Futuristic Thinking: An Opportunity for Teams to Shift & Thrive with Andrew Freedman

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of the Huddl3 Group, and today I'm joined from Maryland, Baltimore by Andrew Freedman. Andrew is the author of Thrive, he's a managing partner at SHIFT, and he's got a number of other roles in the community, both in the giving realm and the innovation and startup realm. So welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew Freedman: Thanks, Dane. Good to be here with you. Looking forward to the conversation. I know it's going to be a good one.

Dane Groeneveld: It's going to be super fun. We talked a lot about opportunity to unlock human ingenuity, so maybe that's a good starting point. Could you share with our listeners what it is in your life's journey that's brought you to be an expert in doing all of this work around human ingenuity and high performance cultures?

Andrew Freedman: Sure. There's a couple things that are probably important for your listeners, the people who follow you to know about me. One is I am a big believer in why people do things. I think mindset and beliefs that people have are really foundational to any kind of achievement, people living their value, living their purpose. For me, one of the things that I wake up every day really serious about but really excited about is my opportunity to share my experience, my gifts, my knowledge so that other people can be more, not less. That's really something that is foundational. I got that from my mom through some of the things that she went through in her life, some of the trauma, some of the trouble, some of the things that I observed that I struggled with also. I got to a point in my life, Dane, where I said, " I have to stop playing small. I have to stop being in a shadow. I have to stop being afraid of what if I fail? What if I succeed? What will people think of me? This imposter syndrome piece." And I said, " I can't do it anymore. I'm not living the life that I want to have." And so I really dedicated myself to learning, to understanding and to studying human behavior, human psychology, organizational dynamics, organizational behavior, company culture, why people do the things they do, why some people are able to achieve and some teams and some organizations at a consistent high level, and why others continue to struggle. That really has been my life work. It's everything that I do in every facet of my life.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. It's got to be a good energy to wake up serious and excited about helping people be more.

Andrew Freedman: It is. I will say my wife Joanne, sometimes to her chagrin, because I really do bounce up out of bed and she's like, " Oh my God, could you please just dial the energy back just a hair?" We've been married 17 years. We just had our 17- year anniversary.

Dane Groeneveld: Congrats.

Andrew Freedman: I love her. I love her dearly, but it's kind of a funny thing between us where she's like, " Do you need to be that excited all the time?" And I'm like, " I don't know that I need to be, but I am. It just comes from inside."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I mean that is a power to harness. I must admit. I think my wife Claire suffers a little bit of the same with me. But actually the dark side of that, or the less good side of that is that when you go out and you get so much energy from being with people all day and then you come home tired, it can go the other way. And she's like, " Hang on, you got out of bed excited for them, but you walked in the door tired and reach for a beer from the fridge before saying hello."

Andrew Freedman: I think Claire and Joanne know each other, I'm pretty sure. But it's interesting because when we talk about unlocking human ingenuity and the power of teams and healthy and high performing cultures and that pairing is important to healthy and high performing piece. Pre- COVID, I was on the road a fair amount. I would be on planes, trains, automobiles. When I would come back from client sites, I had a little bit of built- in decompression time from the car ride or from the airplane ride. And today in this very remote and hybrid work world where I still do travel, I still am with clients, but I'm also hitting around the home more. And so my decompression time is less, and Joanne knows me so well that I'll walk in sometimes and she'll just take one look at me, Dane, and she'll go, " No, no, no, no, nope. Go back out. Go work out. Go do something."

Dane Groeneveld: Start again.

Andrew Freedman: inaudible Andrew. I need the Andrew, Andrew, because you're right, what we do takes so much mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional energy, and I wouldn't change it for the world. I love it. And sometimes I just need a little bit of reboot time. That's important for people to know about themselves and others.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it is. It is. I think that's a great point, the reboot. One of our guests, Duncan Young, he talked a lot about wellness from Australia. He was sharing that often in COVID when he was no longer going into the city, when he finished his workday, he'd walk down to the ferry terminal and back just to get that routine of, hey, the day's over, I'm coming back to be the Duncan that I need at home.

Andrew Freedman: inaudible.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. Tell me a little bit more about the book Thrive. What was it that sort of brought that project to life?

Andrew Freedman: That was a journey. I've been doing what I do for, gosh, I guess almost 25 years now. I've had the good fortune of working with some amazing people, some incredible clients doing really good work that, I mean, it changes people's lives. It's not an overstatement, not even by the thickness of a nail. People say that. They come back years later and say, " Gosh, the work that we did together was transformative." But when I thought about the impact that I was having and the impact that I want to have, I really felt like, I mean this, it might sound weird to your listeners, I felt like I was being a little selfish, Dane, because I wasn't getting the message out on big enough scale. I wasn't sharing what I've had the benefit and the privilege of experiencing to enough people where they could benefit from it. And so for me, some people are like, " Well, how many books do you want to sell and what do you think about? Are you going to do a TED Talk and all that stuff?" I'm like, " That's nice. That's ego stuff. I don't really care so much about that as much as I do getting the word out so that people can read it, digest it, use it, and change the way that they think about building cultures and building companies." I mean, we've given away in this book, there's a website that's got like 25 downloadable tools and templates in our frameworks and the processes, and people are like, " Are you crazy? You're giving all the stuff away. You know how much you could be charging for that?" I said, " Don't care." It's not the point. The point is get it out and help change the way that leaders think about building their companies. That was really the origin point for me. Stop playing small, come out onto the stage that you really belong on, and share this stuff.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's powerful. I've actually noticed that with a couple of other guests. In fact, one guest recently said, " I'm not here to scale my work because scaling means I own it. I'm here to spread my work." I thought that was really cool, and that's what I'm hearing from you.

Andrew Freedman: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: As you get into the book, there's these frameworks. Is it something that you've built from interviews, case studies with customers that you've worked through? Are there sort of premises around research? For the listeners that haven't read it, I haven't read it myself, where does the real magic start to come to life?

Andrew Freedman: Yes and yes. Some of it is just practical wisdom, the things that are in there, the frameworks, the approaches, the models to having just things like interview more effectively, select more effectively, coach more effectively have better one- on- ones, better performance management, how to set inaudible vision and values and how to have difficult conversations and how to build profiles of excellence for specific roles. A lot of that has been homegrown based on research, client work, interviews, seeing what other people do, collaborating with others. I mean, it really has been an amalgamation. My co- author, Paul Elliott who helped me write the book, he's got even more experience than I do. And so we collaborated on some of the case stories, the examples to really bring to life for people when they read it. Although I do teach at a university here in Baltimore, it's not an academic book only. For academics, they're going to read this and go, " Wow, this is really interesting research and data and experience." But for the folks who want practical, read something and go, " I get it, I understand it, this speaks to me, I can pull this and use it now," there's something for those folks too. That's really the way that we want to wanted to write the book is people would be able to take these stories, these examples, these templates and go, " I can download this today and I can start using it now." That was really, really important to us. And that's how we got there was the practical wisdom of battle tested things that we go, " You know what? Learn from our bumps and bruises. Let us spare you the pain and just use this stuff, because it works."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it does work. It's always something that teams, no matter how big they are or how much time they've kind of got in the bank of hiring and being intentional about building teams, they need to come back and just reset on some of those best practices because we're all busy. Some of those approaches, creating a job description or a success profile, how you're interviewing, over time, kind of like at the end of the day, we all go through highs and lows. Those things can slide in an organization, so you've got to just keep coming back and refreshing it.

Andrew Freedman: One of the interesting things we talked about a lot about teams before is we can think about qualitative and quantitative metrics of success or anything really, an individual role, a team that forms at a business unit level, an organizational level. But when you're interviewing, it's so funny because COVID, the pandemic, remote work, hybrid work, it really has changed a lot. I see so many leaders who they're still trying to shoehorn old realities, old processes, old ways of thinking and operating into today's reality. The reality is that just doesn't work. For example, there's a different type of collaboration and way of being and understanding and connecting that is required now in this digital environment as opposed to when we were co- located in the same office. And so we need to adapt the interview questions. We need to ask differently scenarios about how people collaborate, how they brainstorm, how they disagree, how they connect, how they share themselves with others. Some people, they aren't as good, whatever good means digitally versus in person. And others, it's flip. They've become more collaborative, more connected. They're more comfortable operating this digital way. They feel like maybe the playing field has been a little bit leveled, especially I've seen this in folks who maybe aren't extroverts or don't see themselves as extroverts feel like they get dominated in a same physical space, but technology has leveled the playing field for them a little bit. And it's like, wow, these people are amazingly brilliant. They always have been. Leaders just haven't figured out how to unlock that power, that ingenuity, that creativity in a really different way.

Dane Groeneveld: That's an interesting viewpoint on it. I mean, I saw an article the other day that mentioned that in the eyes of the author, hybrid work is the worst of both. It's the worst of being in the office full- time and the worst of being remote. I was like, " Wow, that's kind of heavy." But something that you said actually makes me believe the title of that article more, which is it does level the playing field, it changes things up. But if you're really good at working digitally, remotely, and you are an introvert, I mean there's a lot right now around neurodiversity and the importance of neuro distinct individuals in teams, particularly when it comes to innovation. A number of those brilliant people don't like to turn up and have small talk in the break room. So maybe they are going to do their best work in a 100% remote setting. And then there's other people who just, they need to bounce off other people for their energy and their ideas and feeling like there's a sense of belonging so that they can show up as their best self at work.

Andrew Freedman: Absolutely. I talk a lot in the work that I do, it's also in Thrive, about this concept called right to left thinking, right to left thinking. Right to left thinking, just to put a little color and context around, it means defining success and then working backwards. In the example that we're talking about here, it would be really good for leaders, some have done this well, some have completely fallen flat on this, to define when we say it's not about are we fully remote, are we hybrid, are we in the office? I think that's starting with the wrong question because that's defining work by where we are as opposed to when we talk about having a connected culture, I'm just assuming that people want that, so let's just play with that example, what does that mean to us, and how does that connect to our organizational values and to value creation? When we say connection, how does that show up in how people work together? How does that show up when we onboard people? How does that show up when we disagree? How does that show up in having one- on- ones? You know this, I had the pleasure of at the end of last year doing research and co- authoring the 2023 State of Workforce Burnout. It was a global study, 40 countries, thousands of people. It was a really interesting study. I can send it to you if you want to drop the link into inaudible-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that would be wonderful.

Andrew Freedman: ...episode. But one of the things we found that was really fascinating is for burnout, incidences of burnout are highest for people who are 80% or more working from home or 80% or more working in the office. It's like when you're at one of those, you are in most burnout. Burnout is an organizational thing. It just so happens that people experience it, but it's really because of organizational issues. The ones who are in the middle with hybrid, I don't want your listeners to hear, oh, cool, if I just go hybrid, nobody's going to be burned out. That's not what I'm saying. It does need to be with intention. We need to define when we're together, why are we getting together? What's the purpose of getting? If you're going to bring people into the office and have them sit in their cubicles on Zoom meetings, please don't waste your time. You're going to kill your culture, and your people will get frustrated and quick. So just interesting to see those two ends of the spectrum.

Dane Groeneveld: It really is, and that intentionality is key. I was talking to another colleague actually in New Zealand the other day, and she was referencing the fact that it's becoming more and more important, particularly from a diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging standpoint, that leaders when there are people in the office are being very clear, very intentional on how they share their time with others. Because if you're a leader in the office, and I follow this all the time, and you're coming in and you're sitting with other leaders doing project meetings and you're not sitting in the break room talking to teams or asking someone for how they're experiencing a customer or a piece of technology or a project, then that actually doesn't help culture. It's not intentional. You're not reinforcing the right behaviors.

Andrew Freedman: Yeah, absolutely. The practical equation that people go through in their mind knowingly or not, is they're asking themselves this question, is this culture worth it? Is the commute worth it? Is the effort worth it? Is it worth it? I talk a lot about what gives me juice. It really is helping leaders figure out how to create this culture wherever people work, doesn't matter, where people go, " It's more than worth it. It's like I wouldn't trade this for the world. I find so much value out of this." I can create a part of that value creation where others say, " This is an amazing place for these reasons, not just because we have foosball and we send people Uber Eats food delivery to their house, and we do Zoom happy hours." No shade to that, but that's just fluff. That's not the real stuff that binds people and teams together.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. It's interesting. I saw on one of your LinkedIn posts this week, you talked about sort of six key measures, moments, methods to really driving performance culture. The first four didn't surprise me, vision, shareholder alignment, you had metrics and accountability. They were the first four. But the last two really caught my eyes, and you've just been touching on that. I think number five was reinforcing behavior, and number six was skills development. And so often you see performance culture methodologies, and it's talking about the top four, but skills development and reinforcing behaviors are very individual, incremental, continuous efforts. Can you tell me more about those two?

Andrew Freedman: When you think about what organizations and leaders will create visions and they'll create values, and values, I'm a huge fan of having organizational values. They are absolutely essential in creating a healthy and high performing organization. However, many times what I see is they become really static. They're on a piece of paper or maybe they're digital, they sit on a website. They're there, but they don't really connect to how people behave, how we make decisions, how we disagree. An easy example of this is we might value some type of collaboration or connectedness or treating each other with respect, yet when you see some roles that are really focused on production sales, some other kind of throughput, oftentimes you will have people who have really high output who are just cultural nightmares. They're super toxic, they treat people badly, they're rude, they're not collaborative. They feel like they're a better class of citizen than somebody else. So when we talk about reinforcing behaviors, it's did the behaviors of the organization match the intentions that are set in the values? And if they don't, that's a problem.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I've seen a lot of articles about talented jerks lately. I think that talks to that point. If they're talented, they bring a lot of expertise, but they're not living those behaviors that tie to the values, then what are you doing to your team? And then skills development, as you go deeper on skills development, where does that fit into high performing teams and culture?

Andrew Freedman: Well, if we have worked right to left just at the team level and we have defined what does a high performing team look like in the context of this business, our strategy and goals, and the charter that we have, it would be easy to say there are some dimensions of teamwork that should persist across any kind of team. What are the five attributes of high performing teams? Generally that might be true, but what's missing is the context, in the context of what? What are we trying to accomplish? So if we've taken the first step, which is defining that, then when we say who goes on this team, one of the areas of criteria needs to be what are the skills and knowledge that are required for a person to be able to play a role or roles on this team, or on the various teams if you've got people who are on multiple teams, which I know we talked about inaudible, maybe we'll come back. So what's my role on this team? If I can't play that role, this goes back to a different version maybe of Moneyball for those that are familiar with that, this is just the science, the data around back in the day, Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, what was absolutely essential, what were the attributes and the value production that he needed to make sure that his team was able to perform at the highest levels? Nobody had the code that he was using. He cracked it and they did very well, and they had really low payroll. Today you've got lots of teams who, I mean, this is all they study, data, data, data, data across all kinds of teams, not just athletics. In this way, you can say, " What are the skills and knowledge that people need to have, and then how do we put them on a path so that they can develop other skills and other knowledge that might be needed over time?" It's not just what you have, but it's, can you also build, and are you one who invests in your own skill and knowledge development? For folks who have a limited mindset, instead of a growth mindset, it's more of a scarcity mindset, they go, " I got everything I need. I don't need to learn new things. I'm good as is." That's going to be a problem in many teams today.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. The Moneyball example is an interesting one because in the game of baseball, the game isn't changing. Simon Sinek talked about the infinite game, that the rules of the game, the field you're playing on, the instruments that you're using change. In baseball, baseball's not changing a lot, a few timing variations on how long the pitcher can be on the mound these days, but in business, particularly with generative AI coming out, the rules of the game are changing constantly. So it's almost like you're re- upping on that Moneyball strategy every six to 12 months right now for a lot of businesses, particularly those that are more innovative or have seen a lot more disruption in their supply chains.

Andrew Freedman: It's funny, I talked to some folks when Thrive came out in the work that I do, and I had one person who I remember who was like, " Thrive is really good and I appreciate it." Then he goes, " Well, one thing, there were a couple parts that were like, no, duh." And I said, " I would love your feedback. Give me a no duh part." And he said, " Well, you say hire people with the skills and knowledge to do the work really well. Duh." I was like, " Well, maybe duh, but you might be surprised how many people are thinking about skills and knowledge in a very static way." Today, because of what you just described, how fast things are changing, the cycle that we have is really, really quick. And so are you interviewing the right way? Are you asking the right questions to understand do people have the drive, the desire to learn new things? Do they have the ability to flex and to change, and when things change, do they shut down? Are they super adaptable? Do they relish and get energy from these things or is it like, ah, I resisted and the amount of effort it takes to get them to learn a new skill and to amass new knowledge? It's actually not a no duh thing. It's a, are you applying this in a way that is helping your business, or are you finding, gosh, why is it that we have so many people, we think we hire them and they're really good, but six, 12 months down the line, it's like they can't keep up. They're working too slow. I don't understand what happened. Well, what happened is your selection criteria and your interviewing process might not be a fit for your business strategy. That's a problem.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Actually, I've got a friend, David Nason, who started a business called HireBrain, and he's looking at how you make your selections, how you run your interviews, how you make your selections so that you can come back and see who was successful and who wasn't. And then you might say, " Hey, Dane over here, he keeps thinking when he hires an entry level recruiter that when he was an entry level recruiter, it was all about hitting the phones hard, but now it's all about digital marketing and communicating by email. So he's hiring the wrong profile in person."

Andrew Freedman: There you go. That's it. That's 100%. I'll have to check him out. I'm not familiar with this work.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I'll make a connection, but it's really cool. I mean there's so much good HR tech out there right now, but therein lies part of the problem because now you've got all of these different tools that are starting to kind of fragment your workflows. Some of them are very positive, but others, it takes work to make it all play harmoniously together, which is another skill you need in a team.

Andrew Freedman: Yeah, I mean, some of the clients that we talk to and the prospective clients, they tell us, and this is like mid- size and enterprise size clients, I know your listeners are a range across that spectrum, but they say things to us like, " We've got 11 or more HR tech systems. We have 11 different systems." And so part of the challenge of that where people are feeling is nobody's sitting back eating bonbons going, " I wish I had another thing to do." So people are like, " I've already got too many systems to go into. They're not totally connected or integrated." And so they feel like it's another thing I have to do as opposed to these systems and the information, the data, the insights that we can glean from them are actually, they're designed ideally to help us do our work better, or at least to give us insight to go, " Huh, let me think about that," as opposed to like, " Oh yeah, I got to do my CRM today, or I have to put this stuff in inaudible, or I've got to use Slack." People are experiencing these things as the platform is a thing to do as opposed to what's the business we're trying to run, what's the value I'm trying to create in my role? It's a messy, difficult equation for people.

Dane Groeneveld: It is, it is. I've got a belief here, it'll probably be one of the chapters in the book when we finally get around to the book, is that the best technology is actually going to be a member of the team. It may be generative AI is going to get us a little bit closer to that, but the technology needs to participate with the team and not be a tool that we have to run to and capture everything that the team's trying to do, because if that continues to be the case, there's always going to be a lot of imperfection, a lot of fallout. I'm intrigued to see what technologies really come through in the next five to 10 years that you see out there helping the teams do the work in real time. A lot of people are talking about nudges right now in knowledge work, but I think with the technology developments that we're seeing, I think there's plenty of opportunities for people to be getting nudges in real time from whatever that technology is that fits their industry or role.

Andrew Freedman: Massive. Massive. I am not a good predictor of things, so I won't try to be super precise here, but my prediction aligns with what you're saying, which is I think the change is going to be exponential. It's going to be massive in terms of the impact it has. It's going to happen fast and furious. I mean, I was reading, it was one of the little charts, a visual representation of how long it took whatever the business was to get to, I think it was like 100 million users, and ChatGPT I think it took two months. And even going back to Airbnb and Uber and whatever, I mean, it took longer than that. It might've taken like 12 to 18 months, but that's how fast the cycle is going. It's like new things are coming out and people are trying them. 100 million users in two months. ChatGPT isn't the end all be all right now. I mean there's going to be the next and the next and next. I think from a change management standpoint, part of the opportunity here is to do what you said, which is get people to think about how to integrate these things into the way that we work and think but also to not fight it, not refute. I mean, could there be some dark sides of AI? Sure. But if we get too hung up on that, we're going to miss the point of how it really could unlock human ingenuity. Let's let the tech do what the tech can do really well as part of this working human organism so that our humans can really be thinking critically about the stuff that we need the human brain focused on. There's nothing to fear here if we think about it the right way.

Dane Groeneveld: That's my hope too. I've heard two schools of thought there on the dark side of AI, which is, hey, if I'm allowing my team to use the large language models or to upload company data in, are we giving away trade secrets, expertise, capability? But on the flip side, if we're not playing with those models, are we going to fall behind all of the teams that learn how to leverage the technology to do more of the really human ingenuity type work?

Andrew Freedman: Well, and this may sound like heresy to some folks, and I'm going to say it as it's a yes or a no, and it definitely is not. However, the trade secrets piece is funny to me in some ways because it's like, I mean, there are some companies, millions and millions and billions of dollars in research and development, there are some things where there absolutely are trade secrets, no doubt. At the same time, we've got a lot of leaders and a lot of companies who are going, " We don't want to give away our trade secrets." And I'm like, " Are you kidding me? Do you really think what you're doing is that secret sauce?" It isn't. Get over ourselves. What's not copyable is the culture you build and the people that you have and how you run your organization that way. But your processes, your purchasing, the way you develop stuff, the tech that you have, all that stuff is changing so fast and is copied so quickly that we get too full of ourselves, I think, in some ways, which is our stuff is so special, I don't want to share with anybody. It's like it's already out. Somebody else is already thinking about it. Somebody else is already doing it. Just don't waste your time worrying about that stuff.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's a great call to action, Andrew, is that culture is the real differentiator and competitive advantage for a lot of these companies. Let's be honest, what leaders out there have had remarkably easy and accelerated technology implementation stories in the last few years? I mean, I read somewhere in COVID that I think companies across the world invested$ 1. 3 trillion in new technologies to help go remote in those two years, and already 900 billion of those implementations have been switched off or adjusted or traded out. I mean, no one had a very good experience of deploying technology.

Andrew Freedman: I want to see that study, and I don't want to see that study.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's scary.

Andrew Freedman: I think part of what's behind that is, and there is a chapter in this in Thrive, which I think it's good, it's all around implementation, successful implementation of strategy. When people needed to act so fast when it was like, boom, we're all in the office and all of a sudden we're all at home, so people had to do something. What was missing were things like, well, nobody had a playbook. Regardless of whether you had people working in other places, it's different. We didn't have, what are we really trying to accomplish? So what happened was things like people started using Microsoft Teams or they started using Zoom or they started using other tech platforms, but they didn't think about and redefine the way that they were actually trying to get people to work. So they were trying to take what we did when we were in the office and just go, " We'll just do that on Teams and just do that on Zoom and just do that through Slack." No wonder inaudible. It doesn't work that way.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That was one of the things. We had Kian Gohar join us, and he's been doing some writing and some work since his time as I think he was also executive director of the XPRIZE, which was a pretty cool former title. Kian was suggesting that asynchronous meetings have been huge for innovation, but they've also been a really good way for teams to come together in a digital environment. He was suggesting that while there's a lot of, let's call it myth out there that well, you can't innovate if you're not working together, he actually has seen the data that says some of these asynchronous meeting formats are creating more innovation because some people can take information and digest it over time and share what they want to, and others can do it really quickly and share and come back to it. But I think the technology does allow us to do things in better ways than perhaps we've been able to in a more analog setting.

Andrew Freedman: That was some of the premise behind the platform Latch that we launched a year and a half or so ago, is this piece around asynchronous. We were on this already. The pandemic was just a bit of an accelerator for us because what we saw was everything that everybody else saw. Since 2020, this is from a Microsoft study, there has been a 252% increase in time spent in meetings, a 153% increase in the number of meetings. Those two statistics are flooring enough. We talked to people. They go, " Well, here's the deal. I work from 9: 00 to 5:00 and I'm in meetings all day, and then after five o'clock I get my work done." I mean, that's insanity. That is the antithesis of healthy and high performing. Then you've seen this crazy proliferation of emails, so more emails going out. Well, here's some more research and some more data for those who like it. There's about a 70% email open rate, so 30% of people aren't even opening the emails that executives are sending out. Problem number one. Problem number two is 55% of people who do open the emails are spending nine seconds or less. That's not reading for understanding and synthesis and application. That is skimming and scanning. So there's no way that what leaders are trying to get across is actually getting across. And so employees at all levels of organizations are saying, " We don't know what's going on," and executives are going, " I'm communicating more than ever. How do my people not know what's going on?" And we've got this massive divide. It's a big problem, big problem.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a huge problem. Actually that brings me back to your earlier comment, Andrew, on burnout's not an individual thing, it's an organizational thing. Those metrics there alone would suggest that most businesses are right on the edge of burnout.

Andrew Freedman: Well, it's true. They are. I mean, there's no doubt about it. You see things like indicators of burnout or how they're described, it's like increased cynicism. So I'm thinking more negatively about work. I've got reduced professional efficacy, so I'm working longer or harder. My output may still be good, but I'm working harder-

Dane Groeneveld: It's a cost.

Andrew Freedman: ... to get thisinaudible. That's right. There is a cost. That's a problem. Physical, emotional, mental cost, and my anxiety level. Anxiety goes up. So you got cynicism that comes up, anxiety that goes up. There's so much data on this, just the amount of money that's being spent right now on wellbeing related things. Wellness, not like go take a yoga class. I mean health related issues. Many leaders are ill- equipped to understand how to have conversations about these things, so they don't. And so you've got people who are lonely, isolated, depressed, anxious, cynical, and they're toiling and you're like, okay, so these people are going to be working at their optimal. They're going to collaborate effectively. They're going to make good decisions. They're going to be the best face to our customers. It's like, that's really risky, really risky. Take care of these things. If you don't address them, that's a problem.

Dane Groeneveld: It is a problem, and it's compounded by the fact that when you started seeing increased cynicism and anxiety, I started thinking of that not just as organizational. I started to think of that as community- based. I mean, if you really think about it, there's lots of companies right now that are relying on each other to do work, whether they're suppliers, vendors, partners, and that cost is huge. I mean, partner drag at the best of times is real, but when you've got two anxious, cynical, stressed out, overworked organizations trying to achieve something together in collaboration, it's going to be even worse.

Andrew Freedman: It strains the system. It's one of the reasons I'm such a big believer in the power of teams and teamwork, which is when you've got a team that really works well together, and it can be a persistent team or a short sprint team, either way, you can have this culture of psychological safety, of belonging, of inclusion, of really feeling connected. That can persist well past the team disbands if the team is not a persistent team. Those are the things that really help lift people up, that allow people to be creative, innovative, brainstorm, collaborative, really work better together, and frankly, be better as a human, which is inaudible. I mean, if we're better in life, we're better at work. And if we're better at work, we're oftentimes better in life. We need a little bit of both.

Dane Groeneveld: 100%. Yeah. I think again, that came up in the conversation we had the other day. There's no empirical data right now that shows you that those organizations that have got leaders who are creating a really good human experience are seeing better social outcomes back home in the community. But we can't be far away from seeing that data start showing up because we've now got a combination of the really good companies are standing out and everyone else because of this organizational burnout and just the time that we live in is actually falling. So that gap's widening.

Andrew Freedman: The great resignation, call it whatever you want, was going on and it's still going on. This year in 2023, I think I saw one of the studies that said another 40% of people were projected to leave their current employers and go somewhere else, whether they're re- skilled or do their own thing or work for a competitor, whatever it is. I mean, that is staggering statistics for people voting with their feet and saying, "If we can't get it right organizationally from a system standpoint, if I don't feel like I belong, if I don't feel like I've been heard." Many leaders are saying things like, " Ah, people just have to toughen up. They just have to figure it out." It's like our way or the highway. You're going to come back to the office or you're going to whatever the thing is that they're saying. And people are going-

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Andrew Freedman: ... "Sorry, I'm just not putting up with it. My value equation has changed, and I'm not going to be beholden to what you tell me I must do. I'm not going to do it."

Dane Groeneveld: Which actually that excites me because you and I were talking before this show around fluidity in teams. And you just said it yourself. Sometimes you can have a sprint team and that can work great because people come together, they define the role, the objective, the skills needed, the behaviors, and they get it done. I actually think that we're seeing this natural attrition of leaders that are stuck in the old ways are going to lose their teams, and those individuals are going to find themselves in new teams. Maybe it's within the organizational boundaries, maybe they're leaving organizations, maybe they're gig workers and they're parts of multiple organizations, but I actually think that that combined with this pace of technology shift that we're seeing right now, we're going to see a whole lot of new practices emerge in the next five years. I think you're going to see some real disruption because people get culture right, because people pull a team together that are excited about and clear about what they're working on, and they just outperform.

Andrew Freedman: I believe that wholeheartedly. I think you're right. Again, I'm not an amazing predictor, but I do think you're right on this. I can only speak for myself in this way, which is I get a lot of energy from variety. So when I'm involved in a number of different things, not unlimited things, but a number of different things, it fuels my creativity. It helps me learn new practices. I can bring some of what I learn into different engagements and different work. I can patch together, oh, I saw this and this over here, and I learned this with this other team that I was on. That really helps me add value for the team that I'm working on or the client that I'm serving. And so for me, participating in different clients and different teams and different accounts and different projects is not only invigorating and enriching to my brain, it allows me to operate better. I know we also talked about there are some people who say, " You can only be part of one accountable team." I'd say maybe. I'd be interested in understanding that point of view and my research more. I've seen it go down a little differently. I think for whatever a person's belief is, if we haven't learned anything over the last five years, we should all question everything. Does it have to be that way? I mean, I don't know about you, Dane, but there were things that I thought were absolute truths pre- pandemic. All of a sudden inaudible, it was like, guess that wasn't true after all, was it? It's like what are the beliefs we have around teaming and teamwork and performance and culture and help that we should question and say, " Does it really need to be that way?" What if? How might we? I wonder. That's the kind of thinking we need more of today.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's excited thinking. Maybe just coming back to a final question there, Andrew, we talked through some really good topics here, but again, coming back to this skills development element, what are the skills that you think leaders and teams really need to be focusing on now so they can start asking more of the what ifs, so they can start embracing teaming in a more fluid and more parallel process?

Andrew Freedman: Well, I think a little bit of whether you label it futuristic thinking, I'll just pull it down, I'll use that category for now. Futuristic thinking, which doesn't mean I got to look 20 years down the line, but I do need to be thinking big, I need to be thinking conceptually, I need to be a little bit boundless sometimes in the way that I think and not be constrained by rules only. Rules can be good. Structure can be good. Frameworks are really useful. And sometimes if we can bring disruptive thinking about, and we didn't invent this at Shift, but we use Q storming a lot. Q storming is different than brainstorming, which is we're not trying to come up with the answer to a problem. What we're taking is a situation, and in a short sprint period of time, we're asking as many questions as we can about that thing. And then once we're done with that, we might whittle it down and go, " What are the questions that we need to answer in order to move slower towards solving whatever it is?" So I think this conceptual thinking, futuristic thinking, ingenuity, creativity, absolutely essential. Next I would say empathy and compassion. One of the guiding principles that we love, and our clients use this, and we gift this to them as a possibility is just assume positive intent. Just start there, because so many times we leap to, oh my God, did you see that email that person sent or that text or they haven't responded to me. And then we attach intention behind it. And there isn't. Let's not confuse behavior with intention. The person didn't respond to your email, there's not necessarily intention behind that. So they were a little shorter with you than they normally are, there's not necessarily intention behind that. Don't make it mean something. If we can just have a little empathy and go, " Gosh, I wonder. That's not like Dane. I wonder if he's okay, I should check in with him."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, he's probably stuck in 252% more meetings.

Andrew Freedman: Right. There's a reason why there's a behavioral change, whatever it is. And so let's just explore that a little bit. If I were creating the team or the leader scorecard, those would be things-

Dane Groeneveld: Big ones.

Andrew Freedman: ...that would be high on the importance list.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I like the way that you finished there with the word explore because it's very exploratory where we're at now, and it's not just leaders that need to be exploring. We get the opportunity to invite our teams to be part of the exploration.

Andrew Freedman: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. Well, it's been a great conversation today, Andrew. I think we could go on for at least a couple more hours, but I like just the way that you started by sharing that energy that you bounce out of the bed with every day to be able to go out and help people be more, that really shows through. So thank you for the work that you are doing. If any of our listeners want to reach out and learn more about the book Thrive, work with Shift, and your new product platform Latch, how do they best find you or those entities?

Andrew Freedman: Easiest way to find me is just on LinkedIn. That's my platform of preference. afreedmanthrive is my handle. Andrew Freedman is my name. The company, our company is Shift, and you can find us at shiftthework. com. That's our website. So those are two couple easy ways to find us. It's been awesome. I mean, I mentioned to you at the start, I've been following you for a while. I love the stuff you put out. I appreciate the conversation. Today was just the next in a series of connections I know we'll have. So thanks hanging out with me and having this chat.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet. Thanks, Andrew.