Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Thank you, Rosalind. So Rosalind talked about the need to have fun in the work that one does to truly succeed in one's career, and I can think of no better way to motivate the next talk from Dr. André Martin, whose work I have admired for years.

He talks about a surprising characteristic that might be a very close cousin to fun, which is fit.

I met Dr. Martin when he was Chief Learning Officer at Nike, where he served for four years, and I was so excited later when he took the role of Chief Learning Officer at Target.

He then became the VP of People Development at Google, where he led the global team committed to helping Google unleash the full potential of Googlers worldwide.

Dr. Martin got his PhD in organizational psychology, and he spent his entire career exploring the nature of organizations. He'll be sharing some of his very recent revelations.

A bit of trivia for you: one of the metrics of organizational performance I love so much in the State of DevOps research is the employee Net Promoter Score. This metric actually came from a suggestion from Dr. Martin. He proposed it because it so wonderfully collapses so many dimensions associated with workplace engagement. We loved it, and we integrated it into the survey.

His presentation was one of the most startling from the DevOps Enterprise Summit that we held live in Las Vegas in October. We wanted to bring it back for everyone today. So here's André.

André Martin

Good evening, everybody. How are we doing tonight?

Thanks for sticking around for one last presentation before you get to go do all the fun things Vegas has to offer. I thought we'd do something a little different. Instead of talking DevOps, which frankly I don't know a lot about - I'm learning every day - I thought we'd talk about you, the talent in the room.

I don't know if you know this, but over your lifetime, you're going to work 13.5 years. Total years of your life is going to be spent at work. That's only second to sleep.

For me, what I see is dedicated individuals who are hard-working. You're passionate. You've put in countless hours in perfecting your craft. My guess is that there are many of you sitting in the room today that don't feel like in your current position or your current company, you're getting to show the brilliance that you have to offer this world. What I'd like to do is spend a little bit of time tonight exploring how we might change that.

You see, the last three years I have been consumed by a single piece of data. Let's see if we get this thing to move. And that is that in our organizations around the world, we have over $7.8 trillion of lost productivity due to disengagement. To put that number in context, that's three times the GDP of France. It's thirteen times the market cap for Berkshire Hathaway. And to get it really close to home, it's about 2,000 times the revenue in 2021 of Caesars Palace.

What that tells me is that there are individuals like yourself who aren't getting to do the innovation they desire to do. They're not getting to show their creativity. They're not getting to bring new, beautiful, bold solutions into the world. And I think we all have a responsibility to change that, first for ourselves, but then for everybody else.

So as a researcher, what did I do? I spent the summer first reading everything I could read. And you know what? The one stat I showed you wasn't the most interesting one. As you fast forward to today, there are other things happening. Thirty-one percent of new joiners leave the company they join within the first six months. I can't even fathom that. Sixty-five percent of employees in 2021 were looking for a new job. They have their head up. Forty percent of us feel isolated at work. Eighty-three percent suffer from work-related stress, and only 32% of employees in companies today are fully engaged.

Does that feel familiar to anybody? Yeah, I will bet that sometime in your career, if not right now, one of these things has been true. I've had moments, and you've had them too, where you take a job with a company, you have this great expectation of what it's going to feel like, and you walk in the door and it feels like you just entered Mars. Or you're looking around at the people you work with and you wonder why it seems everybody has an easier path to success than you. You come in, you get a disappointing performance review, even though you've been putting in tireless hours at this job.

And so I wanted to go out and find out why. At first, after 25 years in the workplace, I thought for sure it had to do with good and bad culture. I thought for sure that it had to do with some companies doing the right things and others don't. But you know what? I just don't believe that to be true. I had a few conversations, read a lot, reflected on all the companies I've been in, and on par I don't really know a company that sets out to make their employees miserable. It just doesn't make any sense. Now, there are toxic leaders. There are competitive teams. There are jobs that frankly don't hold up to what we were promised. But companies, by and large, want to care for the people that work there.

And as I started having conversations, I had a realization. Maybe it's not good or bad culture. Maybe it's right or wrong fit. Maybe it's not about the place and whether it's good or bad. Maybe it's about whether or not I, as the person, fit the very nature of the place that I'm working.

So again, given my research orientation, I went out and I interviewed 50 people over the course of the summer: CEOs of global multinationals, heads of functions, new joiners, high potentials, people in Europe, China, right here in our own backyard. I was asking them two simple questions: tell me about the time in your work experience when you had right fit, when you had an authentic, deep, and consistent connection to the way that your company worked every day. And then tell me a time when that wasn't true.

What was really interesting, folks, is that in every interview, in every case, everybody had those on the tip of their tongue. They could pull them up immediately. They were visceral, and they were felt, and they stayed with them.

On the good side, there was quite a bit of regret because most people had left the place where they felt most at home. We talked about why, and why they made that choice, and what happened in their mental scheme and their life to make that happen.

On the wrong side, we learned that it was devastating. It cost them their confidence, their competence. It ruined relationships, and it put them in a state where they were stressed, if not depressed.

It was fascinating. Today I hope to share a few of the insights I gained and give you some ideas about: if you've got good fit, here's what you've got to do to hang on to it. If you don't have it, here's some things you can do to go find it. It's just the tip of the iceberg, and there's so much color here. If anyone wants to talk again about this, you know where to find me, and I would talk to you for days.

The first thing I learned is the way people described right fit and wrong fit. Right fit was described by: I felt comfortable. I didn't worry about what I was wearing every day. I could just practice my craft. My attention wasn't in the context around me. I didn't have the Sunday blues. Even though I put in the hours, it just doesn't feel like work.

Wrong fit was even more interesting. It felt like I was on a Ferris wheel, always in motion, never getting anywhere. It felt like I really didn't want to go to work any day, and it was costing me my relationships. It felt like being punched in the face in different ways every day I came to work. And last but not least was: it felt like everybody had a secret decoder ring for success and no one gave it to me.

These are really poignant descriptions of a phenomenon that is happening in our workplaces today. I like simple metaphors. I'm a simple guy. I grew up in the middle of the Ozark Mountains. I always think about right and wrong fit in this way. Right fit is like writing with your dominant hand. It's easy. It's almost automatic. The quality is high, and it feels like you're putting in no effort. Wrong fit: if you ever pick up a pen and try to write with your opposite hand, you can do it. If you practice, you can get better. You're never going to be as good as you would be with your dominant hand. It's higher stress, lower quality, and the more you do it, the less confidence you have. That's what these things feel like.

It was really fascinating when we talked to new joiners of companies. They describe the experience by saying, when you join a company, there are actually three different companies you get introduced to. The first one is the company that gets marketed to you. It's all poetry, beautiful campuses, wonderful people, awesome collaboration, and all the things. It's the company on its best, and actually more than that, it's the company that they wish they were or that they want to be in order to attract great talent.

Then there's the company you see on day one, and that's the best version of the current company. You get to meet the best leaders. They come and talk about the culture. You get to hear the best consumer stories. You get to learn about values, get your computers, all those things that happen. And then there's the actual company you work in day to day.

What tends to happen is this sort of pattern where you come in with all this hope, and then it feels different, and it feels different, and you bump into the company. You're trying to figure out how to work, and in the process you start to lose confidence, lose engagement, and lose a little bit of yourself. I think that's where a lot of the $7.9 trillion lives right there. If we just did a better job up front of saying who we are, we would probably do a better job in keeping our talent at the optimal level of performance.

Another thing I learned is what makes up fit. Obviously in your right-fit experiences, there was a connection to the purpose of the company: why the world's better with the company in it. There was a connection to the values that the company holds. There was a craft: you had a meaningful job in an area that you thought you could be successful. You had a great manager and a wonderful team. Those things were said by everybody we interviewed.

What was really interesting is, as we dug in, those things were important, but not as important as something that was below the line, under the water, often not made explicit but really important to right fit: how a company works. Every company has a way of working. How do we collaborate? How do we solve problems? How do we make decisions? How do we set strategy, prioritize, manage conflict? How do we give feedback, judge performance? What's our relationship with time? What are our beliefs about well-being and rest? All those things are inherent in a company.

What we found is that as these leaders described these right-fit experiences, they found alignment in the day to day, in the way that the company worked. It felt like they were riding with their right hand.

So here's the big question: how can we find right fit if we don't have it, and how do we keep it if we do? Again, we had a plethora of insights. I'm going to share three big categories, and then there's going to be a lot more coming, maybe the next time I come talk to you all.

The first one is: you've got to know yourself really, really well. Two things get in our way here, folks. First one is that often when we start a job search, we start by searching for jobs. You just put yourself right in the middle of a marketing campaign. Almost immediately, because of a lot of short-circuiting in the way our brains work, you've set yourself up to make a choice that might not fit you.

The second thing is we live in this world of infinite browsing. We're constantly looking at the world, comparing our lives to everybody everywhere all the time. In that comparison, we think what's good for you must be good for me. What's good for you must be good for me. If you've got that, I want what you've got. It's the worst way to live your life because inherently you lose the connection to yourself.

The first thing I would ask you to do is think harder about who you are at a deep level and reflect often on that. The first one is know what you value - not what you say you value, not what you wish you value, what you actually value when you make the biggest decisions you make in your life.

I'll give you a primary example for me. I want to believe I'm a risk taker. I really do. I want to believe I'm a risk taker who likes to get out there and try new things and do new stuff. But the truth is, when I look at the decisions I make, like buying a house, I'm not a risk taker. I'm about financial security. I'm about stability. I'm about a smart purchase. I'm about family. When I tell people what I value, I don't often talk about the same things that I actually value in the big decisions I make. So that's one thing I would ask you to do: think about your values in terms of what's present when you make big decisions.

Second one is: are you of craft, are you of company, or are you of cause? A career is built on one of these legs. You can shift amongst the three, but one is always primary. If you're about craft, you should have as many experiences as you can in a very narrow area. I practice culture and talent. I've never had a job that isn't culture and talent. I've done that job in a bunch of different companies because I'm trying to hone a singular craft and be really good at it. That may be right for you. If it is, there's a certain way you build your career.

You may be of company. You may have found the company that you love, the place that you adore, the place that you call home: the product, the people, the mission, all of it. If so, you should make sure in that company you have a diverse set of experiences in a diverse set of areas, because the more you know about the company, the more knowledge, power, impact you can have.

Some of you might just be around cause. You might actually use work as an instrument to accomplish something else. You might go to work to pay the bills, to have the money to do the side hustle that is actually your passion. You might go to work because you want to retire and live on an island by the time you're 52. That's cause. Depending on where you come from, it will dictate the kind of career you should be creating for yourself.

The second area is: you've got to get super clear about how you work. How do you make decisions, manage projects, socialize ideas? How do you like to socialize with people gathered? How do you like to get feedback, praise, and recognition? How do you like to prioritize? All those things matter. Often what we think when we join companies is that we've got to start working the way they work. That's fitting in. That's riding with your non-dominant hand. You should be thinking really clearly about how you like to work and find a place that works like you work.

But companies can't articulate it. I talked to more CEOs this summer. I'm like, tell me how your company works. They're like, I don't know, it just does. That is insufficient when you're asking people to come work here. That is their response because it's so natural; it's because it emanates from them. It's how they work, how their team works, how every team works, how a company gets built. So you need to know that, and you need to find the ways to look for those things. In other companies, we found about 57 factors of how people work that are continuums you can kind of play with, and someday I'll get that to you for sure.

The last one is: no matter if you're in a right fit today or a wrong fit situation, there are buffers that you need to use. If you're in a right fit today, chances are your leader is going to change, your company is going to transform, things are going to shift, the market's going to change, and you're going to need to buffer against that change so the place remains the place you want to be. If you're in a wrong fit, you can make it manageable. You can do more than survive.

This one's really important to me because I heard more stories of people who told me that in that wrong-fit experience, they just lost themselves. Some lost years. Some said, you know what, I came to this job, I couldn't succeed. All I did was try to work harder and harder and harder, and I never made any progress. I started to believe that I wasn't good. I was getting poor performance reviews. I wasn't getting positive feedback. I wasn't getting recognition. What's funny is we automatically think it's about us. Maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was. And the truth is, it's probably just about fit.

The first thing I would say is put yourself in the mindset to learn. Anyone know who Nola Ochs is? This grandmother lived on a single farm in Kansas her whole life. She had 15 grandchildren, countless numbers of great-grandchildren, and she had the Guinness Book world record as the oldest person to get a college degree at 95. At 100 years old, she was still in college as a TA working on a master's program.

What I find really interesting is, when you put yourself in a learning mindset, a few things happen. You get more curious. You gain confidence. It actually can reduce anxiety and depression. It can make you more successful. The way you do it when you're in a wrong-fit experience is you've got to accept your circumstance. It's not perfect, and that's okay. Otherwise you get in a cycle of negative feelings, where you're constantly using all of your creative energy to manage these negative feelings and become victimized.

Accept your circumstances. Decide how you like to reflect. It might be a journal. It might be talking to somebody. It might be interpretive dance. But find a way for you to reflect on the days. You're pulling things out of it. Lastly, see every day as a prototype. You've got nothing to lose. You're not in a good space; use it to learn how to work or find or do things in a way that can bring you pleasure.

Second is find people who can give you inspiration. Find the storytellers in your company. They can connect you to what was, what is, what might be. They can remind you of all the reasons this company is great, even though your experience isn't. Find models. Find people that represent the truth of the culture. They're out there. Spend time with them because they're reminding you, you know what, it is a good place and there are good opportunities and you can be the kind of person you want to be. Find a mentor. Mentors are invaluable - someone who can help you through this and give you perspective and keep your feet.

Last but not least, find masters of craft. In every wrong-fit experience I've ever had, I found a person that I could learn from that could make me better at the thing I want to do. It got me out of my head and back onto the field, learning more about the thing I love to do.

Last but not least is work harder - not smarter. I mean smarter, not harder. On this one, it's really important to understand that you have more time than you think. Recent research: 32 people, time logs of all the ways they spend their calendar. Forty-one percent of their time was spent in discretionary activities that had no value to them and no value to their company.

We waste a lot of time, all of us. You'd be amazed if you really looked at your calendar, what you did, how much time is out there for you. Secondly, with the time that we do have, we tend to procrastinate. Procrastination isn't idle time wasted. It's time spent in the negative feeling pattern about the place that you are or the thing you're being asked to do. If you manage that, you can find a way through that. You can work a little bit more smart.

Last but not least, when we're in wrong-fit experiences, we tend to think: if I just put in more time, I'll find my way to success. I'm a smart person. I'm good at my job. I'm a type-A personality. In the end, more time does not produce more results. It produces more negativity, often. We start losing the very things that matter to us. We give up our health. We spend less time with our families. We lose our hobbies, all those things. So put boundaries on it. Be there as long as you need to be there, but do not try to compensate for wrong fit by doing more. Look at the time you do have and watch how much you're spending in negative thought patterns. And third, really put your time toward meaningful activities, and make sure life outside of work is magic.

I'm over my time. I'm a talker. Two things to end with. If you have right fit, don't take it for granted. Because the ways of working are under... and we're comparing ourselves to all the things that other people have, we forget that because it's comfortable, because we're riding with our right hand. That's really hard to come by, and you should cherish that and recognize how lucky you are.

If you don't have it, it's out there. There's a company that works like you work. You can be in the environment for now. Use the buffers to make it work for you. But look hard for how a company works, not just their brand, not just their cool campuses, not just the fun perks and the places and the proximity. Those things in the end don't really matter. They don't define your experience.

And if you see someone in your company struggling, they're having a tough time, they're in a wrong fit, they can't find their feet, they cannot find their way to success, help them. I had more people help me in more moments in my career. They saw me. They made me feel valued. They allowed me to turn what was a hard experience into one that, if nothing else, I learned a great deal from.

So, tip of the iceberg, just a start. I hope it's a fun way to end the conference. Thanks for giving me the time, and I wish you all the best: that you find right-fit, fulfilling careers, and you get to put your brilliance on display every single day of those 13 years that you're going to be at work. Have a great night, everybody.