S2E5: Peter Hayashida on Interviews, Culture, Remote Work, and More!

Peter Hayashida is a nonprofit consultant and coach based in Honolulu. He most recently served for more than 12 years as president of the UC Riverside Foundation and vice chancellor for advancement at the University of California, Riverside. He oversaw development, alumni engagement, university communications, and advancement services and led planning, execution, and completion of UCR’s first comprehensive fundraising campaign. The effort surpassed its $300 million goal, doubled annual production of private support, and tripled the endowment.

Peter previously worked for more than 19 years at UCLA, mainly in advancement leadership. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication studies from UCLA and an M.B.A. from California State University, Northridge.

Peter served on the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Board of Trustees and has chaired and presented at CASE educational programs for 25 years. He served for a decade on the board of directors of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the world’s largest and most comprehensive provider of healthcare and human services to the LGBT community He speaks and writes on issues of fundraising, leadership, diversity, talent management, and succession planning.

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In this episode, we talk about the following:

Interviews

• When interviewing, look for a place aligned with your values, that will challenge you, and where you'll report to someone invested in your growth.
• Have a healthy objectivity about your job opportunities.
• Behavioral interviews are the norm.
• Be prepared with questions about the organization.
• Search committees are valuable when they bring a diversity of perspectives, members are present and engaged, and aligned on job definition.

 Bad Managers

• Maybe they've not been coached?
• Anyone can become an effective manager.
• They might be missing organizational training.

Culture

• It's the set of values, practices, norms, and rituals that makeup where we work.
• Toxic cultures tend to have a lack of trust, lack of transparency, and/or inconsistent accountability.
• Leaders can help culture by modeling behaviors, creating incentives for others to come along, operationalizing values, and confronting bad actors.
• Practice respect and show compassion.

Hybrid v. Remote v. In-Person

• Remote/Hybrid present challenges for building camaraderie and holding meetings.
• An intentionally handled hybrid setup may be the best.
• But there's not enough history or data to conclusively weigh in on this. 

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Leadership Voyage

Leadership Voyage
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Transcript

0:29

all right welcome back everybody to another episode of leadership Voyage I am very happy to be joined by Peter hayashida Peter it's great to meet you this morning great to meet you too Jason thanks for having me absolutely I'm really looking forward to this Peter because as I shared with you a few months back I learned of you through my wife who uh you were her Mentor at a summer Institute a couple of years ago and she told me something about you something you had said there that really has stuck with me and it was something like if you managed someone and farther down the line that person became your manager how in long and short of it you would think that that was really cool or that was a positive thing and the humility of that really struck me as something very powerful and I'm looking forward to hearing how how this is reflected in some of our discussions so um so wonderful um if I understand correctly you're a Consulting partner at Martin Lundy which is a um consulting firm for non-profits I believe that's been around for like 100 years right right and you have a history in uh in academic settings in University as well and uh given the anecdote I shared earlier and uh and kind of your your career path that you've been on I'm really interested to hear you know what gets you up every morning to go to work yeah it's a great question Jason and I think one that most people should ask themselves because if you can't come up with a reasonable answer to that question you're probably doing the wrong job or in the wrong place um so when I graduated from college I had a communication studies degree and no plan which I graduated into a recession as many people are doing today and that's not an enviable place to be but it also doesn't close a lot of doors in your mind of What kinds of things you might want to do but what it does do is create a little bit of a conflict and panic in your mind about how are you going to know whether you're successful if you don't have a destination in mind right so I had no bar to pass I had no CPA exam to sit for I had no residency to complete so I had to sort of make up my own set of parameters and because I wasn't really thinking of a particular profession I had to dig down to the next level and say okay regardless of what I end up doing how am I going to measure at the end of the day at the end of my life at the end of my career whether I was successful and I came up with three things number one I want to wake up every day and want to go to work whatever the work is I want to want to do it the second thing is I am I've always been very Mission driven so I really wanted to feel like I was making a difference in someone else's life making the world a better place leaving it better than it was when I found it all of the typical cliches about people who follow their passion at you know at 22 years old I believed it all and and it was important to me and then the third thing was I'm just a voracious learner I love learning things I love reading I read every day I do a lot of writing and and I really wanted to make sure that whatever I did offered me an opportunity to continue learning all the time um you know this this plan is flexible it's not constrained to any sector or job um and it hasn't changed over my career I still measure my satisfaction and my sort of professional Effectiveness based on whether those three criteria are met and I'm fortunate in that it gave me early insight into my own values that helped guide my career in ways that made the best use of my interests and talents but also was able to bring some value to a few different organizations what a great answer thanks for sharing all that Peter and boy it does strike me as a as a wise move at 22 years old though uh to really stop and reflect and as you said maybe the circumstance pushed you there a little bit but you you really thought about those three things thanks for sharing those um what I'm gonna do today and this is kind of cool I don't know that we've done this uh on the show yet but it's going to be kind of a buffet style of questioning as I'm saying it um for those of you who aren't familiar with Peter on LinkedIn uh Peter one thing I love is how your your posting consistently um you just referenced that your your third principle if you will or value whatever you want to call that as you measured as you mentioned is um voracious learning and it you're reading all the time every week it seems if not more often you're you're posting an article on LinkedIn providing an in-depth commentary from your own perspective that complements this story and what that's done for me and will be to the benefit of all the listeners is you have gotten involved on many different topics that I think could be relevant to many listeners out there based on what they're going through in their professional lives anything from job interview to company culture to uh hybrid work and what they like to do is just walk through the buffet today and and grab a little bit of of each thing and let's see where it goes sounds great so let's start with the job interview process I personally work in the tech sector and a lot of folks in the tech sector are um getting laid off and I'm sure many of us are going through job interview process or searching seeking employment you posted a little while back about excessive number of job interviews and and some other things uh that are going on in the process of looking for work and and I'm wondering if you could help us out a little bit from the perspective of someone who is seeking employment from the perspective of an applicant what are what are some of the red flags that we should maybe be looking out for throughout the application and interview process so it's a great question and one that I think any candidate who's searching for a job should ask first because the question really becomes not what am I going to do because you could probably do the tasks you do at lots of different organizations the question is is is the organization going to be well aligned with your values is it going to be a right the right cultural fit are you going to be surrounded with people who challenge you and make you better and are you going to be reporting to someone who's as interested and invested in your own growth as they are in your success professionally as it contributes to the team and I think I've learned a lot of what I know about this topic as a hiring manager for 30 years more so than as a candidate I don't tend to move around that much professionally so I don't interview a ton but I interview lots and lots of people and that has helped me come to the conclusion that you will rarely be treated better by your potential employer than you will as a candidate and so if your experience as a candidate is characterized by a disorganized unprofessional process a lack of consistent communication or responsiveness um indirect or non-answers to questions or deflection a lack of transparency or Candor in the interview process that is not a good way to think about what the experience of working at that place might be it's a pretty good indicator actually that there are probably some things in the culture that that aren't working at a hundred percent and that's just something you really need to take into consideration because the only thing worse than not getting the job you really wanted is getting the job you thought you really wanted and finding out it's a different job the other thing I would say is you know the hardest part about interviewing for jobs is is the same it's the same advice they give people when they're buying houses right don't fall in love with a house because there will there will be another house and that house may not end up being your house but there's a level of healthy objectivity you can bring to a job search process that allows you to step back and say okay you know this feels like the opportunity of a lifetime but the fact is there are no opportunities of a Lifetime right and if I don't get a job self-servingly I just decide well it was someone else's opportunity of a lifetime but not mine you know I also think that given the number of people who are partnered or married in the world the if there were only one perfect person uh finding them in a world of eight billion people would be pretty challenging so I think it's reasonable to say that you find a job that fits well enough and then you work really hard to make it to make it work for you to make it Flex around what your object your objectives and your goals are um so I think those are the kinds of things I would say as you go into a job you know there's a lot of uh tactical logistical kinds of things like you know be prepared for the obvious questions what's your biggest failure what's your biggest weakness tell me about a time when you had to when you were in conflict and you had to get out of it and what did you do and what were the circumstances lots of places are going to behavioral interviews now so have an example for every answer um never ever ever and this I was shocked at the number of times this happened to me when you get to the end of an interview and you ask a Canada do you have any questions for me and they say no I don't um to me that just shows a lack of curiosity and in my work curiosity is really important it's what drives our success when we engage with donors when we engage with other stakeholders so I think those are the kinds of things that you can sort of Google interview preparation and you'll get a lot of that kind of stuff but you know really internalizing that and making that a part of your it's not just a list of lists what it is is it's a sort of integrated model in your head a cognitive model of how to approach the situation so that you're interviewing them at least as hard as they're interviewing you thanks so much for all of the answers Peter and for the depth for each each one I I think I don't know how well I'm representing folks but my guess is in some cases someone loses their job and and maybe Panic it could set in right and I think what you're introducing into the process here is as you said a healthy objectivity a level-headedness a proactive thinking not just finding a job so let's run down the list again you're saying it's likely that if I'm interviewing at a company that this this experience of being interviewed and being the applicant is probably representative of the best I will be treated or or something in that in that area um that having a healthy level of objectivity is important I love how you drew parallels there to looking for a house or finding a partner it's not likely just one perfect fit for you in your situation um and behavioral interviews are are definitely more common than they've ever been it appears and that be prepared for examples with those questions that you're going to get biggest failures and so on um and come prepared with questions about the place you are interviewing with because you were interviewing each other yeah that's right beautiful now if we switch to the other side as you said you're coming with most of these insights from being a hiring manager of 30 years which is a lot of experience um a lot of people out there are probably hiring or working in organizations that you know maybe they're not perfectly involved in hiring but they're they're tangential to the process from your point of view and from your experience what are the characteristics of a good search committee yeah that is a a tricky question and one that I think has to be culturally contextually appropriate you know the um purpose of using a search committee the greatest value in my mind of using a search committee is diversity of perspective and the more people you have involved in the committee the less likely you are that an individual is going to sway the process with some kind of unconscious bias right um women don't write code well so I'm not going to hire a woman well that's a that's not true and B if you have enough people around the table you can balance that perspective with the perspective of others who perhaps have a different lived experience so part of this for me is you need a hiring committee that doesn't all sort of think act and breathe the same way and so there are people who come to our work in advancement from lots of different directions we have certainly people who do the kinds of things you'd find in many businesses accounting the gift processing function is very similar to functions that are done in other Industries and then you've got Frontline fundraisers who some people call analogs to sales which I I actually react a little negative too but it's there's a sales element there's a marketing element there's a Communications element um in my world the alumni engagement people have to be a little bit of everything they have to be event planners they have to be volunteer managers they have to be programmatic creators but all of this really speaks to the value of having that that breadth of people at least in my organization we were broad enough that we could bring a group of people together who came with their own sets of Notions and ideas about what might make for a a good candidate now I will say that before you even create a search committee one of the things that I think is really important is to Define what the job is and make sure everybody in the search committee understands and agrees on that that description because the worst thing that happens is you get into an interview with a committee and it becomes clear to the candidate that people either don't know or have disagreements about what the job actually is that's not a good sign for a person who's looking for a clear path towards success in their new job you know one of my favorite questions from candidates is what does success look like in this job what does it look like at one year is it three years at five years and especially like the way that's framed because it implies that they might want to stay um the people who are on the committee need to be fully present and participatory so so you know if someone is not carrying their weight on the committee they're not showing up to meetings they're not being engaged in the process of developing a set of questions um that's a problem it's a problem because part of this is a buy-in exercise as well the other reason for using search committees is so that there are lots of people when the person starts on the first day of the job there's a whole group of people who can't came in contact with them before they were hired who can attest to their skills their fit they were the right candidate we saw all the candidates and this was our this was the best one by far right um and then I think that the last thing I would say is that you know if if you if the organization is large enough my preference is to not have the hiring manager on the committee interesting um because and so so my role at UCR um my last job was um you know I only had four division heads reporting to me and then I had someone who did administrative support and so most of the positions there were 130 people in the organization most of the positions didn't report to me uh but it was it was my practice to interview every finalist for every job at every level and there were a few reasons for doing that one of which was because I wanted to sort of make sure that the search committees we were using were giving people the right um depth of understanding of our culture and why it was so important that they understood from me they heard from me what my vision was for the organization and what values I expect from all the people on the team and that they have a chance to really you know and candidates don't always get this chance to ask the person who makes the decisions what makes them tick and I love those conversations because a lot of times people would ask me you know occasionally people would ask me very challenging questions and I I love to engage around that I think it's important that they see how I react when someone says something that might not sound popular because that happens in organizations if it doesn't happen in organizations that's a real problem no that's cool and and thank you for all of those um all of those answers Peter and when we talk about the last anecdote you were sharing uh that's when you were Vice Chancellor at University of California Riverside is that right that's right okay perfect thank you um so on the committee we're talking about first of all uh we're talking about we need some shared alignment around what this job actually is it almost sounds silly to say it out loud but I'm sure it happens you're sitting in the room and over a year this person thinks this job is this and over there there's someone who thinks it's something else great great thing to not take for granted um taking advantage of uh diverse perspectives having on that search committee you said as well um and I really loved when you're talking about um you said 130 Folks at Riverside all in your uh Department advancement right you're saying you you interviewed personally anyone for every role that came in there is that right finalists the finalist sorry yes and some usually would be one but sometimes it would be two because the committee couldn't make up their mind or the hiring manager could make up their mind and they had two very close candidates and they would enter they have an interview both and say you know what do you think and it by the time someone gets to me I assume that they know how to do the job right that's what the earlier stages of the process are designed to do my role in this is is if is to assess the fit right and when I say fit I don't mean cultural fit because that can be code for bias and all kinds of things I mean they're fit with the values are they are the motivations that they bring to the organization the kind of motivations that will make them successful so people who are motivated and excited by collaboration loved working in our organization because people collaboration was in our DNA people who were who liked being the star or the sort of the Lone Ranger they didn't like it so much because they didn't get so much individual Glory um they they had to share it with other people people and so really conveying those nuances of our culture allowed people to self-select out sometimes and there were times when we made offers and people to climb them or when they withdrew their candidacy after interviewing with me and I never took that personally I just assumed that people are collecting information along the way and at any point they may decide you know maybe this isn't the right job for me maybe this is the right place for me better to find it out then right no kidding for all of us for all of us thank you you mentioned something a little bit earlier in in some of this interviewing process for a candidate it's important to be at an organization kind of where your values are aligned where you're going to enjoy the work and whether you have a good manager that's invested in your growth a question I'd love to ask is what's your take on I I don't know that I have the quote perfect here but there's a saying that something like people don't leave bad jobs they leave Bad Bosses I think the reality might be all of the above but I really would love your thoughts on that saying what do you think of the saying people don't leave bad jobs they lead Bad Bosses well I think the saying like like many of these sayings are is a shorthand that probably over generalizes but but I would I would the the caution from this quote is really about not underestimating the impact of a direct supervisor on an employee's engagement their satisfaction their ability to be successful and their loyalties of the organization because those are all things that really if you think about who impacts your life most on a day-to-day basis you tend to have a lot of contact with your co-workers and the co-worker who makes decisions about your performance evaluation and promotions and raises you know if you feel like you have a good rapport with that person you trust them it's easier to feel and imagine yourself being successful over the long run than if they are the kind of person um that isn't really looking out for your best interests and I so I do think in that in that sentence you have to sort of qualify the what what the word bad means because bad means different things to different people um sometimes the boss is just not well trained or um hasn't been coached on effective management and and I actually believe you can be a more of anyone can be a more effective manager if that's what they want to do I think there's a problematic aspect of many professions where the only way to get promoted is to become a manager and that's a whole that's a podcast for a different day but in this case you know I I think what it question is if they're lacking training does that make them bad or does that mean um the organization has to be accountable for uh creating a better ecosystem for good management practices um and sometimes change happens and an employee just doesn't feel aligned with the values or the or the goals of the direction anymore that can lead someone to lead and and I've seen that happen not because the changes themselves were inherently problematic but because the communication about the changes was inadequate or incomplete or inaccurate sometimes it's because they feel that no one ever asked their opinion before the change happened sometimes it's because the change actually represents an opportunity for them to go do something else that they wanted to do so you know during the pandemic a lot of people left their banking job and went back to become a ceramicist I mean those are the kinds of moments those stressful moments when you think to yourself is this really what I want to be doing for the rest of my life and if the job doesn't feel challenging it doesn't feel engaging if it doesn't feel rewarding you may move on and and in those kind of cases I always say no harm no foul right if someone really has a passion that they want to pursue and it's not what the job that they're doing for me I think they should go do what they want to do because ultimately there's plenty of people right I mean we've got millions and billions of people around the world who can do jobs and the question really for an individual is if you only get you know one go at this in terms of a career um there's a mistaken impression that whatever I start I have to stick with because I've already invested all this time and energy in it well that's an economic concept called it's on cost right it's you're not going to get it back by staying and being miserable but you might decide it was worth it if you end up someplace where you really want to be um I also feel there's an interesting concept so I when I went to my last job it was a challenging set of circumstances when I came in I was the seventh Vice Chancellor in 10 years I had about 89 budgeted staff positions a third of them were vacant and and a lot of that was because people just got demoralized and tired of waiting the people who were there were very committed very devoted um each brought their own set of talents but you know you do get a little tired of wondering who the flavor of the month is going to be and how that's going to affect your daily work um but there's also an element where I think people feel that if they get into a job and then the job changes that that's not okay right that I'm entitled to the job I took 17 years ago whatever it might be and I don't think I've never seen that work very well I think you you know there are three things that that I try to focus on when particularly when I'm coaching young professionals one of them is self-awareness which I think is the Achilles heel of virtually every person in the workplace because I've never seen a termination happen for other than budgetary reasons where the person wasn't shocked no one told them that there was a problem and I think in some cases that's true because the manager was not competent but I think in many cases the signals were all there and we see what we want to see the second thing is you've got to have environmental awareness right so when things happen around you um I I went through three CEOs at my last institution and I reported to the CEO so you know with each of those changes I had to have an awareness of what that meant for the university for my Organization for my relationship with my boss and then I had to do the third thing that I always emphasize which is examine how much adaptability the I can and want to exert to get through the situation right and in some ways I see adaptability as the intersection between self-awareness and environmental awareness right because if you don't want to or can't change and the circumstances are changing around you that's just a recipe for disaster and and it's okay if you don't want to be there anymore if the place has changed enough that you don't want to be there I always just tell people there's you know three or four thousand colleges and universities in the country if you want to stay in higher ed there's lots of choices if you don't want to stay in higher there's even more choices so you know what I encourage people to do is think about why you're doing what you're doing what's your motivation what's your long game where do you want to be in 5 or 10 or 15 years I don't mean I don't mean a job title I mean how do you want to feel about your work how do you want to feel about what you've accomplished how do you what kind of stories do you want to be able to tell your kids about what it was like to be a working professional and sometimes I've encouraged people to start looking for other opportunities even if they're good performers yeah because they feel stuck right they feel like I've gone as far as I can go I don't see my next step I don't know what to do you know I can certainly keep them around for a few years by investing in them coaching them preparing them but at the end of the day I have to ask myself and they should ask me what are you preparing me for and sometimes I'm preparing for someone for something that that neither of us can see at that moment we don't have access to that but we know enough about it that we can start working in the direction of building specific skills and garnering specific experience so that they can be more competitive at whatever it is they're going to do next boy in all of that you might have hit two more podcasts worth of content uh topics that you're yeah I'm kind of just uh speechless at this point you had so much stuff in there Peter that's great um when I put together the show notes I'll make sure to glean as much as I can uh sir as far as starting from the kind of the employee manager relationship and all these different parts that are relevant and I think you know what I'm hearing from you among among all um what I'm hearing from you wow what I'm hearing from you amidst all of it is a strong relationship where you're candidly talking about what are we preparing for and just working through that in an honest way together which I love um let's switch topics a little bit although I guess they're all related but uh company culture which I find a fascinating topic because maybe to leaders of the organization company culture is the the five values they print on the wall right but but we all know that kind of however you want to articulate IT company culture is is something about what it really means to work in this company as a human being I don't know exactly what that definition is but you posted about this as well um what a lot of people are out there in a lot of different work situations I don't want to focus on the negative but the question I'm going to ask is a negative uh framing what does a broken culture look like if I'm working somewhere what are some things I would see that indicate to me oh this place is is not great yeah that's an important question and one that I think a lot of people are facing especially now as the workplaces start to realign around some of the practices and lessons we learned from the pandemic that first of all so the way I Define culture is it's basically the set of values practices Norms rituals that Define the suit that we all live in when we go to work right so it's it's really that um that the air we breathe the water we swim in uh it's it's hard to Define but you know when it's working and you know when it's not right and and I think um when I think about a car being broken for example the systems in the car aren't working together right the whether it's the transmission or the radiator or whatever it is I'm now dating myself to an internal combustion engine but um you know being able to figure out what it is that's not working for us is the most critical thing so when someone says I work in a place with a really toxic culture one of the first questions I have because it fascinates me is what does it mean what does it look like what are the behaviors that you observe or the words that you hear that that Define that culture for you as toxic because one person's toxic might be another person's thrilling and exciting you never know I don't like to take for granted that I know that or that everybody else shares my own values but as you think about the kinds of things that that tend to be um patterns for employees in the ways that they feel dissatisfaction you come up with some some common denominators a lack of trust a lack of transparency a lack of accountability right one set of rules applies to the senior people one to the junior people um one to the people in a certain function whether that's engineering or marketing and a different set that applies for accounting or HR um I think that poor communication is a common denominator of all of those because ultimately we don't read minds so we need to have clear sets of of messages and guidelines as we go through our work partially because we need to know what we're doing partially because it just gives us Comfort to know what's going on around us the last thing we want to do is feel like we're the only person at work who's not if you ask people I didn't even finish that sentence but if you ask people where is the communication problem in your organization you shouldn't be surprised to hear someone say you know what information flows right down to my manager and then it stops regardless of what the level of the person is I mean I think people feel like there's there's information floating around that I should have that people just aren't giving me whether that's true or not if people feel that way that's a problem um I think they're that in in in today's workplace because life is so complex between supply chain problems and remote work that there is a there there is a set of unclear and shifting expectations that people have a hard time keeping up with and it's up it's the responsibility of managers to really kind of keep realigning those two uh the expectations and the understanding of um the the ecosystem in which we're doing our work that's gotta that's gotta be clear to the employee otherwise you feel like you're chasing something that's kind of ethereal and you don't really know what success is going to look like I think there's a problem in a lot of workplaces around a lack of equity and when I say Equity I don't mean equality right it's not everybody gets treated the same it's everybody gets treated fairly and what does fair look like well I remember um interrogating the the thought the question once and I wasn't interrogating the person but I was someone was saying I I get no that person disrespected me and I said tell me what that looks like what does it look like when you're disrespected and the person responded well I had this idea and they said they didn't like it and I said was it the way they said it no but I thought it was a good idea okay well that might be disagreement but it doesn't sound like disrespect to me so let's let's unpack what disrespect means to you so that the next time you go into an interaction with that person you can reframe your expectations because if you expect that everybody's been agree with you on everything you are setting yourself up for disappointment I think that when I was growing up in organizations one of my biggest frustrations was an unwillingness or a discomfort by leadership of confronting conflict um conflict happens in workplaces but if you ignore it it doesn't get better it gets worse and so figuring out if there's underperformance issues how do you address that in a way that doesn't completely destroy the morale of everyone around them right someone who's a Rainmaker who is um rude inconsiderate not a team player um doesn't get involved in the success of the team is not going to be successful in my organization that doesn't mean they can't be successful someplace else but that's just not how I like to build organizations um and then the last category I would say is the category of what I call playground behaviors gossip backstabbing manipulation bullying harassment passive aggressiveness these are all the kinds of things that I think inevitably happen when you get more than two people together and you've got to figure out how to deal with them in a grown-up way um these are like battles people who have wars on email which to me just feels silly I occasionally someone would copy me on a thread where things was trying to intensify and um and I just couldn't help myself I had to reply all and say this email thread stops with this message I want you and you to come by my office and we're going to talk through this and we're not going to leave until we've figured it out because what I don't want is for the emails to be the only form of negotiation or moderation of conversations and then of course the last thing which um you know there's so much popular culture right now that's dealing with things like being in clicks the Mean Girls syndrome marginalization leaving people feeling left out of of work engagements I think that's a problem it's a problem not because we can fix it in that sense because I think people tend to gravitate towards people they have something in common with but we have to create a situation where even if everybody's not best friends that people don't do things that knowingly make other people feel left out uh because it just doesn't create the kind of trust you need in order to have really good collaboration and really excellent outcomes so you did point out a lot of potential symptoms or examples of where maybe one person's definition of they're in a toxic culture perhaps I mean I like your example I gosh I don't know how comfortable everybody would be with it but I really do like your example of this email thread ends now let's let's talk it out right um making a broken culture healthy obviously doesn't happen in a week um there might be a little repetition in the answer to this question I don't know but that's okay with me you know what are things that leaders or managers however we want to think about it what are things that they can be do what's a step I can take today to get a little bit better with what's in my control right to help in the spirit of making our culture just a little bit healthier yeah let me just say that I I think that there's two kinds of leaders there's the Big L leader who is nominally responsible for the team and then there's the little L leader which I believe everyone needs to be and that when I say that what I mean is that culture is not uh something that happens by dictate it's something that is a a an unspoken or maybe spoken agreement among a group of people that we're going to all abide by the same set of Standards um behavioral standards values whatever it might be this is not group thing right this is not we're all going to agree on everything but when we disagree we're not going to name call uh we're not going to make people feel shamed we're not going to make the the personality the issue we're going to stay focused on the topic so what I would say is whether you're the titular leader or whether you're a leader in the sense that you want to help move the culture to something that's more healthy I think we all have to model the desired behaviors right so I can't as a leader Big L of an organization I can't have one set of standards and behaviors for my self and then a different set for everybody else because that's the the quickest way to make send a clear message to everyone that it's actually not about healthy it's about healthy for me and not necessarily healthy for you I think then you need to um to the extent that you're in a role to do so create incentives for others to come along to to be more um focused on the kinds of healthy things transparency openness supportiveness um the collaboration the that requires clarifying values and then explicitly operationalizing them um in your processes your procedures your Norms whatever might sort of be the governing processes of your organization and so so really thinking about that in an intentional way so it's not culture is just what happens when you throw a bunch of people together but it's throwing a bunch of people together and saying as a group what kind of a culture do we want Here and Now obviously with that question you're not going to ever get 100 agreement and someone has to say okay this is the culture that I believe we need to create because I think it's going to give us the greatest outcome and then ask for feedback right so for me I had a very clear set of values that people got tired of hearing about could probably repeat right it's Excellence Integrity accountability respect and collaboration I would say that to every candidate when they interview with me I would say it constantly in the context of the work that we were doing but that then creates a set of expectations for my managers that they will reinforce those behaviors and then they um Ripple that down to their work teams to make sure that across the organization people understand that these are the standards by which we operate so when there's a question that comes up where uh we might have a bad outcome to a particular project the first inclination is not how do we cover it up the first inclination of who needs to know first so they can help us figure out what the message looks like I think we have to confront Bad actors and actions we can't just let those kinds of things fly I um did a post recently about sort of how you react when someone says something that offends you at work it requires an enormous amount of courage to say things like gosh that really hurt or um you know the author said sometimes the the most effective response is the most automatic response ouch right or gosh I I know how much such and such really matters to you what I just heard you say I must have misheard because it doesn't seem aligned with what you've said before giving people a chance to you know respond with grace to say oh that's not what I meant at all right I mean we we have seen so many high-profile examples of people saying things that they later say they didn't mean maybe they didn't but how you respond after you say it can impact the relationships you have with others and then the last thing for me is I feel like we have to all practice respect for each other and and I think in today's America that's a hard thing to do because of so much political divisiveness um we have to be non-defensive because if we're not open to hearing feedback we're not going to get it and if we don't get it we can't get better and then I think we have to show compassion for each other we don't know what's going on in people's lives I spent a lot of time during the pandemic going to bed every night worrying about whether people are getting sick worried about whether their spouses were losing their jobs worrying about whether their kids were being okay on Zoom school um you know those are all things I have no control about control over but but that that sense of compassion I felt for what they were going through I personally don't have kids so it wasn't it wasn't affecting me um my spouse is retired so you know there are all kinds of things that I feel like I was in a position where it was more incumbent on me to give people Grace to show compassion because I was the focus of my energy and attention was really taking care of my team and if you don't feel that way and can't feel that way I don't think you should be responsible for groups of people hmm uh yeah what what do you think of the um uh let's see you familiar with Patrick lensione I am in the okay five dysfunctions of a team and and so on and so forth he he had um he has a podcast and a boy there was something that pandemic it's hard to keep track of time it might have two years ago it might have been four years ago I don't know uh where he is talking about servant leadership and just the idea that um it was almost um you you shouldn't even be a leader if you're not having this mindset of you know caring for others that it seems almost like a redundant term to him um your last sentence there made me made me think of that sorry um well we're yeah let's say one more question Peter uh you're you're giving us so much to think about and I really do appreciate uh all the things we were going through there with culture you're hitting on a lot of what I would just say you know humanness you know and I loved that because it is interesting we how we may treat people differently based on what our contexts are right like would you ever you know people flip each other off driving a car but would you ever just do that talking to some you know it's just fascinating right and then like you said going to work respect empathy um compassion uh I don't know if we could ever have too much of that so thank you for for saying all those things sure um I did want to uh quiet quitting was on the list but I think I'm gonna skip over it so I think what I what the last thing I really want to talk through with you is on-site work versus remote work versus hybrid work because boy you're talking about a lot of challenges and organizations we've adapted or kind of adapted since the pandemic we've got this um economic Outlook that's very confusing right unemployment's super low but there are a lot of tech layoffs inflation when we have all of the stuff going on it strikes me that as you've kind of said communication and organization is Paramount it's more important probably as important as it's ever been I don't know I haven't been along live that long but you know looking at on-site remote hybrid do you have any strong opinions either just your own or or data based that suggests the strong benefits or drawbacks to any of these type work configurations because it really does seem to be an interesting topic and I'm sure in hiring it is as well yeah it's it's interesting that we had this extended experiment on remote and hybrid work that we would not have had but for a global pandemic and many industries that would have sworn up and down in 2019 that this is not a model that would ever work in our industry um unless they're in Hospitality on-site Hospitality or a similar kind of function that can't be done in some less human-intensive way I'm not I'm not sure that they would have even imagined the kind of restaurants I could get carry out from was just amazing so I that was a that was a silver lining of the pandemic you know I think that none of these three approaches is perfect and I don't think this is a settled question um even in some of the most sophisticated organizations and and part of that is that there really isn't enough history and enough research that would that there and by the way before the pandemic started there was research on on hybrid work it wasn't very plentiful and it was largely ignored by the business Community because it wasn't relevant those who were interested in it went and did it those who weren't interested in it didn't the question now though becomes how do we create a path forward that gives employees a greater sense of predictability that gives them the flexibility that is required often to retain High performers um I think on-site work is great for building camaraderie collaborating in real time um nurturing trust but the added financial and logistical complications of that um commuting dry cleaning eating out plus all the distractions of being in an office are problematic for a lot of people um you know I certainly have friends who are extreme extroverts For Whom the last three years has felt like Purgatory but the truth is it if you have that that human variation that richness in your work environment nothing you do is going to work for everybody anyway I think remote work brings Flex brings benefits that that we as a society probably never even imagined a better focus there is there has been research on people being more productive when they work at home and I'll tell you since the pandemic started there's been a there's been a branch of that research that's trying to look into are people getting more done because they're more focused or because they're working longer hours because there's not a ritualistic five o'clock stand up and go home but it is clear that it's more flexible that it's less onerous for caregivers whether they're taking care of children or elderly relatives whatever it might be there is that quality of life issue that was impossible when you were expected at a desk and your productivity was managed by how long you sat in that chair between eight and five I I just think that that's and and that has created a crisis of management leadership because you have managers who don't know how to measure productivity any other way and you have leaders who don't know how to define desired results in terms of the characteristics of the outcome rather than the process of getting there now certainly being in a in a for-profit environment you have clearer indicators of whether the corporate goals are being met but if you're in a Social Service Agency um certainly there's a element of how many clients are you serving um how effectively are you serving them but but there's still this question of where do you do it right if you're doing teletherapy became huge telemedicine became huge so there are things that we would have never imagined receiving in that framework that we now do I'll also tell you that for people who are historically underrepresented in the workplace um uh women people of color there there's a lot of self-report of fewer microaggressions right so they feel like if they're if they're working from home they don't have to hear the snarky comment at the water cooler and and what benefit does that have for mental health and are there other ways to to address that rather than having everybody work from home because my biggest fear about remote work is that there is a there is a um visibility bias in the workplace when their people start talking about promotions and special projects and additional responsibilities the people we see every day tend to be the ones we think of first and I worry about especially early career employees who say I'd be happy never working in an office again perfectly legitimate choice and comes with consequences and so the question is you know you can say well that's not fair why should I have to show up to an office in order to be promoted well sorry if someone ever told you life was fair they were lying it's not and so so you know you could either sit in a corner and pout or you can understand that there are some rules to the game and that if you want to play the game successfully today it's going to look different than when Millennials and gen Z are running organizations I hope I hope Millennials and gen Z are able to fix some of the intractable problems that my generation and those before created but I I'm just not sanguine that humans change quite that quickly I also feel that the remote work can feel a little isolating so people are just out of the loop they don't hear about things in the same organic way they might hear about them walking down the hall and someone says oh did you hear such and such is leaving oh really where are they going you know you don't actually hear that stuff until later there's also this decreased sense of commitment to the organization right you work the workplace becomes a commodity if you're working from home here's where you work right you just want to make the most money and you want to be able to hold down a job um it's it's harder to make sure everyone stays on the same page as a manager because they're having asynchronous conversations with each other as opposed to sitting in the same room and realizing when a miscommunication happens um video meetings are exhausting um and they no longer have the buffers we need between meetings that we had to have in person because I don't have a teleportation device so if I'm going to have a meeting here and a meeting in another place walking down I have to build in a half an hour for for Transit time you don't do that with zoom you turn off you turn back on um hybrid might be the Best of Both Worlds if it's implemented thoughtfully and that means you have to synchronize the in-office time you have to set up rules and expectations for hybrid meetings so that the remote participants don't feel left out I've been the hybrid person the remote person the hybrid meeting and I've been the in-person person in a hybrid meeting and I can tell you that when you're in the room those are the people who take up most of the air yeah and the people who are on the phone or on the zoom really don't have the same access to the interpersonal flow of the conversation um and then the last thing is just a really practical one which is as as managers when the when the pandemic happened when lockdown happened we had to think about the the million logistical questions right um where's their equipment where's their workspace do we have shared workspace or permanently assigned workspace um what do we do about telephones right do we do we have people use their cell phones and if so does that get people cranky because they feel like they're paying for cell phone service that the that the employer is using and and how do you split that you know how do you even know and I I I'm old enough to remember in the old days when we used to have to go through and and sort of highlight on our cell phone bills the uh personal calls so that they could deduct the minutes I I that was insanity and I'm so glad we don't do that anymore but frankly I personally would rather pay for my cell phone than have to resolve those questions but but not everybody that has that right I mean I want to go back to something you said at the beginning which is about layoffs you know not everybody has the luxury of staying common objective during the layoff likewise not everybody has a luxury in a hybrid situation of having access to a printer at home of having high quality Wi-Fi uh who pays for the Wi-Fi right there's all those kinds of things that I think if we're going to fix this problem um for good when I say for good for good is possible for the time being we're going to have to answer a lot of those questions because those are the questions employees want to know and with a with a three percent unemployment rate we better answer them now because the political Capital we build today is going to prevent people from leaving tomorrow and that's the biggest problem at least in my industry is this constant turnover that is not good for a business that's based on building relationships yeah thanks for saying all of that and also thanks for throwing in the bit about um not everybody has the the luxury uh of of staying calm or or all you know the other circumstances yeah thanks for for making a point of saying that Yeah you mentioned a lot there about the different work Styles and and I'm sure a lot of folks will identify with many of the elements that you ticked off but at the end of the day it does sound like you're right the it's a it's a lot of new data um and it's hard to really say anything very definitive at this point I think all I think from Gallup when I've read some of the stuff they've put out it sounds like they're aligned with what you've mentioned that if you're gonna do hybrid for example it's it's best at the lowest level and let the teams determine it and they need to be in sync it's not like oh Peter you go into the office Monday Wednesday and Friday and I go in on Tuesday and Thursday that's not going to work if we're on the same team right things like this but boy it does seem like there are more questions uh than answers but that's what we're navigating together so thank you okay I ask everybody the same question to close things out so I will ask you Peter doesn't have to do with work it could be whatever you like um what is something that you've learned recently um so when I stepped down from my last job I did not have another job waiting and and that that was partially circumstanced because I had decided when I was going to leave my last job and was busy creating the transition over the course of the last six to 12 months and didn't really have time to job hunt and I really needed a break I I've never taken a break between jobs and I needed some time to step back uh my career like many people just kind of happened to me right I took a job and I took another job and I took another job and and after a while the momentum just carries you in a direction I needed to sort of get off of that path and say okay what do I really love doing what do I want to do more of what I want to do less of no job is going to be 100 I love every minute of every day but what do I do how do I get there and and so I'm doing some Consulting I'm doing some coaching I'm doing um some volunteer work but but really what I'm learning is how to feel engaged and fulfilled without the structural anchoring of an organizational home a place that that I call my work right my work really is now an activity not a place and and it's kind of episodic so I also don't have long-term continuity I'm learning what I like what I don't like and what I'm capable of doing um I'm not done learning but I'm I'm checking in with myself to make sure I'm doing what I'm sort of meant to be doing based on what I love doing and um and I'm also doing some volunteer work here to address some of the talent challenges in our industry because if you think the talent Channel challenges are are hard when you have the United States Mainland to work with try living on an island in the Pacific island of the Pacific Ocean that has the highest cost of living of the 50 states and you realize that um there are some big challenges in getting Talent here getting people here to be engaged and and challenged and feeling like they have some sense of growth a lot of the big conferences don't take place here because they're too expensive so only the organizations that can afford to send people to California or Arizona or New York get that kind of professional development outside of their workplace so I'm learning a lot of those kind of things that I think because I've been in institutional roles my whole life I never really had great insight into and you begin to realize how smaller non-profits especially really struggle with some of these issues because you have lots and lots of Demands and not a lot of resources to meet them thanks for sharing that Peter joining us from Honolulu Hawaii a beautiful but expensive place it sounds like yes um Peter for anyone who is interested in seeing what uh you know either through your your work or through what you write out there on the uh on the internet uh where would you like to direct them to uh to go well LinkedIn is the best place to find me I'm I'm there every day uh and so if you go to LinkedIn and search my name I'm the only one with my name um it's it's a blessing and a curse and then there's a following button so if you want to follow me you'll get my my uh posts delivered directly to your feed that sounds great well thank you so much for being generous with your time today Peter I had a great time with this discussion and I know a lot of people will get a lot of great insights out of what we talked about so thank you so much I appreciate talking with you today thanks for having me Jason I like I enjoyed the conversation all right