Dr. Steven G. Rogelberg - Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte | The Science Behind 1:1’s

Today, my guest is Dr. Steven G. Rogelberg. He is a chancellor's professor at UNC Charlotte and a leading expert in organizational science, management and psychology. He boasts a distinguished career with over 150 publications addressing topics from team effectiveness to leadership. As editor of the Journal of Business and Psychology, he shapes scholarly discourse on the topic, recognized with awards like the 2017 Humboldt Award and the 2022 Raymond A. Katzel Award. He is renowned for his impactful contributions and commitment to the research that makes a difference in organizational behavior and psychology. He is also the author of the best-selling book, The Surprising Science of Meetings, which has been featured on various media outlets such as CBS this morning, NPR, BBC and Forbes, as well as his latest book, Glad We Met, The Art and Science of One-on-One Meetings. Dr. Rogelberg is a sought-after speaker and consultant who has worked with many Fortune 100 companies and served on multiple advisory boards. He's also a passionate advocate for community engagement and animal welfare and has been recognized as a top 40 changemaker by the Charlotte Business Journal. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Quick shout out to HubSpot before we get started. HubSpot has an incredible tool called Sales Hub. If you haven't checked it out now, you got to why? Well, you know what time it is. It is sweater weather, football season, Q4. This is the home stretch for your business. It is time to close out another year of growth, another year of business building strong and to prep for the next year of more revenue, more customers, more deals. To bring in more business, this Q4 and beyond, you need sales software that helps you score and top tools are all inside the new HubSpot Sales Hub. With the customizable prospecting workspace, smart deal management and AI-powered apps, you can take total control of your sales operation and manage your people and your pipeline with ease. They've built it and designed it all into an accelerated workflow baked right into your HubSpot CRM. And when you pair sales hub with other hubs like HubSpot Smart CRM, your team will be on the same page across the entire customer journey. Leads don't slip through the crack. Stop sticking to the same old strategies and start closing more deals because the best time to score is Q4. Make the switch to HubSpot Sales Hub at HubSpot.com slash sale. A bunch of people multitasking checked out a couple people just dominating or the leader dominating and by looking at their body language, you know that this is the last place that they want to be. You know, I was very interested when, you know, we first connected to discuss meetings because I think everybody has an opinion of them. And I don't know too many people that spend their whole life studying them. I think we just casually suck at them across the board. And I think that maybe a little bit more education and insight could be useful. So that scenario you just described, that sounds like every job that I've ever had and some of the meetings that I've held and some of the meetings that I've joined. So how did we get to the point where meetings that should be the most important integral part of a business because we have to, we have to function, we have to connect and share ideas and move forward. How did they turn into this time suck, time wasting, potentially not useful thing that we get roped into? And I see it because I've worked in Fortune 500 and I've worked in startup environments and it seems almost like the competitive advantage of a startup is less meetings move faster, break things, no red tape, no politics. But this all seems to in my mind come back to all those horrible meetings that large companies hold all the time that are totally unnecessary. Yeah. So it's a great question. There's a lot to that question. There's a lot of time talking about that. So let me take it a few different parts. I want to share with you a little history of meetings because I think you made a really important statement and I want to build on it. Then I want to tell you about the blind spots of leaders and the blind spots of organizations that are the causes or precipitators of this meeting crisis that we're in. So don't let me forget those pieces. But the history one, let me start there. You know, we forget that meetings are an evolution. They're an evolution over the old command and control systems of the industrial revolution where we didn't care about employee voice. We didn't think they had anything to offer. We thought the top leaders could just make the choices and everyone will line up and do it. We've evolved since then. We know that employee voice matters. We know that innovation, creativity can be spurred by more people in the room chatting, disagreeing, constructively. We know that meetings are an essential gathering activity to promote coordination, cooperation, consensus decision making. We know that when people are involved in decision making, they're much more vested in the outcomes. So absolutely, we need meetings. This idea of eliminating meetings just for the sake of eliminating meetings is a false goal. The real goal is to eliminate bad meetings and wasted time and meetings. And that can be achieved. I know we'll talk a lot about that. Now let me tell you about these blind spots. And so there's two sets of forces that I think are really intriguing. So the first set is a leader blind spot. If you survey people leaving a meeting, there's one person Scott who says this was a great meeting. You want to guess who that person was? I would assume the person who held the meeting. That's right. That's right. And why wouldn't they, right? They called the party. They invited all their friends. They're dominating it. So they think it's going well. And so they have this leader blind spot. This is highly problematic because if you think your meetings are good, you're not motivated to make any changes. In fact, you just assume bad meetings are everyone else's problem, not yours. That's the first key blind spot. But then there's organizational blind spots. It's really pretty amazing, A, that organizations, even small organizations, organizations do not assess the quality of their meetings on their engagement surveys. So here you have this work activity that people are spending a third of their time in. And yet there's no accountability. There's no feedback being provided to the organization of how these meetings are going. So that obviously perpetuates an organizational blind spot. Related to that is for some weird wacky reason organizations have decided that their people don't need training around meetings. In fact, the data suggests that only around 20 to 25% of leaders ever received training on meetings. That is crazy, right? That is crazy. So no training, no feedback, no accountability, and this blind spot leads to us basically just recycling all the bad practices that we ourselves have experienced and thus we continue to wallow in bad meetings. So I'm very curious because you're you're you are an organizational psychologist. That's the that's the that's the term used to describe that the work you do. So you study organizations, you study companies, but I'm assuming you also can very easily understand how an individual acts in an organization and what causes them to do a certain thing. That's that's the premise of your work really. But I'm curious if bad meetings and bad corporate culture is is that something that is accidental or would you say that in some cases this horrible meeting culture is really just to make people feel busy and to make people feel like they're doing something and I again I'm equating it to these large companies where you can hide under the radar as long as you seem to have some activity. Not startup where if you aren't contributing everybody knows it. If the meetings aren't moving the needle, everybody knows it because you're not hitting your revenue milestones, you're not closing your next round. Do you see that often or is that just an edge case? So we actually have some research on that. I'm sure you do. And what we found and it's pretty horrible is that those employees who are low in something called accomplishment striving. These are people who tend not to be very goal oriented. For people like that, the more meetings, the better. They actually derive satisfaction. They feel better about their days and their jobs when they're having meetings. But this is for the people who aren't goal oriented. And to no surprise those people who aren't goal oriented, those are your worst performers. Not your best performance. Yeah. For those people who are goal oriented, high accomplishment striving, meetings have a take a toll and it drains them, fatigues them. And I think what a lot of organizations just don't realize is that the cost of bad meetings is not something they should ignore. It's not just the cost of doing business. It's highly problematic. You will lose your top talent, right? Top talent leaves organizations that have bad meetings. You will disengage your people. You will create tons of rework more meetings to resolve uncompleted, noncompleted meetings, uncompleted meetings. In fact, there was even a study done that looked at organizations that really do a great job in their meetings. And this is small as well as large. And what they found is that those organizations that do prioritize doing meetings well actually were making more money. They actually were more innovative. And so it just speaks to the effect that while we think about meetings as being places of drain and it can be, meetings done well are actually places of gain. Not just for people, but for teams and for the broader organization. And I think that you mentioned in most corporate cultures or a lot of corporate cultures, you walk into these horrible meeting scenarios where there's only one person that walks away. But you have been, anybody who's listening to this has been in these meetings where you do feel consensus and you do feel communication was clear and articulate. And action steps were very, very tangible. And you all walk away knowing exactly what you do. But you also everybody who's listening to this will also have those times when they all go to a meeting. And it seems like an hour of your life just like like gone. And nothing is clear. And I, I guess we don't all, we're not all low performers or people that aren't goal oriented. But we always, sometimes we fall into these traps. And I think it's maybe because we don't have the system sort of, you know, you know, as we fall to the level of our systems and to the level of our preparation. So, you know, we don't have these systems. We get tired, we get fatigued. And then we go into a meeting and we were, you know, we're well-meaning. But then nothing really gets communicated like it literally happened to me yesterday. We had a meeting on Monday that should have rectified a whole bunch of stuff. And then we had to, and then in the WhatsApp chat, we're talking about it. Nobody's clear on anything. We had another hour and a half yesterday. Like this is the, this, this drains people. And this is a tangible hourly cost attributed to that meeting. So let's talk about what, like what good is because we're going to go, we're going to go deep. We're going to talk about meetings. And then I know your latest book is focusing on one-on-ones. And we will go there as well. And why those are so important. And talk about how to do those properly. Because I think that's probably another level of new oncests required for a leader who doesn't even get trained on how to do a group meeting. How do you go into this one-on-one session? That's a whole other ballgame. But let's talk about this, like set the set to stage. What does good look like? If you're looking at all these different companies that you study and these different organizations, like I see in the news, you know, Shopify put a dollar counter on their meetings. That's interesting. I can hear the things like, I don't know if it's Amazon or Tesla with Musk, you can't have a meeting this more than, you know, the amount of people that could eat a pizza or whatever it is. Yeah, is that Amazon? Okay. So what is, what does good look like? Sure. Good is a meeting that where what is being discussed is highly relevant to everyone in that room. That the people who are invited were invited because they have a perspective on what's being talked about. Their voice matters. So they look at the content they go, I'm really glad I'm there. So that's obviously the key. So it's the right topic, the right people in the room, not bloated, not extra people, not nice to have, but keep it focused on the must-habs. Then the reader starts the meeting sharing a vision and set of hopes around the meeting. The meeting leader thanks people for attending and express his gratitude because when people give you their time, you should be grateful for it. So therefore it kind of starts in a more positive tone. Then the leader is actively facilitating. They're making sure they're not privileging their voice over everyone else's. In fact, they're trying to foster constructive conflict. We want disagreement of ideas. And they're focused on the most important items. In fact, they've structured the agenda so that the most important things happen first, not at the end. And so they're actively engaging. They've set the stage, they've created the norms. People are invested because it's all relevant to them, right? They're invested because the room isn't just stacked and stacked with other bodies. So they're dialed in. And then the meeting has a proper close. And this goes to your comment that you made about your meeting. A very common problem is that meetings don't have an ending. They just end. And the best practice is five minutes to go in the meeting. The leader stops and just says, OK, here's what we decided. Here's who the DRIs are, which is Apple Talk for directly responsible individual. Here's our outstanding issues. And this is how we'll pursue completion of those. Therefore, everyone goes saying, OK, this has been resolved. This has been resolved. This is still in progress. Great. Those points could then be communicated to all those nice to have people that we kept out of the meeting because we want to respect their time. So we're now keeping them in the loop effectively. So that gives you a sense of what a good meeting happen. What good meeting looks like. And when you have those, you're good. Like you're glad to be there. And so, you know, I almost go back to, let's say, professional American football, right? There's meetings all the time. I love the sports analogies. It bleeds over all the time too. Right. Every play on offense, there's a meeting. That team could not do their job if they didn't huddle and have a meeting. And quarterbacks received training on how to have those huddles to make that short amount of time really productive. And it can be. And so if you have a clear sense of purpose, you have the right people there. You're focused. You are dialed in, right? Because even at the end of the huddle, there's a proper conclusion, right? You have that proper conclusion. You have the play you're going to play. Yeah. And we execute. And that's more or less that is the proper meeting. That's the format. And it actually, you know, it's funny. It doesn't seem incredibly intricate and complicated. But it seems like it has lost on a lot of people. Is it? Is it? personalities of individuals that take over a meeting when there is no de facto system? Is that usually how? Yeah. Okay. It just becomes chaos. Yeah. And but I want to, I want to build on your first, your, your, your preamble to your questions. I think it's a really important thing you hit upon, which is there's a lack of intentionality when it comes to meetings. And we just invite people. In fact, we over invite people. And then we dial it in. We're an autopilot when it comes to meetings. But here's the really intriguing thing is that we're not an autopilot when we're meeting with stakeholders that really matter to us. When we meet with our boss's boss, when we meet with a key customer, we're very intentional. The thought of those people leaving the meeting saying it was a waste of time is so disconcerting to us that we make sure that the meeting is a good use of time. But when we meet with our directs and our peers, that same level of intentionality just goes away. And in my books, I talk about this notion of stewardship that the best meeting leaders recognize that inherently there are steward of others time. And when you embrace that notion, the thought of people leaving your experience saying that was a waste is so disconcerting to you that you will make sure it's not you. And amazingly, being a good steward can just take a couple of minutes of time with practice. And I want to make a connection to you. You are in the business of being a good steward. I'm thinking of it as you say it. Yes. You know, as a podcast host, very successful podcast, you are prepared. You think about it. You don't overthink it. As we were designing this, it's not like you created a script that we have to follow, but you thought about it. You thought about the story. You thought about how to involve me, where to tap into my expertise. You were intentional. And I was suspect, given your level of experience, it didn't take much time. But that few minutes of intentionality elevates the entire experience. And then we're done. We say, that was a satisfying meaningful experience. Yeah, that's very, very valid. And I think that that's but that's something. For myself, I had to learn that. I had to learn because I had those awkward podcasts at the beginning where I had, you know, you always think it goes worse than it does. You add those podcasts where you feel it, oh my goodness, that I just waste this person's time that I'm not prepping the right way. So it's like a painful experience. But you know, it's interesting. It's always, it's always these highly successful individuals that you that I have the, you know, the privilege of speaking with. And it makes you up your game quite quickly. You off your game very quickly. If you get, you know, I remember one of the first episodes that I did, it was not a bad episode, but I had Guy Kawasaki on. And that was probably one of the largest names, like a recognizable name that I knew coming into it. And it's just the amount of prep and stress. And, you know, you just want to make sure that you're not letting that guy down. I'm curious. And that's the attitude that I think we lose in business and in meetings. And like, you to your point, I love that you care about your boss's boss, you care about your investor, you care about the person that has control over your salary. But for some reason, not maliciously, but we just stop caring about for some reason, everyone else. And you know what, we're going to talk about one on one. But this is just my one, one on one lesson that I heard from one of my leaders at a young, when I was growing up and working in companies. And it's struck, it's stuck with me. And he was a really good guy. And he said, I was always in sales. And he said, we have one on ones to review your pipeline. But those are not true one on ones. Those are pipeline review. I will have a separate one on one with you weekly, biweekly to see how you're doing. Like, yes, exactly. Right. And this is something that's stuck with me as I built out teams, and I built out sales teams and other, other different teams and different parts of the company. But this is something that really stuck with me. It's not just metrics, which is important. There's intentionality to that interaction with that person. And connection and genuine connection. Right. Not just transactions. Yeah. And in today's world of work, especially for those of us who are working remotely, connection is still really important. Right. We think we might not need it, but humans need connection. And one on ones and excellent meetings are that those points of connection. But when executed poorly, it backfires. You know, a great little example is a leader calls together their team has a Zoom meeting, let's say, and then says, hey, how what did everyone do over the weekend? Let's go around. Everyone tell me what they did. Like, that's horrible connection. Yeah. Yeah. Eat it. Hate it. Um, but there's little interesting twists that actually are intense can be intentional and meaningful. For example, when I lead large team meetings virtually, when people come to the meeting, I actually throw everyone into a Zoom breakout above two people with the instruction. Just talk. And they do that for two minutes. That's it. Do they have trouble or real? Do they have trouble doing that? Do they have trouble? No, nope, because if it's just you and another person, you can't hide. Yeah. So that diet, diet is actually having a meaningful conversation of substance. And it's only two minutes. And then I bring people in, but every meeting, we kind of do that. And as a result, people are making that connection with other people. They generally put some into a better mood. It generally helps separate what they were doing before the meeting to the meeting, which is helpful. And so that is a small intentional act that I do. It doesn't take time much time. In fact, I say it saves time. And I think what a lot of leaders don't realize is that when you execute your meetings effectively, you really are saving time. It's just when we execute them ineffectively is that is where we're wasting time. Well, there's so many. This is what's so interesting. I'm very curious as to as to why you chose this as your expertise. And maybe go into a little bit of your background and how you how you ended up here. I was listening to some of the shows that you did before we jumped on and I was laughing when you did your last book launch. And you were like, well, it's about meetings. I didn't know I didn't know who was going to buy it. But then it turned into a best seller. I'm like, well, yeah, I think that it's we under index how important this is for businesses just for people because we all go through this really horrible experience with meetings more often than not. But where was I going? I want to know why you chose to get into this field. Why? Yeah, basically why? Why did you what did you go down this back? Because you're you're so you have been I I'm just going through some of your accolades. Like you have been doing this since 94. So what happened? What happened where you thought that like you even growing up? Did you want to go into psychology? Did you want to go into business? Did you want to fix people? Fix organizations? Where did that come from? Okay, so no, I was I just wanted to play sports and watch cartoons and eat junk food. That was good. My vision as a kid. And you know, it was basically in my junior year of college. My father said, Stephen, you need to come home and tell us what you're going to do when you graduate. And that's a horrifying question for me because I had no idea and I wasn't thinking about it. And so I was a pretty flaky student. I just didn't care all that much. So I didn't have very good grades in college, but I actually was getting my first A. And that class was organizational psych college. So when my father pressed me to say what I'm going to do, I'm like pan panic mode. I'm like, I'm going to be an organizational psychologist. That was it. That's so fun. And I don't regret the decision in any way, but there wasn't much thought that went into it. It was just a nice opportunity. And it's been a great field. You know, the thing that I like about it, and this is how it connects to meetings, is it's about gathering evidence to address practical issues, right? It's about leveraging science to do good for organizations and people. For me personally, my motivation is purely around pain and that people experiencing pain and discomfort at work, to me is just very worrisome. So probably the first feeling I had that motivated me to jump into this research was this notion that people are having days at work filled with meetings and yet they come home saying that was a wasted a waste of a day. And that's their life. That's their life. And that word means so much that I just wanted to see if we could start leveraging science to figure out how to solve that problem. And clearly it's resonated, right? So the story you mentioned, you know, when my first book came out, yeah, I didn't know. I mean, is a book about meetings. Science was in the title. And I was amazed, you know, when Washington Post named the number one leadership book. And I'm like, oh my gosh, there actually might be an appetite out there for the science around meetings and making them better. And to my complete surprise, I started doing this media, right? I was on CVS this morning and CNN and all these. And each time I pinched myself, because here I am, you know, I love talking about this stuff, but I pinched myself going, wow, my 15 minutes of fame is continuing. And it hasn't stopped. You know, I get contacted by organizations and the media, you know, weekly to do events and to provide more insights about the science. You brought up shopify. I've been on, you know, as you know, CNN a number of times sharing my perspective on that. And it's fabulous. You know, the beauty of being a meeting scientist is that because meetings are just so bad, doing 20% of what I say will actually have huge gains. Yeah. So it's, it's really fun to be able to talk about is, is organizational psychology a newer field? Um, like I'm thinking, okay, so yeah, let me, let me frame the question. Um, obviously when you get to the level of an Amazon, they have people that optimize everything. And I want, and we'll talk about some of the tricks and tips to optimize, but that you learn at that level. But I've worked in startups, I've worked with startups. I don't see people. Some great founders, probably the successful ones look into it, but I see a lot of people that don't look into this. Don't figure out how to optimize their meeting companies in the 10 to 20 to 30 to 50 million dollar range that don't train anybody on me. So I think it's more common than not to have horrible meetings and to probably not include other organizational psychology insights into your company. So I'm curious if it's new, if it's ignored, if it's something that people don't quite understand, the concept of until then you write a book about it, very tangible, very tactical. What do you think? So the field is, I mean, it's around 100 years old. So it's not new. In fact, I think it was around three years ago, it was identified as the number one fastest growing profession. So the number of graduate programs is just increasing incredibly. So I think the word is out. And I think organizations are more and more realizing that having an organizational psychologist on staff or as a consultant is an incredible opportunity to make sure you're getting the most out of your talent and not hemorrhaging your key talent and building teens and building leaders. So yeah, there's momentum. Obviously, there's a little bit of a war on science these days, but we're not seeing it in the organizational work arena. I think it actually provides great clarity. When I think about the success of my past book and I think what's been appealing about my new book coming out, it is because it just says, here's a set of practices that here's the data. It's new ways of thinking about things, try it, try new experiments. And the beauty of our science is that it's customizable. So like, especially in the one-on-one book, the glad we met, the art and science of one-on-one meetings, I threw in the word art and science of one of meetings very intentionally because the science, in all cases, it definitely provides insights but we still have to make it fit for you and make it fit for your situation. So what's unique about my content, I think, is I don't take the similar tack of meeting suck, meetings suck, hate meetings, meetings hell. Instead, I say, you know, these things are really important. They can be potentially transformative. Here's a menu of choices. Go through this menu. It's founded in science and make choices that fit who you are. But that notion of making choices is where we need people to evolve to. And another good example is setting meeting times, right? So most meetings are an hour. Why do you think that is? Because somebody has that in their calendar. Exactly. That's the most uninspired reason to have a meeting that's an hour, especially given something called Parkinson's Law. And Parkinson's Law is the idea that work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. So if a meeting is scheduled for an hour, magically it will take one hour. But we can actually use Parkinson's Law to our advantage. If we schedule our meeting for 42 minutes, 25 minutes, we will get it done. Going back to our football analogy, there's a tight clock on those huddles. They can't run over. No, they have their time. That's it. And they get it done. Yeah. Actually, you know what? Just a nod to your understanding of how to influence people with data. I think that the way that you structure your arguments and the way that you write your books, I think it's actually very, it's a very important way to communicate data and facts, because when you give people autonomy to sort of choose how to implement into the organization, I think that's probably why your message is so successful. Because you show people, like listen, this is the facts. We're going to tailor it to your circumstance. And I think that, you know, people are so funny. You mentioned there's a war on science. People always push back when they feel like they don't have a choice. And this is where dogma extends far beyond this conversation. And we won't go there. But the point is, people always need to feel like they have autonomy in their decision making. And, you know, in business, it's no different. So I think the way you communicate is probably why you're so successful at what you do. And it's very kind of you. And I appreciate it. And I sucked at it in the beginning. But I work really hard. Well, you know why it's because you know, you know, you know, you know, and you just want to like shape them. And why don't you get it? But yeah, I digress. You can't do that. So you just say, I'll also, I'll also add, it's tied to even how you started your interview with me offline. When you told me, assume our listeners are really smart. Yeah. That's what I assume. When I write, you know, when I write, I assume that people are looking for the facts, looking for evidence. And that when presented with choices, you know, they can make good, reasonable choices. Doesn't mean they won't make mistakes. But mistakes don't bother me, right? I mean, mistakes are just the opportunity to learn. Yeah. And without mistakes, it'd be a really boring world. Of course. And so it's just helping people think about a common problem differently. Which again, was why I was so excited about the one-on-one meeting. I know we'll talk about that later because there was nothing on that. Like you go, you know, when I wrote my first book, you know, surprising science and meetings, there was a lot of traffic in that space, you know, which is why I didn't necessarily think it was going to get the traction and it did. But when you look at the one-on-one meeting space, there's no traffic. It's wide open. And yet there's around 200 plus million of these things a day around the globe. And so that's a lot. That's in the use. I'm really hoping that, you know, the one-on-one content can truly take organizations to a whole new level. But I know we'll hit that way. Yeah. We can go into that pretty soon. I just have one more question because it's the one thing that you were asked to probably go on CNN or Fox Business or MSNBC to speak about that thing that Shopify did. I thought was very interesting. What is your opinion on that? Is that positive? Is that potentially encouraging the wrong behavior, the right behavior? What do you think? And we can describe what it is. It's basically like, maybe you can describe it because I don't want to misspeak. Yeah. I mean, in the simplest, when it first came out, there's really basically a ban on meetings that everyone was asked to remove all meetings from their calendar of three and more people for at least, I think it was a couple of weeks or so. And so it was this massive just cleaning the slate and elimination of meetings and putting a lot of pressure on people not to have meetings anymore. And so I don't know where they're at right now. You know, I talked to some Shopify folks and they appreciate the efforts, but they, I mean, I've heard people meeting in secret. Oh, that's really what that's the ridiculous thing. Another calendar. That's so ridiculous. So my issue with Shopify was, so first of all, I was really appreciative that they're an organization that wanted to try to do something about the meeting issue. So really kudos to them. I think that's fabulous that they made this a priority. But this idea of just eliminating meetings is like trying to get healthy and saying, okay, I'm no longer going to eat any processed food and sugar. You could say that, but that's a diet that's going to be hard to maintain. We know from health that the best thing you can do to become healthy is to take a system's perspective, right? To start engaging in better healthy and lifestyle choices. It's not just about depriving yourself of something. And that usually when people just deprive themselves of something, they're just drawn to it even more. So what I think, if an, you know, what Spotify should have done is not take such a strong top down perspective. Every function in an organization has different meeting needs, right? Those in marketing are going to have different needs from those in sales, from those in IT. So this idea of saying that this is the corporate policy, everyone needs to just doesn't make sense. You could really hurt certain functions. So what I would have done if I was doing Shopify and I wanted to get my meeting number under control is I'd actually do a bottoms up process, not a top down process. I would charge each of my managers to meet with their teams, do an audit, start talking about meetings and what can be eliminated, what can be short and what can be shrunk, and let each team take this challenge because meetings are a collective experience. So I love the idea of taking all this incredible negative energy around meetings and harvesting it for good. And people are prime. So some of my engagements I do with the organizations, I do that activity. And people are fantastic. They are so hungry for it. I can't get them to stop, but they're able to re-engineer their meetings, shorten meetings, fix meetings. So I like this bottoms up approach. But at the same time, I like when an organization also A, make sure that they've leveled up people's skills. So go to the training thing we talked about earlier. B, that they make sure that their engagement surveys include content around meetings because we need to create that feedback loop. C, that they've assigned someone on their leadership team ownership of meetings. We need someone to own it. Meetings are bigger investment than IT. Bigger. And yet we couldn't imagine not having someone own IT for an organization. Of course. Someone needs to own meetings as a critical work process where they say, yep, I'm going to monitor. I'm going to make sure we have a good return on investment. So that's that's the C. And then there's a host of other, you know, interesting practices, you know, that can be done to change that ecosystem. But so what I advocate for is taking a systemic approach to changing meeting culture so that you get the positives without the negatives. I felt like Shopify's approach was just about demonizing meetings. And as a result, it could have some unintended consequences. So I love their passion, but I would have chosen approach. I think that mitigated some of those unintended consequences. I'm just going to take a quick break. Thank the longtime friend and sponsor of the show, the HubSpot podcast network. They have incredible podcasts. One of my favorites, one that you have to check out this month is Nudge hosted by Phil Agnew. Now, if you've ever noticed, the smallest changes always seem to have the biggest impact on Nudge. You learn simple evidence back tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, grow a business. The point is every bite size 20-minute show comes packed with practical advice from these incredible entrepreneurs, behavioral scientists, and everybody in between. Nudge is fast paced, but very insightful and a must listen if you're a podcast fan. Make sure you listen to Nudge wherever you love to get your podcasts. So let's talk about, let's talk about and thank you, but let's talk about one on ones because I want to give a significant amount of time to that. So one on ones in my back, in my experience, it's always been, again, that one example that I gave you was like the best possible one-on-one experience that I've ever had in any job that I've held. Outside of that, because my background's in sales, it was either for pipeline or for quarterly or annual or semi-annual performance review, and that was like the only one-on-one instance. And I think that also, I've seen that in other departments where it's just performance review is the only one-on-one engagement that somebody would have. Is that correct? Is that incorrect? Do organizations use one-on-ones differently? Do organizations not use one-on-ones at all? It may be, give me a rundown of all the different things you see, what's common practice, what's not. It's all over the board. It's all over the board, but I'll tell you this. It's not all over the board when it comes to our best leaders. They absolutely leverage one-on-ones. They recognize that one-on-ones are the display stage for their leadership. In many regards, this where leadership happens. So when you look at the less effective leaders, yeah, I mean, they're not having them, or if they do have them, they're just treating as a micromanaging session. They're just getting up all in the grill of the employee, but the best managers aren't like your example. The best managers recognize that they're orchestrating the meeting, but the meeting's not for them. The meetings for their direct. The best managers realize that this is an investment, and it's an investment that pays dividends. In fact, when I was thinking about a title for the new book, the glad we met, and I was talking to Adam Grant, who's another organizational psychologist, and we're brainstorming top titles. The alternative title, which we didn't use, but I was really tempted to use, but it didn't really fit my brand very well, is basically the one meeting that shouldn't be an email. I like that, which I don't hate that. I don't hate it either, but I generally take a positive spin on all these things, so I don't think it fit as well, but I think that sentiment is perfect. It is the one meeting that should not be an email. It is about connection. It's about me learning what's on your mind and how I can best support you. And the fact is, each of these meetings winds up saving me time, because now by dedicating this time to you, I'm addressing your issues, we're actually eliminating a lot of spontaneous encounters, because I'm giving you what you need. In fact, you often will save your issues for these one-on-ones. So there turns out there's less interruptions. So not only are we giving time to the manager, because we are, we're elevating you as the team member, the direct, because you're getting what you need. You're feeling heard, right? You're feeling elevated. You're feeling supported. You're feeling aligned. But the twist is that it's positively affecting the leader's performance. Leaders are judged by the success or lack thereof of their directs. So the better your directs do, the better you are as a leader. So these one-on-ones hit all those elements. But similar to what we talked about earlier, that blind spot I mentioned still exists. And that we have seen in the work that leaders think their one-on-ones are better than the team members. The team members often leave the one-on-one not feeling satisfied. And I'll share one little finding and then I'll pause and let you do your one-on-one. I have a lot to. I know. It's such a great topic. There's so much here. The best predictor of one-on-one success is the direct doing the majority of the talking. Therefore, the best predictor of the ineffectiveness is the leader doing the majority of the talking. I think that's really telling. And it could apply to your world, right? If you have a podcast and you were talking more than your guest, you probably wouldn't have this fantastic audience that you have. No, that would be a big issue. I've seen podcasts or it's like that, but yeah, I've been on podcasts like that. Oh my goodness. That's so funny. Okay, so in this one-on-one interaction, somebody who's listening to this, they understand that we have to have them. I want to pull out. It's like a mini therapy session to a degree. How would you best describe the end result, the best possible end result, outside of just the person speaking more than you? I'm the leader. You're the direct. You're coming in. I want you to be speaking, telling me all your worries and your problems. But I'm trying to tie this back to like, okay, where does this go in terms of business context? I'm talking about their girlfriend, their boyfriend, their spouse, their dog that had to be taken to the vet. Am I talking about the fact that I don't know, they're not performing at work. They're stressed. Is it everything outside of work and inside? It's mostly inside of work. It can touch upon outside of work, depending on your relationship with the person, because clearly what's happening outside of work typically gets brought into work. So it could be some of that. But in general, it's work-related topics tied into the direct reports, well-being, motivation, productivity, priorities, clarity of assignments, alignment, but also bigger, longer horizon, their career development, their sense of place in the organization. So it's about the day-to-day experience, but also the longer horizon experience. If I had to sum it up and I love this expression, you hear this. You're seeing it a lot more on television these days. This notion of seeing someone. I see you. One of them ones are your way of seeing someone. The one-on-one is the opportunity to have that connection where the direct says, okay, here's what's going on. Here's why I need some help. The leader through excellent questioning and excellent listening is really able to fully engage and be present in those moments. The desired state is not the leader feeling happy at the end of the meeting. It's not necessarily even the direct feeling happy, but the direct feeling heard and seen and supported and appreciated, and those things can happen even if you have to deliver some negative feedback. Because when it's done well, that actually can elevate a relationship too. So the one-on-ones are just the high-touch mechanism for truly enabling and supporting and elevating your team. What would be your recommendation to create a psychologically safe environment that allows the person, the direct, to feel comfortable speaking about some of this stuff? Like their career aspect. So I love this and I love that bringing this up because I'm a big believer in helping somebody get to where they need to be inside or outside of the company that I'm working in, but it's a lot for somebody to take in. If I was hired by an individual, I'm very apprehensive about being honest about where I want to go. Yep. So first of all, it really is how we roll this out or reboot our efforts. What I advocate for in the book is tying this initiative to organizational values and your own personal values. You know, people don't like flavor of the month initiatives. We're very cynical. But if you actually look at your organizational values and scan your personal values, one-on-ones actually align perfectly with it. You typically see people's personal values are helping others, caring. One-on-ones are that mechanism. So when you communicate this thing, tie it to these broader values, then frame it. Frame it such that people know that you're doing this not to micromanage. You're doing this so that you can be the best manager to them that you possibly can be. So set the stage, set why you're doing it, tell them that every few months, you'll collect some evaluation data from them just to see if it's working for them. Also, when you have these meetings, start them well. Start them with positive energy, connect to some past one-on-one so they see you're actually listening and making connections. Be appropriately vulnerable. If you want someone to disclose to you, look for opportunities to disclose to them. We know from the research that the days of leaders coming across like they have no problems are done. We know we're all humans. We all have problems. We could be making $10 million a year or $10,000 a year. We all have problems. And when we're appropriately vulnerable to people, it just opens the door. And then as soon as someone does share, now the pressure is on you to honor that sharing. Listen, appreciate, empathize, reinforce. So we can start to build the psychological safety in these one-on-ones over time. And it doesn't take much time. But we do need to do it. And when people see that you are committed to them, that the agenda of the one-on-one is their agenda, they'll start truly enjoying these things. And we have a little theme here. I make a comment and then I share some research. So let me tell you. So I did in one of my studies, and I talk about this in the book because I think it's a kick is that I ask people would they want more one-on-ones with their bosses, less one-on-ones with their bosses. And I assumed that people would want less one-on-ones with their bosses, basically if their days are just filled with meetings. They're like, I can't do another meeting. I can't do another meeting. I need less of these. I need to get this under control. But we actually found that when a leader does these one-on-ones, well, no matter how busy the person is, they want more. Really? And I love that. People want real human connection in their work. They want real human connection. And all right, here's a bonus research insight. And I think this one is such a kick. When we started to ask people what's their desired cadences for how many of these happened, we assumed that the most junior people would be like, I need these as much as possible. I'm new. I need this weekly. What we found was the opposite. The more senior you are, the more you want these. Right? Because you know at that point that really effective one-on-ones elevate you, make you more successful. And that contact with your leader is so critical. So they wanted absolutely weekly one-on-ones. But interestingly, most senior employees don't get weekly one-on-ones. Often the cadence is slower. What is the, like, so you would say ideal is one-on-one. That's what the employee wants. That's what the leader wants. And the goal is also, there's a lot of pieces that will allow this to come together properly. So you shouldn't be overloading your leaders with too many direct reports that they can't do this. That's very important as well. I mean, the leader also has to be open to the concept of being vulnerable and making something not about them, not purely not, I don't want to say it's not about performance. But it's all these adjacent factors that will lead to performance. So it's like you're looking, you're actually one-on-one in the leading indicator, not the lagging indicator basically. Yes. Yes. I mean, it's investment. Yeah. It's all it is. You're just investing in your people. But it's one of those, one of the few investments that you will get a tremendous return on. And if you keep your top talent, they don't leave. That saves you huge amounts of time. If people are more aligned, it saves you huge amounts of time. So it actually is an investment that you get that return on. So to go back to the first part of your question, the research generally supports weekly or every other week. Cadence says, those were the best. And I best is being defined as the employee feels much more engaged. They feel that they can be much more productive and aligned having those regular points of contact. Those can be 30 minutes or 25 minutes. Easy. Then you could have some other fillers in between. So some leaders do some async. So they track like basically their one-on-one notes are put into a Google Doc and then people can provide async updates. And they can ask questions and the leader can respond. Beautiful. Love it. Once you start going beyond two weeks, you get these massive recency effects. So if you and I are doing our one-on-ones once a month, the things that we will talk about are basically the things that just happened the last week. And that lack of full expression limits. So there's a recency bias in the media. And there's just no momentum that builds. So a monthly one-on-one is still better than no one-on-ones. But basically, the gains associated with that weekly or biweekly are just so much higher. And it just starts to decrease when you have monthly. It's still better than zero. But we just don't have the same utility. So I would much rather have people do the weekly or the biweekly for less time than saving to the monthly with more time. And I'm just now just thinking about all these edge cases, or not edge cases, or just like different things that could impact this. Zoom versus in person, I would assume in person. Well, we collect a date on that. I'm sure you did. That's fine. So I have a chapter in the book that talks about where to have these one-on-one is. Because it's kind of interesting. And so the place that we found was the least desirable was the directs office. Oh, interesting. That was kind of neat. Yeah. Most desirable was actually the manager's office or a conference room. Then there was this almost a bimodal where half loved the idea of meeting off-site or taking a walk. And the other half hated that idea. So, you know, where you come with this is that because this is a meeting orchestrated by you before the direct, you just ask them, you know, where do you want to have these things? Happy to do it anywhere that would be helpful to you. That's a nice message, right? And that kind of reinforces. Now, as it relates to virtual, there was a slight preference for face to face over virtual, but it wasn't huge. You know, people generally found the virtual worked for them. But early on, when they didn't really know the manager as well, they just felt there was a little bit of a missed opportunity. And they didn't feel as comfortable disclosing. Now, interestingly though, the walking meeting is really one of the best choices if everyone's game for it. What the research shows is that when two humans walk next to each other, they're actually much more comfortable sharing. There's just something about not staring at that person. There's something about being in a different setting, you know, ideally, you know, nature. That seems to evoke greater safety, greater willingness to share, and more creativity, by the way. So I think that's part of this intentionality equation. And so while I just shared the science, I just want the manager to decide, you know, talk to the people and figure it out, and use it as the opportunity to keep convincing them that this is their meeting. What about some other behaviors that I've seen that I think are in my personal opinion, they're not great, but it seems to be things that people do to do instead of a strong one-on-one designated time. So I'm seeing managers texting back and forth async, sending five-minute long voice notes, having super casual conversations on WhatsApp. What are these things play into? Again, it's all about leader-direct relationship. Are these things damaging? Can they help a degree at all? I appreciate that leaders recognize that there's lots of different ways of communicating with their people, and they can leverage so many different techniques. But those types of communications by the very nature just tend to be very tactical, right? They're just about moving the ball down the field. They just lack the substance. Oh, sorry, you're good. My dog has saw another dog outside and is going bonkers. No, you're fine. And she's a tiny little pug, but they always are. She thinks there's no dog that she couldn't defeat in a fight, and she needs them all to know that she is the toughest dog in the neighborhood. Listen, you're hopefully safe at home if somebody tries to break in. At least, at least she'll sound vicious. That's all the matter. She will stay ambitious. So basically, those other forms of communication can complement the one-on-one, but they don't replace it. And I put in the book, this quiz basically that says, okay, if you're doing this, this, and this, and this, do you still need to do one-on-ones? And I go through it, so you're, you see the person casually. Your door is always open. You text them, but it's a fake quiz, because anytime that you, if you say, no, I don't need to meet with the one-on-one, you're wrong. Because one-on-ones are different. One-on-ones are about that genuine connection, and helping someone to feel truly seen at home. No, I think that I believe that what happens is people always look for shortcuts and hacks and everything they do. And unfortunately, communicating with people is no different. I mean, that's why people send voice notes even instead of sending attacks or an email. It's just trying to hack it, basically, and expedite it. And again, I mean, that can work, but if you're truly trying to build a relationship, you're truly trying to help someone, you need more than that. And I just can't emphasize enough that while we could, you know, maybe a listener can come away saying, oh, you know what? I don't want to cuddle my people. You know, I don't want to spend the time. They know what to do. But the fact is, these one-on-ones truly, truly help you as a leader too. And I mean, it's just like that often gets lost on leaders. This makes you better. And think about how much time it takes to replace your good talent. This makes you time. So it makes you better. It makes you time. In fact, there's even some research that was where employees were surveyed saying, how do one-on-ones affect their team performance? The vast majority said it improved team performance. Well, they feel, okay, so if somebody feels seen and listened to and cared about an organization, they're not, it's not like they're not going to eventually move on to something else. Everybody has their own career objectives, but a couple things. You're going to know what those career objectives are because you're speaking to them all the time and you're okay with at some point in their career moving to another company. If that's what they want, you're not going to stop them, but at least you can know when it's happening and you can help them get there. And one of my favorite things as a leader is to make like a verbal contract with somebody like, listen, we're going to work together for two years. And then after that two-year period, I'm going to help you get to where you want to go, but give me like two of your best years basically. But you know what's going on. Yeah. And I love that by the way. And so often employees leave just because they don't think they have a future. And they're in their own heads. So these conversations, once you hear it, there might be paths that the employee didn't think about at all, right? We have people who leave us who were surprised, right? Where we say, if you just would have told me, we could have figured something out. Yeah. And the employees say, you never asked. And the fact is, is that the one of ones provide that mechanism to keep figuring it out and exploring new opportunities. And that's exciting. That's why I go back to how we started that some leader could listen to this podcast and say, oh yeah, okay. So one of ones are an option for me. No, they're not an option. It's a requirement. If you're not doing them, you need to start. If you are doing them, you need to make sure that you're doing them well. Otherwise, you're not reaping the benefits. But this is the foundation of leadership, especially in hybrid workplaces. Yeah. Can you actually on that point? So somebody's listening to this and they understand the benefit, they're bought in. They can figure it out themselves to a degree, but just even go a step further tactically. How do you start it? Cades of questions that are sort of agnostic of the individual that's in that meeting. Good questions to ask. And then how do you end it? So that's you're basically, that's a question asking me to describe my entire book. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. No, you have to apologize. It's a perfect question. So again, I mean, that's what the book does is it literally walks from start to finish. I'll give you not everything. You don't want to give away the far. So, but I'm going to give it a few examples. By the way, just a side point, you're very good on stage. I was again, I'm just referencing the things that I saw when I was prepping for this. And you said like the six pillars of good meetings. And then you were teaching it over, I think, to a Google talk. And then you were saying how I guess your editor or your publicist or something says, don't tell them the six pillars or six pillars are not going to read the book. And then you said, well, these are just six of 250 million that I put in the book. And I was laughing because that's the best way. But you know, in all seriousness, when somebody listens to something like this, it's so interesting. They're going to listen to it. They will still get the book. And then there's actually another level of, I guess, commitment that they have to have, which is holding themselves accountable to doing anything. Because you can consume all the information you want. And people have this actually a really nasty habit of just consuming, consuming, consuming, and not actioning. So they'll listen to this. They'll read the book. They'll get it on audible. They'll go find you on social. And they probably still then will not do anything until they, you know, maybe six months later, they're like, yeah, maybe I should try something out in my company. But I know. I hope they think more seriously. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. All right. So I'll give you one that I think is really fun and interesting. I'll give you two at least two. Okay. I have a feeling I'm going to leave you more than two. But I want to bookend the start and the end. All right. So a question that doesn't work is asking, how are you? When you ask someone, how are you? They tend to go into autopilot. Right? They go good. You basically didn't learn anything of value. But you can ask the question differently. If you ask someone, how are you? But actually, I want you to respond on a one to 10 scale with 10 being great and one being horrible. How are you? Now you're going to get responses like vibes, sixes, sevens, eights. And now you can talk about it. So that's a simple example. Asking a good, how are you? In that manner, elicits a real and genuine conversation. So that's one tip. I love that. Another tip is in the beginning, and I think I may have shared this is after you refresh on what you hope to achieve in the one-on-one. And by the way, one-on-one should have a plan of action. A lot of leaders think that you don't need an agenda for these things. You actually do. It just doesn't need to be a big, heavy, formal agenda. But the research was generally showing that people need some plan of action in the beginning where we've clearly identified the critical priorities to discuss. And the most important element of creating that agenda is the direct doing it or the direct collaborating with you. So when you're creating that plan of action, the direct's voice should be dominating it. So you refresh on that plan of action. So you're making reference to other things, you're facilitating, you're listening. Another key piece, and I'm trying to give you different little tips at different stages, is around solutioning. It's critical, obviously, to ask your directs their ideas on how to solve the problem. Because that's good. You don't need to be the sage on the stage. Let it be someone else too. But here's the thing that leaders often get wrong, is that if the direct solution does not align perfectly with yours, you think they have to go with yours. And that's wrong. If the direct solution maybe in your mind is lesser, but the gap is not meaningful, let it go. Yeah. Let it go. Go with their idea. You don't know for fact your idea is better. If the gap is big and it's meaningful, sure, share your perspective. But no one to let things go. So often we ask people their opinion, but we're just using it to tee up our own opinion. And so much good can come from one-on-ones by showing and demonstrating that you trust them. You can ask them good questions to help them keep shaping their initial thoughts. But don't intervene unless you truly have to let it go. By doing that, you're building all this commitment. People are going to feel much more supported and heard and listened to. So that's another common issue that common problem that leaders have is they don't know when to let things go. You know, I'll go ahead. Are you going to say something? Sorry. I have so much to say. So you go. No, I don't want to take it away from this. Keep going. And then I'll bring up something after. Keep going. Sorry. All right. Another thing is recognizing that as you're doing these one-on-ones, there are these two constellation of needs that you need to meet. You need to meet the employee's tactical needs. You know, but you also need to address the more personal needs. This is a now-legate like to go into a restaurant. You could get great food, but if the service is terrible, that experience wasn't good. If you get great service and the food is terrible, the experience was bad. So the leader just has to be dialed in that they need a process that addresses both the tactical and the personal needs. And I have a model I provide along with behaviors that do both. The other thing, and I'll just two more quick things. One is, to your point earlier about people read and hear these things, but don't necessarily do something with it. That really haunted me as I wrote this book. So this book is really different from me because I filled it with self-assessments. And they're really hard. Like they really make you think and challenge some of your assumptions. So I'm hoping through those self-assessments that people realize here are their blind spots and here are set of things to do. All right. One last thing, and I'm going to stop. The end. All right. There's a research finding and I love this and it ties to one-on-ones. Basically, they did an experiment. They brought people into a lab. They were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. One condition is they basically stuck their hand into ice cold water. That hurts, right? They did it for a minute, felt lots of pain. The second condition, they put their hands in the same ice cold water, but then for 60 seconds, but then they were told, we're going to do it for 30 more seconds. We're going to put it back in this glass. The water was slightly, slightly warmer, still freezing and painful, but slightly more, slightly better than the initial glass. And what they found is that those people who ended on that more positive note actually said, yeah, I'd be willing to do this experiment again. Oh, wow, that's funny. So they were miserable for actually longer than the first group, but because it had more of a positive ending, their experience was different. And that same applies with a one-on-one. That no matter what you talked about, how difficult it was that even if you had to give negative feedback, we can figure out a way of trying to end on a more uplifting note where the person doesn't feel be down. The person realizes that you still believe in them, that you're there for them, so that they leave feeling energized as opposed to deflated. So what I wanted to say, and I didn't want to stop you because this is just, I know you're going to have a thought on this as well, and I didn't want to take you away from this because it was amazing, but there's so many parallels in just relationship, communication, your spouse, your partner, your kid. This is, I know this is going to be for business leaders, but as I'm hearing this, I'm like, oh my goodness, this is just a masterclass in communication. Oh my gosh, I love that you brought that up. Because you're absolutely right. I mean, so one of the things I talk about is we should be having one-on-ones with our kids. They need to be seen and heard, and too often we just get into these rhythms with our kids that our conversations are just impassing. And kids, children need connection. This opportunity where you're just purely dialed into their needs, listening, asking questions, reflecting, even focusing on the short term and the big picture. So what subjects are you really loving at school that maybe you want to do more of? That's a long term, that's like career advancement question. So there's layers to this, and you're so right, like these one-on-ones and what comes from the science applies in so many different relationships. And if we take some of these same skills and act intentionally and empathetically and benefits all the relationships in our lives. And I just can't stress enough that this investment promotes so much harmony, so much creativity and innovation, so much effectiveness and productivity, so much resilience, so much more grit, and all these things, right, help individuals, teams, organizations, and families thrive. Yeah, at the end of the day, it's just this purposeful time dedicated to communicating. And you know what? I don't have kids yet, that's that's soon, but not yet, but I have so many friends with kids, and even the way I was raised, I love my parents, they raised me very, very well, but a lot of it is just casual in passing. And I'm thinking about the times even growing up that I think are not a thing with parents raising kids now, like that time at the dinner table when there was no distractions, when you could in theory have these quasi-one-on-ones. I don't think people even have those anymore, because everybody's on an iPad or an iPhone or an iPhone TV. I agree. I mean, I think our world is becoming more and more disconnected. Yeah. And we see it in all contexts, right, so people basically socialize with people who have the same worldviews. Yeah. And it just creates more and more polarization. I think we'll look, you know, I can see right now in the world what it's causing. I testified to Congress this past summer on some work psychology-related issues. And some of the things they were telling me, it's crazy. So they have a lounge, you know, where people could go. But it's not, there's a Republican lounge and a Democrat lounge. The Democrat lounge has CNN, the Republican lounge, headfox. People can't even hang out together. When they get on buses to go to various locations, they're not on the same bus. They're two separate buses. There's a Republican bus and a Democrat bus. I mean, this is horrible. So without these points of contact, this meaningful interaction and conversation, it's just hard for us to break down barriers. I firmly believe that as a country, that people have so much more in common than you would ever know by looking at our politics. Yeah, I agree with that completely. I think politics is the worst representation of the average individual. I agree. Yeah, I agree. I'm actually, it's funny because I notice it more. I'm Canadian. Hey, so my wife and kids are Canadian. Okay, so they must notice it that there's such a huge divide in the U.S. compared to Canada. People are not, people are political. They're not as political as they are in the U.S. People are, they are very, yeah. And there was this research study that I saw that when I was growing up, what they found was the biggest thing a parent wanted for their kid was to marry someone in the same religion. Now, the biggest thing that a parent wants from their kid is to marry someone within the same political party. Wow, that's super telling. And that's actually really, that seems very bad. Actually, there's not an eloquently to say, it just seems like it's not a good thing. And it's like social, social encourages us. The echo chambers on social and algorithms on social definitely don't help and COVID didn't help and being locked down and not talking to people didn't help. Nope. And a broken educational system, right? Absolutely. And the notion of, you know, confirmation bias, right? People seek out information that they already know and or they think they know as opposed to seeking out information that questions what they know. And maybe this is a nice tie back, you know, where I feel like what's neat about glad we met is, is it brings, you know, this knowledge, this science, this evidence. And I feel that through research and data, you're able to penetrate better, right? Into someone's mind. So they might say, Hey, I do this all the time. It's working for me. But now when they read about the science, it gives them a little bit more pause. Yeah. And they're willing to, I think, break that confirmation bias a little bit more. And so that's why I'm just, I'm such a big fan of making science work for people, you know, communicating science in a way that reaches people. And, you know, all these things work together that, again, if we can make our one-on-ones and we can make our regular meetings, 25% better. The gains are tremendous. That's huge. All right. Okay. We've gone through a lot. What, what did we not, what did we not go through? Is there anything else that we wanted to go into that you want to go into rather? Excuse me. I'd love to tell people, check out my website. Yeah. Where do they go? Where do they go? Sorry, socials, website, all that. Yeah. So I have a strong presence on LinkedIn. Okay. So definitely check me out on LinkedIn. That's my main, that's my main thrust. And then my website is stevenroglberg.com. Okay. Stevenroglberg.com. And I have so many resources there for people. I also have a page that I just created around one-on-ones. I've had two articles I just published in Harbor Business Review that have links there for people to read again about one-on-ones. One of the things we didn't talk about, but maybe we could do this at a future podcast is skip levels, right? Because skip levels are really interesting. But I have, I have that in my book and I have some content on the webpage. I don't know what a skip level is. What's the definition? That's when basically leader meets with the directs of their directs. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, but okay. Got it by the book. Yeah. So you definitely check it out the resources. Feel free to reach out to me. My email's on there. I have no problem with people reaching out and talking to me. And and then obviously please buy the book. Because you know, you write these things. You just want people to buy it. Oh my goodness. And by the way, I don't, I actually am donating all my earnings. Everything goes to American Cancer Society. So buy the book. If you're interested in one-on-ones or buy the book, you want to support the American Cancer Society. I love that. Good. Well, let me know the links you want in the show notes. I'll put them all down there. Okay. So just a couple questions to end this out just to pull it some last bits of wisdom. If I had an incredible career at this stage and you look back, you would tell your 20-year-old self one thing what would it be? My 20-year-old self wouldn't even listen to me. That's fair. It wouldn't really matter. But you know, what I would tell my kids is you know, strive to have a meaningful life. And there's not one particular path to that, but strive for meaningfulness. This world has meaningful problems and you need to be part of that solution. And I'm a huge believer that very difficult problems can be solved with each and every person doing something. So pick a life, pick a career that allows you to do something and to reinforce that meaningfulness. I love that. And last thing at this point in your life, what does success mean to you? Helping as many people as I can. I love that. It's very simple. I'm very clear on that. And that actually happened after my first, I think after I did CBS this morning, and I started getting hit up to just kind of be a general workplace commentator on TV. And I got tempted because it's very addictive. Knowing you're talking to a couple million people is really addictive. No kidding. Yeah, it's fun. Especially if you have a good message, too, and you can help. Exactly. But I really decided that I didn't want to do that. That I want to stay true to what I do. My science, as opposed to just being a generalist. But it ties to just my hope of what success looks for me now is just doing meaningful work, helping as much as I can, especially shedding light on problems at work that are just draining and hurting people.