Bestselling author Robert Glazer joins us to explore what sets thriving teams apart from dysfunctional ones; and how project leaders can build a culture of energy, engagement, and sustainable success. He shares his capacity-building framework: spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional, and he explains how strengthening these four dimensions drives performance and boosts team productivity.
Chapters
00:00 … Intro
02:06 … Friday Forward
04:53 … Dr. Oz Show
06:30 … A Thriving Workplace Culture
08:16 … Doing the Right Things
09:07 … Capacity Building
10:15 … Four Dimensions of Capacity Building
11:28 … Keeping the Balance
13:21 … Emotional Resilience
14:59 … The Locus of Control
15:41 … Setting Healthy Boundaries
17:58 … Avoiding Burnout
19:40 … Spiritual Capacity
21:11 … Deep Self-Awareness
23:53 … Intellectual Capacity
25:42 … Physical Capacity
28:32 … Leaders Who Model Good Routines
29:33 … Connecting with a Remote Team
30:25 … Withhold or Sugarcoat the Truth
33:01 … Find Out More
34:00 … Closing
Intro
ROBERT GLAZER: …early in your career, it’s a lot about saying yes to everything. Later on, I think it’s about what do you say no to, and what do you create space for? Because everything is a tradeoff, and not everything matters equally. So, I think the best leaders, the best project managers figure out the things that matter more, you know, and make sure they get their priority and their time.
WENDY GROUNDS: Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. We are so thrilled to have you with us. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to us on Velociteach.com, on social media, or your favorite podcast app. Your feedback helps us keep inspiring and supporting project managers just like you.
We like to bring you conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts who are shaping the future of project management and leadership. And today we’re joined by Robert Glazer. He’s a true authority in leadership, entrepreneurship, and performance.
We are so honored that Robert has agreed to talk to us today. He is the founder and chairman of Acceleration Partners, which is a globally recognized partnership marketing firm. Under his leadership, Acceleration Partners has earned multiple awards; and Robert himself has been recognized twice as a top CEO by Glassdoor.
Beyond his business success, Robert is a bestselling author of seven books, including “Elevate,” “Friday Forward,” “Elevate Your Team,” and “How to Thrive in the Virtual Workplace.” His insights reach a global audience through his Friday Forward newsletter and the Elevate podcast. And I highly recommend it if you’re looking for something else to listen to. And he’s going to tell us a little bit about his Friday Forward newsletter, which we highly recommend, as well.
BILL YATES: Robert has interfaced with so many teams. And as he shares with us, some of those leaders were outstanding and out of healthy teams, and others not so much. So, we get to learn from his lessons and hear his advice based on the years and years of experience that he’s had.
WENDY GROUNDS: Hi, Robert. Welcome to Manage This. Thank you so much for joining us today.
ROBERT GLAZER: Thanks for having me.
Friday Forward
WENDY GROUNDS: I’ve been looking at your bio and some of the information you sent to us. And there’s something I saw that you talk about is your Friday Forward emails. I would love to share that with our audience. Could you tell us a little bit about how that started and the impact that’s had?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah, the impact is far more than I could have ever imagined. Back when my company was 30 or 40 people, I had gone to a pretty intensive leadership development retreat with Entrepreneurs’ Organization. And one of the things that we did while we were there was we kind of focused on a healthy morning routine of kind of 10 minutes of quiet thinking, 10 minutes of reading, 10 minutes of writing. And while I really liked that routine – and the reading was, hey, read something positive or inspirational. And, you know, they gave us kind of like “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books and stuff that was just a little not my speed.
And so, when I got home, I continued that routine. I was like, well, what if I can combine this a little bit? I’ve been collecting some thoughts and quotes and otherwise, and I have a remote team of 30 or 40 people. Maybe I’ll just start sending this thing on Friday about an idea or a concept. And I did that for four or five weeks. I didn’t know if anyone was reading them, but I liked sending them. And it was sort of becoming a habit for me. And then I did start to get notes about how people were reading them and sharing them with spouses or siblings or outside the company.
I was at another event with a few CEOs. I told them I was doing this. I was like, look, I’ll send it all to you. And I was thinking, you know, they would maybe copy it, or we call it R&D, Rip-off and Duplicate. One person – one person did, and until this day is on his own. The others are like, this is great. We’ll just send this to our team on Fridays. And so I was like, huh. People outside the company seem to be interested in this. And it was all like BCC, and people were adding me, and I didn’t have the past one.
So, one weekend I bought, like, a $25 WordPress site. I made a directory of the past ones. And I put it on a newsletter system that made it look like a regular email. But that way people could join and sign up.
And I threw 300 friends and family on the list, and I waited for the hate mail, like, the next week. But it didn’t come. People started sharing it. Someone wrote an article a couple months later, “This is the only newsletter I read.” Two thousand people signed up. And two years later I woke up, and there’s 100,000 people in 70 countries opening the email.
BILL YATES: That’s awesome.
ROBERT GLAZER: I renamed it. I tried, like, 10 names. But I renamed it Friday Forward because it was being forwarded. So, yeah, it’s been, like, seven or eight years. I don’t know, I think I’ve been saying seven years for a year, so maybe it’s seven or eight years at this point. I can go by the number. We’re getting close to number 500. So…
BILL YATES: Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s about how long we’ve been doing the podcast.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, yeah.
BILL YATES: Eight years? Nine years?
WENDY GROUNDS: Nine years.
BILL YATES: Nine years, yeah, yeah, yeah.
WENDY GROUNDS: Nine years we’ve been on the podcast.
ROBERT GLAZER: You’ve made it through the great quit. I’ve seen so many people started podcasts, and probably not for the right reasons, and then just quit them. So, it’s interesting.
Dr. Oz Show
BILL YATES: Now I’ve got to, before I jump into details with you, I want to ask this question. When I was looking at some of your websites and some of the postings, there was an image of you. I think you were on the Dr. Oz show.
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
BILL YATES: And I’m a big fan of the Shark Tank. And one of the sharks, I think Barbara, was – I don’t know if she was a guest of Dr. Oz.
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
BILL YATES: I don’t know if she heard you were going to be on there, so she came on just to meet you. But you’ve got to tell me, well, give me the – all I saw was a picture.
ROBERT GLAZER: That would be a false distortion of the truth. I thought I had removed that picture since he’s become a lot more controversial these days.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
ROBERT GLAZER: So, my business, the core business Acceleration Partners was in this field of affiliate marketing. And there was basically, like, there were a bunch of folks who were out there kind of selling crappy products, saying they were endorsed by Dr. Oz and getting commissions on them. And he kind of couldn’t shut it down.
And so, he was trying to understand the affiliate industry. Someone gave him my number. A lawyer called me. And they had me come on the show, and Barbara was on, kind of just talk about this sort of web of players and how it worked and who’s who. And he was just really upset that he didn’t have anything to do with products or product endorsement.
BILL YATES: He didn’t control it.
ROBERT GLAZER: But then people go out there and say “Endorsed by Dr. Oz,” and then they’re making money off that. And so, I was there as sort of an expert witness, and they were doing an exposé. They followed the whole train and found these, like, shady guys in a – and, you know, approached them in a parking lot and were like, why are you doing this? But I wasn’t part of that. I was just part of the, here’s the web of who’s who, yeah.
A Thriving Workplace Culture
BILL YATES: I just had to ask about that. Well, let’s turn to our project teams and our project leaders because every project leader that I have come in contact with, they want team members who are excited about working on that team, being a part of that team, and producing whatever the result of that project’s going to be. What are the key ingredients to create like a thriving workplace culture that you’ve seen that parlay so well over to project teams?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah. I think the first is, look, we’re facing a real sea change in work itself and the notion of a team versus a contractor versus a project or a contributor. And I think it’s up for each team member to sort of define that culture and what the team and what their expectations are, hold it. Like, you know, I wrote a book on remote work, how to make virtual teams work. And I’ve had people come to me and say something like, let me ask you a question. Have this person on my team. They’re really good at their job. Like, they do their part, but they don’t want to come to any of the team stuff. They don’t want to do any of the social stuff. They kind of don’t want to be integrated otherwise. And, like, is that okay?
And my answer is like, that’s not really a yes or no question. That’s like, what kind of culture do you want? Like do you want to say, no, that’s not okay? We’re about team and communication otherwise, or we’re kind of like a free agent shop. And as long as you get the project or the plan done, you can do whatever you want, but you need to kind of set that and enforce it.
So, the definition for me of a culture is the core values of the organization or the team, whether they’re real, first of all, and then how they’re kind of enforced and lived. And I think the problem, particularly with project management is that it’s very task-oriented. And what do you do with someone who’s really good at that part, but doesn’t meet any of the other pieces?
BILL YATES: Yeah, that’s good.
Doing the Right Things
WENDY GROUNDS: You also emphasize that success isn’t necessarily about doing more, but doing the right things. Can you elaborate on that?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah. We cannot escape the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, which says that, you know, go look in your closet. You wear 20% of your clothes 80% of your time; 20% of your clients are 80% of your revenue; 20% of those clients are probably 80% of your profit. You can’t get around that rule. So, it’s not about the volume of what we do. It’s not about all the things on your task list. It’s figuring out those things that move the needle.
And early in your career, it’s a lot about saying yes to everything. Later on, I think it’s about what do you say no to, and what do you create space for? Because everything is a tradeoff, and not everything matters equally. So, I think the best leaders, the best project managers figure out the things that matter more, you know, and make sure they get their priority and their time.
Capacity Building
BILL YATES: The heart of what we want to talk about with you is this concept of capacity building. I think back to the project teams that I’ve led. I mean, this really gets at the heart of it; right? It’s like I want, for me personally, whether I’m the leader or just a team member and contributor, and for all the other members on the team, I want them to be as productive, as efficient as possible. I want them to be happy in what they’re doing. I want us to be a well-performing team.
So, this idea of capacity building is really intriguing from a project leader and a team leader standpoint. And we’re going to go into this deeper, but can you kind of give us just a quick flyover of the four…
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
BILL YATES: …types of capacity? And then we’ll dig in deeper to each one of those.
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah, so capacity building is to me the framework of how you get better. And what’s really cool about it is that it’s a holistic concept of, particularly with people working from home, there’s not a work self and a personal self and a family self. Like, we have the same strength and weaknesses across it. And so, if we can focus on helping people get better overall, there’s a huge work benefit, and there’s a benefit outside of the work.
Four Dimensions of Capacity Building
So, these four dimensions of capacity-building are very interconnected. They go in a specific order.
Spiritual capacity is about helping people understand who they are, what they want most, and the standards they want to live by. Intellectual is how you improve your ability to learn, plan, think, and execute with discipline. Physical capacity is a health, wellbeing, and physical performance. And Emotional is how you react to the things that you don’t control, challenging situations, the mindset, the quality of your relationships.
And again, imagine them as like four quadrants of the ball. I think they kind of all grow, and the ball gets bigger, and then there’s mass. Or if one of those is totally shrinking, and the others are growing, that ball is going to kind of fly all over the place. And they go in that order particularly because I think spiritual is the foundation.
You’ve got to understand who you are, what you value, what your strengths are. You’ve got to want to develop in line with your values. And that drives you to the things you want to get better at and learn. And that makes you want to focus on your physical health. And that makes you focus on the relationships that support that and don’t support that. If you don’t figure out the foundation right, you can do all the other things really well. What you end up doing is summiting a mountain that you don’t want to be on.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT GLAZER: That’s the problem.
Keeping the Balance
BILL YATES: This resonates with me so much. And obviously this is not a new concept. But I think we’ve all experienced this in our life when one piece of that gets out of balance, and other things start to suffer. It’s so funny. So, Robert, I went to a small university in South Carolina, and I had a health and physical education professor from Hungary. He was a Greco-Roman wrestler in the Olympics in Hungary. And he was quite the personality. I could not wait to take this mandatory PE class with Dr. Sandor Molnar.
ROBERT GLAZER: I mean, that’s much cooler than most of the normal PE people you hear about, yeah.
BILL YATES: Oh yeah, it was huge. He was just this little plug of life. He was amazing. But he was so funny. You know, English was not his first language. And he was so inspiring. And he had this little model that somebody had made for him that was basically a triangle. And he described, he had the emotional, the physical, and the spiritual that he talked about with that. And it was just so fun to have him explain how, you know, if one of these gets out of balance, then life’s no good.
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah, they’re used a lot in energy. I’ve seen them used a lot kind of in energy. I think this, you know, difference in terms of how do you build and the capability of people. When you think about what organizations, look, we’re past the ZIRP zero interest rate decade. I’m like, raise a lot of money, grow fast, burn through it. Now we’re on the efficiency and AI.
And to me that playbook’s not going to work anymore. And so, the playbook that’s going to work is like, look, let’s grow by growing the people, and grow with them. My line is always, if NASA said they’re going to put someone on Mars, right. And they fly a ship. It lands on Mars. We’re live video feeding this. They open the thing, and all the astronauts are dead; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah.
ROBERT GLAZER: You’re not going to have everyone like, oh, amazing. The vehicle made it to Mars. It’s kind of how companies are like, look, we got to our goal, and like we killed all of our employees in the process.
Emotional Resilience
BILL YATES: That’s so true. So, let’s talk about emotional resilience. What are some practical ways that leaders can build emotional resilience and then – I guess within themselves? And then how can they influence their team and help the team build that?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah. So, look. In an organizational context, high emotional capacity manifests itself with deep levels of trust, open lines of communication, and sort of organizational resilience. I think the biggest thing is building psychological safety, right, which is sort of trust at scale. So, in the organization, you know, we need to be vulnerable so that people understand us more, I mean, understand where we’re coming from. And we need the feedback to know what our blind spots are, what we don’t do well otherwise.
I think great leaders in emotional capacity also figure out a way to get people to focus on what they control, not what they don’t control. So, think of, like – I always pick on sales teams. But, like, they’re sales teams. They’re like, they just never lost a deal that was their fault; right? It was the timing. It was the quarter.
BILL YATES: Yes.
ROBERT GLAZER: Like, to me a great sales leader would be like, why did we lose this deal? And you can only focus on what we could have done better; right? There’s no external things. Like think about COVID. So COVID happened. Every restaurant in the world is closed. And there are sort of two approaches. They’re like, hey, we’re going to wait until, like, it comes back to how it is, and we’re going to do it because we do how we do it.
And then there’s like, we’ve got people to feed. We’re going to sign up for all four delivery services. We’re going to figure out how to sell alcohol, wholesale food. We’re going to set up an outdoor thing across the street. We’re not focusing on this thing that we don’t control, which is COVID. We’re doing all of the things that we can do. That’s to me what emotional capacity looks like in the context of a team.
The Locus of Control
BILL YATES: That’s such a good example, too. Just, I mean, resilience, that key word that you said, that just jumps out at me when I think about the incredible thinking outside the box at some companies, like restaurant industry, that they did during COVID to think, okay, these are things we can’t control. What can we control, and go from there? That’s good.
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah, it is the locus of control. Look, here’s a perfect example in a personal life. You know, I won’t name names, but there’s some people I know, like they have an excessive focus on the weather. I can’t think of a more unhealthy thing than looking at the weather, five and 10, you can’t control the weather. So, me, like, if it’s raining, I’m going to wear a raincoat. That’s just sort of my – that’s my approach to that day, yeah.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Setting Healthy Boundaries
WENDY GROUNDS: It’s important also in safeguarding your emotional capacity to think about boundaries and setting healthy boundaries. What advice do you have on setting healthy boundaries; but also making sure that, you know, it doesn’t impact your professional performance?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah, great point. There’s this concept called energy vampires that I talk about. Like people that you’re around, and they drain your energy, and you feel worse. And you actually don’t need to have like a big breakup with these people. You just need to stop giving them your energy, stop making plans.
You know, everyone’s got this couple that they hang out with every year, and they have dinner and, like, we should do this again. You don’t mean it, like, like don’t say it or don’t pick a date, but we’ll call you. Like, you know, it’s the old college friend, and you can’t stand their partner, and you just don’t want to do it.
So, it is so easy to just stop feeding these relationships, these energy vampires. You don’t have to have a breakup. You don’t have to have a discussion. Just stop making plans, stop giving it your energy, and you will be so much better off for it.
BILL YATES: That’s so good. And I think of some clients that I’ve had in the past. Not at Velociteach. This is prior. But I think of, you know, some of the long projects that I worked on with a team. And, you know, some of the individuals on the client side, they were those energy vampires. They would just…
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
BILL YATES: …suck the lifeblood out of you.
ROBERT GLAZER: Well, and there’s that 20/80 rule; right?
BILL YATES: Exactly.
ROBERT GLAZER: They created all of your problems, you know, 20% of the clients.
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, for some of the leaders that are listening to this, they need to understand you’re human. We’re all human. You don’t have to do that all the time. You don’t have to take the brunt of that. And you need to let the team know and then trust them that they’re going to step in for you. So, if I see my capacity, I’m about to reach that point where I’ll say something that I regret to this energy vampire client.
So, I need Fred to jump in. I need Susan to jump in and have that next conversation or take that next meeting with the client because I’m kind of reaching my dead battery capacity level and, you know, just having those conversations with the team and not feeling like I’ve got to be the hero. I need to go deal with this myself every time.
ROBERT GLAZER: No, I think that’s really good advice. You realize I’m at my limit. I’m frustrated. I’m going to do something else or have my AI avatar, you know, listen to this.
BILL YATES: Yes.
ROBERT GLAZER: And, you know, this is – the know thyself is very important.
Avoiding Burnout
BILL YATES: So, talk a bit about burnout. What are some warning signs that team leaders should be looking for both in themselves and their team members? And then what action can we take to keep our team healthy and our team members healthy and to avoid burnout?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah, I think people burn out when they are not engaged; right? They’re not enjoying their work. They’re not working to their strengths. Or they just don’t see the vision or see why they’re doing it. You know, what’s super interesting, and I’m always jealous of, you know, Musk in this context, but I would say this line years ago, so, whatever.
Or people at Boeing, because they have this mission vision, like trying to put a plane in the sky or an astronaut on the – like, it will make people, right or wrong, walk through hell and high water to do that. And possibly hang around with some really bad cultural stuff because that’s so inspiring to them; right? We either need to give people that vision and that thing to believe in, or they’ve got to kind of be in their zone or genius.
And I believe a lot about sort of core value work. And I think that you don’t mind working really hard, you know, when you’re doing something that’s aligned to your values, and you’re in the zone or otherwise. Like it’s the stuff where you’re like, I just don’t want to be doing this. I’m not good at it. This is where it becomes much more of the drain.
So, I think understanding what people value, what they’re good at, where their strengths are, having them work on those things. When you give people that project, and they’re in their zone of genius, they’ll play around with it all night; right? That spreadsheet that you’ll do for six hours. But then there’s another thing that they just, it just feels like a buzz saw that they’re, you know, making themselves go into.
BILL YATES: Yeah, play to your strengths.
Spiritual Capacity
WENDY GROUNDS: Can you talk a little bit more about the spiritual side? How can a team leader, if they’re approaching a group of people that have very diverse backgrounds, they completely come from different spheres, different life standards, how do you, you know, promote the spiritual aspect of this?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah. So, for me and most people, this is understanding their core values and their strengths. So, what I’ve done differently on teams and in leadership development is help people figure out their personal core values because I think this is how they show up to work. This is how they show up as a leader.
By the way, these core values are usually very tied to childhood, informative events and things that they’re trying to double down on or run away from. And having done this work with so many people, they don’t even realize how it’s showing up as an asset, and how it’s showing up as a liability.
A lot of being in a professional service firm for 20 years, I feel like I’m an online degree away from being a psychologist. The difference between this work and sort of some of what happens in therapy is like, I’m not trying to blame people and go back and adjudicate the past. We’re just trying to say, look, this is true for you. I’ve seen adults fighting over a budget in a company, and I know that this person did not feel heard as a child, and this person grew up in a house with never enough money.
And that is the fundamental root behind this budgeting discussion. But they don’t know it, and the other person doesn’t know it, and they can’t, you know, have the awareness where someone who has to understand, they grew up like, look, like maybe they went into finance because of that, and maybe sometimes they’re overly focused on protection and downside.
Deep Self-Awareness
And so, I think if you really want to be a Level 5 leader to Jim Collins, you need this deep self-awareness, and you need to understand where these things are part of your operating system, and they probably are why you’re amazing at some things, and then there are huge blind spots in other areas.
The example I always give, we’ve had a lot of people over the years who have a core value of trust. And usually, they have a core value of trust because their trust has been violated. I’ve seen about one or two positive examples of trust, and mostly negative. I never asked them what it is. But I’m just like, look, did you have a huge fight? Okay. Yes, you have a core value of trust. Maybe it’s even your why. How does that show up for a leader in the workforce?
Well, when people on their team are five minutes late to a meeting, they miss a deadline, they can’t be found on an afternoon, this triggers very deep things of like, this person cannot be trusted. And they basically, the leader throws them in jail, gets rid of the key, and they have no chance of getting an important project. And they just don’t know it at all. And these leaders are just sorting binary. I can trust this person. I’m not.
So, people on their team feel like I’m in or I’m out and – but they can’t articulate it; right? Obviously upfront that leader can be like, hey, you know, you’re joining my team, Sarah. And just so you know, trust is really important to me. And here are the things that take away trust. And once it’s lost, it’s really hard to get it back from me. So, these are the things that are really important.
Giving them the playbook to work with you and understand you’re not going to change that. And again, you’re probably a really good judge of character, and you probably, you know, really empower people. There’s a pro and a con side to it.
WENDY GROUNDS: I really like that point, being open in the beginning, saying these are my things.
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah. Our leaders that have taken that learning and gone back and done that have just seen great results. Like, again, I am who I am, not going to change. You know, when we’re 40 or 50 years old, we’re not going to change. If we’re 27 maybe, you know, we can change. But I think we’re baked at that point.
And so, to me, your weaknesses are your strengths overused. So that person probably has super deep relationships and all kinds of things. But again, their weakness is that they probably throw people out, you know, mentally before they’ve actually deserved it.
BILL YATES: This is good. And it’s so practical. You know, with projects, we create a team charter, or we create team guidelines. Talking about what’s important to us as a team, as team members, what is important to us? Trust, you know, the examples you gave: showing up on time, speaking appropriately to vendors or outside contractors or our clients. You know, those are things that, if we can kind of set expectations at the beginning of our project with a brand-new team, man, it just sets up future conversations so much easier. And it gets at, okay, what’s important to us? What are our core values? Let’s talk it out.
Intellectual Capacity
Let’s talk about intellectual capacity. That was another capacity that you described. And what I’m thinking about there is, you know, kind of sell me on the benefits of continuing to grow this thing between the ears and staying curious. And then how do we inspire the team to do that? And how do we create space for the team to do that?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, if you’re not growing, you’re shrinking; right? And in organizations, I really don’t think particularly today, it’s so fast, I don’t think anything can stay still for very long. So, in the organizational context, companies and teams with high intellectual capacity, they build cultures of learning, feedback, and strong habits. And they also help employee’s kind of achieve personal and professional goals, and they coach each other to improve.
So, I think, look, you see teams that have book clubs and learning and feedback. And we’re about getting better, and best practices, and speakers come and talk. And David Epstein kind of proved in his book “Range” that it almost, it doesn’t matter what people get better at. Like if they’re off learning Spanish, they’ll find some way to bring that back into your room. We’re either getting better or we’re not.
And so that’s what I think it looks like in companies that really empower that. And you’ve got to have feedback as part of it. We all make mistakes. It should be about, hey, here’s what happened. Here was the bad outcome of it. And let’s avoid that going forward. I have no problems with mistakes. Repeating mistakes drives me absolutely nuts because that’s a failure to – failure to learn.
BILL YATES: I think of some companies that have done this well, that they’ve created communities of practice or, you know, they may call it an area of excellence or whatever. But I’ve spoken to some of those company communities of practice, and other companies will have lunch and learns.
ROBERT GLAZER: Right. Book clubs.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
ROBERT GLAZER: A podcast club is actually cheaper and better than a book club because you can just listen to an hour podcast and discuss it.
BILL YATES: That’s true.
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
Physical Capacity
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about that other capacity, which again, I’m back to Dr. Sandor Molnar. He was obviously very physically fit. So, he was all about…
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
BILL YATES: …physical capacity. Talk about physical capacity from a standpoint of a healthy team. And talk about the benefits of that.
ROBERT GLAZER: When I do a presentation on this, I have a picture of a little scrawny guy and a super muscular guy. I think, how many people are like this at work and home, or if you flip it; right? You’re the same. So, if you’re exhausted, if you’re tired, if you’re cranky, like this is how you kind of show up. So as a baseline, our organization should not be destroying people’s physical capacity, and our leaders.
And ideally, we should be looking for ways to expand it and promoting kind of positive routines, letting people have vacation. People need to kind of recharge. Vacations are a perfect example of how you model as a leader.
Look, there’s two ways to do this; right? “Hey, hi, team. Julie, Sam, I’m going on vacation next week.” I’m the CEO, right? “I’m going on vacation next week with my family. We’re going to be on the Cape. I’ll be online. I’ll be on email. I’ll be on Slack. If you need to reach me by my cell phone, reach out. I’ll make sure to get back to you really quickly.” Okay.
So, what does that signal to the company? It signals that vacations are not vacations, that they’re changes of venue; right? Alternatively, I could say, “Hey, look, I’m out next week with my family. This is a really important time. I’m excited to rest and recharge. If there’s an emergency, reach out to my assistant, and she’ll get to me. Otherwise here are the channels to kind of follow up.”
I even had a CEO who set up an alias that said, “If you need to reach me in emergency, you can email interruptmyvacation@thecompanyname.com.” Those send very different messages, and it’s modeled from the top. When Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo!, she was bragging about her 130-hour work week. She set up a nursery next to her office, but told all the women at Yahoo! that, you know, obviously, like, they should take their maternity leaves, but she wasn’t, you know, taking one. And you know, what you do speaks a lot louder.
We can’t get over that 80/20 rule. So, I think we should just stop celebrating overwork. Marissa Mayer worked at Yahoo! for five years and did nothing but destroy value in the company, working 130-hour work weeks and doing 52 acquisitions. You’d have been better off like slowing down and focusing on a couple things that worked or mattered.
And so confusing this, like, hamster wheel with productivity is kind of a lose-lose. And people should work hard, but then they need their – they need their rest and relaxation. If I ever know that someone’s working to run a marathon or a triathlon, it’s like, yeah. And they want time during – yeah. If you ever have any team who’s training for a triathlon, they’re going to be in peak mental and physical shape, and you are going to notice the difference at work. And if they want to go run 10 miles in the middle of the day, let them do that. Like they’ll be all wired at 10:00 o’clock at night, and then they’ll be doing their work.
Leaders Who Model Good Routines
BILL YATES: Exactly. Do you have some leaders that you’ve seen model this well? There are obviously a lot of bad examples. Anybody that stands out in your mind of they did a good job at this?
ROBERT GLAZER: You’re just seeing culturally, I know Bezos and Gates have talked a lot about like how they get eight hours sleep. If someone gets less than five hours sleep a night, they’re the equivalent of being intoxicated cognitively at your company. So, you don’t encourage people to come to work drunk, but you may be having the same impact otherwise. You just see a little more about people talking about their sleep or their Whoop or their positive health habits or, you know, kind of maybe focusing on how much sleep they got or not.
We are culturally a little bit, it felt like a decade ago it was like celebrating like how little sleep you could get. And then you hear these stories of people just physically falling apart and everything, and their doctors being like, you just need to stop. So, I feel like the lore has changed a little bit. That was also this kind of grow-at-all-costs era that we’re moving out of.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Connecting with a Remote Team
WENDY GROUNDS: I saw that your company is completely remote. How do you make sure that everybody feels connected, that your employees kind of feel connected all over the world?
ROBERT GLAZER: That’s a great, great question. And look, we designed our culture years ago, and our core values around that kind of work. It’s a freedom and a flexibility. It’s an accountability. So that is very designed around that. Everyone kind of feels on the same page. So we use hubs. We hire around hubs. We try to be able to be in touch with our employees. And we have an all-company event. People join our company, and they say, look, I’ve worked in non-remote companies, and I actually feel more connected here.
Everyone’s on the same page. We have the same systems. I’ve heard that comment over and over throughout the year. So, it works for us. It works for our industry. It works how we design the culture. It works for the type of person that we hire. It doesn’t work for everyone.
Withhold or Sugarcoat the Truth
WENDY GROUNDS: Some leaders, they want to keep the morale in their team. And so, they’re going to withhold information sometimes, or they sugarcoat the information if it’s bad news. How can we tell the truth to our teams and not demotivate them when things are uncertain?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah. The framework I’ve always leaned on here during crisis is the Stockdale Paradox from Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great.” And that is that the winning combination is that you need optimistic long-term messaging to your team, but you can’t ignore the brutal realities.
Because one of two things happens when you do this; right? You’re either, you know, leaders take too much of the extreme. Well, everything’s gloom and doom, and the ship’s going down and whatever. And you’re like, well, hell, then I might as well jump off before the next person; right? Or you will lose people forever.
And we saw this during COVID. We were very honest with our employees in the first two weeks of COVID. Like it was bad. We told them what was going on. And some of the younger people who had 10 years they had been in a boom economy and never even seen a recession, they’re like, why are you traumatizing us? Why are you telling us this stuff?
And then their partner got laid off. And like suddenly their roommate got laid off, and their company had never even discussed that anything was going on. And they came back, and they were like, oh, I’m sorry. Now, you know, I get it. So, you either, you know, you tell people it’s all great, and they get blindsided, and they never trust you again; or you tell them it’s all horrible, and there’s no hope.
So, the Stockdale Paradox is like, look, we talk about we’re going to get through this. We’re going to figure it out. But, like, and we’re not going to sugarcoat it. Like our clients are leaving. Like we may have to take some tough decisions. We’ve got to do what’s best for the company. It is really that balance.
And that is, it comes from the study, what got people through being prisoners of war. And when Collins asked the doctor, like who died first, he was like, oh, that was easy. That was the optimist. They were the blind optimist. They thought they were going home in a month. They thought they were going home in two months. And then they were just kind of heartbroken, you know, every time.
BILL YATES: Yeah. Christmas would come, New Year’s would come, and…
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
BILL YATES: It’s interesting, too. It may have been in “Good to Great” that I read about this, too. But I remember, you know, Winston Churchill in World War II in the Office of Statistics. He was so inspiring as a leader; but man, he would cut to it; right. And he would share the real statistics. And that’s a good model for us as team leaders, too.
ROBERT GLAZER: Look, I’ve asked people a lot, and the reality is they want to know the truth. Whether it’s hard, they would rather know the truth. But there needs to be a message. Like I said, there needs to be some message that goes along with that; you know. And there’s got to be a vision and a, look, the sea is going to be rough and whatever, but here’s where we’re going, and here’s how we’re going to get through it.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm. Robert, this is such practical advice for team leaders. This is so good.
ROBERT GLAZER: Great.
Find Out More
WENDY GROUNDS: If our audience wants to find out more or connect with you, where can they go?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah, all of my stuff – podcasts, books, Friday Forward – is all at RobertGlazer.com. From there you can jump on Friday Forward, which is moved over to Substack like the rest of the world. It’s free. And join a couple hundred thousand people around the world.
BILL YATES: Thank you. We are all about healthy teams. Personally, I’ve been on projects before where there’s disagreement. We’re not all aligned properly. Maybe there’s some disengaged members. And I know how hard that is versus the healthy team where people are pulling for each other. It’s a lot like sports; right?
ROBERT GLAZER: Yeah.
BILL YATES: It’s like when you’re on a healthy team, and your results are just so much better. Plus, the journey is so much more fun. So, taking this advice from you and all the experience that you’ve seen, both with healthy and unhealthy, we appreciate you sharing that so that we can be better as leaders, too. Thanks again for your time, Robert. Really appreciate it.
ROBERT GLAZER: Hundred percent. Thank you very much for having me.
Closing
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