Speaker 1: So, how many people out here are someone's boss? Okay. How many of you have a boss? Okay. So, this could be the right audience to talk about the future of your workplace. Now, what's interesting is when you look at the, when we talk about the future, a lot of people like to get nervous, but the fact is that the future has kind of left some breadcrumbs for us in all this data that we collect today. And so, I like to think of myself almost as a time traveler. At Workplace Dynamics, we gather, well, we survey about 2.2 million employees every year at 6,000 companies, and we ask them 22 questions. That's a lot of data, but in a way, it's a window on the future. So, for the next, oh, I don't know, nine minutes and eight seconds, think of me as that person who's seen the future and is coming back to give you a warning, and that warning is this. We are about to get hit by a stormageddon of feedback, and if your company, organization, or you personally are not ready to deal with it, the consequences are not going to be particularly pretty. Now, this is, I call it stormageddon because with storms, you basically, you have two fronts that collide. On one side, we have the feedback giver, right? On the other side, we've got the feedback receiver, right? Now, nature had intended for feedback to benefit the receiver, but when this thing called the science of management, and we actually invented managers, all of a sudden, the attention went to the feedback giver. In fact, it's kind of gotten so out of hand that a lot of companies right now, they teach their managers how to deliver feedback in what they call a quote-unquote crap sandwich. Have you heard this? Right? Where first you put, first you give them the good news, and then you, you know, hey, you're pretty good at coming to work on time, and then you dump on the really bad stuff, and then you sprinkle some encouragement on top of it, right? And to me, that's like the definition of cynicism, right? So think about what's going on about that. Now, the other problem with this, I guess, is that this type of approach to feedback is way too slow for our modern business world. So by the time the boss, who's on thick ice, tells the employee on thin ice that the ice underneath him is cracking, it's going to be the boss who's all wet. That wasn't very funny. All right. So one of the things that... That's okay. So one of the things, but, so here's something to think about in terms of this, is that when, that in a sense, when time speeds up, nature wins. And what nature is trying to do here is restore the natural feedback loop. Now, to understand the loop, we have to go back thousands of years, really, to when nature created this feedback loop. So let's pretend for a second that we heard a... Beyond those doors, we started hearing a bear, and it was growling. So that would be our solicit. What would you do? We turn to each other, we start asking, okay, did you hear the same thing I heard? And then we probably listened a little harder, and then we come to the point where we assess the inputs. So we're in the Jepson Center. How likely is it that there's a bear roaming around in the halls making that noise? Then we would have to integrate that feedback into our behavior, and the problem there is that most of us may say, well, that's just not reasonable. But me, I'd run like heck, and I'll tell you why. Our predecessors who didn't listen to the loop got eaten by the bear, and they were not able to pass their genetic code down to us. Our ancestors who ran passed down their predilections to us and have embedded this feedback loop into us as we are. I'll use this speech maybe as a better example. I asked 24 people to give me their feedback on various versions of this talk, and it was all very helpful, but as it turns out, in the end, the quality of their feedback really has nothing to do with how good this speech will be. It's all about how I choose to apply it, which is as it should be, because it's my responsibility to provide this speech and make it somewhat interesting and informative for you guys. If I screw it up, they're not going to be here to take the feedback anyway. So the receiver actually has all the power, but unfortunately, that's not how we tend to look at things at work. So what nature intended was for giving feedback to be really easy. The magic in life comes from learning how to solicit, receive, and integrate feedback into our lives. Now you'd think this would be easy for us because we swim in feedback from the time we're born. I'm losing my headset here, this is kind of distracting. My ears, I thought, were plenty big, I'm Dutch, you'd think, but ... All right, so we're swimming in feedback. We get it from friends, we get it from family, we get it from just about everyone. In fact, we're not satisfied with this kind of feedback, so what we end up doing is we get it now from our devices. We carry feedback devices on our body, on our phones, on our wrists. The problem with this is now is that feedback can be something as simple as my wife telling me not to drink milk right from the carton out of the refrigerator, or it can be as complex as my watch telling me how many calories I need to burn today to make up for the Ben and Jerry's ice cream I had last night when I was nervous about the talk. So the point is that we're hardwired to recognize that feedback makes us better at just about everything except for when we go to work. When we go to work, feedback just makes us feel bad and perform worse. Now it could be all the crap sandwiches we've been served over the years, but as a recovering boss myself, the thought occurs to me that if I don't tell people that they're doing a good job, how are they going to know? Right? That's my job. I'm supposed to tell them whether or not they're doing a good job. The neuroscientist in me knows that this is kind of baloney, that our brains are wired to overvalue good feedback, and when we hear bad feedback, we go basically into this fight, flight, or freeze mode. So the challenge I have is how do I find balance between my inner boss, or recovering boss, and my inner scientist? And the first thing I found is that feedback has to be a closed loop. If it's not closed, it doesn't work. But as managers, we've become addicted to linear thinking, right? So what we do when we see something that's in a loop, we try to take it all to pieces apart and we try to put it into some kind of organizational chart. We've got to put all these things into a little box because we're not allowed to have loops. And the result is it looks a little bit like this mess behind me. And listen, don't try to read this. It's kind of like trying to understand a Cheech and Chong joke when you're sober. Because to a certain extent, the junkies who run our companies are addicted to this process. So what we do is we try to hide our addiction by inventing languages and kind of coming up with this fuzzy math. So for example, bossiness, which we don't really consider to be a great attribute in our personal lives, becomes decisiveness at work. And then we go around and we assign numbers kind of randomly to people. Let me tell you, I've looked at millions and millions of surveys and I've not found one employee yet who tells me that their goal in life is to get from a 3.5 to a 3.75 on their company's performance evaluation scale. The other thing I noticed is that when you strip feedback out of this loop, out of this circle form, what happens is it loses its core elements, which are timeliness, emotion, and context. Without those, if there was a bear out there, we'd all be eaten. Which reminds me that bear provides, it lights up the same region, it's the defensive region of your brain that your boss does. And so it doesn't matter what you think of bears or bosses. What happens is we all go into this defensive mode. And with the storm that's about to hit us, we really can't afford to be a bunch of defensive people in our workplace. Now you say, what's this storm? I feel like the weather guy. Well, you know, it could be bad, it could be good, but I call it the millennial stormageddon. So what's happening here is that millennials are going to change the way we deal with feedback at work. Because for them, feedback has been currency. They get immediate feedback online. Their feedback is, they get social status, and in some cases money, for their feedback. And so for them, the combination of collaboration and feedback is currency. And they've become very good at getting it and receiving it, which is really aggravating to boomers. Boomers find this extremely irritating because they grew up in places where, darn it, I don't need feedback, nobody stroked my ego like that. And they've created workplaces that most of us now don't really want to work in. Now you would say, they're in charge, boomers are in charge, that's going to change real soon. But the boomers really don't believe in this system. Turns out that the higher you are up in an organization, two things are true. One is, you're more likely to be a boomer, and the second thing is, you probably have not had a performance evaluation in the last two years. So if these things are so important, then why aren't managers begging for them? You would think managers would be saying, I need my performance evaluation. I don't think I've actually ever heard that come out of anyone's mouth. And why? It's because 95% of managers say that their performance evaluation systems are unfair, and 60% of the folks say they're not really very good at delivering them anyway. So unfortunately, I can look into the future, but there's this whole rule about spoilers, which I'm not allowed to tell you who's going to fail and who's going to succeed after this storm is done. But I can tell you there are companies out there who already are starting to experiment with things. There are companies like Cargill and Medtronic and Facebook that have gotten rid of their traditional performance evaluation systems and are experimenting with different ways to handle feedback. There are smaller companies like this company called RevZilla and Greater Media and Goddard Schools that are experimenting with real-time feedback, and then there are companies like mine that are trying to figure out how do we harness all this storm's energy to help people make a better place to work. Now I'd encourage you to look at all these, but I guess I would like to end with a story about my current feedback hero. The gentleman who drew this picture is the CEO of a large traditional tech company, and I asked him to draw me a picture of what it was that kept him up at night, and what he basically said is he kept having nightmares of drowning in his company's process and bureaucracy. Now this company was about a $600 million-a-year company, so you think, wow, that's plenty of money. But he had three new competitors, and they were growing, and he was pretty much stagnant. So he could have done a lot of things. He could have gone out and hired a process consultant. He could have gone to his managers. He could have come down and handed down some edicts. Instead what he did is he went to the people in his company who were closest to the customer, and he asked them a really simple question. He said, when you think about working, when you think about the future of this company and your future in it, how does that make you feel? Mad, sad, glad, or scared? And the eloquence of these answers led him to a very simple conclusion, which is what this whole natural feedback is all about, which is people drive business, and emotions drive people. And when he realized this, all of a sudden, instead of seeing his people as folks who just simply filled roles in the company, he started treating them as individuals who could learn, who were adult, and who, with the right information at the right time from the right people, could make good decisions both for themselves and the company, and could take responsibility for their own behavior. And this was a revelation to him and to others that worked with him. The second thing he did is he took responsibility for his own behavior. So instead of using his weekly staff meetings to give people motivational speeches, what he did is he started using it to ask questions and simply listen. And instead of doing management by walking around and bugging the heck out of people and giving them advice how they could do their job better, he went around and said, okay, how can I do my job better? And what should we as a company be doing better? The end result of this was that he let the floodgates of his feedback in his company finally reach the people who he needed to reach. So they were able then to come up with some innovations, some better customer service. They hit a billion dollars in revenue. They lost two competitors who went bankrupt during this time. And he did that, actually, unfortunately, for those of you who are managers, by getting rid of an entire level of management throughout the company, because it turns out all they were doing was making sure other managers were doing their job. So if your company's feedback system doesn't look like this, then you have some decisions to make, because the storm's going to hit. The millennials are here. We can't do anything about them. We can't make them... We definitely can't make them into boomers. We can't make them into boomers. We can't go backwards. We can only go forwards. So if your company is still basically doing annual performance reviews, then you are probably going to be only writing about your company's extinction pretty soon. And if you're an employee and the best your company can do for you is give you an annual review, it's time to start looking for another job. Because what the future's message to you is that feedback is where magic lies. Whether you're running away from bears or creating the next project, the next device, the next idea that will change the world. So let your feedback free, and I await yours. Thank you. Thank you.