Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Let's go to the next speaker, who I've known for many years, and there's so much about his work that I admire. I met Dr. André Martin when he was the Chief Learning Officer at Nike, where he served for four years. I was so excited when he later took the role of Chief Learning Officer at Target, a U.S. retailer. I had so many questions for him, such as why an organization would create a senior position to create a learning dynamic, why executives view employee engagement as important, and how we as a technology community can leverage those values.

Dr. André Martin has spent years, his entire career, exploring these issues, including getting his PhD in organizational psychology. He then served as VP of People Development at Google, where he led the global team committed to helping Google unleash the full potential of Googlers worldwide.

Just a bit of trivia for you: one of the metrics that shows up in the State of DevOps research is the employee net promoter score. This actually came from Dr. Martin. It's something that he proposed to me that so wonderfully collapses the many dimensions associated with engagement. We loved it and actually integrated it into the survey.

I'm so delighted that he's putting his learnings into his new upcoming book, Wrong Fit, Right Fit, coming out in September, because it's so important for leaders. Here's André.

Dr. André Martin

Hi, Amsterdam. How are we doing tonight?

I'm here as probably the person who, if you took a poll, knows the absolute least about DevOps. That's not because I don't pay attention. It's because my days have generally been consumed by a different craft and a different set of questions.

I've spent about 25 years helping some of the most revered brands in the world try to create even better companies. I do it because I stare out to audiences like you, and here's what I see: super talented people who have spent tireless hours gaining knowledge and understanding of whatever craft you're pursuing. You go to your job every day in the hope that you're going to get to show your full brilliance. What's been really devastating to me is that rarely is the case.

As I look at the world right now, I see $7.8 trillion of lost productivity in our companies today due to disengagement. That's bigger than the market cap of Apple, Amazon, and Google combined. It means there is real creative energy in the world that isn't getting utilized. It means these big challenges that we're facing are not getting our brightest minds at their very best. My hope is that we're going to do something to change that.

But before we get there, you have to look at an even harder set of data. Thirty percent of people like yourselves who join a new company in the hopes of having a better experience leave those jobs within the first three months. Of those people who stay, about another 50% will continue to look for a job even as they've decided to stay at the company. Fifty-three percent of our managers, many of you in this room today, would say they're burned out. Forty percent of us, about half the room, feel isolated at work. A devastating 22% of us walk in every morning fully engaged.

Does this sound familiar? Do you see some of these trends happening in your workplace or even for yourself? If so, we have to look at what's happening. What has made work so much work for so many people?

It starts in a very simple place. The aspiration and narrative that our companies hold for who we are, what we value, and how we expect everyone to work every single day isn't aligned to the felt experience you have when you walk in the door.

We've known this intuitively in my field for a lot of years, but recently MIT and the folks at Culture 500 proved it with data. They did a study on the espoused values of companies like yours, and compared that to the lived experience of people as they talked about those companies on review sites like Glassdoor. What they found is that there's zero correlation between those two things. What a company says they are and what we see them value every day are at odds with each other. They're very different, and that creates issues for engagement.

What are the trends that have gotten us here? We'd love to say it's COVID. COVID wasn't the cause, but it was an accelerant. It got us to a place where these things were more acute, and so we're paying more attention.

Some trends over the last few years include companies becoming giant marketing campaigns. The information that we use to make decisions about where we're going to go next isn't necessarily built on the truth. It's built on this highly aspirational view of the world.

Second, we've had a decade of decadent growth. Our companies have filled our pockets with perks, better pay, massages on Thursdays, all the things that we see. In doing so, our companies became instruments of consumption, not of cause.

Then there's this infinite browsing mode that we all seem to be in, thanks to our phones and the access to information that we have. Pete Davis wrote this wonderful book called Dedicated, where he talks about infinite browsing: everywhere we look, there's someone having a better experience than us. We all have this sense of FOMO, fear of missing out. As a result, we're keeping one foot in and one foot out of our companies.

One of the most pervasive trends has been our search for meaning. One thing COVID has done to all of us is made us look hard at our lives: our lives at home, our communities, our immediate space, our lives at work, how we're spending our days, and what we want out of the future.

It's important to think about what else is standing in our way of changing. We won't change unless we start seeing the world as potentially different, unless we stop bringing our old models to the workplace every single day. If we take three steps back, open our eyes really wide, and look at what's happening differently, I have a lot of faith and optimism that we can make a change.

How do we change the way work is done? I think it comes down to looking at the question not as good or bad culture. I've walked into many of the world's companies over the years, and I've yet to see a company that sets out to make the experience really bad for its people. There are toxic leaders, poorly run teams, and way too much work in our companies. But 60% of us generally are happy and content. Forty percent of us struggle, and we struggle for real reasons. Something is happening in terms of right or wrong fit.

Over the last four months, I did 65 interviews with talent all over the world to understand why work is so much work. I want to share what I found. But before I do that, I want to do a quick exercise that lets you feel what I felt.

Everyone take out a pen and a piece of paper. Pick it up, and write this sentence: the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy log. Now put that pen in your other hand and write it again.

If you're anything like me, the experience you had when you wrote with your dominant hand was effortless, high quality, and easy. It felt like you had done it a million times. You were competent and capable. That is what right fit feels like when you have it in your job.

When you switched hands, my guess is it was stressful. It was exhausting. If you tried to do it repeatedly over time, the quality was lower and you were more unsure. Even if you wrote that same sentence 20 times, it would never be as good as you could have been with your dominant hand.

This is the story of right fit or wrong fit. When you have right fit, it's like writing with your dominant hand. When you don't, the days are hard, the days are stressful, and being at your best is almost an impossibility.

What did we learn over the course of the conversations we had with leaders? First, right fit and wrong fit experiences are pervasive. Everybody has them. What's interesting is how talent describes them. When talent describes right fit experiences, they say: I felt like I could practice my craft every day. Their creative energy was going to the thing they're really good at, not toward coordination cost, not toward trying to figure out how to be a success in the system. It felt like they were wearing their best outfit. The days were easy, and I never had the Sunday blues. They were learning and growing and getting better at the things they were being asked to do every day.

When they had a wrong fit experience, the world was very different. People described it as feeling like I was getting punched in the face every day. I didn't want to get up and go to work. I felt like everybody had the secret decoder ring to success except for me.

The worst thing about those stories was how they described the aftermath of being in those wrong fit experiences. They said they were less confident, less capable, had worse relationships at home, and walked around every day feeling like there was something wrong with them. Instead, what was probably true is that the company worked in a way that isn't the way you work day to day: the way it solves problems, socializes, collaborates, gives feedback, develops people, and its relationship with time. Those things were different than what you prefer, and therefore the days were hard.

When we talk about right fit experiences, another important takeaway is that most people left them. They left because they were chasing something else. Often they mistake comfort for a lack of pace in their career. Many looked back and said, I wish I would have stayed where I was.

Why is right fit so elusive? First, the things that are visible as we're making career choices are purpose, values, products and services, current manager, current team. Those things are important, but they're not as important as what is below the line, often unclear and unseen: how we work. How does work get done at this company? How do we make decisions, collaborate, recognize, celebrate?

Many interviews told me something compelling: when I'm in the company, no one tells me how it works. Instead, I have to bump into the company every day and figure it out. In doing so, we chip away at commitment, engagement, and creative energy.

As companies grow, we bring in leaders from the outside, really capable people from other companies. What they bring with them is their technical skill and all of their ways of working, all of their ways of collaborating. We become this chaotic mess of individual choices about how work should be done because we don't set them back up. We don't sit them down and say, you're great at your craft, and we want you to do your craft the way that we like to work. In not doing that, we create coordination costs day after day for a lot of people.

As we make career decisions, whether to stay, join a new team, or change companies, there are cognitive traps we can fall into. The first is confirmation bias. There is a set of truth in the world about an experience you're getting ready to take, and then there is the decision you would actually like to make. Once you have clarity that this is a decision you want to make, you only see a partial version of the truth. You overemphasize information that allows you to make that choice and underemphasize information that might make you take a beat, pause, or look at other available options.

The second is called BIRGing, basking in reflected glory. It's a social science idea that says we will be oriented toward choosing experiences that are fun, exciting, interesting, and new. The system in our brain governing that is our approach system. It seeks joy and excitement. It's hedonistic. The drawback is that the system that keeps us in place is more about comfort. This new thing feels exciting and high energy. This old thing feels like a nice, soft, warm hug. We tend to underestimate comfort and its importance in our life and overestimate what is new and shiny, or the greener grass in the other pasture. In that, we leave things where we're comfortable and go to things that might not actually fit.

For leaders, think about the experience any talent has when joining your company. They start in recruiting and get a bright, shiny, beautiful, bold, aspirational view of your company, the company you want to be. Then we bring them in on the first day and curate an experience of the company we want them to believe we are. We show our best leaders, products and services, and systems that work. The third version is the one they go to every day. Suddenly they are sitting there saying, this thing I'm doing every day doesn't really feel like the thing you showed me on the way in the door. You create a giant expectation gap.

What do we do as leaders to make sure more people get a more authentic view of our company and feel right fit? First, we have to shorten the cycles of re-recruitment. It used to be that we could hire somebody, onboard them, set them free, and they would go do their job. Now, because of the distraction of their options and the pace of growth, what we're seeing is that as growth goes up, energy in our company starts to dip.

The only way to get people to get energy back is to remind them why they're there, remind them they matter, and show that the effort they're putting forth makes a difference. We miss those moments because we think recruitment only has to happen once a year. We'll do a big strategy kickoff and let you go. It's every moment, every second, every day, because people are looking up, keeping one foot out of the organization, and thinking about those greener pastures. You have to bring them back to the company.

You do that by realizing commitment and engagement is a ground game. In a single year, you have a thousand moments with a company, a thousand places where you bump into it as talent, or where you as a leader have a chance to increase or decrease the commitment and engagement of the people who work for you. We often see these moments and pass them by. We're in the moment doing tactical work, running a project, doing a scrum, driving toward a strategic initiative, and we forget that in those moments you are either reminding people where they work and why they're there, or allowing them to forget it.

Very few moments are neutral. As a leader, and as talent, you should use these moments to remind yourselves of the answers to five questions. One: why is the world better with our company and team in it? Two: what are we aspiring to do, where are we trying to go, and what priorities matter most? Three: how do we make money or have impact in the world? Four: how do we get work done? Five: what's our promise to you as talent?

If we were able to answer these questions more often in more moments throughout a single year, I think you would see fewer of us leaving right fit experiences, more of us feeling like wrong fit actually might be okay, and you would see that $7.8 trillion of lost productivity start to come back in the company.

In the end, all I want for all of you is one of three simple things. If you have right fit, respect it. If you're in a place where it feels comfortable, like you're writing with your right hand, don't mistake comfort for slowness in your career. Second, if you don't have it, it is waiting for you. You can either find it in the company you're at or search for it somewhere else. There is a place that will work for you. Third, if you're a leader, remember that every moment you have with your talent and your team is an engagement moment. It's your chance to either increase or decrease the commitment of the person standing right in front of you.

My ask is simple. If you have any interest in joining up and helping out, go to the website and subscribe to the newsletter. If you have a story of right fit or wrong fit that you think is important to be told, I want to sit down and talk to you. I want to hear that story, make it anonymous, and share it with the world, because there are a lot of people out there who have struggled in ways that you already have, or might be struggling right now. If you think wrong fit, right fit might be a conversation worth having at your company, let me know. I'm happy to come have that conversation with you.

More than anything, it's going to take us all to change or get rid of that $7.9 trillion, because culture is simply the aggregation of our collective behaviors. You as an individual show up in a certain way. If that happens a hundred times, it creates a movement. If it happens a thousand times, you have a brand new culture in your company.

With that, I wish you the best. I hope you have a right fit experience right now. I'll be out in the other room with the book. There are a ton more insights in it and a lot I want to share with you all, because I just want us to wake up every day in the 13.5 years we will spend in our adult lives at work and be at our best, because we need it, our companies need it, and so does the world. God bless you for what you do, and best of luck as you continue the conversations in your careers. Thank you.

Host Close

All right, thank you.