Episode Summary:
In this enlightening episode of the ideamix podcast, host Sam Jayanti sits down with Professor Frances Frei, a distinguished academic and expert on leadership, to delve into the critical elements of building trust and fostering a learning environment within corporate settings.
Episode Transcript: Frances Frei
Sam Jayanti [00:00:03] Welcome to Ideamix Performance and Wellness, where world leading coaches and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve your personal and professional goals faster. Hi, it’s Sam Jayanti, co-founder and CEO of IDM coaching. Coaching has played an important role in my life. It’s helped me through my journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife. ideamix coaches, help you increase your self-awareness, improve your problem solving skills, and evolve your habits to achieve your goals. All things I’m grateful to have learned and done through my own coaching journey. Our easy. One minute assessment matches you with an ideal mix coach that best fits your needs and values. Each idea makes coaches vetted and experienced. It helps clients map and achieve their wellness, professional, and business goals. If you or someone you know could benefit from coaching, visit our website at www.theIdeamix.com. We also know that not everyone can invest in coaching right now, and that’s why we provide free coaching in our Coach Shorts episodes. If you think someone you know would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Today, we’re excited to have Professor Francis Frei join us on the show. By any measure, Francis is unusual. She’s a professor, advisor, author, strategist, Ted speaker and spent 2017 at Uber on a leave of absence to lead leadership and strategy for several thousand employees in a company contending with rapid growth and a quickly evolving culture in her day job. She’s a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School, with a research focus on the intersection of leadership, operations, strategy and culture. She’s also the author of a viral Ted talk, How to Build and Rebuild Trust, and I unfortunately did not have the privilege of being taught by Francis as an MBA student at Harvard 100 years ago. But I remember a close friend of mine who did study with her describe her as singular and legendary. So I could go on and on. But I’d rather that Francis and I show you, rather than tell you about her work in the rest of this podcast. Francis, welcome to radio mix coaching.
Frances Frei [00:02:16] Well, that’s the best introduction I have ever had, so thank you.
Sam Jayanti [00:02:20] Well, I will send it to you so that you. I would love it.
Frances Frei [00:02:23] Whenever you and I will send it to my mother.
Sam Jayanti [00:02:27] Fantastic. So I wanted to start us off, Francis, with just a few really quick questions. So simple. Kind of yes or no answers. And we’ll dive into a lot of those topics later in our conversation. So, number one, do most companies, in your experience, put service at the heart of their business?
Frances Frei [00:02:48] No.
Sam Jayanti [00:02:51] Do most leaders understand how to empower their teams?
Frances Frei [00:02:55] No.
Sam Jayanti [00:02:57] Is trust the single most important element in the success of a company?
Frances Frei [00:03:03] Yes.
Sam Jayanti [00:03:06] Number four. Do most leaders in your experience exhibit the self-awareness necessary to lead effectively?
Frances Frei [00:03:14] No.
Sam Jayanti [00:03:16] And last, if you had to pick just one activity that you enjoy doing in your spare time, what is it?
Frances Frei [00:03:24] Watching the deer eat on video in a beautiful deer sanctuary up in Maine. It is mesmerizing, I was expecting. It’s mesmerizing and amazing, and I do it in the middle of the night when I have spare time. And I just love it. Brownfield, Maine. It’s amazing. It’s called Deer Pantry.
Sam Jayanti [00:03:45] Wow. Okay, that’s very cool. I’m definitely going to check that out. So Francis, in an article that you wrote in back in 2020 and management today, you described your time at Uber fixing what was then a very toxic culture, and you talked about encountering 3000 managers who had been really strong. Individual contributors were then elevated to be managers with very little training, and the result that they were very poorly equipped to lead and manage during a period of hyper growth of the company and a culture of sort of a lack of focus on developing individuals to be effective in their roles. Right? There was maybe no time, but this is such a common problem at companies more broadly. We encountered daily in our coaching business, because the skills that get you to that leadership role are not the same skills that you then need to manage a team effectively. So you’ve had these encounters with Uber and you’ve advised lots of companies on the same issue. What’s the underlying structural problem in your view?
Frances Frei [00:04:59] The structural problem is, I think, to find out why is it that people aren’t able to perform well and it’s not their fault. So whatever the obstacle is and it’s only ever like one of three, but whatever the obstacle is, let’s just systematically address it as opposed to lamenting that it’s not there. So if if we take radical responsibility for the success of our employees, we will be able to get there and and the, the three obstacles. And this is in the language of a colleague of mine, Ryan Bulls, but they either don’t have the capability to do it, which was the case at Uber. Or they don’t have the motivation or they don’t have the license or permission. Whichever one it is, address it. It I find that like my no answers to all of your earlier questions. I didn’t. I’m a crazy optimist. If I could say a longer answer, it’s no. And it can be readily taught. So everything you asked for, we can teach it, but we’re not born knowing it. I like to think of it as the secret memos on how to do it, and we just haven’t had wide enough distribution on the secret memos on how to do these things. And so I feel like that’s what I did when I went to Uber, is I provided the secret memos to how to manage. And these amazing people that they didn’t know how to manage makes them amazing.
Sam Jayanti [00:06:25] People thought it so true. I mean, you know, these skills are learned, right? In most cases. I mean, maybe there’s a minority of people who just sort of either know these things or develop them as they go along, but most of the time they’re learned skills and they’re very teachable, as you’ve identified. And yet organizations fail to create a structure and a mechanism to actually shepherd people through these career transitions and evolutions. Right. And and so sort of, in a sense, set them up to fail. Was that different in an Uber context? Was it common to a lot of the other contexts that you’ve seen? I mean, obviously you knew that context much more intimately since you were in there.
Frances Frei [00:07:12] Well, I think that in Hypergrowth, it’s particularly tempting to under invest in development, because you’re like scrambling to do other things and you think, well, the ROI of taking advantage of that next dollar of revenue is more important. And I’ll get to development later. Right? I’ll just I’ll sequence it to later, organizations that we see that really benefit, excuse me, that really benefit. They do a couple of things, but one is they get very efficient at the development. So development needn’t take a very long time. Like you went to the Harvard Business School for two years. Right. So that is a very long time. But you to learn things that are going to last a lifetime, organizations to train somebody from, going from an individual contributor to a manager. I think that if you well, we did it in 30 days. Right. And fully equipped people in 30 days. And it wasn’t even their primary responsibility in 30 days. That was back in 2017. I think we’ve gotten much more efficient at doing it now, and with AI, we can get even more efficient at doing it. But what most people think is that they don’t have good models to do it. They think it takes a long time and it’s less important than getting the next dollar right. What I like to say is you’re going to get the next dollar, but it’s going to blow up in like a little while. So like, let’s do this, solve it once so that you’ll have it forever. But I understand the pressures that these organizations are under. Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:08:44] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So another of the areas of your research have focused on service businesses, and you distinguish them very clearly from product based businesses. Would you explain for our audience that distinction that you draw?
Frances Frei [00:09:03] Sure. And that distinction was born out of I when I went and got my PhD, it was in operations and information management at Wharton. And so if I take the operations management part of it, up until that point, the study of operations by academics was entirely in manufacturing. It was entirely in what we would jokingly say things you can drop on your foot, and if you can drop something on your foot, physics applies. You can’t pretend it doesn’t. I was obsessed with service organizations for a couple of reasons. One, it’s like, well, north of three quarters of most economies. And it had been understudied. And you can’t drop it on your foot and people can. seduce themselves into thinking that physics doesn’t apply, so you can. The lessons that I came up with for service organizations. Most of them also apply to manufacturing. But you couldn’t have pretended they didn’t. So, I’ll give you one example of that. My favorite example of that in manufacturing, we know that you can’t be great at everything, like cost, quality and speed trade off against each other. Why? Because, you know, if something’s going to be heavy, it can’t also, you know, it can’t also be light. These two things trade off against each other. I see so many service businesses that think it can be heavy and light at the same time, but think you can overcome trade offs just by sheer will. So I was studying the understudied one because it was so vast, and two because we were seducing ourselves into all of these, you know, wacky things. And so if we could just provide common sense to these contexts, we could make a big difference.
Sam Jayanti [00:10:49] That’s a that’s a great way to explain it. I think the, the sort of tangibility is, is such a key point. Right. Because I totally agree with you that the, the sort of delusion that you can just wills something into being. No, they’re very contradictory forces competing with each other. You know, it’s sort of an easy.
Frances Frei [00:11:07] To exist in services because in manufacturing, like quite literally physics applies. Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:11:13] So. Right. So, you know, service businesses are super interesting to us. Most of the companies we work with are either in the professional. They’re either companies in professional services or their individuals working in professional services businesses. Right. In an HBR article that you wrote in 2008, you talked about the four elements that service businesses have to get right, right, in order to be successful. Tell our listeners a little bit about these four elements, because I found them fascinating. And why getting them right is not a one size fits all, because there is such a diversity of service companies in the end.
Frances Frei [00:11:55] Yeah. So the first one, which we called service offering when we wrote this and this is back in 2013, I, I like to joke that it would almost get a classic car license plate. It’s almost that old, and still holds true today. But this is the one that in order to be great, you have to be bad. And so the example, the manufacturing example, or for the parallel we always use is the MacBook air. Best in class at weight, worst in class at physical features when in the dawn when it had it had recently come out when when we started talking about that and service organizations just they will talk about what they want to be great at and they will be embarrassed, but they want to buy what they’re bad at. And we’re like, no, no, no. You have to be equally articulate at both and understand that the reason I don’t have physical features is so that I can be best in class at weight, like one is in service of the other. Both are equally important. So that’s the first part. If you don’t get that part right, it’s going to be hard to make up for it with everything else I’m about to say. So that’s the most important thing because you’re seeing it.
Sam Jayanti [00:12:59] Sort of it’s an articulation and an acknowledgment of yes, of it effectively.
Frances Frei [00:13:04] Yes. Because otherwise when you’re not looking, I’m going to get better at the things we’re designed to be bad at, which means I’m going to get worse. The things that we were trying to win that. And so we’re going to play an infinite game of whac-a-mole, and we’re going to lead to exhausted mediocrity, which is what I tragically see in way too many people and in way too many organizations. And it’s not out of laziness. It’s out of constantly trying to make up for what we’re bad at, as opposed to realizing that is precisely the fuel of what we’re great at. So that’s the first part of the four things. Once you have that, the second part is and this is particularly true for services is a funding mechanism. And that is you have to make sure that you get paid. Now of course you have to get paid usually for products you pay once and that’s it for in services. And it’s what we often do is that we’re tempted when the customer says, oh, I would like this. We’re tempted to give it to them for free. Right. What we refer to as a gratuitous service. The problem is, if I give you something for free now, I’m going to have to charge you later. And what’s going to happen when I charge you later is I’m going to raise the price without raising the features. And you’re going to hate me. So I did something out of love. Now that’s going to come out of. You’re going to end up hating me for later. But we do things for the for free all the time. So if I go to an organization, I say, tell me all of your improvement ideas for the customer. Let’s say they lost 50. I’ll say okay. And how many will the customer pay extra for? 40 of them come off the list. I was like, stop working on those. Let’s let’s work on ones for which we have a reliable funding mechanism. Let’s work on ones for which people are going to hate us later, for when we ultimately do have to end up getting paid for it. So that’s the funding mechanism part is a real is a real thing. That’s number two. The third one is what we were alluding to earlier. We call the employee management system and we titled the chapter in Uncommon Service. It’s never your employees fault. And hear it. Have you set your employees up for success? Have you reliably set them up for success? And here’s what we know. Selection, development, promotion, retention, the employee life cycle. Those four things have to be mutually reinforcing. So if I hire inexperienced people, I better give them a lot of training. If I hire experienced people, I better give them a job designed with lots of license in it. Like, it’s not that there’s better. It’s not a highly experienced hiring experience. I don’t care which one you do. I just know that the rest of the parts of the employee life cycle, and the rest of the parts of the employee management system better be mutually reinforcing. Yeah. So have we taken radical responsibility for the success of our employees? That’s the employee management system. And then the fourth part is the customer management system. In services customers can play an operating role. So it’s not just at the employee behavior influences quality but the customer behavior might. So health care for example, know how I behave as a patient influences the overall outcome of my health. It’s not like a doctor can just deliver my health, I co-produce it. Well, that’s true in most services and it’s not true in most manufacturing. When somebody manufactures tide detergent, it just is as good as it is regardless of what I do. So we have to select, develop, train and retain customers the same way we do employee. So there’s a there’s a parallel customer management system. Those are the four things the service business must get right.
Sam Jayanti [00:16:43] Yeah. And I think especially your point about this idea of managing customers is so often lost on service businesses, right. Because either in the beginning stages, they want any customer that comes in the door. And later on it’s because growth is happening relatively quickly. And so there’s no time, in a sense, to distinguish between the desirable customers and the undesirable ones. But as you said, if they’re co-creating the outcome, unlike in manufacturing, that choice of customer is incredibly important, incredibly important.
Frances Frei [00:17:20] And I liked how you said we often say that we’re looking for customer, we’re looking for revenue with a pulse. And we we have to be more discerning than that, just like we are for our employees if customer behavior matters. We have to be discerning. But that is an awfully courageous act for most organizations, but an absolutely essential act.
Sam Jayanti [00:17:43] Yeah. Absolutely necessary. And I think, you know more on this employee management idea. Later. So we’ll come back to that. So I want to shift gears a little bit now to talk about trust. Yeah. The loss of trust surrounds us. Consumers have lost trust in products. Professionals have lost trust in their organizations. Citizens feel less trust in their government and institutions. And even though it’s only in some ways 30 plus years since the end of the Cold War, right when capitalist democracies became the clear winning model, liberal democracy itself now is sort of in question because of this, this kind of loss of trust. In your Ted talk on rebuilding trust, which I loved. And that was based on your experiences at Uber. You talked about encountering an organization that was literally on fire because of this lack of trust. And I would love you to please share with our listeners that finding and, and sort of what catalyzed it in your mind as you went in there. And, and how you sort of, you know, in a sense, alighted on this idea that the loss of trust was so deep and institutional and that really you were going to work to kind of bring this back. Right?
Frances Frei [00:19:08] Yeah. So the way I got to Uber, I think might be useful to just shed a little light on when I was asked if I would come out and meet the then CEO of Uber, I said no. And it was a former student that asked me and she said, I understand you have an opinion based on what you’ve read in the newspaper. He’s a different person than that. As a favor to me, will you come and meet him? I, of course said yes, because once a student, always a student. And, and I flew across the country that I would never do again. But I flew across the country to have a relatively short meeting. The meeting, which lasted three days. I postponed my flight home five times because the meeting just kept going on. And so we talked about everything. I got to raise every single issue because Ann, and I coauthor and wife, we help good people do hard things, but we take our responsibility to help good people very, very seriously. And I didn’t think he was a good person by everything I read. Well, at the end of the three days, I was absolutely certain he was a good person and he was very inexperienced in what he had done. For example, the last company he led had eight people. When I got to Uber, they had 13,000 people and were one of the most successful startups of, you know, by, by certain measures. And so he was out over his skis in a couple of areas, which makes him human. In in that regard, he also wanted help the places where he was over his skis, in particular, leadership and strategy were two places where I just happened to be a really good fit. So not only did I think he was a good person, but the unique things I can do. It just it was hand in glove.
Sam Jayanti [00:20:59] Right?
Frances Frei [00:21:00] And so that’s how I got there was to, to do that. And when I looked around at the problems, the problems were very consistent, regardless of which stakeholder it was. So the employees had lost trust, the regulators had lost track, riders had lost trust investors, drivers, like literally every constituent in some ways had the same problem. And to me, from my operations mind, that’s a much easier problem to solve than if everybody had a different problem, right? So when I got there and I looked at it, I was like, I’m just seeing the same thing manifest again and again and again. And so what we did is tested whether or not teaching people about trust and teaching them the remedies to overcome broken trust would work. And it worked, like at an exhilarating pace.
Sam Jayanti [00:21:57] So you went in, in a sense, with this concept of trust, you know, as part of your research and think.
Frances Frei [00:22:03] Well, well, before I got there. So before I said yes, I had to test whether or not. So I probably taught 1500 of the three of the 13,000 people before I said yes. Okay. So I was like, I got to see if the way in which I communicate works. And I very quickly, early on, realized trust is what I should be teaching them to see if that’s it. So I started hearing about it right away, and then I started teaching it. So I had taught 1500 people about trust, and it was being absorbed at a beautiful rate. And then I was like, there’s something I can do here.
Sam Jayanti [00:22:38] And and even though the loss of trust in many ways would was attributable to different reasons depending on the different stakeholders. Right.
Frances Frei [00:22:47] It’s almost always the same reason.
Sam Jayanti [00:22:49] Okay. So same.
Frances Frei [00:22:50] So if trust if trust consists of you’re more likely to trust me if you experience authenticity, logic and empathy. Was almost always an empathy model. It was almost always I was so self distracted in myself. Yeah. That I would be okay with collateral damage of you.
Sam Jayanti [00:23:13] Fascinating. Yeah, that was bad. I mean, in a sense, it was dictated by company culture.
Frances Frei [00:23:20] I think the company culture was. And which was, you know, Travis would often say, like he was diagnosed as I am, as an empathy wobbler, which is if we’re going to lose trust, it’s probably for empathy. And as a very successful founder CEO, his wobble became the cultural wobble.
Sam Jayanti [00:23:40] Right of the entire.
Frances Frei [00:23:41] Eye. And I see that all the time. Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:23:45] So is that would you say, of the three elements that you just outlined? Is that the most? Is that the one you see most commonly?
Frances Frei [00:23:54] It is, it is. And, I was just with an organization, this morning and 50% had empathy wobble and 25% had authenticity and 25% had logic. What I see more commonly is 60% empathy.
Sam Jayanti [00:24:14] Yeah.
Frances Frei [00:24:15] 30% logic and then 20% authenticity.
Sam Jayanti [00:24:21] Okay. Super interesting. So it’s by far the lion’s share. Yeah. So trust lies at the heart of leadership. Right of you. As you’ve just identified, and the teams at Uber had no trust in their managers. And the managers, in turn, had no understanding of how to lead or trust in their leaders. I, you know, recently came across a CEO who basically described his leadership style to me as what I would characterize, I guess, as super micromanager. Right. He sort of described how every day at work starts with a two hour team meeting, and every day ends with a sort of one hour team meeting, and that’s how he kind of runs the organization.
Frances Frei [00:25:12] Wow. That’s an organization built to be a hobby, not a not a company. I mean, no disrespect, but that can’t scale. And you’re.
Sam Jayanti [00:25:19] Not salable.
Frances Frei [00:25:21] Yeah, yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:25:22] And, you know, and I we have this conversation about his style was such a clear impediment and, and we talked a little bit about, okay, this is what you do at your company. Like what do you do at home with your family. Like how does that work. Right. Nice.
Frances Frei [00:25:37] Nice.
Sam Jayanti [00:25:37] And he and, you know, same tactic and sort of refusal to accept that it should be or could be different. Right.
Frances Frei [00:25:48] Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:25:49] And not long after that. I mean, in a very sad way. The problem with his leadership style became very evident to him in a home context, in fact, not in the work context initially. And it was that moment where he sort of, you know, realized that this wasn’t working and it wasn’t going to work kind of going forward. And, you know, they’d ended up in sort of a really bad place. Why do you feel so many leaders struggle to empower their teams? And and equally, a lot of these behaviors show up at home too, right?
Frances Frei [00:26:26] Yeah, yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:26:27] Family. And and so you know what that experience is like. And and and you see a mirror image of those behaviors in both spheres in a sense. And and why do you think it’s such a struggle.
Frances Frei [00:26:39] Yeah. So, I’ll tell you how I overcame the struggle as maybe a way to show what the struggle is, which is. And I overcame it in a parenting context. But to your point, it can be with partners, parents, employees. It’s all, which is when I heard Carol Dweck, say there are two ways to parent and one of them is the right way. As an insecure parent who was sure I was doing things wrong, I just didn’t know specifically what I was doing wrong. She had my attention and she said, [00:27:11]you can either prepare the path for the child. Or you can prepare the child for the path. [5.8s] So many of us are preparing the path for the child. So many of us are weed whacking. Yeah. Out of love. So we’re not micro-managing out of anger. We’re micromanaging out of love. [00:27:32]What we fail to realize is that we’re making people reliant on our presence. [4.9s] And [00:27:39]what we want to do is be preparing the child for any path. [4.4s] What we want to do is to be preparing people for our absence, as opposed to making them reliant on our presence. Building resilience. Right. And micromanaging is requiring that people can only do excellence in our presence when if we just put on a different lens, give this context, I could fix it for you or tell you how to fix it. Or I could interact with you in such a way that you will be able to do things like this and beyond in my absence. It’s a whole different pedagogy associated with it. I think we all have to have the equivalent of that light bulb moment. Am I preparing you for my presence, making you reliant on me, or am I preparing you for my absence? And the moment we realize we’re preparing people for our absence? That’s when empowerment becomes one of the most beautiful things in the world.
Sam Jayanti [00:28:35] Yeah. So true. I also, you know, think back to I spent some time at Palantir, and one of the things that used to amuse me a fair amount was that there were a lot of old economy companies that would come through, not just Palantir, but sort of a bunch of companies in the Valley. And they would come on these, they call them innovation tours, like, you know, trying to figure out what is it that creates this culture of innovation in the valley. And, you know, why are we not able to replicate it? And, and and the reason was like, you didn’t even have to come here. You know, it was super simple. It was if you approach running your business from a position of risk aversion, where you’re all where the culture is, don’t screw it up, then that’s what you get, right? Whereas if you.
Frances Frei [00:29:19] Incremental.
Sam Jayanti [00:29:20] Right. And if we approach your business from the position of, hey, we trust you to take some risks, we understand that mistakes will be made, but we’re sort of here to back you up. Then you’ll get a very different culture, right? And and so many companies are kind of unable to shift their culture, get out of their own way. Yeah. You’ve had tons of experiences with this, I’m sure. What is that about and what’s an example have shifted culture and been successful at that?
Frances Frei [00:29:55] Yeah. Well, I think my favorite large scale example of a cultural shift with Wild Benefit is Microsoft. So Microsoft before Satya Nadella was like, I think the prior CEO, maybe the value of the company at the beginning of his tenure was the same as the at the end of his tenure. Yeah. And now look at us now. Yeah. And now look at what happened with Satya. And he changed the culture completely into all of the ways that you would want empower mantra, growth mindset, intelligent failure. Like all of the things did all of the things. So to me we have maybe before then we just people thought that that’s some, you know, unproven methodology. But now the most successful companies are exhibiting these traits, so I expect them to be more contagious back then. Companies, even if they weren’t successful. We seduced ourselves into thinking, you know, tough guys finish first in shouting shows. My a Scott Galloway is really wonderful thing. Acting, shouting shows my masculinity and I’m going to shout. And that’s like, not at all what masculinity is. Masculinity is like a beautiful thing where we’re taking care of other people and setting the conditions for them to thrive. So it’s a reinterpretation of what great looks like. And I think we now have lots of lots of successful turnarounds. I would say that Walmart today versus Walmart yesterday, another well, I guess we would call an old economy business that is so progressive in what it’s doing, is doing development at a faster pace than most other organizations. And they have 100,000 employees in the US, and they are using AI and beautiful ways to empower and develop people in really progressive ways. So I don’t think you I don’t think you have to be new economy or old economy to do it, but it does require leadership. Yeah. Doug McMillon, Satya Nadella, these are I think you could have them lead any company and those companies will be successful.
Sam Jayanti [00:32:15] Yeah. So true. So I want to come back to this idea of human capital management. Right. Much of our work has focused on, helping companies design a human capital management strategy that sort of works for them. And it’s like way to help them identify the right people, put them in the right roles at the right time, etc., through talent assessment, you know, organizational design and team design, but then also coaching where it’s necessary.
Frances Frei [00:32:46] Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:32:47] And most companies, in our experience, do not think cohesively about that continuum of sort of recruiting selection. You know, being really clear about people’s roles in a team. Are they aligned with one another and then gathering feedback and drawing accountability and then coaching for skills where necessary? Give us a couple of examples of companies that are actually getting this right.
Frances Frei [00:33:17] Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:33:18] You know, it might well be that they’ve worked with you in order to get it right, meaning this sort of holistic design. But, I’d be really curious.
Frances Frei [00:33:29] Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you my favorite current day example, which is one that surprisingly few people have studied, but I believe the entire world is going to know him in just a minute. And that’s ServiceNow. So ServiceNow is in the land of tech companies. They have had faster growth by some measures than any of the other top growth companies that we have heard of. They’re just under the radar with it. Their their approach to talent. Jackie Canny is just a world class, head of human resources, head of people. Which is a better word for it? But the whole Bill McDermott, the CEO and others, the whole world really thinks systematically about it. So, for example, in tech, everyone had layoffs over the last few years, right? I mean, and it was like super painful in the beginning. And now it’s commonplace. Everybody had layoffs except ServiceNow. And it’s not that they sacrifice growth in order to do it, but they could read the tea leaves early so they knew when to slow down hiring. They knew how to have career paths for people. They knew how to shift people. So they now get like a million applications for a thousand roles. Word is getting out one of the top places to work explosive growth, explosive profitability because they do everything you just said with intention. They do it with intention. And so you have to be super smart. Yes. But honestly, it’s the difference between doing it with intention and doing it without intention, doing it as a priority and doing it without a priority. And what I like about making public. And so I try to be evangelical about the ones that are doing it well, so that other people realize it’s possible and that you can do the set of things you just said. And people are like, well, how do you know? Go look at ServiceNow and be mesmerized by what you’re seeing. And it’s not magic dust. It’s doing these things systematically. Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:35:32] Totally. I mean, I think the intentionality and and and systematizing it are the.
Frances Frei [00:35:37] Battle everything.
Sam Jayanti [00:35:38] Or the answer. Yeah.
Frances Frei [00:35:39] Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Sam Jayanti [00:35:41] So, Francis, I want to go back to the last question I asked you at the beginning when we started, which was watching the deer eat. So how did that start?
Frances Frei [00:35:53] You know, the algorithms on YouTube. I don’t know what’s behind. But, I will admit that I probably dwelled a little too long on some pet themed, and some animal themed things, and so they probably caught my dwell time, and they just served up a set of things. And I might have been watching live videos of hawks in Africa and, you know, and so they served up the this deer pantry in, in Maine. And I just it has everything I love one it helps like everybody needs help. I know of no one that’s been successful, including Michael Jordan, all the way down. Nobody’s been successful without help. Well, these deer need help. And their deer that are in the wild. But they need help in the winter months. And so they have systematically set up a way to feed them in the winter months without sacrificing any of their awesome dearness. And they have multiple cameras, but it’s really cool. And the kids do it and they put out apples and you get to do. It’s just I love it. So now that you you I said it to you, allow some time because you won’t believe what you see. Some of the deer have been coming back for ten years. Wow. The community has named the deer and you get to see them and see how they evolve over time. And then you get to see their offspring. It’s really it’s quite amazing. So it has kind of everything I love.
Sam Jayanti [00:37:30] Okay. That’s a that’s a really good you’ve you’ve captured it in a nutshell I think so. Yeah. That’s it. That’s it. Any parting thoughts as you sort of think about the conversation we just had.
Frances Frei [00:37:42] Yeah I think that the, the one thing I would emphasizes the importance of coaching and, and coaching and teaching, these are, these are things where we want to get disproportionate, you know, non incremental gains out of people. And it is really hard to do this leadership stuff as a solo sport. Yeah we need peripheral vision. And I think having a coach is a pretty amazing way to have peripheral vision. And so my parting thought is don’t try to go to alone. There’s no reason to. And there are people who have devoted their lives to being helpful to others. Partner with them.
Sam Jayanti [00:38:27] Absolutely. Well, you I couldn’t have said it better myself. So thank you for that. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Frances Frei [00:38:35] It’s such a pleasure.
Narrator [00:38:38] Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer, Martin Milewski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.