Beyond the Bubble: What Are You Missing as a Leader?

Introduction

Nolan: Hello everyone, welcome to The Talent Equation, sponsored by Infopro Learning and hosted, as always, by me, Nolan Hout. Joining me today, we have Dan Rust. Dan spent years inside companies like GE trying to figure out why their best people keep going quiet, and he got tired of watching organizations answer the wrong questions. Not a stranger to the spotlight, Dan has been a thought leader in the corporate leadership and development space for over 30 years, speaking at conferences, hosting his own podcast, Leadership Disrupted, and writing books.

And speaking of books, after a brief, maybe not so brief, 10-year hiatus, Dan is publishing his second book, The Unbearable Lightness of Leading, which comes out December 1st. It’s built on decades of employee perception data across more than 80,000 respondents per year. And the argument is kind of uncomfortable. Positional authority has lost its grip. Most leaders are responding in exactly the wrong way. If that doesn’t hook you into wanting to hear what Dan has to say, I don’t know what will. So, let’s get to it. Dan, welcome to the podcast.

What 25 Years of Employee Data Reveals

Dan: Hey Nolan, great to be here. Good to have another conversation with you on this podcast. Whenever I talk to people about what I think is happening in the workplace today, and I don’t think it’s a pretty picture, I like to start with hard data, because I have plenty of opinions, and I can be a little cynical when it comes to my opinions. So, I think it’s good to start with a grounding of data. I shared with you a summary of about twenty-five years of survey data, and I’ll tell you briefly the story of this.

Nolan: Yep, I just pulled it up here. Sorry, Dan. For those watching this on YouTube, you should see the graph now.

Dan: Sure. And if you’re not watching, if you’re just listening, I suppose I could verbalize each data point for 25 years. But if you look at this overall trend, here’s what we see. I can’t necessarily claim scientific validity for the original survey, because the survey questions have evolved over the years and the survey audience changes every year. This is just one guy’s effort to survey a large enough group of people and then validate it against other surveys from folks like Gallup, Glint, and Gartner, to make sure that directionally I’m in alignment with others who are surveying similar things.

What you see on the screen is that over the last 22 years, employee uncertainty about their careers, about their businesses, about their leaders, has been on a slow but consistent rise. Employee cynicism has been on a slow but consistent rise. You see little peaks and valleys at various times. For me, what really grabs my attention is the employee perception of how engaged their leaders are. That’s the third line there. Particularly over about the last 10 years, there is this perception of less and less engaged leadership. In fact, last year Gallup published a report that said leader engagement had dropped by another 4% year over year.

Then you add to that the perception of ethical leadership. And again, those two are perceptions. I can’t say in fact that leaders are less engaged and less ethical than ever before. What I can say in fact is that they are perceived by employees as being less engaged and less ethical than ever before. So you end up with an environment of employees who are disengaged and doubtful, and leaders who are less engaged than ever and have less natural authority over the people they’re leading. They may still have positional authority, they may still have the job title, but that authority doesn’t bring them what it used to bring. Those are the facts, and I think that’s hard to argue with.

Dan’s Temperature Gauge: Stories From the Workplace

Dan: Now, my personal temperature gauge, so to speak, springs from this. You mentioned that I wrote a book about 10 years ago. That book was Workplace Poker. One of the unintended consequences of writing it was that people started emailing me, text messaging me, LinkedIn messaging me, sending me their own stories. The book itself is full of stories, of challenges in the workplace, and it’s all about how you navigate a workplace where competency just gets you in the game. Doing the best job does not win the game. That’s table stakes. You’ve got to find a way to be highly competent and also navigate the interpersonal dynamics.

So, I started getting lots and lots of these stories. Occasionally people would ask for my perspective on what I would do. Then nine or ten years go by, and this accumulation of stories starts to form another book in my mind, because the stories I’m hearing, literally daily, give me a sense that all is not well in the workplace. As people talk about their leaders, I get the impression that leaders are earning less and less respect, or at least receiving less and less respect, and less positional authority. The workforce has essentially been rewired. They react differently, they think differently, they make decisions differently. That brought me to The Unbearable Lightness of Leading. It’s the culmination of my thinking on that topic.

So as stories come in, some I can share with others and some people just want to keep confidential, I feel like I have my finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the workplace. I admit it might be a cynical pulse, because rarely does someone decide, “Hey, I’m going to send a message to Dan Rust because things are going so well. My life is really good, I have a fantastic leader, things could not be better, I’m going to send you two paragraphs about that.” Mostly there’s a selection process where I’m getting letters from people who are experiencing challenges. I admit that’s a filter. But even with that filter factored in, I just think the workplace is struggling right now.

The Invisible Struggle: Talented Employees Giving 40%

Dan: A lot of the struggle is what I might call invisible. And this is probably the first opinion I’m going to assert. Your most talented employees are showing up. They’re doing the job. They’re doing what you ask them to do. They may not be doing more. They may not be giving their extra. But they can show up, give you 40%, and make it feel like 100%. AI helps that even further, so they can show up, give you a portion of their potential, and you’re fine. They’re not complaining. They may feel dissatisfied, disgruntled, disengaged. They need the paycheck, they want the work, they don’t dislike the work. It just doesn’t fill them up the way it used to. So they give you what they need to give you.

And you end up wondering why. Nothing seems wrong, but things aren’t changing as rapidly as they should. Nothing seems wrong, but initiatives seem to move slow. Nothing seems to accelerate. You have this army of people with you, everything seems fine, but if it’s all fine, why does it feel so heavy and so difficult to get something done?

If you go back to the Gallup survey, what we used to refer to as quiet quitting, quiet cracking, bare minimum Mondays, used to be an employee thing. Now we’re seeing it as both an employee and a leader thing. Leaders are quiet cracking right along with their direct reports. I don’t think it’s a pretty picture.

Who Is to Blame for Weak Leadership?

Nolan: I’m trying to think of a better way to ask this, but the simple way is: who’s to blame?

Dan: There’s this little voice on Dan’s shoulder that says, “Say Trump, say Trump.” And if it were a previous administration, that same voice would be saying, “Say Biden, say Biden.” But the answer under that answer is, I don’t think we’re being led well by anybody right now. From the very tippy top all the way down, I think there are more examples of not great leadership than great leadership. So when you say who’s to blame, fair or not, I’m going to say leaders.

Now, I can give leaders a little bit of grace, because think about the world leaders are addressing today. It’s a world of disruption. Technology is disrupting everything. Remote and hybrid work is disrupting. There’s social discord. You have faster work, more complex work. You have different generations in the workplace, different cultures in the workplace. And you have the end of what I call the linear life.

The End of the Linear Life

Dan: It used to be you go to school, you get your education, you go to work, you get married at a certain age, you buy a house at a certain age, you have children at a certain age, you get your first used car and then your first new car. At least there was this illusion that life progressed in a very linear fashion. If you were in your mid-30s, you knew where you were supposed to be. Mid-40s, mid-50s, same thing. And I think it’s possible that linear progression was always a bit of an illusion.

In fact, there was a book back in the 70s called Passages. This is before your time, because you’re a younger man than I am. The author was Gail Sheehy, and her thesis was that the key to a happy life was to make sure your life progression matched the stage you were supposed to be in at that age. She had research to validate that these stages reflected a happy life. It turns out that when people look back on her research today, it’s not so great. It really wasn’t as valid even then. Most of her research audience was what I would call northeastern, highly educated, blue blood people. New York, Connecticut, Boston, where that was how upper middle-class folks progressed in life at the time. That was her world, and that’s what the book was based on.

My point in sharing that is, if it ever was reality, it is absolutely not reality today. Stuff just happens. Health issues happen, job loss happens, family issues happen. Things happen that throw our life plan completely out of whack.

Let me tell you a quick story about that. I was interviewing someone for the book, and I was very impressed with him. I had reached out to him because his LinkedIn profile showed some background I thought was very interesting. He and I had two conversations. The first was what I’ll call formal, that get-acquainted conversation. A couple of weeks later I had some follow-up questions, and in that second conversation he had obviously thought about our first one and had become a little more comfortable with me. He said, “Can I share some information that you can’t really use in the book?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “My LinkedIn profile is a lie. That profile is for public consumption. That’s how my life is supposed to progress, or how I thought it was supposed to progress.”

He said, “I’m happy with where I am today. But there is a story in between every one of those jobs. There’s job loss, there are health issues, there’s a divorce.” He shared a fair amount of the details with me. He said, “It’s a life I’m embarrassed to tell people about, so I’ve cleaned it up, and that’s who I am for public consumption. Only very few people who know me really well know what my life is really like.” And yet I think his real life is probably closer to the reality of the rest of us than any of us like to admit. But he carries that with him.

Another woman I met runs a local food bank for her community. She’s the director of it. She has a wife and two children, and she lives what I think anyone would view as a very respectable life. She’s contributing to her community. She’s doing all the things you could ask a human being to do. And yet she said to me, “I’m the black sheep of my family because I didn’t follow the progression I was supposed to follow.” She said, “I still kind of carry it with me.”

I share those two stories, and more of the details, in the book, because I think there’s a mismatch between what we think is expected of us, or what we think everyone else is doing, and reality. If you look at social media, whether it’s LinkedIn or anything else, it’s every young man driving a Bugatti and carrying eight percent body fat. Everybody is making a ton of money without necessarily working hard for it. It seems like people are living great lives online. Whereas when I look at the real world around me, it ain’t quite so beautiful.

The Taco John’s Leader Who Matters Deeply

Nolan: If I were to attempt to summarize who’s to blame, what I’m hearing you say is that there are a lot of environmental factors. But I doubt you wrote a book about environmental factors, because those are things outside your control. The book hasn’t come out yet, so I haven’t read it, but what are the things within our control that can help change this narrative?

Dan: That’s a great question, and it’s the reason my first instinct when you ask who’s to blame is to go to leaders, because leaders at least have some levers of power. Let me give you an example of a leader who makes a difference in people’s lives, who holds his authority loosely while mattering deeply to his employees. He’s the owner of a small chain of Mexican restaurants in the upper Midwest. Some of you listening may be familiar with a chain called Taco John’s. Taco John’s is like the poor man’s version of Taco Bell. Or actually, no. Here’s the way I see it: Del Taco is the poor man’s version of Taco Bell, and Taco John’s is the poor man’s version of Del Taco. So, Taco John’s is two levels below.

Nolan: I’ve always seen Taco John’s, and I must admit I just assume it’s Del Taco. When I’m driving through, they must blend together in my mind.

Dan: This guy runs a couple of very small fast food outlets, Taco John’s franchises. His workers are doing exactly what you would expect, putting refried beans onto tortillas and cheese and all the rest. His stores are in an area with very high turnover, as you’d expect in fast food. But he has a very high retention rate and very high loyalty, both among his customers in the community and especially among his employees.

Many of the people who take a minimum or close to minimum wage job are at the very lowest end of the economic spectrum. He has hired people who are just coming out of the justice system, who have been recently incarcerated. He’s hiring people for whom this is maybe their second or third job because they’re in tough economic circumstances, people with lower levels of education. He is not hiring the cream of the crop. And yet he manages to have very high retention and high loyalty.

When you talk to him about his employees, he can tell you the backstory of every one of them. He can tell you why the job matters to them. He can tell you their life schedule. Joe, for example, needs to be off Wednesday evenings for this reason. Sally can’t work Saturdays, but she comes in Sunday afternoons to make up for it, for this reason. He’s connected with them at the interpersonal level, which of course is important, he connects with them as a human being. But he also knows why the work matters to them and their families. At a very specific level, he can talk you through why this job matters to this person and what this person’s goals are. Some of them just want to work another six months to save up some money to move somewhere else. Some of them actually want a career and want to grow within his business. He understands that.

Mostly what I took from him, and I spoke with some of his employees as well, was this level of transparency and authenticity in his approach to leadership. There was no bubble around him. There was no “off to the side, let me tell you how things really are,” or “let me share the downside of working here.” He is what he says he is. This business is what it is. We’re not pretending to be anything other than exactly what we are. At the same time, we’re doing work we feel proud of, we’re doing it in a way we feel proud of, and we’re doing it because it matters to us and we understand why it matters to us.

I thought he was a great example. He’s not in Silicon Valley with a highfalutin job. He’s not a director or VP at Google. He’s working the kind of dirty job where it doesn’t come naturally to make the job matter to people. And yet he is somehow making that job matter to people. So I loved his example.

What Great Leaders Do Differently: They Tell the Truth

Nolan: When you look at that example and others, I’m assuming you’re recognizing some trends in what the great leaders are doing and what the others are not doing. Every leader, according to the data, is operating on the same playing ground. We’ve got the same environment. Some people choose to do one thing about it, some people choose to do the other. Did you notice any trends in the people who have engaged employees and are bucking the trend, and the counterpoint from the people who are below average?

Dan: Let me give you a couple. Let’s start with one that might strike some as controversial. Number one, they tell the truth. The hard truth.

Nolan: Are these good people or the bad people?

Dan: To clarify, the good leaders tell the truth.

Nolan: Okay, that is pretty controversial.

Dan: They tell the truth when the truth is easy, and they tell the truth when the truth is hard. Now, I’m a big boy. I understand there are truths a leader can’t share. A leader can’t share everything. There are also cases to be made when a leader has to strategically lie. I get that. Sometimes you consciously, strategically tell an untruth for a specific purpose. But broadly speaking, great leaders tell the truth consistently.

So, number one, if you report to a leader who more often than not makes you cringe, because what comes out of their mouth is either happy talk, like they’re just cheerleading their way through, or blatant, out and out lies, or lies of ignorance, where the leader is saying words that I know are not true and they may not know they’re not true. Even saying untruths out of ignorance doesn’t help much.

The reason I focus on the truth is that it’s so less than common today. There was a time when, if a president of the United States said something to a journalist that turned out not to be true, it was newsworthy. It would make the news that Jimmy Carter said X, and it was discovered that X was not true. Just the fact of the untruth would make the news.

Nolan: Even the smallest slip-up, not even an overt lie. Say you said Iraq when you meant Iran, and you’d get raked over the coals. People would say that this guy’s not fit to lead, this gal doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she can’t even pinpoint it on a map.

Dan: And now the truth is viewed as something so fungible. Our younger employees see it. They may not say anything to us, but they see it, and it communicates something to them. They recognize when telling the truth is hard and a leader actually does it, steps into that natural tension and says, “This may be hard for you to hear, but here is the truth.” And then they find a way to share the truth so that people will hear it, whatever that hard truth might be. We could probably spend much more time on telling the truth.

The Leader’s Bubble and Why Judgment Gets Distorted

Dan: I also want to give the other half of that coin. Great leaders also see the truth. They see the reality of their world. That’s a harder one, because most of us in leadership positions may not realize there’s a bubble surrounding us. The moment you’re an individual contributor and get promoted into a leadership role, now you have a small team, and maybe these were your peers, and now they’re reporting to you. The moment you have even that small bit of power over them, people start to calibrate their responses to you. They start to be a little careful about what they share with you, the opinions they share, what they do with the information they bring you. As you move up the rungs of the ladder, that bubble goes from a thin veil to getting thicker.

What I see with the very best leaders is that they recognize it, and they recognize you can never get rid of it. You can minimize it, but you must be conscious of it. If you’re a leader in a board meeting with eight people around you, it might be your direct reports, it might be a mix of people, recognize that they’re working you. They’re always working you. I’m not saying that’s bad, it’s just human nature. The person sharing their opinion is doing it for a couple of reasons. One may be the objective reason. The other is that they want their voice to be heard in front of you. There’s always a bit of fronting occurring, and the more you move up the ladder, the more of it there is.

As that bubble gets thicker, your vision of reality gets skewed. Have you ever seen a really senior, intelligent leader who suddenly makes a really boneheaded mistake, or a decision that just doesn’t seem to make sense, and they drive an initiative off the rails, or drive a business off the rails? A lot of times, not always, what has happened is that the leader’s view of reality has gotten so distorted that their judgment has been impaired. They’re operating with a view that doesn’t connect with actual reality, and they make decisions. It’s like Napoleon Bonaparte directing his armies in one direction because of the information he’s been given, but in fact the armies go off a cliff because they’ve been given wrong directions. Great leaders not only tell the truth, they have a strong radar for the truth. They’re trying to minimize that bubble.

You ask yourself, how do you minimize that bubble? The big lesson is probably this: when someone delivers you information that’s uncomfortable, right or wrong, and you recognize it’s not correct, they’ve still stepped forward to deliver what they consider to be bad news. How you treat them, whether that information is accurate or not, and how you react, particularly in front of others, says volumes to your organization about what happens when somebody tells you something you didn’t want to hear or weren’t expecting to hear, or shares an opinion that disagrees with yours.

I ask most senior leaders, when was the last time somebody disagreed with you openly in front of others and actually changed your mind, actually shifted your point of view? How comfortable are people coming to you with bad news or bad information? Most leaders, when you ask initially, will say, “My direct reports have been with me five years, 10 years, 20 years. I hired most of these people. I have really deep, close relationships.” The data tells us otherwise. The data tells us that for most senior leaders, your senior leadership team is as much a source of misinformation as information. It’s just filtered more professionally. And this is not criticism, it’s human nature. Your senior leadership team knows how to soften the blow when it needs to be softened, and how to filter the information when it needs to be filtered. They are as focused on maintaining their senior leadership position as anyone else is on maintaining their job.

There was a leader named Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel years ago, who wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. Andy Grove spoke to this most beautifully. He had a way of speaking about positive paranoia, how you can maintain a sense of doubt about everything and still be positive, still be oriented toward growing your business, still have positive, productive relationships with everybody, and yet never get totally bought into any one person’s thought process or opinion. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, but you can probably find it on eBay. I highly recommend it. It’s a fantastic book.

Leadership Blind Spots: A Personal Reflection

Nolan: This is something I’ve spoken and written about, and I want your take on it. What you’re talking about sounds to me like blind spots. Whether you call it unconscious bias or something else, it’s the idea of “I’m the leader,” like the phrase “lions don’t concern themselves with the troubles of zebras.” And I have to admit that much of what I’ve learned in my life and applied to my professional life, I learned in my personal life, fortunately or unfortunately.

I remember when the MeToo movement came out, and a comedian I really liked, Louis C.K., did some very unquestionable things. I was talking with my wife about it at the time, and I said, he’s an adult, he was with another consenting adult, what’s the big deal? And she said, the big deal is that there’s a level of power somebody like Louis C.K. has, when he’s seemingly infinitely more important than you, and he has abused that power. That power has a crippling effect on others, where they’re not in a spot where they have the freedom to object.

That was more than a decade ago, and it was the first time I recognized that that’s exactly what’s happening with my employees. I was truly blind to it. I did not think that way. I thought, I’m a great leader, we have a great environment, people are going to say whatever they want to say. It was at that moment I realized there is a reality that is different from my reality, and unfortunately, when you’re a leader…

Dan: It’s a great example of a bubble. Because of Louis C.K. being who he is, this bubble gets formed around him. I guarantee you he didn’t do what he did because he thought, this might get me in trouble. He did what he did because, within his bubble, nobody was coming to him saying, “Hey, you almost crossed the line there. Better watch out, buddy.” You spend years in a bubble where nobody is bringing you the reality. That bubble gets thicker and thicker, and you push the envelope further and further. Then there does come a point, if you go too far, where the bubble bursts.

Nolan: The other reason I bring it up as an example is that it’s so incredibly obvious. Now, if you look at the decisions being made in business, a lot of them aren’t that ludicrous. But they’re still not good decisions, they’re not formed well. So if you have employees who are willing, or unwilling, to subject themselves to a person like that, imagine what’s happening to your employees in a professional context, in terms of what you’re getting away with, so to speak.

Dan: Setting that behavior aside, in the world he works in, he gets direct feedback on his comedy all the time. You stand in front of a group of people, and they’re not going to fake the laugh. You’re either going to earn it or not earn it. You either kill or fall flat every night. That kept his professional edge as far as the actual comedy.

Nolan: So, meritocracy.

Dan: But he lost his behavioral edge because of the lack of feedback.

Earning Honest Feedback

Dan: Someone shared a situation with me. She worked for a fairly small family-run business, where everybody says, “We’re a family, we’re all equals, we’re all partners, everything is very egalitarian.” She said the one thing that reminds them of their place is that the owner brings his dog into work and lets the dog have free rein of the entire workplace. One of the employees, relatively new, misunderstood the signal being sent. She said, “This must be a dog-friendly workplace.” She didn’t really understand the lay of the land, and one day she brought her dog into the workplace. Her dog and the owner’s dog didn’t get into a fight, but they didn’t get along. When the owner saw that she had brought her dog in, he had somebody have a conversation with her that this is really not accepted.

The new employee thought, wait a minute, what do you mean this is not accepted? And it was explained to her, “Well, that’s the owner. He owns the place. Of course he can bring his dog, but employees can’t.” Suddenly the reality of the bubble came home to her. It’s not that we’re all a family. It’s that you live in one bubble and I live in a different bubble. And no feedback was ever given to that owner about the signal he was sending.

Instead, what do you imagine happened? Within a few days, that new employee is on LinkedIn looking for another job, and she eventually gets one. Then she goes to Glassdoor and posts a very negative review of the company, with that specific example. I think that reflects a lot of what happens in our work life. Employees have thoughts. They don’t always share those thoughts with us.

So, if you’re ever one of those business leaders who gets surprised when you go to Glassdoor and see reviews from employees who have left your business sharing critical feedback, understand that, sure, maybe some of it is naysayers with an axe to grind. But in reality, employees observe, employees think things, employees have opinions. And if you want your employees to share their authentic opinions while they’re there in the workplace, you have to earn that as a leader. It does not come naturally. How do you earn it? You earn it by the way you communicate, by the way you share. You earn it when you, as a mid-level leader, speak truth to power. When you, as a leader in a public forum, share some less than thrilling information with your boss or your boss’s boss, and you do it in front of people, and they see this person get celebrated for sharing challenging information as opposed to punished. That’s how leaders earn the right to have those authentic conversations. But that’s not very common.

Inside The Unbearable Lightness of Leading

Nolan: As a way to wrap it up, Dan, the book is coming out very soon, December 1st. Give us a short summary of what people should expect. A lot of what we’ve talked about today is stuff you talk about all the time and help organizations with. Is this book meant for people who find themselves in an environment where the leaders around them aren’t the leaders they want? Is it more for you, as an individual, to be a better leader? Who is this book written for, and what should people expect to get out of it?

Dan: Probably mostly written for my mom, so that she’d be proud.

Nolan: To get a peek into Dan’s brain.

Dan: Beyond that audience of one, I’d say the book is written for anyone who leads others in the workplace, at whatever level. Here’s what I hope your experience would be. The first couple of chapters are hard. I don’t want to say gloom and doom, but there’s a fair amount of bad information, tough information, and we don’t shy away from that brutal reality. Then we move toward what you can do about it.

One of the most common questions I get is, “Well, what’s the one thing? If I can only focus on one thing.” I don’t know that we are, we’re so far beyond the one thing. But that’s what we’ve been trained to do. “What’s the one thing I should focus on?” Well, it’s more than one thing. If you have a remote workforce, there’s a whole set of practices for optimizing your remote workforce. If you have social or cultural differences among your workforce, there’s a whole set of best practices for optimizing a work environment with different cultures, different generations, different viewpoints. If you’re leveraging AI in your workplace, it’s more than just one thing. There’s a whole set of best practices related to optimizing the use of AI in the work. We cover the whole range of challenges, and specifically the best practices that optimize a workforce facing these particular challenges.

I even had this battle when I was first trying to get a publisher for the book. The publisher wanted a one-thing book. I could have written a one-thing book, and I could have sold it much more quickly. But I had to spend a lot of time explaining it’s not one thing. It’s a lot of things. It’s hard. So if you feel like I’m beating up on leaders, I am absolutely not. It is hard to lead people today. It’s hard because they are distracted, because they’re overwhelmed with information coming at them. They are cynical. They are doubtful. They are focused on their own lives and what matters to them. It is more challenging than ever to lead people. I get that. So this book purports to lay out a path for leading people. It’s not an easy path. It’s a hard path, and maybe that’s one of the reasons we don’t see it often.

There are examples of leaders at high levels of business, in the mid-tiers, in small businesses, and we share plenty of examples of leaders at those levels who exhibit these characteristics. But it’s rare. It’s far more common to see leaders who are, let’s say, less than inspiring in today’s work environment. So, we start with a tough landscape in the first couple of chapters. Then we move into hopeful practices that can help, and we share tons of stories, tons of examples, real-world examples of how these things can be leveraged in the workplace.

Winter Is Coming

Dan: But I have to be completely transparent. We don’t end on an optimistic note. This is probably the most personal part of the book, the last chapter. In fact, the title of the last chapter is “Winter Is Coming.” I would hate for you to be surprised when you open the book. The last chapter is not a hopeful creed. It is a battle plan. I do think things are going to get worse before they get better, and then at some point in the far future, things might get better. If I was advising or coaching any leader today, I would coach you to expect winter soon and be prepared for winter. Prepare yourself, prepare your people, prepare your business.

I’m not optimistic about the near-term future. We’ll get through the disruption of AI. We’ll get through economic disruption. We will get through a lot of these things, but we may be one or two generations beyond where we are today before we’re finished getting through them. I would hate for somebody’s entire useful career years to be eviscerated because they were operating on a 90s playbook in the 2000s or 2020s. The goal is to give you a playbook you can use today, and prepare yourself for the twenty thirties, twenty forties, and beyond.

Nolan: If you want that playbook, it’s The Unbearable Lightness of Leading, December 1st. Do check it out. If you want to learn more about Dan, he posts incredible content on LinkedIn, does a lot of webinars, and shares a lot of information for free. I’d recommend checking that out. If you like that, definitely pick up his book as well, because he tends to share it as it is.

Dan: And I’ve got some news for you. Dan has a podcast and Nolan has a podcast, so Dan decided, I have to have two podcasts. I’ve got a new podcast coming out called Job Smacked. It’s more about the world of work from the employee perspective, not the leadership perspective. So look up Job Smacked on your favorite podcast platform.

Nolan: Job Smacked. Lovely. With that, Dan, thank you so much for joining us again on the podcast. We hope to see you again soon.

Dan: Cool. Thanks, Nolan. Bye.