Truth, Lies & Work

Episode 300 · 12 May 2026 · 1:14:16

JP Morgan's sex scandal, A.I. fears and the executive presence problem. PLUS! Are diverse teams better? With Dr Jake Tuber

Featuring Jake Tuber

JP Morgan's sex scandal, A.I. fears and the executive presence problem. PLUS! Are diverse teams better? With Dr Jake Tuber

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  1. Episode 300 celebrations and introductions

    intro#podcast#milestone#introduction

  2. FOBO: Why Gen Z is resisting AI

    news roundup#gen-z#ai#fobo

  3. The JP Morgan scandal & US job cuts

    news roundup#jp-morgan#scandal#layoffs

  4. Lovable's automatic 10% pay rise

    news roundup#pay-rise#compensation#lovable

  5. Truth or Lie: Do diverse teams perform better?

    truth or lie#diversity#team-performance#truth-or-lie

  6. Workplace Surgery: The drained team lead

    workplace surgery#workplace-advice#team-lead#burnout

  7. Workplace Surgery: The group chat trap

    workplace surgery#communication#group-chat#workplace-culture

  8. Workplace Surgery: The executive presence problem

    workplace surgery#leadership#executive-presence#career-advice

  9. Closing thoughts & where to find Jake

    outro#closing-thoughts#podcast#guest

Show notes

Episode 300: JP Morgan's Sex Scandal, AI Fears & the Executive Presence Problem — with Dr Jake Tuber

Guest: Dr Jake Tuber — industrial-organisational psychologist, host of Forces at Work, and author of the upcoming book The Deliberate Manager.

It's episode 300! 🥂 And to celebrate the milestone, Al and Leanne are joined by a very special guest — Dr Jake Tuber — for a bumper anniversary edition packed with workplace scandals, AI anxiety, and a deep dive into whether diverse teams actually perform better.

Jake brings two contrasting stories to the table: a jaw-dropping $1M settlement offer in a high-profile JP Morgan lawsuit, and the curious case of US job cuts — which are down everywhere except tech. Is AI really the culprit, or is it just a convenient excuse?

Plus, Leanne introduces a brand-new workplace acronym — FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete) — explaining why Gen Z are quietly resisting AI as an act of self-protection. And in Truth or Lie, Jake takes the hot seat to answer the question that's dominated business strategy since the 90s: do diverse teams actually perform better?

Finally, in a special management-themed Workplace Surgery, the trio tackle three burning questions: is the first year of management always this exhausting? What do you do when you accidentally see what your team really thinks of you? And how do you bridge the gap between being a "great executor" and looking like a VP?

🔥 Stories Covered

1. The Rise of "FOBO": Why Gen Z is Resisting AI Move over FOMO — there's a new acronym in town. FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete) is driving a quiet backlash against AI among Gen Z workers. Leanne breaks down why younger employees are slowing down adoption as a form of self-protection against automation that threatens their long-term value — and why this is really a management issue, not a generational one. Source →

2. The JP Morgan Scandal & The Tech Layoff Mystery Jake brings two contrasting stories: a massive $1M settlement offer in a high-profile JP Morgan lawsuit, and the curious case of US job cuts — which are down everywhere except in the Tech sector. Is AI really the culprit, or is it just a convenient excuse for layoffs?

3. The 10% Automatic Pay Rise: A Cure for Toxic Culture? Stockholm startup Lovable has ditched traditional performance reviews and negotiations. Instead, every employee gets an automatic 10% raise on their anniversary. We debate: Does guaranteed security make people work harder, or does a little "insecurity" keep you sharp?

🧠 Truth or Lie: Do Diverse Teams Perform Better?

It's the claim that has dominated business strategy since the 90s, but what does the research actually say? Dr Jake reveals that while cognitive diversity (varied skills and perspectives) consistently boosts innovation, demographic diversity alone can sometimes increase conflict and slow down coordination if not managed correctly.

The verdict? It depends — but the real magic happens when you combine diverse perspectives with deliberate, intentional management.

💬 Workplace Surgery: The Management Edition

In honour of Jake's upcoming book, The Deliberate Manager, we tackle three burning questions:

  1. The Drained Team Lead: "Is the first year of management always this exhausting?"
  2. The Group Chat Trap: "What do you do when you accidentally see what your team really thinks of you?"
  3. Executive Presence: "How do you bridge the gap between being a 'great executor' and looking like a VP?"

(Got a question? Submit it via the connect link below.)

Top 3 Takeaways

  1. Bring data, not assumptions. When you're feeling drained or overwhelmed as a manager, ask yourself: am I bringing assumptions or am I bringing data? Separate the facts from the feelings before you act.
  2. Diversity needs deliberate management. Demographic diversity alone doesn't automatically improve performance — it can increase conflict and slow coordination. The magic happens when you combine diverse perspectives with intentional, skilled management.
  3. Executive presence is part art, part science. There's value in the "play-acting" part of executive presence if it means something in your organisation — but the real foundation is competence, credibility, and knowing your stuff.

More From Dr Jake Tuber

Connect With Us

Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect

Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14

Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Full transcript

Expand full transcript
Leanne ElliottThis episode contains some coarse language, so listener discretion is advised.
Al ElliottComing up this week in work.
Leanne ElliottA.I.'s been causing stress at work for a while, and if you believe the narrative, it was the older generations who were struggling to keep up. But according to headlines this week, Gen Z are the ones feeling the pressure. What's behind it? I'll reveal all in my new word of the week.
Al ElliottAlso this week, one startup is giving every employee an automatic 10% Pay rise every single year. No negotiation, no politics. But does knowing your raise is guaranteed actually make you perform better or worse?
Jake TuberAnd in truth or lie—
Leanne ElliottHey, that's my line!
Al ElliottDr. Jake, what the hell are you doing here, son?
Jake TuberWell, I heard it was your big day today, so I thought I'd lean in and make the announcement for everyone. Leanne is leaving the show. No, it's your 300th episode. I thought I would chime in and help you celebrate. And Leanne, I thought I'd I thought I'd give you an easy week. I thought I'd take some of the burden away.
Leanne ElliottOh, thanks, bud. You're such a gent. Did you bring any cake? No?
Jake TuberNo cake, just Earl Grey tea with a spot of Skimmilk for you. And in Truth or Lie, do diverse teams actually perform better? The idea is that diversity means varied perspectives, which lead to better decisions and more innovation. But does the research back it up? I found the insights and the verdict.
Al ElliottAnd in the Workplace Surgery, one newly promoted executive asks, who the hell puts skim milk in Earl Grey tea? No, no, no. What they really ask is, how do I look more executive? Their colleagues have no problem with how they do their job, but a huge problem with how they show up. Dr. Jake, we have a mystery to solve.
Leanne ElliottThis is Truth, Lies and Work, episode 300. We are the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Al ElliottMy name is Al. I'm a business owner. I'm here to ask the questions that you might be afraid to.
Leanne ElliottAnd my name is Leanne. I'm a child occupational psychologist, and I'm here to answer them along with my mate Jake, who has terrible taste in sea— in tea. Terrible taste in tea.
Al ElliottAnd tea also. South, South Indian is his favourite. So terrible taste. Terrible.
Leanne ElliottAwful.
Jake TuberI went with the Caspian for years.
Al ElliottAnd also, I meant to say that South China, but anyway, carry on. Sorry, Leanne.
Leanne ElliottI'm an organis— organisational psychologist, and Dr. Jake Tuber is here as well. Say hello, Jake.
Jake TuberHello, Jake.
Leanne ElliottTogether, we'll help you simplify the science of work and build amazing workplace cultures. Maybe. I have a feeling this episode's gonna be slightly chaotic.
Al ElliottI was just gonna say that, yeah, be prepared. It will be chaos, but we'll try and get it together and we'll have these next 60 seconds to sort out, give our heads a wobble, as we say in the UK. Right back after a quick word from our sponsors. The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.
Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.
Al ElliottNice. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Welcome back. Welcome back. I'm glad you decided to come back because that intro was, as Leanne said, I think it was some of our best work, actually. Look, Dr. Jake, we've known you for, it feels like at least a month now, right? Yeah. But it does honestly feel like you are, you are, you are like, my brother's getting married next in about a month's time and I'm seriously considering—
Jake TuberOh, I know. I'm doing the ceremony. Yes.
Leanne ElliottI've already been invited.
Al ElliottI was, I was gonna say I was seriously considering my, of ditching Leanne as my plus one and asking you if you'd come along because I'll be there either way.
Jake TuberWe can spend the night together, Al.
Leanne ElliottThat's no problem. Oh, guys.
Al ElliottBig spoon or little spoon? Which do you prefer?
Jake TuberOh, you know what? Honestly, I'm just happy to sleep in a bed without my children kicking me for whatever reason. I'm good.
Al ElliottAwesome. Anyway, Leanne.
Leanne ElliottYeah, episode 300. What a milestone. Oh my gosh. How did we get here? I'd say it's flown by, but it's been a really freaking hard slog. I'm not going to lie. I've aged at least 20 years in the past, past 4 years or so.
Jake TuberBut yeah, it's flown by Spirit Airlines style. Too soon for those in the US? Too soon? No? Okay.
Leanne ElliottSorry.
Al ElliottYeah. And following from chapter 10, this is chapter 11 of our podcast as we— that was a really nerdy bankruptcy joke. I'm just going to just— I'm going to back away from that anyway. Dr. Jake, what's going on in your life?
Leanne ElliottWhat's new news?
Jake TuberOh man, I have big news for you all. Huge news today. Believe it or not, everything in the world now fine. I know we were— it was on the precipice. A lot of worry about things going on in the Strait of Hormuz. But I am here to assure you that everything is fine. And more importantly, everything at work is fine. So this 300th podcast will be your last show because we've solved it all and work is just going well. And that's my update.
Leanne ElliottAwesome. Brilliant.
Al ElliottWell, I like that because politically in the US, everything seems pretty stable.
Leanne ElliottThe UK is fine as well.
Al ElliottNothing's on fire.
Leanne ElliottI mean, as you say, So Keir Starmer did not have a bad weekend at all.
Al ElliottOof, yes.
Leanne ElliottHe is riding high on his election results.
Al ElliottOh God, yeah. I mean, I dunno, for those in the States, I don't know anything about politics or news. I don't read the news, but our Prime Minister had a pretty tough weekend. I can't imagine he got a lot of sleep. I'd imagine that he probably cried himself to sleep most nights.
Leanne ElliottWhat do you think about this, Jake? So he came on, basically we had like local elections, like local council elections, and Labour, who's the party that our current Prime Minister is the leader of, Completely just, just lost.
Al ElliottShit the bed.
Leanne ElliottShit the bed. They lost so much to the point where Wales, which to our American listeners, Wales is a country within the UK. We're made up of 4 different nations. Wales is one of them.
Al ElliottThat's condescending.
Leanne ElliottCome on now. The number of, the number of YouTube Shorts I've watched where someone's, someone's just basically any— you don't need, you know.
Al ElliottJust in case any listeners don't know what condescending means, condescending means talking down to you, just to be really clear. Sorry, Leanne. Yeah, you were talking about Wales.
Leanne ElliottBut anyway, yeah, he lost loads of seats. Wales is now under, is it Plaid Cymru for the first time?
Al ElliottThat'll confuse non-English speakers.
Leanne ElliottIt's a different language as well. But yeah, so he came on today as like a breaking news, Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, is gonna speak live to the nation. I was like, he's gonna resign, he's gonna resign. And he did this rally call of like, we've got this, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna nationalise this organisation. We're gonna rejoin Europe. And I just wondered, it felt like a Hail Mary in the desperate world, words of a troubled man.
Al ElliottIt felt very much like he was going, look, a squirrel.
Leanne ElliottLook over there!
Al ElliottDr. Jake, I'm not going to ask you to comment on UK politics because it sounds like yours— you've got your own problems.
Jake TuberI'm going to make a comment, okay? I heard the election didn't go the way they wanted it to. Okay, now I know a thing or two about elections getting stolen. Okay, happens a lot, a lot more than you think, even in The good countries, the UK ones and all of the countries. But let me tell— okay, excuse me. Okay, excuse me. Meta-talking. And I got to tell you, nobody wins more elections than me. Nobody. Okay? And if they had asked me, I would've said, sure, fine. I'll help you win your election. But they didn't do it. Okay? And I would've won. I could've won the election. The Labour Party.
Al ElliottWhat?
Jake TuberLabor? Do we even— what are you, you're building a house? You're doing your bricks? What is that? What is the party? I want to go to a party. We have a lot of parties down at Mar-a-Lago. Let me tell you, we have the best parties. And I will, I will tell you this. Okay, excuse me. Once we get the new ballroom fixed up, we're gonna have a big party. Labor is involved. All the people, you can come. They're doing the labor party for the party right now on the ballroom. It's gonna be huge. And we're gonna have a great time.
Al ElliottYou guys can't even spell Labour right, so you can't comment on how we— That was, by the way, that was, that was really, really good. By far the 4th best Trump impression we've had on this show so far. So yeah, brilliant.
Jake TuberIf there was any chance my wife was listening up until this point, she has definitely dropped off.
Leanne ElliottReally?
Jake TuberSo you've lost at least one listener.
Al ElliottWell, thank you for that. That's advertising revenue, Dr. Jake. Thank you so much. Are we allowed to ask you about your upcoming project? I'm being very vague because I'm not sure how much you're allowed to say.
Leanne ElliottThe one that he promoted the shit out of the last time he was on the show.
Al ElliottI wasn't listening. Sorry.
Jake TuberYes, absolutely. Very kind of you. Yes, I'm in the midst of finishing up a major draft of what will be my first book, The Deliberate Manager. It will be out not until February of 2027, but hopefully Pre-orders available soon, and I am learning everything there is to know about the book publishing game, and apparently pre-orders are everything. So you and your listeners and my friends and my family members can get excited to get annoyed the shit out of by me when it comes to pre-ordering this book, uh, because apparently that's everything. No, I promised I wasn't going to blatantly promote it, uh, so let's just kind of subtly promote it. How does that sound? Is that okay?
Leanne ElliottDefinitely.
Jake TuberAll right, we're gonna sneak it in. We're gonna just promote it a little bit. We're giving a discount.
Al ElliottJust out of interest, if someone's listening and they go, actually, yeah, I do want to preorder that book, is there a place they can go?
Jake TuberProbably. I don't know yet. It's technically not— I don't think it's technically live as of the time that we're pushing this out. But I would say, in all fairness, if you subscribe to my Substack Workwise, which is just workwise.substack.com or whatever your country's suffix is, I will both have lots of advertisements in there, I'm sure. that include preorder links and also happy to get any of our listeners a free comped paid subscription to the Substack. So if you subscribe and just shoot me a quick note on Substack, I will make sure to do that as well.
Al ElliottNice. Well, I was going to say that we were hoping for a free promo press copy of your book, but actually we've got free Substack access. You gave us that. So we did. Thank you. So we probably should pay for this. But anyway, like you said, we don't want to mention it. We mentioned it once and got away with it, to quote John Cleese. So Leanne, is there any other business before we go to our news roundup?
Leanne ElliottNo, I think we should, we should go to news roundup. It's my favorite time of the week, Al. If you weren't sure, cue the jingle, please.
Al ElliottPressing that button. Leanne, what have you seen?
Leanne ElliottI've got a new word.
Al ElliottYes. Okay. Now we do make notes on this just, just so that we, and we do share the notes. And what I noticed was that Leanne completely redacted proper, like, like, um, Good Morning Vietnam style.
Leanne ElliottLike Jeffrey Epstein files.
Jake TuberYeah. I was gonna say it was like an Epstein level redaction. You could see through it pretty easily if you wanted to.
Leanne ElliottYeah, you totally, totally, you just had to highlight it. Poor Dr. Light.
Al ElliottSo in theory, I definitely don't know what your new word is. Dr. Jake probably has cracked your code, but go on. Hopefully. What's, what's the code? What's the, what's the code? What's the word?
Leanne ElliottPhobo.
Al ElliottFear. FOMO is fear of missing out.
Leanne ElliottFOMO, yeah.
Al ElliottSo phobo is fear of bumming out. No, that's, you can't say that.
Leanne ElliottNo, it's very, very different.
Jake TuberThis is gonna reveal quite a bit. This is an interesting psych test, isn't it? This is gonna reveal a little bit about where our minds go, doesn't it, Al?
Al ElliottMm-hmm.
Jake TuberI'm thinking it's fear of Fear of breaking objects.
Al ElliottOh.
Leanne ElliottOh.
Al ElliottThat's better than mine.
Jake TuberFear of being old.
Al ElliottThat's even better.
Leanne ElliottOh.
Al ElliottWell, that's what it should be. Doesn't matter what it is, that's what it should be.
Leanne ElliottYeah. And do you know what, Jake? You're not far off in terms of it's an age-related thing. Is that right? But it's the wrong side. It's the youths that have unsurprisingly coined this and are running with it. It's the fear of becoming obsolete.
Al ElliottOh, but that still applies to older people.
Jake TuberTrue.
Al ElliottNo offense to Dr. Jake. By the way, just, just in case you— no one's seen Dr. Jake. Dr. Jake is about, is about 20 years younger than me. So, uh, that was definitely, definitely a, a cell phone. Sorry, Leanne.
Leanne ElliottAnyway, FOBO. So this I saw in a Fortune article looking at how the Gen Zed, the Gen Z, sorry, Jake, workers are responding to the rollout of AI. In their workplaces, and I do need to shout out Dr. Eliza Philby, who posted this article on LinkedIn, brought it to my attention. Her content's really good as well, actually. So I'll leave a link to her profile in the show notes. Go follow. So the article basically explains that while companies are investing heavily in AI and encouraging employees to adopt it, there's a growing backlash among younger workers. And I think sometimes we assume it's the older workers, right? Change, ooh, scary. But the younger workers are not happy either. So some employees are resisting or slowing down adoption, and it's not really because they don't understand. Understand the tools or don't, you know, they get it, but because they're concerned about what those tools might mean for the long-term value they bring to the workplace. So it's basically, they're describing it as a form of self-protection. So workers are being asked to use systems that can, of course, automate parts of their role and in some cases replicate tasks they previously owned, which does, of course, raise the question about job security and future career prospects, especially when we're seeing tens of thousands of layoffs in the tech industry. So the article highlights that this fear is particularly pronounced among Gen Z, who are already kind of having to deal with a labour market that is changing rapidly. There's lots of economic uncertainty, and of course, career paths are just very blurry and weird. So in that context, AI isn't so much a tool, it's a representation of disruption to how work is defined and where our human contribution sits. And as a result, the article has described some behaviours which we might call, I don't know, would we call these incivil behaviours? But certainly questioning the reliability of AI and what it can do. So the article frames FOBO as a key reason for why these AI rollouts are not always as smooth as organisations expect. And it suggests that resistance is not simply about capability or willingness but about how people perceive the impact of these tools on their own role and their future. Thoughts, Al and Jake?
Al ElliottCan I just jump in? Because I saw a really interesting article this week where it's— I can't remember where I saw it, but it's basically someone saying that AI isn't necessarily replacing jobs, it's hollowing them out, where you end up just babysitting agents or you end up like— I know when Leanne's working with Claude and this is audio, audio medium, so I can't really show you, but Basically, she'll type and then put her elbows on the, on the desk and touch her mouth and sit there and wait for the reply. Then she'll start typing a bit more. I do that. And I feel that that is kind of where I think a lot of badly implemented AI is happening, where employees are essentially typing something, waiting for something, and going, that's not exactly what I wanted. And in a lot of cases, deskilling or whatever the word is, taking skills away.
Leanne ElliottI'm sorry, what are you trying to say about me in this story? That I'm both Poor at using AI, and I'm degrading my skills by using it.
Al ElliottI was talking generally, but now you've brought it to light.
Leanne ElliottNo, you said my name, Jake. You heard that, right?
Jake TuberSo anyway, I don't know what you're talking about.
Al ElliottBros before hoes. Got it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Well, do you know what? I am going to try and extricate myself from this ditch. And Dr. Jake, what are your thoughts?
Jake TuberWhat you just said there reminds me of an interesting parallel, which is when knowledge work really first surfaced in the workforce, you had a bunch of people who were doing work, who got elevated to the role of manager, and they were managing essentially a not-so-great knowledge work junior workforce. And so they spent a lot of time just kind of sitting around, sort of supervising them, giving them instructions, seeing when they came back and did things. And now a lot of this agentic stuff is just kind of that, but in LLM form. So you have kind of a replication of What it was probably like in many ways to first be part of organizations that, what, I don't know, the '70s or '80s as knowledge work exploded and you could hand work down to slightly less capable, slightly more needy, different responsive type of employees. Now you're sort of seeing the same thing. I mean, that's kind of what it is, right? You see people kind of sitting around watching the agents do the work, not so great, giving them some instruction, et cetera. That's like a lot of what early middle management was like. A lot of what middle management probably still is like in too many organizations. Yeah.
Leanne ElliottYeah, I like that parallel a lot. And I think this is where, again, it comes down to it's a management issue, right? Because it's like any change, isn't it, or digital transformation, as they might call it in corporate, is if you're not having that, those conversations, that consultation with employees ahead of the rollout in terms of what it means for jobs, what it means for job design, for job crafting, for, for the whole employee experience, and managers aren't really trained to do this, It just causes anxiety and apprehension and ultimately resistance to change. So I think it's— I think you're right, Jake. I think it's an old, an old problem in new clothes.
Jake TuberI like that. One of the challenges that I think organizations will see as well is that there is a big conflation happening between whether or not technology can do a job and whether or not organizations are actually capable of adopting that technology. So when you see a lot of predictions from leaders at organizations Like Microsoft, like OpenAI, about AI is gonna be able to do all of these jobs. Yes, in a vacuum you could construct DNA of an organization from scratch that would enable AI to do that work, but that's very different than implementing AI in a system that has a lot of different handoffs and moving parts, and it's been built far more around human inefficiency than we realize. I see it as very similar to the fact that Self-driving cars, if they were the only things on the road, would drive extremely safely all the time. But they're navigating a road infrastructure that was built for humans and is still being driven by humans. So they stop and stutter and don't work perfectly in all the places. Some new places that are built just for them, they do just fine. But within human infrastructure, it's a challenge. And so I do think that AI adoption will still lag behind the technological capabilities. Because there's an infrastructure problem. They don't have the roads there, so to speak, to allow AI to flourish. And just because it can get done technologically, it doesn't mean the organization can do it. But that won't stop leaders from spending money on AI, or maybe, as we can talk more about, saying that AI is the reason that they're making job cuts, et cetera. The AI can do some of the tasks, but the tasks all added together is not the full sum that makes up The work getting done.
Al ElliottI love that the roads aren't there where we're going, Marty. We don't need roads. I love that. I love that. We will definitely come back to that. There was a really quickly, there was a, there was an also I saw another thing, but it was a survey by Gartner, I think, saying that 70% of the rollout of AI agents have failed in industry, which is, which makes sense because there's a whole like, I don't know about you, but I'm really in this nerdy AI stuff on X. And so I'm like looking at all the stuff that's really cool and how you get right into Claude and you get into memory and harness and all that. Whereas actually we're like 0.1% of the population, us nerds, and the majority of people are just going, oh well, let's just do Claude, get Claude to do that, and it, and it drops a bollock, as they say again in the UK. Anyway, Lee, any more on that or do we need to go to Mr.
Leanne ElliottJake? No more on that. I'll leave a link in the show notes. Jake, what have you seen this week?
Jake TuberHave you heard about the salacious employee lawsuit happening at JPMorgan?
Al ElliottI haven't.
Jake TuberSo the simple version, Al, is that a junior—
Al ElliottSorry, can I just stop you there? The simple version, Al? That's one of the nicest and most offensive things anyone's ever said to me. But carry on. The simple version.
Jake TuberLet me break this down, Al. So there are people who have money and they call it a bank, and those people want other people to have money. And so they have a thing. They go to a building and they sit at— sorry. Nobody can see this, but Al is bright red and it makes me quite happy. Let me tell you about the salacious lawsuit, though, across the pond from y'all. So the version here is that a junior male employee has accused a senior female employee of essentially threatening his career and making racially insensitive remarks. Unless he submitted to all sorts of interesting sexual escapades, while the senior female employee categorically denies the entire thing, saying not only it's been blown out of proportion, but the entire thing is absurd and made up. So the interesting part, I think, for our purposes, is that word of the proposed settlement was leaked to the New York Times. JP Morgan offered $1 million to this junior male employee.
Al ElliottWow.
Jake TuberJust to settle the suit and keep it quiet, and he and his law team said no. Now, this might make it sound like there's obvious guilt and he realizes that he's got a lot more to gain by playing this out in the courts and letting this litigate, but it's also entirely plausible that $1 million is just the cost of doing business for a company like JP Morgan. It would cost them less to spend that million and pay this thing out quietly than to bother litigating it for years than the amount of money attributed to the bad press, et cetera. And I think that's probably something that I bet most of our listeners don't realize, which is just the frequency with which companies settle suits here in the US anyway, simply because it is just much cheaper to consistently settle lawsuits than it is to actually go through the process of discovery and pay for lawyers and outside counsel and litigation. Before you even get to something like bad press on a major scale. And I can tell you that I have worked with many companies where I have seen employees file absolutely, frankly, absurd lawsuits claiming things that I happen to know are just completely untrue. And the amount of time they get settled for an amount of money that, frankly, I don't think the organization should pay is staggering. And that's part of why employees keep doing it. Now, It's not a lot to the organization, and after the employee has to pay their lawyers out and taxes and all those other things, it's actually not all that much to them usually either. But this is built into large companies' P&Ls, is the cost of just paying out a certain amount of lawsuits every year, because it's simply cheaper and quicker and easier to pay them than it is to fight them.
Al ElliottI heard a stat, and this is probably one of those like old wives' tales, and there's, there's a fancy Yeah. And I think there's a fancy word for old wives' tales, and I can't really think what it is. I'm sure, Jake, you'll tell me what it is. But where if you earn over $100,000 a year in the US, you've got a 1 in 3 chance of being sued at some point in your life. Is that completely made up? Is that one of those?
Jake TuberOh, it could easily be the case, but I'm sure that might also count, you know, somebody suing you for a fender bender or something like that. They're technically— the insurance company won't pay it. So I don't know how you'd really measure that. But yeah, it wouldn't shock me. But yeah, there's a shocking amount of— and it depends what you consider really getting sued, right? Is, is sending a letter saying we're intending to file suit getting counted as that? But the US is such a heavily litigious country that this doesn't surprise me at all. Uh, there's a whole industry, whether it's ambulance-chasing attorneys and personal injury to the corporate space, where folks are just kind of buying and selling settlements. It's kind of wild.
Al ElliottLeanne, thoughts?
Leanne ElliottMy frustration with with this approach is that it comes a bit farcical, doesn't it? It just comes to a game of like whether we just, we just don't know. There's never any accountability in terms of somebody having to be found guilty in a sense of something wrong or immoral or unethical that they've done in workplaces. And I, and I understand that if that, if you're in that litigious environment, organization is going to put aside a budget for that. But it also then, to me, feels a bit icky because there's just an assumption that whether it's true or not, somebody's gonna fuck up at some point this year in a way that is, is, you know. And if it is true, then what an awful, awful thing for this individual to have gone through. And particularly for a man to raise concerns about this, it's actually quite rare.
Al ElliottYes.
Leanne ElliottSo really, there could be a a lot to, to, to learn from this and take from this and, and hold JP Morgan and this individual to account for this in a really, you know, a way that could be very progressive for our workplaces. So I think my frustration is less about the money itself, but how it, it, it influences a system that should be about some form of justice or, or accountability. And it just brings it back to a, a money game, which I'm not sure is useful for anybody really.
Al ElliottIn a different world, in a world, in a different life, I was, I trained as a maths teacher for like 11 to 18. I'm not sure what you call it in the US, but it's middle school and upper school here. And one of the best bits of advice I got was never put yourself in a situation where someone could make an accusation. One of the children could make an accusation. So if you're in a room, always keep the door open. Ideally have someone—
Jake TuberThe door open, sure.
Al ElliottYeah. Someone else there. And it felt very sad because we're going back to like the early 1800s when, when I was teacher training, but it did feel really sad at that point. But since we've moved on, that's one of the best advice I've ever got. So in any situation where it's with male, female, whatever, I will always try and ensure that I'm not in a, in a room with a closed door because just that, you know, that idea of, oh, where there's smoke, there's fire and all that, you just You could just be fucked, couldn't you, from just someone just uttering 9 words and then that's your career just up in flames?
Jake TuberIt's, it's such a tough reality to balance both the desire to believe people who come out saying, I've experienced something really horrible for me, and yet at the same time maintain the capability, if it's proven to not be true, to not hold it against the person who is accused, right? You have that illusory truth effect in where whatever gets put out into the world just sort of sits in people's brains as if it's true, even if it's debunked tenfold later. And that's really challenging. I've definitely known quite a few people who have been— I don't want to say necessarily wrongfully accused, though there's been part of it— or accused of something that didn't really rise to the level of it was, and it kind of lives on in a really sad way. And then there's, of course, many more times where somebody doesn't raise their hand to make a completely credible accusation because they don't believe that they'll be believed or something like that. So So it's just a really painful, complicated case-by-case situation where this sort of thing happens. And yes, the fact that I think, Leanne, to your earlier point, we don't always get a chance to really figure out the truth. We really just kind of figure out the situation and move past it is very dissatisfying. And certainly the American legal system has really been built around that. Al, to your point as well, some of my friends who are employment lawyers love to remind their clients and others that They should never say or email or text or Slack or whatever anything that they wouldn't be okay with being read out loud in a courtroom in front of their friends and family. And that's pretty good advice. If you're not sure if you— whether or not you'd be okay having that read out in front of your closest friends and family in the whole world and wind up on Google's first page forever, probably just don't do it or say it.
Al ElliottYeah, that's really, really good advice. Right, we are running short of time, so I will quickly tell you what I've been Looking at this week, we've got Dr. Jake here, and so this is this is very apt because Dr. Jake is very lovable, and Stockholm startup Lovable is apparently giving every employee an automatic 10% pay rise on their work anniversary. So this is like you don't negotiate for it. There's no annual review to see whether you're going to get it. There's no politics of well he got 15%, he got 8%. You just if you stay, then you get 10% on every year on year, year on year.
Leanne ElliottWow!
Al ElliottNow bear in mind this is a This is a small company really in terms of AI. I think it's 100 and let me just check. I did—
Jake TuberI was gonna say it's just one employee.
Leanne ElliottIt's a single member LLC.
Al ElliottYou made me cough on my own spit there. Uh, yeah, I think it's 120-odd employees. So it's not massive and it has only been going for a couple of years. So, um, you know, we don't know what's gonna happen. It's in AI, which, you know, it might be bought out, it might go out of business, whatever. But the point is the longer you stay, the more valuable you, you become. So the head of growth— now let me just double-check this— the head of growth, Elena Werner— I like saying that, Elena Werner— she basically said, and I'll read, employees shouldn't have to reprove their worth every single year just to keep what they've already earned. Now, to be fair, Lovable, it's not your average company. They're just crossing $400 million in what they call ARR. Well, everyone calls ARR, but annual Recurring, recurring revenue. Easy for me to say.
Leanne Elliott$400 million in annual recurring revenue.
Jake TuberYep. And that's almost what you guys do for this show.
Leanne ElliottAlmost, Jake, almost. And we're, we're like, we've been going, yeah, longer. What does Lovable do?
Al ElliottUh, Lovable is a vibe coding— well, they probably don't call themselves vibe coding, but basically if you want to go and build a website, then you go to Lovable and you create a website and you'd give it an English, like a natural English prompt, and it would just basically build a website. And it's different Claude in that you build it and then they host it. You don't need to like go and say, right, thanks for the files. I will now upload to AWS or Cloudflare or whatever you do. They just host it all and it's all done. So it's for—
Leanne ElliottI see where that recurring revenue bit is coming in then.
Al ElliottWell, exactly. They're a bit smarter. Not that smart. I can't say they're smarter than Anthropic, Anthropic being the most valuable company or the fastest growing company in the world ever. But they are, I think they're pretty smart and I think they're pretty cool. But the point is, sorry, I've gone off track here. I've gone nerdery. The point is, to the, to 2 of the world famous eminent psychologists in the world, my thought was, if you're automatically gonna get 10%, does that mean that you're a bit less motivated to put your best in? Thoughts? Dr. Jake, should we go to you first and then we'll go to the second best psychologist in the room?
Jake TuberI mean, you're not wrong about You shouldn't be starting with me. You know, I, I appreciate the reflexive instinct that, okay, well, if we're decoupling performance management from pay, then what's the incentive to keep trying? I don't think you should be worried about that. I do think, in fact, it's probably healthier to decouple performance management from the actual paid incentive structure that employees rely on year over year. Yeah. But I also would, would go the other direction now, which is I hope they don't just get rid of measuring and driving for performance in general. And I don't think they are as well. So I don't think we should read this as if employees are just never going to be assessed on performance and they're just going to continue to coast and do their job with 10% more coming year over year. I do think, though, that the idea of, hey, we're just going to say what you get across the board, you don't need to fight about it, you don't need to argue about it. You know what you're walking into. Now you're focused on actually getting ahead, et cetera. And again, it doesn't mean there aren't promotions, there aren't new opportunities and roles, but this gets back into some of the things we discussed a few episodes ago around hygiene factors versus real motivators. And I love the idea of decoupling performance rewards from performance management. I think it's hard to do, but I think this is an impressive way to continue to think about it. But I'll also add, by the way, this isn't all that novel. There's a lot of jobs in the US and elsewhere where You're in a job and as part of your union rate, you just get a certain raise every year. You might be able to negotiate more, might not be this set in stone, but this isn't absolutely unheard of. A lot of teacher salaries and other things work this way, so it's not crazy.
Leanne ElliottI'm with Jake. I think, I think what I would be more excited about, and this is good, don't get me wrong, this is lovely. I want to, I want to hear about the other stuff that's being coupled or it's being done alongside of. So is pay transparency a thing? Does everybody know In terms of salary, is pay equity a thing? How is how is performance managed then, and how is that rewarded in terms of promotions or development or other aspects of recognition? I think sometimes my concern is business owners listening might go, "Oh cool, so I'll just give everyone a 10% pay rise every year, and that's my job done." And it's like, "No, no, that's nice, but that's as you know, as Jake said, that's that's not the be-all end-all of all of." of motivation. It's, it's a bit more, dare I say, holistic than that. There's more to it. So I'd want to hear more what's going alongside it to get really excited about it.
Al ElliottGood point.
Jake TuberI don't think that simply saying you're going to earn more next year, that's a bit more than just indexed to the cost of living and inflation, is necessarily going to stop people from trying. In fact, if people seem to stop trying because of that, it's a great indicator that they probably don't belong at your organization, period. I don't know if it necessarily would weed out people writ large because everybody is still there for a paycheck. It's a job. But it would weed out people who are only tied to the value of the work being directly attributable to their compensation in the very near term. And it's not that you can't work really well with employees who want to be compensated more for doing well, but depending on your strategy, depending on the kind of choices you want people to make short versus long term, it can lead to not so great consequences at times. So I do think there's something really to this. And I've been on Lovable myself. I actually checked it out a couple months ago randomly, and it seems like a pretty cool site. So it doesn't surprise me that they're doing cool stuff internally as well as externally.
Al ElliottNice. Nice. Okay, we need to go to a very, very short break. After the break, we've got truth or lie. That's where Dr. Jake is going to be illuminating us on whether something is a truth or it is a lie. And then we've got the world-famous Weekly Workplace Surgery where I put your questions to both Leanne and Dr. Jake. Don't go anywhere.
Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number one management podcast, that's us, by the way, and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network?
Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioral science to help people do better at work.
Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.
Jake TuberAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good-looking.
Al ElliottAnd you're not gonna say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s— the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Jake TuberSeamless, seamless.
Al ElliottTell us about your latest episode, Phil. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie Indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work, and we talk about the behavioural science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff, and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well.
Jake TuberIt is.
Leanne ElliottIt's such it's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing, but there's also just some really interesting episodes that will be right up your alley. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?
Jake TuberIt can.
Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?
Al ElliottI am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.
Leanne ElliottBut come back.
Al ElliottYeah, come back.
Jake TuberDefinitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back.
Al ElliottI'll cut that out. Keep that in. Welcome back to Truth or Lies, that time of the week where we take a popular workplace idea and ask if the research actually backs it up.
Leanne ElliottAnd this week I get a week off. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Jake. You're my hero. And we are examining together, but let's be honest, Al and I have done very little to contribute to this segment, if diverse teams perform better. It is a claim that has been growing since the 1990s when businesses stopped treating diversity as a legal obligation and started treating it as a competitive advantage. The idea is basically that varied perspectives lead to better decisions and more innovation. But is it true? Dr. Jake, over to you.
Jake TuberLeanne, this is the part of the show where I make the recurring joke that our segment is really called It Depends, which of course is the correct answer to any good question. But I will say in this case, the answer to your question about whether or not diversity engenders better performance depends, I would say, on 2 major things. One, What kind of diversity? What do we mean by that? And what kind of tasks is a team working on? So they have been studying this for quite some time because in addition to pushing diversity for moral or ethical reasons, organizations in the '90s that looked at this started saying, hang on a second, there might be some money to be made out of diversity. It's not just a do-gooder move. This is actually a do-better move. And they have done quite a bit of research, uh, really I would say most of it in the past 20 years or so. Uh, and I'll share some of the highlights. So first and foremost, what kind of diversity generally produces better results? So task-related diversity, meaning differences in skill sets, in education and expertise, or even experience, that is more consistently linked to better performance than what you would call demographic diversity, race, age, gender, et cetera. So a study in 2011 from Bell et al. found this as well. So if you are diverse with respect to what specific skills and experiences you're showing up with, that's generally going to help you out. And it does help. Diverse teams in the right ways do tend to generate more innovation and creativity. Studies in 2010, Hunt et al., 2018 found the same thing. There is some value in having what you might consider demographic diversity though, uh, in particular cultural and demographic diversity.
Al ElliottMm-hmm.
Jake TuberSo racial, ethnic, et cetera, can improve decision quality and problem solving. But it can also, and this is where it gets really interesting, it can also increase conflict in teams. It can reduce cohesion, it can slow down coordination. People tend to communicate differently, have different assumptions, et cetera. And those can both be great at helping decision quality and problem solving, but can also get in the way. Uh, and while those diverse teams do tend to perform pretty well on things like creativity and innovation, et cetera, That's not always true when the work is pretty standardized or repetitive. In fact, some research as far back as 2007 found that homogenous teams sometimes coordinate more efficiently on those standard repetitive tasks. So where does this really leave us in answer to our question? Well, a large meta-analysis— Al, that one's for you— suggests that diversity alone doesn't guarantee higher performance. The outcomes really depend. Hmm. On, as you might expect, how well that diversity is led and managed. So places with great leadership culture, etc., diversity is a real asset. Places where management and leadership really suffer and there's not enough psychological safety, then diversity can actually slow teams down and hamper things. So I think that really leaves organizations with two challenges, and Leanne, Al, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. First, Diversity generally that matters most is the diversity of thought and perspective, what we might call cognitive diversity. But that's kind of weakly correlated with many of the measured categories of diversity, like race and ethnicity. So if you want to dig deeper, like many of those findings are pretty predictable. Nationality and culture tend to show stronger correlations with cognitive diversity, but national culture and measurability, that, you know, that makes sense. That shapes norms. Yeah. Whereas things like educational background, profession, socioeconomic class, those often predict cognitive differences strongly, much more strongly than just race. So there can be a mismatch in terms of what we want to get out of having a diverse team and that what actually drives performance. If we are all just looking for basic categories of diversity that are easier to measure and check the box on, we may not actually get the benefits of diversity that we're seeking. And that's really number one. The second thing that I'm seeing is that all of this is nothing without the right management and leadership, without enough psychological safety, without the right norms for getting all those diverse perspectives to flourish. Diversity might actually make things worse. So baseline, you need to strive for good management. That's where I come down on it.
Al ElliottInteresting. Lee, thoughts?
Leanne ElliottIf you do one thing—
Al ElliottYeah.
Leanne ElliottIt's all about managers, isn't it? I have a question. So, I remember reading Adam Grant's Hidden Potential, and he was talking about how the issue with diversity as it currently is in terms of, of kind of assessing it or recognising it in recruitment structures is that, as you say, it's a tick box exercise rather than taking it to what that individual's necessarily been through. Yeah. So, in everything you've kind of summed up about diversity, how might we apply that in certain aspects of organizational life, such as recruitment, to know that we're recruiting diversity in the right way, assuming we have the management structures to manage it once they're in the organization.
Jake TuberIt's a bit of a catch-22 because in some ways, some of what you're suggesting we look for, we've actually made illegal to scan for, at least in the US, right? There's certain questions you rightfully, for decent reasons, can't ask about because it leads to prejudices and bias that we don't want. At the same time, those might actually reveal things about their educational or economic background that are actually really interesting indicators for how they did in school or beyond. So I do think there's a bit of a catch-22 there. I also think that it's just not traditionally what organizations have looked for. It doesn't mean they can't find them, though. It just takes different tools and approaches to be able to look for cognitive diversity. You might have to use a broader and at times slightly more expensive suite of psychometric tools. to help evaluate candidates than just, say, looking at things on their resume. That's going to slow down a recruitment process a little bit. It should mean that the people you actually hire do stick around and do better. And I would argue it's probably net worth it. But that's not exactly what recruiting and HR is incentivized to do when they're told we need to replace this person, get butts in seats. They just run the same playbook they've always run. So you need to essentially look under different rocks if you want to see different things scurrying about. But we don't necessarily give organizations the tools and time and frankly energy to go about doing that. So what do they do? They use proxies, things like race or ethnicity, etc. And that's a real challenge. You know, I was speaking with not long ago an old friend who works in HR at a large financial institution here in New York, and they were talking about how if you look at their organization on paper, they're incredibly racially diverse because of hiring pushes they've really made for the past several decades. But all of the people who come from diverse racial backgrounds are from the same 12 universities of all the superstars who they're hiring anyway. So the kind of person that's going to Princeton, Yale, UPenn, et cetera, and going into finance in New York City, the fact that that person has darker or lighter skin really doesn't differentiate the way they've been shaped as a person because they largely came up in a socioeconomic strata or class or series of experiences. That actually make for a relatively homogenous group of people underneath the surface. And so that's what's so hard is what you want is diversity underneath the surface. And oftentimes the only proxies that we can look at or do look at are things that are very superficial.
Al ElliottYou said something there, and I'm gonna horribly butcher what you said, but something about diverse teams tend to perform especially well on creative or innovative or maybe non-routine tasks. And then you use this, this word homogeneous, which I've only ever seen on describe milk. Homogeneous would be more like standardized or repetitive tasks. And I'm like, okay, as a stupid business owner, I'm like, well, what the hell am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to recruit for compliance? And I just want everyone to look exactly the same. And then for the creative, I want everyone to be different. What am I supposed to do with that?
Jake TuberYeah. I would say there's 2 answers to this in my mind. The first is focus on, regardless of who you recruit for, setting up management to get the most out of their teams. So good management practices, training and educating managers, really writing out and clarifying norms and expectations, and not just leaving them up to the whims of whoever happens to be in the room. Because whether or not you have a homogenous or heterogeneous team, you wanna make sure that your managers are getting the most out of those conversations that they're happening. And that is where diversity can really flourish. So if you have, one, management that is well-trained and well-equipped in place, you don't need to worry as much about whether or not the team being too diverse or not diverse enough will do its job. Number 2, then, if you have good management in place, you can focus entirely on hiring for the right skill sets, abilities, and knowledge rather than really thinking at all about what those people are, because you're gonna have teams that are really diverse, potentially in background, be able to perform really well on creative and innovative, uh, non-routine tasks. So if what you want to get out of your business is creativity and innovation, then in those particular areas, look for a diversity of cognitive skills. You can use other proxies for cognition beyond just necessarily how they perform on a Watson-Glaser assessment, if you will, but try to use those tools and techniques to figure out cognitive diversity strengths, and then you don't have to worry about as much whether or not they're actually going to flourish because you've got the management in place. What do you think, Leanne?
Leanne ElliottI agree. It all comes down to that job analysis, doesn't it? What are the knowledge, skills, and abilities somebody needs to do that job? And detaching from where we wrongly assume that might come from. And what's sticking in my head, and this is such an Al example, is Suits, you know, the TV show?
Al ElliottMike Ross.
Leanne ElliottYeah, Mike Ross.
Al ElliottDo your goddamn job.
Leanne ElliottGoddamn. But you know how Mike Ross was like, everyone had to go to Harvard to be able to work at the law firm. But then Mike Ross walks in completely not from that background at all, but has the, as Jake's saying, the cognitive ability to walk into that world and challenge it and think differently whilst thinking similar enough to reach the outcomes in the way the organisation needed him to. And it's such a, it's a silly example, But the point to make that if you forget about Harvard, if you forget about the university, if you forget about where these skills, you think they should have been developed for some kind of nonsense prestige perspective, and actually just think about what is the knowledge, skills, and abilities somebody needs for this job, and how do we assess them in a recruitment process in the best way we can that is non-biased? And that is hard as well, because a lot of things like psychometrics have are very biased in terms of certain white demographics. So, we need to be careful with that as well. So, yeah. And what I love about this as well is it's— this is— I don't know about you, Jake, but I think when it comes to recruitment and psychological assessment work, it's one of the most sciency bits of psychology we have in terms of org psych. So much research behind it, so many years that I think it can really bring in—
Jake TuberIt's the origin of the field, right? Like, the actual origins of industrial psychology go back in the US to selection for World War I and putting the right people You know, putting the idiots in the front of the lines with guns and all the smart folks who need to do strategy behind, right? That's really how IO psychology really took off. That and Frederick Taylor's scientific management of measuring performance in the US over a century ago. And I think you're right, it is, it is, it's applied statistics at its core, which is what that aspect of job selection really is. And it's funny you mentioned that Suits piece, Leanne, because I'm actually in the midst of a project right now working with a tremendous law firm here in the US. Really love them. That is finding that they're not able to get recruitment right out of law school, and they're really relooking at how they're going about doing things. But it's a good reminder, I think, for people like you and I who know all the science and literature about this, that recruitment happens in the real world and it's really messy. So we can sit around and talk all day about wouldn't it be better to just put things out there and really look at skills and use these tools, etc.? That hiring manager is getting yelled at by some partner at a law firm right now to make sure they have a robust enough class of summer associates, and they can only go to so many places. And to get into the on-campus interviewing schedule at various schools this late in the year is difficult. So they're going to go back to the places they did. And the people that need to go and run those interviews, they're busy partners that need to build 2,000 hours a year. And so to train them up on something new and convince them to buy in on a completely new approach to hiring, that's not super easy. And so while, yes, you and I can sit here all day and say, wouldn't it be great to just look at the skills and detach from all the school names and look at resumes completely blind. And the reality is most organizations are like, I need to hire somebody for this one job today. I posted it online. I really wanna get this person in because someone else is gonna quit if we don't get them some relief and support here. We've got 15 applicants. I think diversity matters. 2 of these folks are minority women. I'm gonna give them more of a shot. And I totally get it. I totally get it. I don't think it's necessarily right or wrong. Um, but a lot of these things, I do think that people like you and I, Leanne, get lost in the kind of woulda, coulda, shoulda world. Mm-hmm. And the reality is the actual day-to-day pressures of people making these decisions are much more influenced by, gosh, who's actually responded to this job and seems halfway decent and we can get them in before we lose out on everything that we need to get done. Yeah. And then we're stuck and we just get into that loop again.
Leanne ElliottI don't know about you, but I know when I've worked with, with clients in terms of recruitment, I've almost had to say to them, just humor me. Just let me do one role and let me show you the difference it will make. And it's once they then see that in terms of the fit, the levels of performance in those first few months, and the engagement they're then in that role, they're with the organization 4 or 5 years. It's almost like you need to, you're right, as psychologists, we need to kind of put our neck on the line as well and go, just trust me with one role. Let me show you.
Jake TuberYeah. I call this the Dwayne The Rock Johnson theory of change management.
Leanne ElliottMm-hmm.
Jake TuberYou can't go from being The Rock to being Dwayne Johnson right away. So if you look at The Rock, he was a, a wrestling star, right? I, I don't know what, Worldwide Wrestling Federation, something. When he was first going into movies, it was, if you look at the movie poster, it said The Scorpion King featuring The Rock, 'cause that's who he was known at. Now he wants to stop being typecast as just a big brute 'cause he's charming and handsome and thoughtful. And so he wants to move into more mainstream movies, but you can't just start calling yourself Dwayne Johnson. Nobody knows who you are. Everybody knows you as The Rock. So if you look at his movie posters in the early 2000s, it's all featuring The Rock. And then slowly you start to see him being this movie starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, right? Gridiron Gang starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson. And now if you see movie posters, it's, you know, Fast and Furious 15 starring Dwayne Johnson. You've got to spend a little bit of time doing both. And I think people in our space have to have a little bit more of that Dwayne The Rock Johnson time, where you're like, I don't need to upend everything you're doing in recruiting because the literature says it's wrong. Let's take off a little piece here that we can bite down on. Let's chew this one bit, see how it goes, and then eventually we can become Dwayne Johnson.
Al ElliottI love that. And I love your deliberate decision to choose The Rock rather than Kanye West, because that's been a slightly, slightly more awkward metamorphosis, isn't it?
Jake TuberI was gonna go also with the transition, That's the transition that Ludacris made to just becoming Chris Bridges, right? He was Ludacris the rapper. He was then— it was Chris Ludacris Bridges, and now it's just Chris Bridges. That's, you know, same thing. But yeah, we can make this a Kanye-free— you're— listen, Al, you're the one spending all the time on Twitter or X or whatever, okay? That's not me. So if there's anyone here that's in Kanye's orbit, you know—
Al ElliottJust to be clear, I do not follow or have anything to do with Kanye Ye or whatever he's calling himself these days. God, I'm ashamed that I I think I might know what the new name was. Anyway, I tried to set myself up for a most seamless link by saying you made a deliberate decision. And then I was gonna say, talking of deliberation and deliberate, Mm-hmm. Jake's book, The Deliberate Manager: The 8 Postures That Make Management Conversations Work, is out in February 2027. And he also has, cheeky, yeah, I dunno if he's getting paid by the word or not, but the title seems to have a parenthesis after that. So I think there's probably more, more words in the COVID of this book than there actually is in it. But The Deliberate Manager is out. February 2027. We thought we'd get a little bit of a head start on helping you with the annoying amount of promotion you're gonna do. And we know you, so we know it will be annoying and relentless, but we're really excited about it. So this week's surgery is dedicated to your most burning management questions. Now, I have not said it yet, so this is welcome to the world famous weekly workplace surgery where I put your most burning management questions to Dr. Jake.
Leanne ElliottJake!
Al ElliottAre you ready for question number 1?
Jake TuberI am so ready. I am so ready. Can I be annoying now, or does that start later?
Leanne ElliottOh, you started that a long time ago, friend. Don't worry.
Jake TuberOuch. Zing. All right.
Al ElliottI do feel really bad because this is probably literally the 3rd person, 3rd time we've ever spoken. And all of those times I have taken the chronic piss out of you. So I'm so sorry about that. I do.
Jake TuberI was going to say, all of those times I have been sufficiently annoying.
Al ElliottYou haven't.
Jake TuberYou haven't.
Al ElliottStanding on firm Let me get on to question number 1. So, so this question is all about someone is a new team lead and it's draining them and they want to know what's going wrong. So, hi, Dr. Jake, I've been leading a small team for about a year now, and while things look fine on the surface, I'm finding it much harder than I expected. I struggle to be clear without sounding harsh. I second-guess myself. I'm not sure how involved I should be, and I don't want to micromanage. And on top of that, I feel like I just don't have a grasp of what's going on.
Jake TuberYeah.
Al ElliottIt's starting to feel quite draining, and I'm thinking a lot about work outside of hours. So my question is this: is this just what the first few years of management feels like, or are there things I should be doing differently to make this a little less stressful for me? Dr. Jake, over to you.
Jake TuberI'm sorry to this person that management has been so tough. That's really hard, and I think you're not alone in thinking and feeling this way. What I would first do is push back.
Leanne ElliottYeah.
Jake TuberI wanna push back though on this, which is, are you bringing me assumptions or are you bringing me data? When you say you're struggling to sound clear without sounding harsh, when you are not sure how involved to be without slipping into micromanagement, is that because you've been told this by your subordinates or your colleagues or your boss? You've been given this feedback, or is that just a fear you have? Because the first thing I would say is, if you're not 100% sure of this, Go get that data. Test these assumptions. I'm not sure that's really true, and you are very, very, very right to think that you don't want to be micromanaging and you want to get things right. But I also suspect that someone who's worried about these things is probably doing a better job as a manager than you think. So my first question to you is, how do you know any of this is true? It might just be that this is what the first year of management feels like, and certainly second-guessing yourself in any new role is entirely understandable. But I'm not sure this is true. So before you kind of put yourself out there as fledgling and failing, go find out, ask for a 360, ask for some feedback from others, get that data, take it upon yourself to find out if any of this is really the case.
Al ElliottExcellent answer. Leanne, anything to add?
Leanne ElliottYeah, I agree. And, and I love that you said that, Jake, I was thinking the same, that somebody who's even worrying about these things is probably doing a better job than than the majority of managers out there, because you care. Genuine concern is one of the biggest predictors of, of, of good management and performance. So, I love that.
Al ElliottMm-hmm.
Leanne ElliottThe thing I would say is that I'd try and unravel this from a people management problem to an operational management problem, because you mentioned there a couple of things in terms of like, not, not sure if you're feeling on top of things, not sure if you're slipping into micromanagement, change has been tougher than I thought. Having been a manager in a team that needed change from a performance perspective, needed a turnaround, micromanaging was kind of part of the job to get on top of everything, to see what's going on, literally sitting down with each member of staff and being like, what are you doing? How are you doing it? How is this supporting our targets? How is, you know, your productivity, your sense of capacity? It was very micromanaging for about 6 months. But once I got on top of that and I helped my people get on top of things operationally, I could step back. Change was easier because they had more capacity for change emotionally and cognitively. So I wonder whether there's some unraveling here as well when you're asking those questions in terms of, is this true? How much of this is, is people management and how much of this is operational? Because the operational bit is the thing you need to solve first, and it's also the easier thing to solve.
Jake TuberAnd I would add to that, Leanne, I think there is a place for some degree of micromanagement. The key is how you go about doing it. And it reminds me of an executive I was just working with who just inherited a new deputy. This is someone in journalism that runs a department section at their newspaper and was worried that the deputy was going to need a little bit more instruction from the get-go. They thought they would be better up to speed. And the person I was working with anyway was concerned that they were coming across as micromanaging. And so we were chatting through what to do about it. And where we kind of got to was it might be okay to do this, but let the person know that you know you're doing it and why you're doing it. So if you feel like you've stepped into a new role as a manager, it's okay to say, hey, I want to make sure that I set you all up for success, that we can, you know, really check off XYZ boxes before moving forward. I also wanna get my hands around the specifics, so I'm gonna be a bit more micromanagey at first. I'm gonna be in the weeds a bit more. I'm gonna ask for some updates. I'm not doing it cuz I don't trust you. I'm doing it because I don't want to have to send you off in one direction only to feel like later I sent you in the wrong direction. So just know that I'm gonna loosen the reins over time and let's have constant check-ins and you can tell me if I'm doing it too much. But I think micromanaging isn't inherently the problem. It's when you micromanage without realizing that you're doing it. And without talking through your management strategy deliberately with your team.
Leanne ElliottYeah, I agree. And that intention, isn't it? A lot of the micromanaging as well is it's protecting your team from noise above, because then you've got the answers to kind of bat away the senior leadership questions without having to over-stress your team.
Jake TuberAnd it's time-bound, right? It's, I'm not gonna be doing this with you forever. I'm doing this right now. It's my first year, it's my first few months. I wanna get my arms around the thing so that I can really set you free and not have to worry about Checking in later, etc. So if you explain to folks that, hey, I'm going to be having my hands in the weeds a little bit more here for XYZ amount of time, let's pull up and talk about it if you think I'm doing more than is necessary, but I'm open to it. I think that gives you a little bit of permission there.
Leanne ElliottYeah, absolutely.
Al ElliottYeah, I love that. I love that. And just as a non-scientist answer, there's something which I don't think you realize if you're perhaps a little younger or perhaps a little more inexperienced at work is that you're never going to meet your potential in real life. And there's a point for that because your potential is always going to be, if you're growing, your potential should always be a good, like, 10 yards in front of you. So if you are feeling this stress that you're not as good as you should be, great, because you've got high expectations for yourself and you're willing to strive towards those.
Leanne ElliottYes, Al. That's beautiful.
Al ElliottThank you very much. I read it. I read it in a fortune cookie, to be honest. Okay. Okay. We will come back to executives in a second. Nice, nice foreshadowing. I like it. Question number 2: I saw what my team think, and now what? Uh-oh. I've been managing a team for years. I know that people always vent about their manager, but recently I came across, or accidentally came across, a private group chat. Oh no. From my team and read some of the messages about me. They're respectful and positive with me in person, but what I read was much more critical and unfiltered. It's left me feeling a little unsettled. I wish I hadn't read it, but now I have. Is this how they actually think, or is this just somewhere they can vent? Oh, thorny one, Dr. Jake.
Jake TuberThat hurts. That's really hard. I don't even mean just at work, but just to find out people who you think think of you one way are talking about you differently when you're not around. Gosh, that, you know, just pulls us all back to grade school, doesn't it? And it's really a challenge. Here's what I think is the painful reality. Which is, yeah, it's probably more likely that what you pulled out of that conversation is a bit real, is a bit more how they actually feel. And that's not necessarily the worst thing. Listen, the fact that they want to show up differently for you, yes, you don't want them to be faking it, but I will say charitably, there's something to be said for managing one's own experiences of somebody else to have a better working relationship with them. Whether it's your subordinate to a boss or peer-to-peer, we do this sort of thing all the time. It just hurts to know that it's somehow inauthentic. What should you do about it? Gosh, that really does depend on how transparent you want to be and how direct you feel comfortable being. There is a world in which you actually bring it up and say, I found this. But if you're going to do that, it has to be, listen, I saw this. I'm sure you didn't intend me to see it, and I'm glad I did because clearly I've been failing you. Yeah. If you feel like you need to show up differently for me than you actually have. So if you're gonna bring it up, you've gotta make it about what you want to do better going forward for the team. And here's the thing, if you're not gonna bring it up, you still have to find a way to bring up what you're gonna do differently, better for the team. 'Cause the bottom line is whether or not you bring this up, you now know that they feel differently about you than they're acting towards you. So whether or not you choose to make it a discussion, And bring it right out in the open, or just have a conversation with them where you say, "Hey, listen, I've been thinking about just kind of reset here as it's you know mid-June or whatever particular occasion you want to reference. I want to make sure that I'm showing up for the way that you want me to show up. Let me get your feedback. Maybe it's time for a bit of a 360. Maybe it's time to find some ways to get some more insight of them. But either way, you have a choice here, which is that you can be pouty and upset." that they haven't been as direct with you as you would've liked. Or you can say, bottom line is I've got some data. I know that they don't feel they can share with me their real feelings and they're not getting from me what they need. What am I gonna do about it to show up better for them? And I think even if it's not as emotionally satisfying in the moment as calling them out and saying, aha, found it, I think either way, if you look at this about what you need to do forward-looking, you're gonna be much more successful.
Al ElliottExcellent. Lea, thoughts?
Leanne ElliottYeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm a little bit concerned by the accidentally came across a private group chat. How does one accidentally come across a private group chat? So, I worry almost coming clean and saying that you've seen this could also damage trust in some way, depending on how you came across that. So, I'd be more inclined to be proactive about it. And particularly, if there's somebody in the team that is a bit more vocal, or that you feel has been a bit more direct with you in the past, And sit them down one-to-one and go, look, I just feel like we can do things better around here. I just feel that there's improvements we could make, there's changes we can make, there's things that I can do to make your job easier and make this work, these outcomes, outputs easier to achieve. Can you talk me through some of those things? I want you to be brutal. I want you to be honest. I want you to be direct because this is how we improve. This is how we make things better. And I think if you get the trust of one person, That tends to ripple effect once you have them one-to-ones with other people, because Jane, who had that one-to-one with you, go, do you know what? They were actually really receptive. Now, it's pretty straightforward and pretty direct with them. It models the behaviours that you're allowing your team to enact in these types of conversations where you're seeking this feedback to drive improvement. And that is essentially giving people psychological safety, isn't it? Which is the term of, of probably the last 10 years.
Al ElliottYeah.
Leanne Elliottcouple of years, but it's, it's, it's modelling that in a way that's saying to people, I want you to be direct, I want to make this better. And they, they might have an inkling that this is where it came from. Maybe they have a feeling that, that you saw this group chat. And even if they did, how cool is that of you to respond in a way that's like, I'm not going to call it out, I'm not going to make this awkward, I just want to be proactive in terms of making improvements.
Al ElliottOkay, on to question number 3. And, um, this is, this is all about what makes someone look executive and they've got— we've got rabbit ears or, um, um, what do you call them? The double commas that fly in the air in the US. You've got a proper name for them, haven't you?
Jake TuberQuotation marks.
Al ElliottThere you go. That's the words. Every day's a school day.
Jake TuberI'm sorry, are quotation marks just a US English phenomenon? I thought they were pretty universal. No?
Al ElliottNo, I'm just— I'm not very well read. I think that's it.
Jake TuberHave you come across a quote before?
Al ElliottRight. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. This, this person writes, I've been a director for about 18 months and I keep getting the same feedback. I'm great at execution, but I may need more. And they've got these, again, these weird little like commas up in the air. Executive presence.
Leanne ElliottMm-hmm.
Al ElliottThe problem is no one can redefine what that means. I've heard things like gravitas or how you show up, but nothing concrete. So I've started watching the people who do get promoted to VP and above. They speak less but connect the dots, don't get defensive when challenged, keep communication short, and seem comfortable with ambiguity. I can see the difference, but how do I bridge the gap? So, Dr. Jake, is executive presence something that you can learn through, like, behavior, or is it more of a mindset, mindset shift? Thoughts?
Jake TuberI think it's probably a bit of both, and I do think there's a bit of art versus science distinction here. I think people who seem to have whatever we would call executive presence— and I've yet to find any legitimate concrete definition of it. It does seem to be one of those, you know it when you see it, Justice Potter type terms. But I do think that there is some degree of gravitas, charisma, poise that is generally hard to pin down as a very learnable, discrete behavior, but it is also broken down as a science. I mean, like, I think a lot of the things they point out, right, connecting the dots, not getting defensive, short communication that is really focused on what your listener needs to get rather than the way you are making sense of the information in your own head, those are a lot of outward things that people who you'd be thinking of as an executive where time is short and decisions are serious, that is something that is the case. So I do think that's real. There's a really important important question here though that I know we won't get the answer to, but really I think is something we have to discuss, which is I'm reading this and my first thought that I cannot shake is, is this a woman or a man? Because I often feel like executive presence is a term that gets thrown at women to describe essentially the same thing at men, but when it's positioned towards women it is positioned as a deficit that they need to acquire. Whereas for men, what we're really probably just talking about is this person needs more directive leadership skills, and it's positioned as almost like this bonus, this next step, this positive benefit they can have. And I have often felt that executive presence is a gender-coded term that usually gets used to describe women who just don't seem classically heteronormatively masculine enough. Um, and so I'm fascinated by the person and obviously other elements of their demography and their culture. And there's so many things here that make this a Rubik's Cube that would constantly shift. It's not just like that one data point is everything. But I do think it's worth noting that executive presence, partially the, the perniciousness of it is that it's, it's so ambiguous, it's so ethereal. It can mean so many different things to whoever is mentioning it, and you can't ever quite Yeah. Can you put your finger on why someone lacks executive presence? Like, well, do they not do this? Do they not show up this way? Do they not come? No, they just don't really seem to have it. Well, that's a really great way to dismiss someone without having really concrete evidence. So I'm fascinated to know about this, and it's something I've written about and thought about before, that executive presence itself is valuable insofar as it can be broken down into discrete behaviors that one can achieve. And when it is, it's usually described just as leadership skills.
Al ElliottNice. Leanne, can you give us your thoughts and use the word perniciousness again?
Leanne ElliottI do not know what it means. No, but I enjoy it.
Jake TuberYou know, honestly, I don't really know what it means either. Sorry, Leanne. Go on. Pernicious means having a very harmful, destructive, or ruinous effect, often in a subtle, insidious, or gradual way. So yeah. How did you type that so fast? Blind squirrel finds a nut twice a day.
Al ElliottThat's our clip. That's our clip. Leanne, thoughts?
Leanne ElliottI have for a long time had beef with women leadership programs because whenever I've actually seen one, it very much looks like teaching women how to lead like men. Right. And it frustrates me that These other qualities are dismissed because they're too soft or they're too feminine or they're not direct enough or hard-hitting enough. They're not executive enough. And it's like, do you remember we talked to John Amici and he was like, when did someone just decide that, oh, this person's too reflective and introspective to be a leader? This person's too empathetic to be a leader. This person shows too much concern for their people to be a leader. It's nonsense. And I agree with you, Jake. I'm so glad you called that out. And I think if Listen, if this is— obviously we protect identities— if it is a woman, I would, I would be very much questioning, is this what executive presence looks like in this organisation? Because in a more diverse organisation perhaps, or maybe a more female-led organisation, executive presence might look very, very different. So I'd take from this what actual tangible skills, as Jake said, leadership skills you can developed that we know are just generally universally great. So in terms of critical thinking, connecting the dots, that's really, really great. Um, there's a lot of communication things here. Emotional regulation seems like a big thing here as well in terms of not being defensive when challenged, being comfortable with ambiguity. My thought would be take this feedback and expand it to the world of just leadership skills, things like critical thinking, communication skills, emotional regulation. And yeah, work on them. If there's channels internally to be able to do that, do it. Get a coach to work on that type of thing. Go on a leadership course. But pin down the skills that are going to be useful regardless of the organisation. Because as Jake said, this executive presence doesn't really have an agreed definition, and it's going to depend very much from organisation to organisation, particularly depending On your demographics and how the organization sees them. So, I would say take this feedback, expand it into general leadership skills, and develop them.
Al ElliottLovely. Dr. Jake, any closing thoughts?
Jake TuberThere is some value in the play-acting part of executive presence if it does mean something in your organization. I have no problem with you playing a fool's game if that's what's required to be successful. And so, one thing that I've advised people to do, uh, is to sort of almost have fun with a lot of this as well. Like, if you think that executive presence is about, you know, holding your hands in a way that suggests you're being very contemplative— you can't see me here, but I'm doing this on the screen in front of Al and Leanne— or, you know, saying stupid corporate phrases like, well, I think we should just circle back on this, you know, that is often the funny stuff around executive presence. And I would say, as a concrete thing you can do, is pick 1 or 2 meetings a week where there's various stakeholders and try to approach showing up in that meeting as if you are a stoic Nobel Prize winner trying to add value. And just imagine whatever you think that person, how would they sit? How would they react to different statements? How would they look around the room? How would they, you know, show up in different ways? Don't do this every single meeting every day. You're gonna be exhausted. That's going to require way too much cognitive load and emotional labor for you. But have fun with it. Imagine that you're going to show up like the veteran smartest person in the room who's trying not to be obnoxious about it, trying to be thoughtful. That's Stoic Nobel Prize winner. How would they show up for this? And if you can imagine that in those big one or two meetings where there's a little bit more at stake, you might find that people start treating you as if you're the person that you've been Promoting.
Al ElliottLove that. Love that. Jinx. Fabulous. Thank you so, so much. Now, that's the end of our episode, our bumper episode by looking at the timestamp. Episode 300. Episode 300. Thank you so much, Dr. J, for coming along. And yeah, we need to, we need to do more of these. I love these. I love these. Next Thursday, or this Thursday actually, we're joined by Rosina Bakari. She is going to tell us all about why intelligence could be a huge obstacle to entrepreneurship. Now she's done both. Fun fact, I went to see, um, I believe the, the guy who started Yo Sushi about 20 years ago. I went to see him speak and he said, if you can spell entrepreneur, you're not one. Anyway, she's done both. And, and the question we're gonna answer is, can you be too clever to be rich? In the meantime, uh, make sure you subscribe. Make sure you go over and check out Dr. Jake at, uh, workwise.substack.com. Is that right?
Jake TuberYeah. Thank you, Al. And yes, I will say that I've often said it's my intelligence that's been preventing me from getting rich all these years.
Leanne ElliottI very much look forward to this.
Al ElliottVery much look forward to this upcoming episode. And also look out for The Deliberate Manager: The 8 Postures That Make Management Conversations Work, which is released in February next year, which is a long time to wait, but just go and join the Substack right now. Check out the show notes. All the links are in there. Leanne, say goodbye.
Leanne ElliottGoodbye.
Al ElliottDr. Jake, say goodbye.
Jake TuberGoodbye.
Al ElliottOh, that was a very sad goodbye. And thank you again for joining us. Not you, Dr. Jake, I've already thanked you. For you, listener, and we'll see you very, very soon. Bye-bye.
Leanne ElliottSay bye, Jake.
Al ElliottSay bye.
Jake TuberBye, Jake.
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