Lessons - Why Your Team Doesn't Give a Damn | Seth Godin - 20x Bestselling Author

In this lessons episode, explore why outdated leadership models limit creativity and how modern organizations unlock human potential. Discover how purpose-driven cultures outperform rigid hierarchies, understand why treating employees as people, rather than resources, drives innovation, and uncover how meaningful work leads to stronger teams and better results. You mentioned in the book that this is a catch-22 and everyone's hesitating to go first in this conversation, and I would, so we're trying to solve for this by getting a conversation going, but I would also argue that many people don't think they're mistreating their employees. Many people are stuck in a legacy mindset and they may not even be aware that this is not the way that you should be leading. So what does good look like? What does an ideal organization look like so that we can sort of frame it? Why is the, it sounds silly to say this, but why is the the assembly line mode of leading an organization not ideal? Okay, so there are very few villains here. Most people who are working hard, whether they are managers, bosses, or employees, are not seeking to do the wrong thing. I will leave several billionaires out of that discussion, but in general, they're just doing their job, but their job was invented 110 years ago. That industrialism is a very specific way of being in the world that was inconceivable before the 1800s, and return on machines, return on time, figuring out how to use a stopwatch, measuring everything. Well, it made us all rich. It gets you a certain kind of productivity, but it's running out of steam. It's running out of steam because now every car is really high quality, and now every car is made in pretty much the most efficient possible way. It's being replaced by a creation of value that works a different way. So the project I did before this one, I was a volunteer for over a year, coordinating the work full-time of more than 300 people in 40 countries to build the Carbon Almanac. Every one of us was a volunteer. We produced a book that's been translated into Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Czech, and many other languages that want a worldwide award for design. It's 97,000 words. It's footnoted. When it came out, there wasn't one significant error in the whole thing. How did 300 people produce in less than five months a book like this with nobody in charge and nobody being told what to do? Well, that kind of leap is possible when you get good people who are enrolled in a journey and get out of their way when you have standards instead of obedience. So yeah, we still need managers. I want the people at the pacemaker factory and the people who are doing surgery to be extremely structured in their management style. But if our job is to invent the future, we have to get beyond being mediocre because GPT is better at being mediocre than we are. Now, when you mention that example, I think of Wikipedia as an example of that too. I think of Wikipedia and all the contributors and them checking themselves and then the output is quite good. But there's a vision associated with Wikipedia. There's a higher calling for the people that contribute and spend their free time, very much similar to what you just did. So I want to I want to understand your thoughts. An organization has to have that higher calling and that vision that permeates the people that work there. But simultaneously, you're running up against the issue of people being very transient in their careers and moving. So the organization wants to have a vision, wants to be able to buy into it, but that person is only spending two years at that organization. How do you solve for that? Well, what's the vision of the Hillside Elementary School? That one of the most common jobs in the United States is schoolteacher. Lenny Levine, who was the kindergarten teacher at Hillside until he passed away, every year started over from scratch. And the mission for a lot of teachers is follow the curriculum, earn tenure, do your job because that's what principals push them to do because that's what boards push principals to do. And Lenny said, let's get real or let's not play. He said, in my kindergarten class, the rules are going to be different and I'm going to change these kids forever. And 25 years later, my kids still remember because you can choose to do that. And the receptionist at the doctor's office isn't a person who's going to be sticking a scope up somebody's nose, but she has a lot to do with whether someone's going to get better or not. And so the question is, how does she manage the office, that's her title, office manager, to create the conditions for possibility, not just for the patients, but for the people who work so that it's not a day's work for a day's pay. It's a human being showing up not as a resource, but as the point because that's what work is for. Once we figured out how to grow in a food and other resources to survive, what exactly is the point of going to work? I'm just thinking about another point that you brought up was balancing the needs of the business versus the needs of the individual. So let's talk, because I think, if we look back at your body of work, a lot of the work that you've done on marketing is to shift the focus from focusing on the organization to focusing on the customer. And then a point that you bring up in this book is, as an organization, you're focusing on the not the needs of the organization, any more the needs of the employee. And you sort of mentioned this a few times. So I think this all comes down to how do we, how do we champion the needs of the individual or the employee? And again, look at them like not just a piece of a company, but an actual human being. So what are the needs of the individual? Once they have their pay and they have their food and they have their shelter of satisfied Maslow's hierarchy of needs, what is a person need in an organization? Well, I need to highlight one thing, which is I am not saying companies need to give some sort of economic value to their employees because it's the right thing to do. What I am saying is creating the conditions for growth and significance actually helps the company achieve what it sought to accomplish in the first book. So if we can use Google as an example and then I'll try to be more specific in your question. Early on when I was at Yahoo, Google was doing some really interesting things. It was a pretty small company and then they were going to have to shut down. And the reason they were going to have to shut down is not because they weren't making any money. They had plenty of money in the bank. It's because the amount of data they were trying to store was so large that it was crashing their search engine. It was taking forever to get results. And the laws of physics were involved here. You can't just say let's everybody work harder because the fact is the speed of light is the speed of light. And two engineers put in emotional labor and effort and figured out that if they just stored certain kinds of data on the outside of the hard drive instead of on the inside ring of the hard drive, it spins faster on the outside and they could get the data fast enough to keep Google from going out of business. Now that sort of change doesn't happen because some manager is offering people a bonus. Nor does it happen because you're yelling at them. It happens because the human being is enrolled in the journey of trying to make a change happen. And what human beings want, and I surveyed 10,000 people in 90 countries, they want to be treated with respect. They want to exceed their own expectations for what they thought was possible. And they want to work with people that they like in respect. They want those three things way more than they want a promotion or title or salary. They don't want to travel or get paid a lot compared to being able to shop as a human to do work that matters with people who care. And I don't care if you run a sandwich shop, that's still going to pay off for you. One example that you brought up, I thought was interesting to that point. And I think this is the right context, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Harry Brighthouse example where it's basically based on the movie, the paper chase, and the professor's cold calling on students. But everybody wants to be in this class. And it's interesting because cold calling on students, it's uncomfortable. It's not something that you think people would want to subject themselves to. But this is the most wanted class that everybody wants to be in. So it shows that people when given the opportunity to excel and be in a group of peers that are also excelling, they're going to take that opportunity. Well, it's important to note that not everybody wants to be in the class. In fact, almost nobody wants to be in the class, but that's enough that if you've been indoctrinated from first grade to ask, will this be on the test to do the minimum amount of work and to get by? Why would you want to be in a class where you get called on? The goal is to take an easy class. But if you are thinking smart about this, college is costing you 50, 60, 70, 80, thousand dollars a year that you're going to be in debt for for decades or more. Why wouldn't you want to go to a classroom where everybody else wants to be there too? And that's the magic of the Brighthouse approach, which is some people want to be in a room with people who want to be in the group. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.