Unlocking Cognitive Diversity of Thought With Heather McGowan

Skot Waldron (00:00.396)
You know, stick around, don't go anywhere when I hit stop. That's got to finish uploading at that point. If free reason, it freezes and glitches. It's still recording high res on your side, high res on my side. so if you bet, if you have no idea what I said, then just say, Scott, I have no idea, dude. You just need to tell me what you said again. I can edit that out later. I can debrief you after too, while everything's uploading.

Heather (00:07.421)
Okay.

Heather (00:17.99)
Okay. All right.

Heather (00:26.91)
Who's the focus of your audience?

Skot Waldron (00:29.608)
so it's going to be.

It's not quite like CEO. I've got some C -suite in there. It's mostly people managers, and in corporate space. my show started out very entrepreneurial and founders and presidents and, venture capitalists and things like that. So it was like, so it was like,

Heather (00:45.756)
Mm

Skot Waldron (00:59.65)
It was that at the beginning. but the other half has really gone into the more see, that the people managers of corporations.

Heather (01:10.098)
And I have to ask Waldron, are you related to any Waldrons in Massachusetts?

because you look a little bit like the ones I know. Okay.

Skot Waldron (01:16.564)
No, no, I don't think so. we have, well, there are any Walgreens up there in Maine, but I've got my nephew up there, but he's not a Waldron. So now I don't see too many of them. There's, there's two Waldron road exits on the way to Chicago from Atlanta. I see those all the time, but that's about it. So, so universe isn't bringing us quite that together.

Heather (01:46.004)
That would be a second interesting point if we had that as well.

Skot Waldron (01:49.067)
That would, that would. Any questions for me? Coming up. Okay. Super cool.

Heather (01:52.528)
Nope, it's real.

Skot Waldron (02:01.644)
All right. So I'm just kind of riff off the questions you sent in. Thank you for filling that out. And then if anything else comes up, we're just going to keep riffing because that's what we do. Cool. Yeah, actually you sound really good. So thank you for that.

Heather (02:13.822)
Alright and sound is all good.

Okay. And you prefer headsets or I don't need the headset?

Skot Waldron (02:22.478)
You're fine, either way. That's fine.

Heather (02:26.226)
Is that just as good?

Skot Waldron (02:28.97)
Actually, now I'm getting an echo. So maybe keep the headsets.

Heather (02:30.266)
Actually, I'm getting now I'm getting an echo. Okay. Maybe keep that.

Heather (02:40.84)
Better? Better, okay. Stay with heads up.

Skot Waldron (02:41.987)
Yeah. Yep. Sounds great. All right. Thank you. Thank you. you. All right. You ready?

Heather (02:49.127)
Yep.

Skot Waldron (02:52.108)
Heather, I've never had a futurist on my call before, so I'm stoked.

Heather (02:59.474)
Happy to be your first. Thanks so much for having me.

Skot Waldron (03:01.826)
Yeah, it's a, it's pretty cool. I always there's a, there's another futurist, Adam Barker that I, that I quote sometimes. and I was like, that title, I would always wanted a title to be like a futurist was my title. So I'm actually talking to one now, which is pretty rad. So thanks for.

Heather (03:20.87)
You can just call yourself a futurist, there's no credentialing of that as far as I know.

Skot Waldron (03:24.099)
Are you serious? didn't like, there's no degree and futurism stuff that I missed out on.

Heather (03:28.718)
I had to, mean, there's four studies in foresight for sure, and there's lots of different things you can look into, but nobody deems you or credentials you with any sort of sword, as far as I know.

Skot Waldron (03:38.03)
No, okay. No sword. Okay. All right. I didn't know if there was a sword thing involved. So, okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, once I feel like I'm there, I'll, I'll check in with you. Just to make sure I, I meet all the criteria. but yeah, the universe has brought us together. We, interacted in 2018. You spoke at a conference at, my agency was putting on at the time. So it's really cool that we're coming back together, to see your growth in that time has been pretty awesome. so thanks for, thanks for showing up.

Heather (03:51.294)
Okay.

Skot Waldron (04:07.66)
Let's talk about, this idea of what work looks like. Let's paint a picture. So we had the pandemic. said a lot of things changed around the idea of the pandemic changed work. that's kind of looking backwards, but you look to the future. So tell me how that works. how do we look to the past to make sure we inform the future, et cetera, et cetera.

Heather (04:19.933)
Hmm?

Heather (04:23.868)
Hmm. Hmm.

Heather (04:35.39)
I always think it's helpful to look at the past to understand where we got to this moment, understand what this moment really is, because a lot of times people are working in kind of a paradigm past as opposed to the paradigm they're in, then they're not ready for the next paradigm. So we have a workplace that was largely defined by boomers. no generation is a monolith, but the idea is you trade loyalty for security. That hasn't been true for many decades. And one of the things that came in with the pandemic is the beginning of

generations in the workforce. And they're our first true, true digital natives. were every stage of their development had some form of trauma from being born into 9 11, not knowing a time before terrorism being raised through the, you know, in grade school years through the global financial crisis, which for some is not like unlike being a depression era baby to mass school shootings, to a pandemic to environmental challenges. So

We now have a generation in the workforce that's looking for a different contract. That's one of the things we're seeing play out today because they're saying, you know what, I know the security isn't there. I want mentoring. I want a career pathway. want, not a fixed career pathway, but I want to know that I'm learning towards something. They're more, is interested in learning and mentorship as they are in what's my title and what am I earning. And that's a new contract. So we have, of course, AI, generative AI, LLMs.

coming online as a norm. It's almost the norm that people are interacting with them. So where does that velocity, that cognitive velocity that's starting to happen where everybody below average is being brought up to average? That's kind of the first phase of AI. One of the things they're seeing is that when people are using the AI tools, somebody who was kind of a C player can become a B plus or an A minus player. That's the first jump in capabilities.

So where do we go from there? We can lean backwards and sort of say, okay, we can relax because we can have AI do more and more things. More of us are average or better. Or we can say, what does this cognitive velocity afford to us? And where do we take that speed that's now kind of offloaded in some ways or augmented or amplified is a better word for it and say, okay, where do we pause, reflect, use our intuition and where's the new leap in creativity?

Heather (06:56.584)
I think that's the kind of, have to understand where we've been, how we got here. That's where we're going next.

Skot Waldron (07:03.234)
Are you, you're a fan of doing hard things. So taking that idea, what about that is hard? What about that should we take on because of the reward that's on the other side?

Heather (07:17.598)
What about that is hard is not being lazy. So right now, I think one of our greatest challenges is not just accepting what chat GDP steps spits out as by way of an example. We can start using these tools to go, I can do less, I can do more at work. But we need the same level of engagement. We need the same level of thought and reflection and contemplation because we're offloading one piece of it. If you think about it like,

When you're driving your car today, you're rarely pulling out a map and flipping through the map and saying, okay, I'm going to turn here, I'm going to turn there. No, you just push it. So you've offloaded that cognitive load. What is it that you're taking instead? What is it that you're learning? What is it that you're trying to do because you've offloaded that? We don't type in phone numbers anymore. We've offloaded that. So we've offloaded a bunch of cognition, kind of at a pretty slow rate over the last decade. Now we're going to start offloading it at a higher rate. So how do we reach higher levels of creativity? How do we reach higher levels of

human flourishing, what becomes important? It would be really easy to stay with the paradigm we're in today and just sort of unbuckle our belts and lean back as opposed to saying, okay, what does this afford us to do? I think that's the hard thing. The other hard thing right now is we're polarized politically, socially, all over the world, but especially in the US. And that is a hard thing that we need to bridge. And bridging that means listening to each other, trying to find our common ground instead of our ability, you know, our tendency to just react.

Instead of saying, why do you think that? Which puts someone in a defensive stance. How did you come to believe that? What's underneath that? What do you care about? So that people feel seen and heard. Because if we don't get rid of that polarization, we're not going to get the next leap. I don't.

Skot Waldron (08:59.202)
That's a lot. We're going to unpack a few of those things. We're going to pack a few things because I, you triggered a bunch of things that I want to ask you about. and that first of all, it's the, my gosh, you're right. It's been a year and I still don't know my kids' phone numbers, you know? So it's like, wow, I need as a parent, that's not very responsible anyway. So there is that offload of certain things. How is that?

Heather (09:00.442)
Yeah, that was a lot. Okay.

Heather (09:06.792)
Okay?

Heather (09:14.163)
Yep.

Skot Waldron (09:25.666)
You know, and, this little seeping in of maybe quote unquote laziness, if we're not careful of it, how is that affecting leaders today? Like how do you lead. And. And that space, what's a, what's some advice or something that you would give a leader that's dealing with that right now.

Heather (09:43.484)
Okay, I'm gonna pull in a few more things into that leadership. most leaders today are leading people who have skills and knowledge that they do not. That was always true at the C -suite, wasn't generally true at middle managers and certainly not at frontline, because you brought up through the ranks and you were put in a leadership position when you kind of sat in all the chairs or jumped over a few. Now the speed of change is such that most people...

have someone reporting to you, whether it's AI, cybersecurity, data analytics, something that you didn't know, you don't know about, you cannot be the expert on. So you can't make that decision with certainty. So we're moving from individual intelligence to collective intelligence. And the move from individual intelligence to collective intelligence is a move from organic intelligence to also organic and artificial intelligence. So it's both of those things at once. So as a leader, you have to lead differently. You're not that unquestioned expert.

The other thing, and that some of this has to do with Gen Z, but also has to do with sort of a zeitgeist shift that happened in the pandemic. The pandemic was a pause. It was an existential crisis. Most people want to pretend it's over and it didn't happen, all this stuff. Well, it happened and it changed us. And the way that it changed us is more and more people have this conversation about where work takes place that shouldn't have took place. We've got more remote and hybrid workers and we will to perpetuity. Not a hundred percent, but we definitely have a greater percentage now.

But it isn't so much about where work takes place, it's about where work fits in your lives. And more and more people want work -life integration. It isn't just work -life balance, because that's a false dichotomy. It is, am I able to bring my whole self to work? Am I able to have self -expression at work? Am I doing work that aligns with my values? More and more people are asking for that purpose at work. So as a leader, it was, set the direction and make sure everybody got there.

Now it's understand your teammates because you have to learn from them. You have to work with them to get that collective intelligence to get to where you're going. And then it's helped them become intrinsically motivated because the external carrots and sticks just don't work anymore. So as a leader, you're going to have to deal with people getting lazy with artificial intelligence, but that's just a small piece of the bigger shifts in leadership that I see.

Skot Waldron (11:55.458)
You talked about extrinsic versus intrinsic. I think about that with, you know, my kids a lot. How do you know, there is a lot of that extrinsic motivation that's put out there. And some of it is, you know, you've got commission structures for salespeople. That's an extrinsic motivator, to sell more things. Right. And there's a lot of success that comes out of something like that.

Heather (12:03.398)
Mm

Heather (12:19.015)
Right.

Skot Waldron (12:22.498)
Tell me about your, let's, let's expand your view about extrinsic versus intrinsic a bit. Cause I'm, I am a big believer in the intrinsic. think that once we get there, we've nailed something and that's build builds loyalty and it builds engagement. but there is a lot of extrinsic motivation out there. And is that brought in from that industrial mindset of the silent generation boomer generation, early Xers, like where did that come from? Is that still, is that where that comes from?

Heather (12:52.018)
Well, we all still have to provide for our families. So there is the economic realities of an extrinsic motivation is what's helpful to have you live a good life, give you economic security. That's always gonna be there. Certain people are more driven by extrinsic motivation than others. If you got a salesperson, they are driven by winning. They're driven by getting a higher percentage, getting a bigger salary, winning more accounts. Not everybody's wired that way. And that doesn't work in every kind of job. There are some jobs where the compensation is fixed.

and the intrinsic pressure is just fear, right? In other situations, there's an upside with each movement in extrinsic motivation. So there is an inherent level of it, because we all have to provide for ourselves and each other, and there is economic security, but then there is different jobs have different percentages, because different people operate with different drives.

Skot Waldron (13:43.374)
If I want to tap into that intrinsic part, because I see the value, I'm just not sure how to do it. I'm kind of stuck in this. My people aren't engaged. got to quote unquote light a fire under them, you know?

Heather (13:56.698)
Mm -hmm. You want to light a fire within them, not under them. That's the intrinsic, you want to light a fire within them. So how do you do that? I was speaking to this biotech group and it was like the fifth or sixth time I had spoken to them. I spoke at the global level and then at each of regional levels and then within different functions. And one of the person who had heard me three or four times, she says, I think I understand now. And she said it without irony. She's like, I never got to know my people before because I would just put pressure in different places.

Skot Waldron (14:02.253)
Amen.

Heather (14:26.408)
But in order to intrinsically motivate, I have to get to know them and what they care about so I can help them direct their own internal motivation, their own aspirations, their own interests towards the goal that we want them to get to. And so there's a certain degree of job sculpting that I think will take place. It's an old idea from the 90s, but it's the idea that we have four or five intrinsically motivated drives, and then we have eight deeply embedded life interests.

and when you line your job around. So if you're interested in technology and ideas, or if you're interested in enterprise control, different drivers would shape you towards different jobs that allow you to connect with where you're gonna go anyway, where you'll go when nobody's asking you to go there. That's what we need more and more of that to connect to that.

Skot Waldron (15:16.238)
That sounds hard.

Heather (15:18.566)
It's hard, but it's worth it. mean, you we can kind of keep doing it the way we're doing it and kind of keep having turnover and disengaged and burnt out employees is working. It's not really working. You know, if we have an economic downturn, you'll have an upper hand for a little while out of the economic uncertainty. But if you really want to endure and you really want your people to perform and when you need them to, I mean, actually, I think what happened in the pandemic is we had higher levels of engagement than we do today. We had higher levels of productivity than we do today because

People were asking their people, how are you? Can I help you? They got to know their people a little bit better, even though we were separated, there was in some ways a greater connection and there was greater concern and we got better performance than I think anybody expected to.

Skot Waldron (16:02.926)
There was a lot of connection happening for sure. A lot of it. And then people were trying to figure a lot of things out and there was probably a lot more collaboration happening at that time as we were learning to solve the new problem that was all over the world.

Heather (16:13.63)
Mm

Heather (16:19.166)
And you know what? That was a hard thing. That was a really hard thing. if you had asked anybody in September 2019 if they thought most of our companies that didn't need to operate in person could operate remotely without much decline in economic activity, that schools and colleges, and I know there's a lot of loss there and there's a lot of problems, but could go fully online in effort to what we thought was keeping more people safe. Nobody thought that was possible. We did it in two to three weeks globally.

Skot Waldron (16:47.482)
That's pretty insane, isn't it? We were watching a show the other day. It was the morning show on Apple and they were showing a clip of a back shot from the COVID and they all had masks on and they were walking around with masks on and my wife and I looked at each other, like, we did that. We lived that and that's just so weird to think about that we all went through this thing.

Heather (16:49.148)
Yeah.

Heather (16:57.766)
yeah.

Heather (17:10.525)
Yeah.

Skot Waldron (17:17.496)
together. You know, we can truly all empathize with everybody in the world about that thing. I don't think anybody was never been able to do that.

Heather (17:24.35)
Yep, but we don't talk about it. But we don't talk about it, and it's interesting. The 1918 flu, more people, 50 million people globally died, 650 ,000 in the US alone. But if you go to look for how many books and movies are written about that, almost none. But then you look at World War and World War II, we lost fewer people, books and movies all over the place. And the one person who wrote like sort of seminal book on that called Pale Rider,

I interviewed that author for one of my last ebooks and she told me that she thinks it's because we had that shared experience and we all just want to forget it. We just don't want to dwell on it. We want to move past it. We want to put it behind us. We don't need to see plays and movies and books about it because we all lived it together. Whereas war is something that only certain people experience. The rest of us want to find out what that was about because we weren't there. So this is something

COVID is something we want to put behind us. People don't want to hear about it talks. People don't want to talk about it in companies. But it did change us. And I think it's important to look at the ways we've changed. We don't have to dwell on it. We don't have to relive every moment of it. But we are in a new place. It ushered in the augmented error.

Skot Waldron (18:38.712)
That's a word you use a lot, augmented error. You talk about that. what is that for those of us who don't know what that is?

Heather (18:47.164)
Okay, so we had the nomadic era, the agrarian era, farming era, industrial era, and then we had the information era. And that was when we could access information pretty seamlessly. Now we're in an era where instead of just getting cognitive reduction from tools, we're getting cognitive amplification, increasing the velocity of thinking, because we have these technology tools that augment our potential as humans. And that's a...

That's going to be a completely different. have to think about what does it mean to be a genius? What does it mean to be creative? What does it mean to have a thought? Right now, we're all using LLMs all the time. Every time we use one of those large language models like ChatTDP, and you ask ChatTDP something, and it generates something, you're creating a synthetic data set that becomes part of the data set you mine the next time you ask that question. So we're living in this interesting time.

Skot Waldron (19:39.276)
Where they'll what we talked about, you know, a lot of people, when they think about the pandemic or they think about the way we work now, is this hybrid space it's gone. was like pandemic all remote and then it like. Flew back to office, but then it was like kind of in the middle and some people are trying to adjust and work all those things out. And it's still kind of what it is. people are navigating that as well. We've seen a lot of the D and I conversations.

Heather (19:52.776)
Mm

Skot Waldron (20:08.77)
that were really hot, also start to decline. Companies are going back on some of the things that they were committing to do because of political pressure and other things that are happening because of that. What are some other things though that you see as part of the pandemic that are gonna make their way into the future of work that you don't see really going away, that are kind of here to stay, you think?

Heather (20:36.636)
I think we've got a marketing or branding problem with DEI because it became a culture war issue. And then when it comes to culture war issue, nobody can win it. Remote work also became a culture war issue. They were returned to office fights. I never got involved in that because I was like, you know, until we have the data, until we understand what kind of jobs, what kind of tasks, what kind of collaboration, what kind of fairness, where different work tasks should take place, we can't make declarations. So people wanted people back in the office.

people went back in the office. Was it better for some things? Absolutely. Was it worse for other things? Sure. That will work itself out. think Nick Bloom's research on that is interesting. He's been doing it for a very long time. He continues to this day out of Stanford. He's got some great data on how we perform better. It should be based upon performance as well as preference of performance would be probably the two things. When it comes to other things that we need to consider,

Like DEI, I think it's a marketing problem, I think, because it became a wedge issue. What we're missing though is if we declare it dead and over, we're missing the diversity of inputs, the cognitive diversity that we need, fairness as well, of course, but the cognitive diversity of inputs that we need that creates, results in better problem solving. You want an environment of people that look like the market you're trying to serve. Otherwise you're not going to serve the market you're trying to serve.

and very few companies are serving a market that's a monolith. If they are, great, continue with your, everybody looks the same because we're serving a market that looks, sounds, eats, speaks, prays the same. It's rare. Most of us are serving a more diverse market and when you want to serve a more diverse market, you need more diverse inputs.

Skot Waldron (22:18.584)
How does that play into other things that are going to shape the future of work or where we are now?

Heather (22:28.298)
I think we're gonna see more, certainly technology is gonna change us. I think the next conversation we're gonna have is what is creativity? What is genius? What is our ability to offload some of these things to technology at a faster and faster clip and with greater, greater depth and complexity is gonna be like, well, what does the human do? And how do we hire a human? So we used to hire a human based upon,

you've done the job before, you hire somebody into the job who's done the job before. So it was past experience. And then degree became a proxy when we didn't have past experience. And then degree got broken down into skills. We'll just hire the right skills we need, because that's more immediate. People can acquire the skills without degrees. can acquire them through training programs. I think we're going to be looking more and more at behaviors. So what are the behaviors that lead you to believe that this human is highly adaptable, will learn and adapt, will unlearn when they need to unlearn?

You're gonna need more unlearning, because as we hand off more and more things or partner with artificial cognition for more and more things, we're gonna need people who are highly adaptable. So we're gonna start looking at hiring people for behaviors and hiring people into roles where they're gonna be hired in to collaborate with technology and collaborate with other people. So collaboration is gonna be key, behaviors is gonna be key.

Skot Waldron (23:44.088)
love that thought. There was a thought that I was having the other day. was reading a book and it talked about skills based approach to coaching, right? Whether it's you are a coach of some kind or whether you are a leader coaching somebody in your team, mentoring somebody. It's a, I coaching for performance or am I coaching for behavior? And behavior based coaching develops

The person, the skills based performance coaching solves a specific problem. Like, Hey, for today, right? It's like, you've got this time management issue. Let's coach you up in, in that time management issue that's happening. But when I coach the behavior, it doesn't just apply to the time management issue. It'll apply to the person as a whole. And I think that that is something that has been shifting as well of even it's.

Heather (24:19.912)
For today, for today too.

Skot Waldron (24:43.084)
You know, people present their resume and say, here's all my checkboxes and all the things that I've done and done and done. how do we start looking at the behavioral stuff when we are hiring, when we are looking for team members to be in that space, how do we start getting our brain around that idea?

Heather (24:58.846)
Well, I think one way to look at it as a framework I use called belief behaviors and benefits. So in your organization, what do you believe? And what you believe is how you want to see the world differently when you leave this place or at the end of some period of time than you found it today. So what you believe drives the behaviors that you want. The behaviors that you want, if you get them successfully around what you believe gives you the benefits you want. The benefits could be an impact on the world, a certain revenue target, a certain market that you met, a certain problem that you solved.

And the benefits are, you'll continually update your benefits, you will refine your beliefs, and you'll be paying attention to your behavior. So when you're looking at it that way, some of the behaviors, I think right now we have coming out of an era of certainty. We sort of look for leaders who are unquestioned experts, so they know things and they're certain about things. Now if you're an unquestioned expert, it's a liability because you need people who are comfortable saying, I don't know, let's find out. So less certainty, more curiosity. If you hire for curiosity,

You think about it, curiosity underpins empathy. Empathy underpins understanding your market, understanding your customers, understanding your employees, understanding your community, understanding your brand. Curiosity is also a key to exploration. So when you're handing more more things off to technology, we're going to be doing what I call collaborative exploration. In collaborative exploration, the number one behavior that you need is curiosity.

Skot Waldron (26:21.282)
Adam Grant was talking, was listening to another show that he was on yesterday. He was talking to the idea of, some of the best leaders out there are the ones that are a bit unsure of themselves. They are the reluctant leaders. They are the ones that you asked to give a task. like, I don't know if I'm the right person for that thing. there's a sense of humility there and there's a sense of teachability and, and, and being comfortable a little bit more with the, don't know is that.

Heather (26:32.595)
Mm

Heather (26:42.675)
Yes.

Skot Waldron (26:49.996)
That insecurity actually produces science has shown the data shows that producing better leaders. because, you, the people that come in here like, yeah, I got this. I'm on it. No doubt. Like I'm to be the best one at this thing. Are the people are like, I don't know, Bronco, like maybe you should tone it down a bit. So.

Heather (27:11.196)
Yeah, the insecurity is interesting because it can be done in two ways. So the insecure individual who's comfortable being vulnerable and says, I am insecure because I do not know, but I'm open to tell you that I don't know and I want to find out, great leader. The insecure person who says, I have to act like the boss and pretend I know all the answers and lead with imposter syndrome is who we've been picking, bad leader.

Skot Waldron (27:34.53)
Got it. I look at that as the idea of secure, breeds confidence, which breeds hum, there's an element of humility of that teachability insecure can that leads to arrogance means that I'm more prideful in my ability of my, I'm not teachable. am. And that's, think what you're, that's what I see from that, what you would I gathered from what you just said. That's really good.

Going back to your belief statement, think that's really powerful too. That stuck out to me because just reading a bunch of Simon Sinek's work, it's always about like, I want to work with people that believe what I believe. If I start with my, and his whole concept of starting with why is about stating my belief first, and then I'll get to what I do and how I do it. But if I start with my belief and you agree with that and we can get on that level.

That will breed, I guess, like you're saying, the behaviors come from that belief system that then give us the benefit of the outcome that we're desiring.

Heather (28:37.746)
Yes, and it's that belief system that establishes trust. So if we believe the same thing, like we both love our families, but you may have a different kind of family than I do, you may raise your family different than I do, you may define your family differently, but if we can stay with our belief that we both love our families, it's how we have connection, it's how we can trust each other.

Skot Waldron (28:58.05)
Hmm. Yes. I love that. I love it.

Heather (29:01.008)
And we have a trust deficit right now, so it's something we really need to work on. When I talk about the polarization, it's really trust. That's what's in there.

Skot Waldron (29:07.566)
I've seen that a lot too, within whether it is just within teams, within departments, with, with, you see, let me ask you this. Do you see the trust, the lack of trust up the chain or down the Bigger. Which one do you think are the biggest deficits?

Heather (29:28.688)
of both and there might be more reason to have it up the chain than down the So up the chain because you've said things to me that are not true and you know I have been loyal and I was discarded for example and layoffs are terrible every company has to do them. The only person I've seen do them really well is Brian Chesky on that May 5th letter to his Airbnb employees where he said this is what I know this is what I don't know I have to let you folks go this is what I'm gonna do for you this is what you should think about yourself. He confirmed their

worth where most layoffs deny you your worth. And that's a really hard thing to do. So that was a masterclass, I thought, in emotional intelligence. But the trust on the way down surveilling your employees is, don't trust you. And when you don't trust your people, you're not going to get anything done. So that's the trust on the way down that I think is uncalled for. think that we design too much of our work for liars, cheaters, and lazy people. And that's a very small percentage of people. When you look at the

Surveys, when you ask people what their best jobs were or why they did things, it was easy and I could get away with it as a very last answer everybody gives. It was, I did more than I thought I could do. We accomplished something important. I felt like part of something bigger than ourselves. Most of us wanna do the hard things. We just wanna feel that we can trust the people around us.

Skot Waldron (30:47.47)
I heard a story of a company that had massive layoffs. They sent a letter out on Saturday morning to let them know that they don't need to show up on Monday for work. And it was like, when you talk about that was so key of valuing your worth, like what is that communicating to me? That type of transmission of information, that's powerful.

Heather (31:07.068)
Hmm?

Skot Waldron (31:16.386)
I never thought of it that way.

Heather (31:17.138)
That's a really hard thing that we have to work on because the reality is we're gonna have different needs for different types of workers. We're gonna have to let people go. Business models are gonna change. Markets are gonna change. It's gonna be how you do it. And I think there is a way of doing it that says, listen, you were a great, if you weren't a great employee, okay, you can still be compassionate to an individual, but what you did here was important. You were a great employee. I'd like to help you find, get settled somewhere else. gonna set up, and we're just gonna lay off a lot of people.

set up a network of referrals where we try to help you. are alumni, you will always be part of us. That's how I think you wanna hire people so that even if you let them go, you want them to come back one day and you're still proud of the work that they did when they were there.

Skot Waldron (32:02.296)
The adaptation advantage and the empathy advantage, two books that you have out in the world. What are those about? Who picks up those books? Why'd you write those?

Heather (32:08.604)
Mm

Heather (32:14.238)
I wrote them because I was out, I live as a keynote speaker. So I was out doing talks and people were like, you know, asking like, do you have something else I can read? Do have something? So it was after a series of talks, people were asking for it. So the first one was written between 2016, 17, 18 came out in 2020 smack in the middle of the pandemic, April, 2020. So it became sort of an accidental guide to what do you do when you don't know what to do? And it was really about how we've

raise these generations of people with the questions of what do you want to be when you grow up? What's your major trade school? Whatever. And then what do you do? We have this fixed occupational identity. At a time it was becoming really clear we needed people to be far more adaptable, not just in work, not just in tests, not just in relearning, but how they think about themselves in the world, because you're going to go through many chapters. And then how do you lead through that adaptation? So that was the first one.

The second one was experiences through the pandemic where I was like, okay, we need a different profile of leader. And empathy is the key to unlocking that intrinsic motivation. It's the key to driving greater performance. You've got a workforce now that's asking for different things. How do you meet that? How do you form that new social contract? So that's what the second one was about.

Skot Waldron (33:30.094)
Great. Audience, who's the audience?

Heather (33:33.374)
In both cases, leaders, adaptation advantage probably could work for anyone from a college graduate to your last job. Empathy advantages more squarely towards first -time leaders to CEOs.

Skot Waldron (33:46.68)
Okay. Awesome. And you're out on the road a lot speaking, all over the place. What, what are you speaking on right now? Like what's the hot topic?

Heather (33:50.876)
Mm

Heather (33:58.366)
Hot topics right now are how do I get more growth? How do I get, know, it's becoming harder to operate my business today than it was yesterday. We've got rising levels of uncertainty, whether it's who's going to win this election in the US. Four billion people voting this year, most of the planet, 40, 45 % or something like that, of the globe is voting this year. How do I navigate through all this change? How do I lead through this?

How do I deal with AI? I've got people who are afraid of AI. And my mantra has been, you have to understand all the vectors of change that are happening, because people kind of focus on one, like, we need a new business model. We need new growth. need whatever it may be, a single statement. But I see it as like an iceberg. And whatever it is you're trying to get folks to focus on, which is inevitably some form of change, what's happening below the surface is a riptide of societal, cultural, political, technological change. So there's some people who have fears of AI. Some people are...

I'm really concerned about school shootings, the Middle East, another pandemic, the evolving role of gender in our society, which is changing really quickly, especially for some generations. What Gen Z means in the workforce? Are my kids going to do as well as I did? Income and equality. So you have to understand and sort of process all those vectors of change because we are still in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. And what happens when you're lonely is your amygdala goes into overdrive and your parasympathetic nervous system sort of freaks out. So you get in fight or flight mode.

So you take fight or flight mode, loneliness, disengagement, burnout, and then you throw in a riptide of societal and cultural changes and you try to get people to focus on the one change you want them to focus on, you've got to understand where people are and what they're dealing with to help them focus. Because what you really need folks to do is focus right now. We've got a lot going on. But it's a hard thing, sure is. But we've done hard things. We've done more in one human lifetime, this one, than all of recorded history. We've done more to lift folks out of

global poverty, we've almost got 90 some percent lifted out of global poverty. We've got a 90 some percent in literate, globally literate. We've connected 65 % of the globe. It's never been so safe to fly, to put what they tell you. We've got lowest levels of homicide, lowest levels of violent crime in the US and in the world. We had a little uptick during the pandemic for sure, but we are at the safest, most prosperous and most educated.

Heather (36:15.996)
We've ever been in all of recorded history and most of that happened in the last seven years. If we can do that, we can take this next hard thing.

Skot Waldron (36:24.374)
Hmm. Goosebumps. That sounds optimistic. You sound pretty optimistic about why, why, why are you so optimistic when the rest of the world seems so pessimistic and so polarized and angry at things? Why are you so optimistic?

Heather (36:28.998)
I am, Abdu... I am.

Heather (36:42.558)
I believe in the power of humans when they connect to each other. So I'll just tell you a quick story. When I was 18 years old, my brother got diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. He's adopted from Korea. The only way we could save his life was a bone marrow transplant. Adopted from Korea, we got no family members. So my father and I went around the US. This was 1990 and 91.

No cell phones, no social media, no virility, no Facebook, no nothing. Phone calls, letters. We got 7 ,000 people rolled up their sleeves and gave a vial of blood to try to save the life of someone they never met. You can't have that experience and not be optimistic about humans. I think that we are barely scratching the surface of what humans can do. So I had that experience when I was 18 years old. We did not find a donor for my brother, but other friends of ours went over to Korea knocking door to door in the village in which he was relinquished.

found his biological mother, she came over, she was his donor. He got another 30 years on his life. He recently passed away because his cancer came back, but nobody expected him to have that 30 years. He had that 30 years because of, in this case, his birth brother, but there were 7 ,000 other people who were willing to do it. You cannot have that experience and not be optimistic about humans.

Skot Waldron (37:57.518)
What a gift. That's amazing. thanks for sharing that. really appreciate it. There's a, there's a little bit of hope and, and, and one of my, my shirts at a nonprofit, my brother runs is called hope dealers. And, and I say, you know, we're all in the business of dealing hope. and that's, that's what we need to be right now. And, and there's a lot of people that need it right now. with the loneliness epidemic and everything that's happened there, it's, it's a problem. And so the hope.

Is that there is something else there is more, there is better and we can, we can be that together. So thank you. If people want to buy one of your books, I'm sure they can get anywhere books are sold. and what about speaking? If they're interested in hearing you come speak at their organization for the, whatever they're doing. how do they get in touch with you?

Heather (38:47.464)
First, try to support your local, I love Amazon, but try to support your local bookstores, because I like to see more indie bookstores surviving. They're one of my favorite things in the world. The other thing I want to say is talk to your neighbors. We are in a politically polarized time, but I guarantee you that your neighbor who didn't have a different flag or a t -shirt or a hat or anything than you do, you have more in common than you have in difference. It's profitable to divide us, and we have to resist that. We have so much more in common than we have in difference.

If you want to hear more from me, heathermcgowan .com, -c -g -o -w -a -n .com. A lot of information on there. You can find me on LinkedIn, connect to my network, eclipsing me on YouTube speaking. So continue the conversation. I welcome it.

Skot Waldron (39:27.618)
Thanks Heather. You're a rock star. And if people are not watching the video, they should because you have great glasses on today and all your videos have great glasses. So they should just check out for that.

Heather (39:36.826)
Alright, thanks so much for your time.