here. My mom’s here. My dog is sick here.,” This and that. I tried to be as compassionate as I could. “Is there something I can do? Do you need some time? Do you want to reschedule? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that?” After a couple of months of this, I had to be honest and say, “I get that you are going through a tough time, and maybe we can revisit this relationship in the future, but now, I don’t think you are the right person for this team because we are struggling, and you are impacting the team. It seems like you are not able to take care of the things that you need to take care of to be an effective member of the team. Go take care of what you need to take care of.”
It reminds me of people who show up habitually late to things but with a completely different excuse and reason. I was on a board for years, and the woman was never on time for a single board meeting. She would rush into the room and say there was traffic, and there was an accident, and, “I’m sorry, this happened.” Eventually, someone was like, You gotta leave 50 minutes earlier. You don’t know how to manage your time and everyone in the room can see it. You don’t and that’s the worst.”
That’s not healthy. All of this comes down to being an adult. It’s about being a grown-up. Be accountable. Be responsible for yourself, personally and professionally and it might sound a little tough love, but I truly believe that nobody’s going to look out for you but you. If you show up to work assuming that your company is going to solve your problems, your company is going to make you engaged.
Your company is responsible for your mental health. This is huge.
If your company has some resources out there, take advantage of them. It’s not realistic for you to assume that your company is going to solve all your problems.
The companies that have tried to solve everyone’s problems and the world’s problems and stuff over the last couple of years have completely lost focus and are struggling financially. There are some companies that have tried to capitulate to employees wanting them to be everything to everyone but you shouldn’t run a mental health clinic. You can provide that benefit, but that’s not your job. If you make widgets, you are trying to figure out how to make the best widgets to make sure there’s a mark. I think the companies that have capitulated this are suffering from a lack of focus.
It’s okay to say no. I like the same thing. If you have kids, it’s okay to tell your children, “You can’t have any more ice cream. We are done.” It’s okay to tell your employees, “You can’t have that. Yes, you should be in the office. No, you can’t save that. No, you can’t do that.” You can say no, and the sooner that organizations and leaders understand that, “Wait a minute, let’s understand what’s going on here.” Why does a company hire you? A company hires you because they are saying, “We have an issue or an opening, or we have something that we are trying to solve, and we need somebody skilled and talented and capable to be able to do that.” You say, “I’m good at that. I could take care of that for you,” and the company says, “Great, you are hired.”
That’s the relationship. In exchange for you being able to help this company, the company pays you, and now, they are giving you benefits. They are giving you perks. They are giving you more and more stuff. That’s the core of their relationship. Nowhere in the contract does it say, “If you start working here, by the way, we are going to take care of all your food. We are going to take care of your well-being. We are going to make sure that you are mentally and physically healthy.”
The company provides again, the contract the company provides payment towards your health insurance. They are not in the business of making sure your legs. It’s a benefit. They outsource it. There’s a lot of things that we have conflated that. Another country is that healthcare is not their responsibility. The US is very out of the norm and it’s made people believe that other things are the responsibility of the company.
The way to think about it is, if your company has anything like that, thank your lucky stars. That shouldn’t be the norm. It should not be the norm. Your company has no obligation or responsibility to do these things for you, but we are doing it because we are so desperate to get people to like even the work from home. The fact that we have to convince employees, and lure them to come to the office is mind-boggling for me. When I was younger when my dad was younger, I’m sure even when you were younger, the very fact that somebody was willing to pay you to have a job was like, “That’s awesome.” Now, you have to be convinced to show up to the office. It’s crazy.
It should not be the norm that your company has no obligation or responsibility to solve all your problems.
Lessons From 100 CEOs
If you want to be a free agent, if you want to be a gig worker, that comes with totally different exchanges. You interviewed 100 CEOs for this book, and one of the things you talked to them all about was how they add vulnerability to their leadership. What were some of the biggest surprises or takeaways? It sounds like if you think about leading with vulnerability and hearing how you are talking about it, it’s not what a lot of people would think. What were some of the surprises or the counterintuitive things that you took from those interviews?
One is that all these leaders understand and recognize the importance and value of vulnerability, but they all recognize that inside an organization, it’s a different dynamic. Inside a company, you have leaders, project deadlines, customers, a boss, and you are being paid money. While they all understood the importance of vulnerability in their personal lives with friends and family members and spouses, where it’s a different dynamic you don’t have these same types of rules or guidelines there.
They were all trying to figure out, “How do I apply this inside of my organization?” The number one thing when we surveyed 14,000 employees who said, “What keeps you from being vulnerable at work?” Everybody said, “I don’t want to be perceived as being weak or incompetent.” As you don’t want to be perceived as being weak or incompetent, you avoid vulnerability. What if you can add competence to the vulnerability? In other words, you don’t talk about the gap. You demonstrate what you are trying to do to close the gap. That removes that negative perception that people are going to have of you.
That was very interesting for me. The second thing is that a lot of these leaders were very conflicted because they kept saying, “On the one hand, my employees want me to talk about my weaknesses, challenges, failures, and mistakes, but on the other hand, my employees want me to be this strong, visionary, competent leader. They want to turn to me knowing that I have things figured out.” They kept saying, “I don’t know what leader I’m supposed to be here. Do I talk about the mistakes?”
This is the principal you were talking about.
Which leader am I supposed to be? That was very interesting and then the stories that people showed me. There are some crazy stories of what CEOs have gone through, what people have done to them, and what they have done to other people, as far as backstabbing. Some of the stories almost read like comedic novels or spy films when you hear the things that go on behind closed doors inside a lot of organizations. It’s very surprising. Also, how open some of these CEOs were with me.
A lot of them told me that vulnerability is a very uncomfortable thing for them physiologically. Their heartbeats and their palms get sweaty. One CEO shared that he had panic attacks. Vulnerability is uncomfortable for everybody. Nobody says, “I love it,” but you do it because, as a leader, to become better, you have to acknowledge that you have gaps, and you have to do something to close those gaps. A lot of these leaders do it because that’s what they signed up for. You’ve signed up to do this, and so you have to do it.
There’s a real vulnerability paradox there. I get that it’s hard. If you get on the phone and say, “I screwed up,” people around you might say, “I’m not going down on this guy’s ship. He seems like a terrible captain.” I don’t have a good answer to that. That’s a tough order to make sure, and maybe it’s being real. That shows people more that you are real, that you are human, you are not infallible but yes, you have to project an aura of confidence that you know what you are doing in leadership, or you’ll scare everyone off.
There needs to be this idea of intention. Why is it that you are doing or sharing whatever you are doing or sharing? If you don’t have an intention behind it, then it becomes a therapy session. For everybody who’s reading, when they are thinking about being vulnerable at work, you should ask yourself, “Why do I want to share this? Is it going to help create trust with my team? Is it going to help us improve collaboration? What is the purpose of me doing this?”
This is not performative virtue signaling because I saw someone else do it.
That’s never a good thing.
Setting Standards As A New Leader
I saw an article you wrote, and I thought that was super interesting because we had Michael Watkins on, who wrote The First 90 Days, and you said, “When stepping into a new leadership role, the first thing a leader says to their team at the first company meeting has an impact on their success.” A) What’s the data behind that? B) What should I say then? What do we do and what do we not do, if it determines our entire arc of success?
How leaders communicate makes a big difference. I don’t know if there’s any official survey or study that’s been done on first-promotion messaging and how that gets communicated, but from a lot of people that I have talked to and we know this when we get promoted, usually what happens is your leader at the time will say, “You got promoted to a leadership role. Why don’t you say something to the team? You are taking over. Say something.”
How leaders communicate makes a big difference.
We have all been in those situations. We have all had to do it. We have seen other people do it. The vulnerable approach to it that I have seen lots of times, and I have heard lots of times, is if somebody will go in front of their team and they will say, “I’m a first-time leader here. I’m so excited to be a part of this team. I know we are going to make some awesome things happen. I have never done this before. I’m a little bit nervous about it, but we’ll be able to figure things out. Everything will be great.” On the surface, it doesn’t sound like a terrible message. There’s some vulnerability in there, but nobody’s going to walk away from that message thinking, “I got to go follow this person through a fire. We are in great hands with this person who said they are nervous and they have never done this before and they hope we figure it out.”
Instead, as a first-time leader, you could give a similar message with vulnerability but add leadership. You could say everything that I said “First-time leader, I’m nervous, I have never done this before,” and then say, “To help make sure I’m going to be the best leader that you’ve ever had, I have an executive coach, and I’m going to be working with. James the Chief Marketing Officer is going to be checking in with me once a week to make sure that I’m moving in the right direction. Here are the three leadership books that I picked up, and I’m going to be going through. I encourage you to follow along as well, and my door is always open for any feedback and suggestions that you have, I’m going to work on trying to be a great leader and together we’ll be able to make amazing things happen.” That’s a very different message.
Now, people are going to look at you and they are going to say, “I get it. You are new in this world, but why are you taking this seriously? You are trying to be that great leader.” The perception of you changes. It’s not like you’ve done this before and you are a master leader and you’ve been a CEO in this and that. You are acknowledging you’ve never done this, but you are also letting people know how you’re going to be the best version that you can be, and that’s a very important message to give to people.
One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that the vulnerability is great, but whatever you are exposing in the vulnerability, you should also be talking about how you are solving that or addressing it. It has value the first time you hear it, but then the second and third time you hear it, it’s going to feel like a problem rather than something positive.
Leadership plus vulnerability equals leading with vulnerability. You have to remember to have both those things. Leadership and vulnerability. The heart and the lighthouse, as I like to think about it.
Where can people learn about you, your work, and the new book?
Where To Find Jacob Morgan’s Work
A couple of different places. The book is available wherever you can find a book. We made a website for it called LeadWithVulnerability.com. I have a Substack that people can follow, which is GreatLeadership.Substack.com and then my email, if people are curious to connect with me, is Jacob@TheFutureOrganization.com. My website is TheFutureOrganization.com. I did a PDF on the top leadership trends for 2024, and some of these things are in there. TopLeadershipTrends.com. If people go there, they can download this PDF and some of the things that we have talked about.
Thank you for coming back to join us. This was a fascinating conversation, and since I know you are a prodigious author, we’ll have you back whenever you release the next one and we’ll do it again.
I’m looking forward to it. Thank you for having me.
To our readers, thanks for reading. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
