Travis Furlow | Lead, Listen, and Lasagna

[00:00:23] Hi everybody, this is Andrew Gadomski and welcome to the Reciprocity podcast where we take a look at how do leaders lead and how do they give back and how do they get from the people that they lead. My guest today is Travis Furlow. Trav, welcome to the show.

[00:00:41] Andrew, thanks for having me man. It's awesome to be here brother.

[00:00:43] Yeah, my pleasure. So Travis, why don't you give us the rundown, give us a little bit of an elevator story.

[00:00:50] No problem man. I am talking to you about 20 miles west of Detroit proper. I will throw a go Lions in for this podcast.

[00:00:59] I am an HR talent acquisition, talent management leader in the space for nearly 30 years.

[00:01:06] The two of us have had a number of years working and partnering together.

[00:01:10] I have a deep interest in giving back and passing on information that I've been gifted, taught and bestowed.

[00:01:20] I'm interested to get into our chat. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:22] Excellent. I'm glad to have you and thanks for being part of season one.

[00:01:28] Let's talk a little bit about leadership and the definition.

[00:01:33] There's all kinds of ways to talk about it, but I'm a big fan of asking questions about it.

[00:01:38] So talk about a trait or a technique you learned from someone else and how you executed it for success.

[00:01:48] Years ago, one of my early stops in my career, a woman who I worked for still to this day, probably the best listener I've ever worked with.

[00:02:00] And when I say best listener, maybe I would pivot that a bit and say she was the most present person who's ever led me.

[00:02:10] Every time you were in a meeting with her, nothing else seemed to matter to her.

[00:02:15] When I first started my career, this was the first foray into worlds where emails were happening and conference calls were being scheduled.

[00:02:23] It didn't matter.

[00:02:24] You were 100% swallowed up by her and her presence.

[00:02:29] And it created a level of I'm being seen and I'm being heard.

[00:02:35] And I've used that to the best of my ability.

[00:02:39] You'd have to talk to some of my team members and former team members to determine if I'm doing it anywhere near as well as she did it.

[00:02:46] But being present with people is huge.

[00:02:49] And I think from a leadership perspective, especially in today's world where it's easy that where's the Zoom link or is the Teams link going to pop?

[00:02:57] Or if I'm on this call, someone's pinging you or could you drop for just a second to answer this emergency call?

[00:03:03] It's really easy to break away from being present.

[00:03:06] I work to not do that.

[00:03:08] I work to be as present as I can in every discussion, every meeting and every dialogue I'm having.

[00:03:13] I have actually called her in the last 10 years to thank her for this because she shaped a huge piece of my leadership style all around the idea of be present, be with people, truly be listening.

[00:03:24] Good things happen when it does.

[00:03:26] I remember there's a pyramid about learning.

[00:03:28] And I remember that there's the concept of doing and then there's this concept of listening and then there's the concept of teaching.

[00:03:35] And there's other methods of learning, but that is one of the key methods is you actually amplify how you learn by listening and then by actually teaching on what you heard.

[00:03:50] And I think that is a unsung and unfortunately, probably not pointed out technique that new frontline supervisors, you know, well, this is what I was doing before.

[00:04:06] And now I'm just better at it than everybody else.

[00:04:09] So now I'm going to lead a whole team.

[00:04:11] It's like you're going to listen to a whole team.

[00:04:13] Well, it's interesting that you brought up frontline and maybe young up and comers relative to leadership roles.

[00:04:21] I've been trapped in this one and would go back and say that the listening has become so important because as we're listening, I think leaders at all levels can get trapped into wanting to listen to respond.

[00:04:38] That's a big topic now. Let's listen to understand. Let's listen to learn, like you were just saying, versus listening to make sure I can come over the top with the right answer.

[00:04:48] Or what if I don't know the answer? Should I know the answer? We can get in our own heads as leaders, too.

[00:04:53] And so I think that concept I brought up just a minute or two ago, it really does cool things for me because it can slow my mind down a little bit.

[00:05:04] But if I don't know the answer to something, we can have good dialogue and say, I don't know now.

[00:05:09] What do you think? I don't know now. Should we go break apart and find answers together and bring them back?

[00:05:14] There's so many ways you can pivot from that discussion.

[00:05:16] So, yeah, the listening bar none would be the biggest thing that someone has bestowed upon me that I've picked up and run with.

[00:05:23] And it's been huge for my career.

[00:05:28] We're going to switch to food.

[00:05:30] So tell me about a food that you make or buy for others that you believe them makes feel love from you.

[00:05:38] Or tell me about a time where you got that from someone that made you feel love for them.

[00:05:45] This will go to my family, my mother.

[00:05:50] We are not Italian in heritage, lineage, or there's no Italy on Ancestry.com for me.

[00:05:58] But lasagna, ironically enough, my mom made lasagna for all birthdays.

[00:06:05] And you knew the lasagna was coming.

[00:06:08] Now, my mom also puts pepperoni in her lasagna, which is super delicious.

[00:06:12] Wow.

[00:06:13] And it probably makes it even a little less healthy.

[00:06:16] But it is a level of comfort food that realistically, I'd say I'll be 52 at the end of the month.

[00:06:23] So probably a good 40 of my 52 birthdays, there's been a lasagna involved.

[00:06:29] I love it.

[00:06:29] And it creates this feeling of the love she put into it.

[00:06:34] But it's something that she could always give as a gift.

[00:06:36] And it was something that I don't even want to mess with trying to bake it for someone else because I would botch it.

[00:06:44] It's that experience of I always knew and everywhere I go, if I see a lasagna, go to an Italian place and have a delicious lasagna,

[00:06:52] there's always going to be the comparison to mom's lasagna.

[00:06:54] But it's beyond comparing it for taste or aesthetic.

[00:06:57] I know how much she loved us and loved me.

[00:07:00] And I'm blessed because she's still with us.

[00:07:02] Now I'm going to have to call her because my birthday is at the end of the month.

[00:07:05] I'm going to see if she'll whip up lasagna.

[00:07:07] And she will.

[00:07:08] It's not just the dish.

[00:07:10] It's the repetition and the expectation, that anticipation.

[00:07:14] And that reminds me of some things that my mother does for me when I come home to the house.

[00:07:19] There's always a couple of little things that are ready.

[00:07:21] And I don't ask for them.

[00:07:22] I don't carry.

[00:07:23] I'm not Mariah Carey where I have a writer that says there has to be white M&Ms in the bedroom when I show up.

[00:07:30] There's none of that.

[00:07:30] I get that.

[00:07:33] Let's talk about mental focus.

[00:07:36] So how do you keep the focus at work?

[00:07:41] And is there a model that you have or that you borrowed?

[00:07:47] It's a model that I think has shaped over time.

[00:07:50] I'll go as simple and operational as color coding on calendar.

[00:07:55] So in the world that I'm in and the teams that I lead, I have about 350 people that feed into nine direct reports.

[00:08:05] And we share a portfolio of a dozen clients.

[00:08:09] It can get very easy to get swept into which meetings am I heading to today?

[00:08:15] Or is a quarterly business review due up and coming?

[00:08:18] Is there some report that we need to deliver on?

[00:08:20] So color coding, interestingly enough, has allowed me to stay mentally aligned.

[00:08:24] I can look at the calendar at the beginning of every day and kind of put in my head, all right, green equals this, burgundy equals that.

[00:08:33] I know the frame of mind I need to be in for the call.

[00:08:36] I know if it's an escalation because I have coded client escalation colors.

[00:08:40] So if there's a meeting that's going to be a client escalation, I understand that it might be a challenging chat.

[00:08:45] It keeps me focused back to my earlier point around being present as well.

[00:08:50] It allows me to stay present, understand what I'm about to step into and stay pretty crisp as I'm working through these meetings.

[00:08:56] So color coding is probably the easiest, lowest hanging fruit I could share with people to say, give it a shot because it's worked really well for me.

[00:09:04] All right.

[00:09:09] Movie, play, musical, poem, or book?

[00:09:13] Which speaks to you and have you experienced more than once?

[00:09:16] Did someone recommend it to you or did you find it on your own?

[00:09:21] I don't know if I'm allowed to, but I'm going to take the liberty of saying all of the above.

[00:09:26] You know that I have a joy of writing.

[00:09:29] So for me personally, as a writer, I journal to keep mental focus.

[00:09:33] I have been blessed to write a handful of books.

[00:09:37] So reading, writing, just words in general are important to me because I think crafting stories brings people together in my opinion.

[00:09:43] So now answering your question, I went back and did the whole high school book, reread all these classics that I probably paid zero attention to when I was in high school and supposed to be reading them.

[00:09:55] Catcher in the Rye is a book.

[00:09:58] The reason it got its title, and I'm hoping most people who have listened at some point probably flipped through it in high school or maybe they've reread it as adults.

[00:10:06] I began this process of rereading high school classics as an adult, and it is profoundly different because the experiences I've had.

[00:10:15] So Catcher in the Rye, for example, the character of Old Ballfield.

[00:10:20] There's, I think, melancholy would have been the word used by Salinger.

[00:10:25] I won't get as fancy and just say this kid is sad and he's bummed out and he's wandering around Manhattan, right?

[00:10:30] So this concept of all he wanted, he could see people walking to the cliff, so to speak.

[00:10:38] And he pictured them in this big field of rye and he didn't want people going off the cliff not even knowing where they were walking to.

[00:10:46] He just wanted to be the catcher in the rye.

[00:10:48] Like that was the coolest.

[00:10:50] Like, oh my God, I didn't catch that.

[00:10:53] No pun intended.

[00:10:54] I didn't catch it when I was a young man reading it.

[00:10:56] But, and then you see the depth of that character.

[00:11:00] So Catcher in the Rye has been one that's meant a ton to me because mental health for me personally and for others is a huge passion point of mine.

[00:11:07] And then to take this and spin it completely different, the play Wicked.

[00:11:13] Okay.

[00:11:13] Yeah.

[00:11:14] I just took Shara and Addie.

[00:11:15] We all went as a family and saw it for the first time.

[00:11:18] I cried.

[00:11:19] I totally cried.

[00:11:21] So as a kid, kind of raised in the 80s, Gen X all the way through, Wizard of Oz, I think it was March timeframe.

[00:11:29] It was like the beginning of spring.

[00:11:31] It always launched on TV.

[00:11:33] And my parents would say, okay, you can stay up late, which was probably 9.30 or 10 o'clock.

[00:11:38] And I would watch Wizard of Oz as a kid.

[00:11:40] I loved the movie.

[00:11:41] It was a huge thing for me and our family.

[00:11:43] Being a closet philosopher, as I went to see Wicked for the first time and realized, at least how they had written it, what an unbelievable position pivot to think the Wicked Witch of the West was forever in my life an awful human or awful witch.

[00:12:02] I don't know if I can say she was a human.

[00:12:03] And then you've got Glinda.

[00:12:04] That spin in Wicked just gave me a what the hell I was such a jerk kind of concept.

[00:12:11] And I think it's a cool way to talk about the perspectives we have of ourselves and the perspectives we have of others as leaders.

[00:12:19] We don't know everyone's story, man.

[00:12:21] And I think that's what I took away from Wicked, all the stuff.

[00:12:23] So there you go.

[00:12:25] Okay.

[00:12:28] So I have to do a lot of this, and I think you do too.

[00:12:32] Short term, short notice.

[00:12:34] There's a topic.

[00:12:36] There's someone who's important.

[00:12:38] You got to brief out.

[00:12:39] Hey, I'm pulling you into a meeting.

[00:12:41] I need you to talk about this.

[00:12:43] Tell me the secret.

[00:12:46] This was given to me.

[00:12:48] The CEO that I reported to in my current business is no longer with us in the business.

[00:12:56] He was a huge believer in the psychology behind kind of neuroscience of learning and the idea that we absorb things as humans in buckets of three.

[00:13:07] The ability to distill a message in the three bullets.

[00:13:12] And understand how to give a storyteller's approach to those three bullets.

[00:13:17] Here's the context of what's about to happen.

[00:13:20] Here's what happened.

[00:13:22] Here's the impact of what happened.

[00:13:24] Bang, bang, bang.

[00:13:26] If you can do that, anyone who's going to receive an update from you is going to understand the context of what's occurred and then know to ask you if they need more context.

[00:13:36] They're going to understand the why behind it happening and the impact of it happening.

[00:13:41] In my opinion, being able to bucket communications into snippets of three allow people to digest things pretty quick.

[00:13:49] So that's how I do it when I have to get pulled into a quick discussion.

[00:13:59] Which class?

[00:14:00] I don't care what it is.

[00:14:01] Primary school, secondary school, nursery school, your graduate programs.

[00:14:07] What made you raise your hand?

[00:14:09] I'm pausing because in each of those different times in my life, different things made me raise my hand.

[00:14:19] So if I'm going to pick on one graduate school, what would have made me raise my hand is something said that created curiosity.

[00:14:27] So if you spark curiosity, I want to learn more, know more, understand more, my hand's going to go up.

[00:14:33] And then disagreement.

[00:14:36] So I find myself prone to wanting to debate, wanting to argue.

[00:14:40] And anyone who's listening to this who has ever led me or managed me will know that they will say hand up probably more for I want to be argumentative than curious.

[00:14:50] So I'm working on that.

[00:14:52] But I think those are the two things that typically brought my hand up.

[00:14:56] It was the understanding of I don't really get what you just said.

[00:14:59] Could you teach me more?

[00:15:00] Show me more?

[00:15:01] Help me with more?

[00:15:02] Or you just said something I disagree with and I'd like to get into dialogue with you.

[00:15:06] And that's carried through.

[00:15:09] Started more in undergrad, graduate school, 100%.

[00:15:13] It was nonstop hand up because we had such good dialogue in our cohort when I did my MBA.

[00:15:18] And it happens now on learning and development trainings.

[00:15:21] I have a coach who I work with every week.

[00:15:24] Same concept.

[00:15:25] Hands going to go up.

[00:15:25] If I'm curious or if I want to debate or maybe shift something that I heard.

[00:15:30] It's important to listen.

[00:15:32] You think about curiosity, follow up or the unknown versus I want to debate or I want to add is.

[00:15:40] And you've known me for 20 years.

[00:15:44] I always have something to say.

[00:15:48] But I now have to listen for did you ask for more input?

[00:15:53] Did you ask for understanding?

[00:15:56] Did you ask for the argument or the debate?

[00:15:59] When I hear at the end of something, does anybody have any questions?

[00:16:03] I guess the question I'm trying to figure out is.

[00:16:07] What are they really asking with that?

[00:16:10] And so I might say, what are you inviting?

[00:16:14] Right.

[00:16:14] And they might say, well, what do you think about what I just said?

[00:16:18] Ah, now I've had context for the room.

[00:16:20] Such that I'm not being argumentative or I'm not agreeing.

[00:16:25] What I'm doing is I've been asked to bring a position, not I volunteered one.

[00:16:33] I think that's a huge distinction.

[00:16:34] And I think all of us, just as people can get pulled into.

[00:16:41] You almost ask the question while you're thinking of the real question.

[00:16:46] And I've noticed that a ton.

[00:16:48] The more I focused on listening, I will ask that question back to team members of mine pretty frequently.

[00:16:56] Did I hear this question the right way?

[00:16:58] Did I miss something?

[00:17:00] Tell me more about this kind of concept.

[00:17:02] Because what I've found is a lot of people will ask a lead-in question, but that's not what they really wanted to know.

[00:17:08] It happened to me literally two hours ago.

[00:17:11] Someone asked me, has so-and-so responded to you on this topic?

[00:17:16] And my answer was no, because I asked so-and-so to stand down on the topic until we got more information.

[00:17:24] Then I received a phone call.

[00:17:26] I didn't receive a response on a couple of things from this person.

[00:17:29] And I said, hold on a minute.

[00:17:30] Because your question was, did I receive a response from person A?

[00:17:36] That doesn't seem to be your question.

[00:17:39] Is your question different?

[00:17:41] The person reframed it and said, I'm not getting a response from this person.

[00:17:46] Is that consistent?

[00:17:48] Is that a behavior pattern?

[00:17:49] Or do I need to escalate this?

[00:17:51] So you can see how, hey, did you get a response from so-and-so?

[00:17:55] It really meant so-and-so is not listening to me or not giving me what I want.

[00:17:58] But how come?

[00:18:01] I'm pressing people now because I was guilty of that for years and years of not asking the actual question I wanted the answer to.

[00:18:09] Hoping to maybe get in a dialogue or that you couldn't read my damn mind.

[00:18:13] Let's just be more impeccable with our word would be my guidance.

[00:18:16] Ask to everyone.

[00:18:18] Ask what you want to know.

[00:18:19] It doesn't have to be accusatory.

[00:18:21] It doesn't have to be judgmental.

[00:18:22] It doesn't have to be negative.

[00:18:23] But if you're not getting something you want, advocate for yourself.

[00:18:26] So I think there's a balance in that.

[00:18:28] We tend to hide questions within questions.

[00:18:30] So I don't know if that lands with you or how you feel about it.

[00:18:33] But I see that pretty frequently.

[00:18:35] I think that's right.

[00:18:37] So I'm a big believer in the concept of a sharp question or sharp questioning.

[00:18:42] And I got this.

[00:18:43] And I always give him credit because I don't want people to think it was my idea.

[00:18:47] One of the professors, J.P. Eggers, that I worked with at NYU for data analytics.

[00:18:54] He said that when you're trying to understand and use data to answer a question, you need to make sure that the person who's asking the question has made it sharp.

[00:19:07] You need to do the sharpening with them.

[00:19:10] Because you can't answer a math-based question with a loose formula.

[00:19:22] Okay, let's move on to our next business-oriented question where we talk about community or conflict.

[00:19:31] I want you to pick one and tell me how you create community amongst the team or how you diffuse conflict when it exists in the team.

[00:19:45] Let's start with community because I'm going to do that thing that I love to do where I won't pick one because I think they're interrelated.

[00:19:52] Because you're a good consultant and you just do both?

[00:19:55] I just do both and then I can go either direction with this.

[00:19:58] Let's start with community.

[00:20:00] I think most would agree that teams have their own community, have their own culture, and those teams feed into bigger teams.

[00:20:08] And those teams have community and culture and all the way up the chain.

[00:20:11] So I think building community for me, as cliche as it might sound, is a trust thing.

[00:20:22] And I think organizations, some that I've been in, I'm blessed to be in one now that I've been with for almost seven years.

[00:20:31] And one thing we agreed to together is that we're business partners and we're going to listen to one another.

[00:20:43] But that took time before you could say that and have it really truly absorbed and believed by all who were listening and hearing it.

[00:20:51] So I think sometimes as leaders, we might step in and assume that we'll instantly be able to have trust built.

[00:21:01] And it just doesn't work from my perspective.

[00:21:03] It takes time.

[00:21:04] Trust is incremental.

[00:21:06] So trust is I'm going to show up to meetings on time and I'm there.

[00:21:09] Trust is if you say, hey, I'm always here for you.

[00:21:11] How can I support you?

[00:21:12] The very first time someone needs support and you're like, so I've got another meeting with my boss and I can't get there.

[00:21:18] I am very purposeful when I step into new leadership roles that I work for months to get trust built.

[00:21:27] Because when trust builds individual component pieces of the direct reports you have,

[00:21:33] then I start bringing meetings together that might not typically happen where groups of, at least in our business,

[00:21:41] we have individual P&Ls for client relationships.

[00:21:43] So you can easily go into the silo of your client partner team.

[00:21:48] I spent months, and this was a handful of years ago, spent months building individual relationships.

[00:21:55] And then brought those relationships together.

[00:21:59] Everyone was comfortable with me.

[00:22:01] I was comfortable with them.

[00:22:03] Now it was time to allow that same process to happen for them with each other.

[00:22:07] And that took a handful of months, if not the best part of the year.

[00:22:11] But what ends up happening is you go from building individual teams into a community.

[00:22:18] Then I'll go back and answer, pull the consulting route.

[00:22:21] Then I go back and say conflict.

[00:22:22] Well, if conflict happens and you are perceived to be a stranger, it's going to be conflict magnified.

[00:22:31] If you have community, when conflict occurs, that's a natural part of being human.

[00:22:36] Conflict occurs and we've learned how to deal with it with one another.

[00:22:39] So I think if you say pick one, conflict or community, my ask back to you would be, how do we do that?

[00:22:47] I think you need to build community to either prevent, maintain, or mitigate conflict.

[00:22:54] So that's how I see the whole thing.

[00:22:56] Give me your thoughts.

[00:22:56] I think it's a great approach.

[00:22:59] And that needs to be understood.

[00:23:02] If you were to apply that without talking about its premise, I think people might be, maybe they're going to be confused.

[00:23:11] Maybe they're going to like, why are we doing this?

[00:23:13] Versus this idea of we're all going to work together.

[00:23:17] And sometimes it's going to be easy and sometimes it's not.

[00:23:20] And sometimes people are going to be confused.

[00:23:22] And sometimes people are going to speak up more than others.

[00:23:25] What's the most important thing is to create this community.

[00:23:29] So when things come at us or when conflict arises, we have that level of trust to work it out together, to challenge each other.

[00:23:40] Or maybe we can recognize when conflict might arise so we can go ahead and initiate a program or a process so it doesn't happen at all.

[00:23:51] Agreed.

[00:23:51] I think a good example of that might be the way that baseball teams operate.

[00:24:01] And one of the things that would be hard for a baseball team that is moving around the country so much is where individual players have to be aware of their own logistics and equipment.

[00:24:16] That would be almost impossible.

[00:24:18] You could not do that.

[00:24:20] And so they have equipment managers with teams of people to help them to make sure everything is done.

[00:24:29] Because you will create a tremendous amount of conflict and mistrust when the bats aren't there, when the gloves aren't there, when the things aren't done.

[00:24:41] Because you can't depend upon the player to do that.

[00:24:44] Because you can't depend upon the player to do that.

[00:24:44] But when the player understands that there's that trust.

[00:24:48] And I have enough trust in everything that you're doing to make sure I have all the things that I need to perform in front of 50,000 people, 162 games a year.

[00:25:02] You have to explain that.

[00:25:04] You have to explain that first.

[00:25:05] And then you understand it.

[00:25:07] You do.

[00:25:08] You're right.

[00:25:09] And I think if we take your example and lay it back over the business scenarios that we all get into,

[00:25:18] the equipment manager might be akin to an IT leader or an HR business partner or a finance leader.

[00:25:26] And when I took this role on and we expanded the capacity of what I was doing, I went individual.

[00:25:35] It would be as if I went to meet with all the outfielders and then I met with all the infielders and I met with the pitching teams.

[00:25:42] And I went individual.

[00:25:46] And then from individual started to form small groups.

[00:25:49] Once I had our leaders comfortable, I was attending all of these team meetings so that the day-to-day operators and delivery engine knew who I was and what our purpose was as being the business partner to their director.

[00:26:04] Then I brought the directors together.

[00:26:07] Again, a little awkward because it hadn't been done and it took us a couple months to get into a rhythm.

[00:26:11] Then a number of months after that.

[00:26:13] So this is about an 18-month process.

[00:26:15] Then I brought the functional leaders into my monthly meetings.

[00:26:20] Now finance is hearing real time from people and they're seeing names and faces.

[00:26:24] And so when you get into a spreadsheet situation and a client might have a dip or an explosion of growth, this is no longer spreadsheet management.

[00:26:32] This is human-to-human connection.

[00:26:33] And that's all I'm after.

[00:26:35] As a leader, that's all I want.

[00:26:36] So I think your baseball analogy is a good one because we do the same thing.

[00:26:41] It's 365 days a year.

[00:26:42] So what do we get?

[00:26:44] Three weeks, four weeks, depending on organizations.

[00:26:48] They're working huge amounts of time.

[00:26:51] And if we have an IT issue, it's impossible for me to think that you could be running a business and handle all your HR issues and handle all your IT issues and handle all your finance issues.

[00:27:02] Now we've congealed everyone.

[00:27:04] It just seems to run a bit more smooth.

[00:27:06] So yeah, it's a concept that's worked well for us.

[00:27:13] So what type of technology do you think will be retired almost completely?

[00:27:19] I don't care the topic.

[00:27:21] Construction, healthcare, furniture.

[00:27:23] Maybe we're never going to sit on a couch anymore.

[00:27:26] What technology do you think is going to go away?

[00:27:30] I don't know if it's a technology.

[00:27:32] And sorry to anyone who sells commercial real estate.

[00:27:34] I think it's going to be brick and mortar.

[00:27:37] I think we're going to get to a point where the concept, even though you're seeing a push now where folks are coming back to the office for more days a week,

[00:27:48] I think there will be a revolt of sorts because people have learned that I can be functional working at home and going into what used to be an office, I think is going to shift and become like collaboration zones and centers.

[00:28:04] And you see it in tons of places around corporate America now.

[00:28:09] I just think the immense cost of having huge campuses, that's going to change.

[00:28:16] And I think people are going to be able to kind of work wherever they want to work more formally.

[00:28:24] And where we've seen some of that happening over the last decade, I feel like there was a push.

[00:28:31] And I wonder if the push was simply because so much cash outlay for big offices that now don't have many people in them, if it was more of a financial play than anything else.

[00:28:41] But I think strategically speaking, I like to be able to go to the bank at 930 in the morning in between calls and go to a dry cleaner, pick something up if I need to.

[00:28:48] If I'm going to travel somewhere, yeah, I want to go see colleagues and I want to see other humans.

[00:28:53] Let's do it more purposefully. And can't that be smaller space?

[00:28:56] So I think gone will be the days of huge campuses and it'll almost be like a resurgence of the WeWork world all over again.

[00:29:04] I think that will come back because I think people are going to be too comfortable with this.

[00:29:08] I think that's fair. It's the infrastructure of work is changing.

[00:29:14] I think mandates on knowledge workers going back to work, I get it.

[00:29:17] There's a real estate play there. There's a fair play.

[00:29:22] I got challenged about, well, why do I have to go back into the office?

[00:29:28] You know, I can do my financial work at this financial institution for my house as well as my office.

[00:29:34] I said, go tell that to all the retail associates who've been showing up at the banks every day.

[00:29:39] You work in an organization that has real estate based personnel.

[00:29:46] So maybe the return to office conditions are slightly different and have a different kind of parody for you than an organization that's 100% knowledge worker oriented.

[00:29:59] Or there were plenty of places that were 10% knowledge worker oriented and people still had to go to the warehouse.

[00:30:09] The Fritos and the Doritos aren't going to show up at the store on their own.

[00:30:13] They still have to get driven there.

[00:30:17] Work-life balance.

[00:30:18] It's almost impossible not to talk about it.

[00:30:20] But how have you helped someone else who struggles with that?

[00:30:28] I was a hypocrite.

[00:30:30] In that.

[00:30:33] I talked about work-life balance.

[00:30:36] And how important it was.

[00:30:37] And people needed to spend time.

[00:30:39] Not only with maybe families, friends, by themselves, whatever it might be.

[00:30:45] But I wasn't applying anything that I was saying.

[00:30:49] Emails might come out for me at 6.30 or 7 o'clock at night.

[00:30:53] And they might see an email if I'm traveling again from an airport at 5.30 or 6 o'clock in the morning.

[00:30:58] The leader was saying balance is important.

[00:31:03] But the leader didn't have any balance himself.

[00:31:07] I think that does two things.

[00:31:09] One, it calls BS on what I'm saying and it dilutes my message.

[00:31:15] And two, it creates pressure.

[00:31:18] And the story, which was pretty cool about it, was someone called me out on it a couple of years ago.

[00:31:23] And said, you keep telling me not to check in with you that you trust.

[00:31:27] And you're okay if I have to pop out to an appointment.

[00:31:30] But you're always pinging me, letting me know where you're at and where you're going.

[00:31:35] Or you might say to me, enjoy the weekend.

[00:31:38] But then I catch four or five emails from you on a Saturday or a Sunday.

[00:31:42] I think about work when you're doing that.

[00:31:45] I loved that this person threw that in my face because I hadn't seen what I was doing to impact the either support or denial of go out and have balance.

[00:31:56] So I made a commitment five years ago that balance was going to be something that I absorbed and I lived by.

[00:32:01] I end my day at a very reasonable hour.

[00:32:04] I'm usually shut down by 530.

[00:32:06] I start my day at 9 a.m.

[00:32:09] And I have made it very clear that between the hours of 730 and 9, I'm at a gym.

[00:32:15] Now, you can call me if you want to call me.

[00:32:16] But I want to keep my health strong because I had some health scares.

[00:32:20] I treat my mental and physical health the same way I do a big meeting at the end of the month or a quarter or what have you.

[00:32:29] And now that I've begun doing that, I'm watching people are way more comfortable.

[00:32:32] I see it happening.

[00:32:33] They're setting the same boundaries that I set.

[00:32:35] But if we're going to ask of our teams, let's make sure we're delivering and doing the same things we're asking them to do.

[00:32:44] Let's not fall prey to being hypocrites and asking them to do something that we ourselves wouldn't do because it either looks sad if we're taking all the time in the world off and asking them to put all the time in the world in or the reverse.

[00:32:58] There's a couple of things that I've instituted.

[00:33:02] I don't bring laptops home anymore from the office.

[00:33:04] I lock them up.

[00:33:05] They're like in a lockbox.

[00:33:07] They're in a fireproof box and they're at the office.

[00:33:11] I've been tempted and it's hard to take this leap of removing my business account from my phone.

[00:33:20] I haven't done that one yet.

[00:33:21] Let me know how that one goes if you do it.

[00:33:23] And it's hard, but I'm a lot more conscious about when I'm engaging my phone after, say, 345 p.m. Eastern.

[00:33:35] It's probably personal more than it is business.

[00:33:39] I don't check my email at night.

[00:33:44] I don't want to invite that.

[00:33:48] And if I do want to think about something related to what's going on professionally, I want the freedom of no distractions that someone else has invited.

[00:34:00] Well, listen, man, you're bringing up a topic that goes back to what I was saying a couple of minutes ago.

[00:34:05] Let's not be hypocrites.

[00:34:07] I used to work for one of the big four and we had a speaker come in and address our team.

[00:34:12] This was probably 15 years ago, maybe 20 now.

[00:34:16] And the woman says, work used to be a place.

[00:34:23] It is becoming a thing.

[00:34:25] And this is at the advent of iPhones that started to ripple through corporate America and conference calls could be accessed from anywhere.

[00:34:32] And now think about what's occurred.

[00:34:34] You could literally be anywhere, any time zone, any place on the planet and most likely find enough of a connection to do your work.

[00:34:41] So work literally has become a thing, not a place.

[00:34:46] It is everywhere.

[00:34:46] So maybe I should have said what is going to be gone at some point from a technology perspective are working hours.

[00:34:54] So the idea that 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. is a work day, isn't that some bullshit?

[00:35:00] Because tell me you don't get on the calls with other regions of the world later or earlier.

[00:35:04] Or tell me that you can't go to a gym at 2 in the afternoon and not be chastised for it because you know you're going to be right back on a meeting that's going to run an hour later.

[00:35:12] So maybe if we're going to do this as a big group of people working and what are there, 150 million working Americans, maybe gone are the days of the traditional work hours.

[00:35:25] But more importantly, if we're going to treat it like a thing, it's everywhere, then give people freedom.

[00:35:30] We're going to treat it like a place and you're going to say, come to my office, then I love what you did.

[00:35:35] Lock all that stuff away at 5 o'clock and call it good because you want me in the place, I'm in the place.

[00:35:40] But now I'm out of the place.

[00:35:41] I need my time.

[00:35:43] So I think we've got to be able to balance that a little bit.

[00:35:45] And there's balance and then there's borders.

[00:35:48] Hey, I tried to get a hold of you last night.

[00:35:50] And I was like, yeah, I didn't pick up.

[00:35:53] Why didn't you pick up?

[00:35:55] Because it was last night.

[00:35:57] I'm a workforce planner and analyst.

[00:36:00] There's nothing you could have possibly called about that.

[00:36:05] First of all, I don't have the kind of clearance and I don't work in a department where I got a call in the middle of the night.

[00:36:11] What's so important that you called me at 7 o'clock on a Wednesday?

[00:36:16] There's nothing that important.

[00:36:18] I have degrees, but none of them are in cardiology where I would have to show up somewhere.

[00:36:27] Last scripted question.

[00:36:30] If you were to create a music group, what type of music would you play and who would you want to listen to it?

[00:36:37] Oh, and give me your band name.

[00:36:43] The band name is the Silent Larrys.

[00:36:48] That to your dad?

[00:36:50] Well, it's actually funny because my legal name is Larry Travis.

[00:36:54] I know.

[00:36:54] I know.

[00:36:55] You know that, right?

[00:36:56] So I have two friends who I worked with who we joked at one point about starting a band and they named it the Silent Larrys.

[00:37:03] So if either one of them are listening, Nikki, Maggie, there you go.

[00:37:08] The Silent Larrys forever.

[00:37:10] It would be, and I said Gen X a bit ago, grunge slash festival style music.

[00:37:19] I would want to be like Pearl Jam reincarnated.

[00:37:22] I would want that audience too.

[00:37:24] So it would be a whole lot of Birkenstocks and socks, flannels and the whole bit.

[00:37:28] That's what we'd be doing.

[00:37:32] That's an excellent segue into our lightning round.

[00:37:36] Let's go, brother.

[00:37:37] Okay.

[00:37:37] So all the questions are there, this or that, yes or no.

[00:37:44] So there's not dialogue.

[00:37:45] We'll blow through them pretty fast.

[00:37:48] Okay.

[00:37:48] Ready?

[00:37:49] Got it.

[00:37:50] Pumpkin spice or gingerbread?

[00:37:52] Gingerbread.

[00:37:54] Toilet roll.

[00:37:55] Do you put the paper forward or do you have the paper in the back?

[00:37:58] Sacrilege.

[00:37:59] It's got to roll over the top.

[00:38:02] Summer or winter Olympics?

[00:38:05] Summer Olympics.

[00:38:06] Sandals.

[00:38:07] With socks or no?

[00:38:09] Never.

[00:38:10] And it's flip-flops, not sandals for me, bro.

[00:38:13] Popcorn.

[00:38:14] Butter or no butter?

[00:38:15] No butter.

[00:38:17] Bringing fast food on a plane.

[00:38:21] Okay or not okay?

[00:38:23] Should be like a punishable offense.

[00:38:26] No.

[00:38:27] No.

[00:38:28] Roller coaster or water slide?

[00:38:31] Roller coaster.

[00:38:33] Oreos.

[00:38:33] Do you break them before you put them in your mouth or do you just put them in your mouth?

[00:38:38] Every other one.

[00:38:39] Oh, good one.

[00:38:42] Pancakes or waffles?

[00:38:43] Pancakes all day.

[00:38:45] Rainbow or chocolate sprinkles?

[00:38:49] Rainbow.

[00:38:51] Okay.

[00:38:51] Everybody, he had like a sigh.

[00:38:53] He didn't know what to pick.

[00:38:55] Android or apple?

[00:38:58] Apple.

[00:38:59] Is the first Die Hard film a Christmas movie?

[00:39:07] Yes, it is.

[00:39:09] One pillow or two?

[00:39:11] Two.

[00:39:12] Is pineapple on pizza okay?

[00:39:15] No, it is not.

[00:39:17] And book club or dance lessons?

[00:39:21] Oh, hell, book club.

[00:39:24] That's a lightning round, man.

[00:39:26] You did good.

[00:39:27] My brother was fun, man.

[00:39:29] This is good.

[00:39:30] I love that you're doing it.

[00:39:31] I'm looking forward to more chats like this, man.

[00:39:34] This was great stuff.

[00:39:35] It'll be great.

[00:39:36] You and I can do the after show in a minute.

[00:39:38] For myself and Travis Furlow, thanks everybody for joining us in our season one of Reciprocity.

[00:39:43] We'll see you next time.

[00:39:45] Jim Garden