I’m in the H2H Business with Chip Conley
+ Notes
My guest this week, Chip Conley, is an extraordinary human. He was Founder and CEO of the highly successful boutique hotel company Joi de Vivre (now owned by Hyatt.) It took a near death experience to made him stand back, look at his life and sell the company.
Then a smart young fellah called Brian, founder of a teeny, weeny startup called AirBnB, hired Chip as his strategic Lead and Mentor. Together, they grew AirBnB to be the most valuable hospitality company in the world.
This is a story of three chapters :
The transformational power of authenticity A powerful collision between high tech and high-touch wisdom and the all-too-often untapped potential of diversity of age, thought and experience The incalculable potency of connected communities Forget B2B or B2C. We are ALL in the H2H business. Chip’s warm wisdom can help us all be better leaders. My favourite takeaway : “Emotions are contagious, the higher up you are the more contagious they are.”
+ Transcript
KATZ KIELY 00:00 Welcome to humans, leading humans towards the future of work that works for people. A smorgasbord of snackable stories to help you be a more effective leader.
KATZ KIELY 00:27 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Thank you so, so much for dedicating the next half hour of your one precious life to listen to this episode. I can promise you you will not regret it.
You might be able to hear the rain. So I'm recording this in December in England and I'm telling you now the weather out there is not good. But today's guest will definitely warm me up. I don't often look back but on no occasions that I do add all the incredible experiences I've had and the extraordinary people that I've met, and that I've learned from and the wisdom that I've gained on the way I feel really blessed. And Chip is one of those extraordinary people and he too has had so many incredible experiences.
If by any remote chance you don't already know who Chip is.
He set up a very successful boutique hotel company called Joie de Vivre which is now part of the White group. And it was a great name for his business because he is a physical manifestation of Joie de Vivre. I can tell you and then he met a young fella called Brian, who had started this teeny weeny startup called Airbnb, who hired Chip as his strategic lead and his mentor. Chip who is by the way, a man who knows nothing about tech about human beings. And together of course, they grew Airbnb to being the most valuable hospitality company in the world.
Now, you know by now that my work is all about one, my work and my passion. Actually, my mission is all about supporting leaders in large complex organizations, helping them to build cultures built on the Create framework, which are the conditions that underpin the environments, in which people are the best, they can be the most productive, they can be the most efficient they can be. So those leaders and the organizations they work for can succeed. Now I know for a fact that dear Chip could tell a million stories of how he has embedded the Create framework wherever he's led companies, and he is an amazing storyteller, so I can't wait to find out which three stories he chooses to tell. Anyway, before I introduce you to the frankly fabulous Chip, I just wanted to say a massive thank you to all of you that send me feedback and suggestions for what you'd like to see more of and how I can improve this show. Your feedback is really really important to me, it energizes me. So you can head over to katzkiely.com and sign up to the Humans leading humans newsletter. Get a bit of inspiration to your inbox, and you can connect with us on our social channels. Or go to wearebeep.com to find out how we embed the Create framework. Or if you really want to and you just want to directly get in touch with me, mail me at katz@wearebeep.com You've waited long enough, here is Chip.
KATZ KIELY 4:10 Oh my goodness. Chip Conley I can hardly believe that you're a guest on Humans leading humans.
CHIP CONLEY 4:25 KK CC is in the house!
KATZ KIELY 4:27 So dear listeners, I met Chip eight years ago when I found myself in San Francisco for the first time and then on the playa for the first time. That was an experience that absolutely changed my life and I will never forget Chip because of that. But Chip, what was your first memory, tell the listeners, how did we meet?
CHIP CONLEY 4:55 We met at a dinner party for people who are going to be going to Burning Man, so when Katz says a playa she's talking about the Burning Man. The arts spiritual festival in the Nevada desert and so we were at a dinner with a lot of really interesting creative people. And we got to get into some interesting conversations there. And then next thing we knew we're both out in the dusty desert, talking about utopian societies and you talking about how do you accelarate behavioural change in cities. While we were in one of the most interesting cities in the world, which is what's called Black Rock City. For the 10 days that that Burning Man is open to the public and one of the beautiful things about being a Burning Man is you just think bigger thoughts and thinking big thoughts with you is is like an aphrodisiac.
KATZ KIELY 5:50 And with you, and with you. I think that, I don't think I know that, that first week of being in an environment where people are incentivized to be 100% themselves, and then imagining how people have to put up with their work life most of the time. It would not leave my head. It burned like a smoldering thing and that's why I am doing what I'm doing now. It's like it is crazy for people to not feel rewarded, and recognized and to be able to be themselves at work when we spend most of our time at work.
CHIP CONLEY 6:37 At Burning Man we call this the phase of the default world. So when we go back to our normal lives, it's the default world and we sort of live in an environment where by default, we sort of fall into the institutionalization, whether that institutionalization is healthy or unhealthy and often it's unhealthy. So you don't have to go to Burning Man to have this kind of experience. Being able to go to a place that's not habitual for you, that allows you to be reflective and imagine operating in a different way is really what is essential because otherwise we just become robots.
KATZ KIELY 7:12 Or zombies. I was talking to somebody earlier I was saying actually people go to work. They put up with it. They go home. That's not the living they working for a living rather than working, living and working at the same thing. We only have one precious life.
Yes, Chip, I sent you the Create framework. And I asked you to think about the first three stories that bubbled up. So what happened for you? What's your story number one?
CHIP CONLEY 7:45 I decided that I would come up with a story for each of the three career chapters that I've had since age 25. And it was really easy to do it that way so the listeners will get a chance to get to know me and my career arc. So when I was 26 I started a boutique hotel company called Joie de Vivre, based in San Francisco and over the course of 24 years we created 52 boutique hotels around California, and loved it until I hated it. Started in 1997 and then and then fast forward to 2008.
So this is many years later, so this is 22 years later, and I thought I'd be doing this my whole life. I thought I'd be running this company when it started. But around that time I just realized how much I didn't like it. And it went from sort of a calling to a job. There is no career. It just sort of fell from the gravity just took it to Earth. And I had written my third book, which is called “Peak. How great companies get their mojo from Maslow”. and I just loved that book. I loved writing about researching it. I loved giving talks about it. And I realized that I was really ready for a change in my life. But I felt completely stuck in this in this work. At the same time my life was falling apart. My long term relationship was ending, my foster son was wrongfully going to prison. I have a series of friends who committed suicide including one that has the same name I have. So it was just a hard time and then I had a flatline experience in August 19th 2008. I had a broken ankle at first, you know, broken ankles, septic leg on a strong antibiotic and at the end of the speech on stage, I was signing books and I I went unconscious and then they put me on the ground and when the paramedics showed up for the first time I went flatline basically it means I lost, I lost any heart rate. And so they had to paddle me back to life. And over the next couple of days I was in the hospital. They're doing all these tests on me and one of the things I had with me was a book that when I'm in dark times I often take this book with me on to travel and it's Victor Frankel's book “Man's Search for Meaning”. And it’s a story of a psycho psycho analyst or psychologist in Vienna, who ended up in a concentration camp because he was Jewish and his whole belief system was that meaning is the fuel of life. And so I took that book over the course of my two days in the hospital because I was really actually pretty depressed myself. I had been considering suicide myself, because that was the only way I could feel like I could get out from under this identity that was like, like the company. It was actually losing money and you know, getting to a place where we didn't know how we can make a payroll. Long story short is I wrote one night in the hospital, despair equals suffering minus meaning, despair equals suffering minus meaning. And from that experience, I came to this conclusion like okay, if you have some Buddhist tendencies and suffering is ever present, sort of a constant, and despair and meaning is personal, the more meaning you can find in life, the less despair you feel.
So this became my mantra for the next few months when, if you remember August of 2008, the world was falling apart, and Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. And the economy is going deep, deep into a great recession. So how do I apply this to my role as a leader and what I call it H to H leader? So when people ask, are you in the b2b business or the b2c business, business to business, business to consumer? I say I'm in the H to H business, humans to humans. So how did I, how did I apply it? I had my flatline experience in August, only a few people in the company knew what had happened and kept it pretty quiet in order for anybody to get freaked out. But in November, we had our annual management retreat of our top I think there were 75 people in the company. It was three days long and everybody was depressed because the hotel business and restaurant business and spa business which is where the business we were in, it was all just falling apart. And, and yes, we were having troubles of figuring out how to make payroll and so I was supposed to go up on stage and give a rah rah speech to start the three days together.
And I threw that speech away because I'm not getting that speech. And I went up on stage and on the easel, I just wrote despair equals suffering minus meaning.
So it's really hard because I had to say listen, three months ago, something happened to me and we haven't told you and I feel awkward that we haven't told you and and I want to tell you what good has come out of it for me, because what I feel right now is, I see a lot of despair in the room. And what I want to do when we leave three days from now to start seeing some meaning. And so over the course of the next hour, it was actually two hours. It was an hour talk and then an hour sort of workshop. I just took them through a process of saying how do we find meaning in our lives? How do we find it individually and then collectively, and this is not what they expected to come to. And this is like a bunch of hotel general managers like how do we improve the bottom line? How do we make sure employees are being well cared for because whatever our basic premises as a company, you know to call your companies you call your company Joie de Vivre - the joy of life, you better be providing a sort of good Joie de Vivre to your employees. And our belief system was you know, if your employees are happy, your customers will be happy, and then your investors will be happy but investors being happy is third. You know, it's the third place. You start with the employees. And so, it was fascinating and ultimately while I was on stage, we can have another equation which is anxiety equals uncertainty, times powerlessness. Anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness, which basically says if you're in an anxious time for your company, as a leader - be transparent, over communicate, because anxiety equals uncertainty. So it creates uncertainty times powerlessness - help people to see how they can have an impact.
So long story short, I would just say I, at that time, realized that for me the CEO of a company is not the chief executive officer but the chief emotions officer. And the chief emotions officer is somebody who is emotionally fluent enough to communicate what's going on for them without making everything feel like it's just a big, you know, personal growth retreat workshop, which I tend to do, I'll admit, guilty as charged. But I wanted to make sure that people felt enough confidence that this is not Chip on stage, losing it in front of everybody. This is Chip on stage being human and giving me the license to be human because our emotions are contagious. And the higher you are in an organization, the more contagious those emotions are.
KATZ KIELY 14:46 Absolutely. And I mean, all of those resonate so deeply with me. And it's funny because Amy, Amy Edmondson in a previous episode, which was extraordinary, by the way, having time with any of you guys is just such an honor. She was saying, certainty is a real problem, because you never know. You never know. And I took it out because I can see how it's misconstrued but the certainty I'm talking about is the certainty of knowing nothing's going to be hidden. The certainty of knowing somebody is going to be consistent and isn't going to suddenly change their mind. And you know, one of the little sayings that I say a lot is in silence, lyes fear.
By which I mean, if you're not saying something, and there's trouble afoot, people can feel it anyway. And word creatures and that goes across like wildfire.
CHIP CONLEY 15:38 It does. I think the key is, you know, what we're talking about here is authenticity. You know, if the certainty if you can have certainty and trust that people will be honest and authentic with you. It solves so much. It definitely gets rid of the gossip. Yeah, exactly. There's, it's amazing how much corporate energy is expended on just basically band aids having a bandaid on my finger right now that kind of, band aids that are masking a bigger problem.
And so, yeah, there's all a lot of companies out there saying, oh, we got to do wellness programs. There we go. Okay, so yes, you do so but what's behind, right, why is there just such an issue around wellness? What is what's behind that? And so some companies do it but the good news is that the trend line is positive for the corporate world to wake up to this stuff.
KATZ KILEY 16:37 100% 100% and it annoys me, it concerns me that people talk about wellness within not really quietly, tightly defined boxes, you know, like, we'll do meditation once a day, and then you're going to go back into the operating model that's going to make you feel completely miserable. Or let's do yoga, or, let's buy table tennis that'll be good for people.
Well, that's not what it's about. Well, it's about as you say, it's about making sure that the people in your organization feel that you're being real, and that's really tough Chip.
CHIP CONLEY 17:22 It requires that you, as a senior leader, are willing to go through your own dark night of the soul and have the wisdom and emotional intelligence, to be able to show that your self awareness is a welcome mat for other people to seek their own self awareness.
KATZ KIELY 17:43 I don't know how that happened. I loved your first story. I want to know more about how you ran Joie de vivre. Give me a couple of hints about what you learned in that company about how to create a community of people who feel cared for?
CHIP CONELY 18:00 Well, I think, you know, in the early days of Joie de vivre we had a head of culture of HR and culture and I think what I've realized over time is we have to democratize culture. Ultimately, we had cultural ambassadors for each of our hotels and restaurants and spas, and they, they were people who had a normal job, but they were not like the general manager of the property. They have a normal job and they would do this on the side and if there's a way for us to help people in the company feel like it wasn't just the senior executives who decided where our philanthropy would go, as a company, how he would give back to the community. It wasn't just the senior executives who would figure out what kind of cultural, events kind of things we would do each year to make the culture of the company feel quite unique and idiosyncratic. So I would just say that, you know, one of my key lessons and I did write about this Michael peak was just the idea of how do we democratize culture, such that everybody feels like their fingerprints are on it, and thank God I learned that along the way because it allowed me to take it to my next place that I went to work, which I'll talk about when you're ready.
KATZ KIELY 19:10 Just gonna stop for a second, Vint Cerf when I interviewed him, talked about this in a different way. He talked about everybody needs to feel they own a brick of the cathedral. And one of the other things I just wanted to say before we move on is I had the most hilarious conversation with a friend of mine who's actually a wellness coach. And we talked about, you know, organizational transformation, and eventually I said, so what we need to do is scrap HR. And I didn't mean scrap HR Isabel Neider, who was another guest who what is incredible, you know, so she says things like how, how big is your team? And she says, well the whole company, because my job is to make sure that everybody feels that they're looking after each other.
Anyway, I just wanted to say your story number two Chip.
CHIP CONLEY 19:53 So, you know, I ultimately thank God for my own sanity. I gave that talk to the team in November 2008. And then by June 2010, I'd sold the company and I needed to, I really needed to move on. You don't want to be staying in a role as the most senior leader in the company when you don't want to be there anymore. People can feel it. That's the back of the authenticity piece. So I moved on. And I got a call from a guy named Brian Chesky. Now this was nine years ago, there was this tiny little startup in San Francisco named Airbnb. I didn't really know much about it, to be honest with you. I was like, oh, that sounds like a stupid idea. People staying in each other's homes like, it'll never take off. Couchsurfing. What is this. That's not gonna work. So Brian asked if he could Uber over to my house and I didn't know what Uber was at that time, nine years ago, and I said what? He did Uber to my house and we spent an afternoon together and next thing I knew I had joined Airbnba s we have a global hospitality strategy. And Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO as his mentor. So Brian was 21 years younger than me. I reported to him and I was his mentor. That was a unique situation because well, first of all, you know, a lot more and more of us are actually starting to report to people younger than us in the US. 40% of the US, reports to someone younger than them. And if you're 55 years old, 70% and by the year 2025 the majority of us will be reporting to younger bosses in the US. So my experience there, they first start calling me the modern elder because as curious as I was, and I wasn't sure I like that, but I was twice the age of the average employee in the company.
My lesson there was the following. They were a rocket ship. They were growing fast. And so part of my job was to help them steer the rocket ship and make sure that they didn't, you know, go off in way too many other directions. And so I really helped them to run the company with you know, on leadership and really run the leadership team so I was in charge of our work or offsites, with our senior leadership team, etc.
The thing that I actually was fascinated there because my company Joie de Vivre was a bricks and mortar company that grew fast. It didn't grow anything like a tech company. Airbnb is a tech company. And so there's a natural challenge in companies that grow really fast. And it's what I call the challenge between scale and soul. So often in a startup environment, a company is like oh, it's way soulful. Everybody knows each other. Everybody now understands the core values. We all feel like we've got, you know, those, our own brick in the cathedral. And then you start doubling how many you know you have 50 employees and you have 100 employees, and then you have 200 employees. And every year or every six months, you're doubling the number of employees and people don't feel like they have bricks anymore, or they want to throw the bricks. And there's an element of like in the process of scaling, you lose the soul of the company. So this is something I talked a lot with Joe Gebbia about one of the other co-founders. And so one of the things that I would just say was a leadership practice that I helped institute there that I had done at Joie de Vivre but I saw wow, it's even more necessary at Airbnb because the growth, is the following. So we had our senior leadership team was like 10 or 12 of us and we would, you know, once a week have a two hour meeting, we would take the last 10 or 15 minutes of every week's meeting between us to have us, each of us, raise our hand and say, I want to recognize the following person and to line level person in the company. And I want to recognize them for what they did. And here's what they did. Tell us your story. And then someone else on the leadership team would say I will go say thank you to to Sally who did that amazing, you know beyond the call of duty thing for an Airbnb host.
So in essence we created a recognition moment, every week of the senior leaders, and then we cascaded that out so that one of the senior leaders usually is from a different department, not the department where Sally was working, would go and say thank you to Sally, I mean, either in person, or by email or phone. It has to be something very personalized. And she would know that oh my gosh, I was just talked about by the founders and the senior leadership team. Well, this created a culture of recognition. And that culture recognition we saw this is working, because what we could see was that people felt that sense of love. They felt a sense of soul. They felt that sense of okay, we're not just this rocket ship that's just scaling big. We all there's also some soul in this company and people are not just catching you doing something wrong. You're catching me doing something right. Long story short is that's something we cascaded out to a variety of our offices around the world, every office, because you can do it in any organization. You know, having a practice of talking about recognition, and then going out and expressing gratitude around that is something that any organization can do that doesn't cost you a dime.
KATZ KIELY 25:08 I love that. That's ultimately common sense. And it's something that Dan was talking about two weeks ago, that actually you can give people waking great salaries, and that's good, but people aren't going to stay for waking great salaries. People will stay for people sending them a text or coming in and saying, oh my God, you're amazing. I love that.
CHIP COMLEY 25:30 People join a company and they leave their boss. And so it's so true that we can do is to help people to feel the allegiance and support of everybody around them. Another question I love to ask my direct reports, whenever I have direct reports in the company is how can I support you to do the best work of your life here at let's say Airbnb? It's a great question because how can I support you says I'm here to support you. I'm not here to have you fail. A lot of times people think their boss wants you to fail. Like, that's not easy for the boss.
How can I support you to do the best work of your life? So I want you to stretch. I want you to tell me what you need. Because that's the only thing that helps build agency in the people to say, oh God, no one's ever told me. No boss has ever told me that I can make a list of the things I need to do the best work and I wonder, okay, let me start working on that. And it's a really nice way to sort of help companies see that everybody should have agency or they should have a voice. It's not just about the senior leaders making all the decisions for us.
KATZ KIELY 26:38 Because if they succeed you succeed better. I love that I love that, that's a really pragmatic thing that Chip just said there listeners, that anyone in any size company can do and if you're not doing it, you're stupid. Story number three.
CHIP CONLEY 27:00 So far we got, we got courage and transparency for the first example, the second example recognition and appreciation. This third example is going to be co- creation, community and empowerment. So I spent four years full time at Airbnb and then another four years as a strategic advisor. So eight years, really helping that company become the world's most valuable hospitality company. What a fascinating experience.
Then, because I had had that experience that is either right I just spoke which is called wisdom at work the making of a modern elder. And the subtitle the making of a modern elder spoke to the fact that that's what they called me there - the modern elder. While I was reading that book I had down in Mexico and Baja at a beachfront home I have, I had this weird epiphany where I just said why is it that we don't have a school from other elders, a place where people in midlife can reimagine the second half of their adult life and we purpose themselves and figure out how to go through a transition whether the transitions or career or a divorce, or empty nesting kids or parents passing away. I mean, there's lots of or menopause for women and andropause for men. There's a lot of transitions in their life. And so long story short is, I created something called the modern elderly academy and its first campuses in Mexico, in Baja California, and Cabo San Lucas. So um, we've had 2000 Alumni now from 28 countries who have come there. Well, great idea except during COVID having a personal growth retreat center that's dedicated to people average age 54, so at slightly older population, flying to, you know, a developing country like Mexico during COVID. Like who the hell is going to do that? So of course, just like everybody else who's sensible. We had to shut down our operation in March of 2020. So this example is gonna is one that really speaks to okay, how do we democratize innovation in an organization? And so I felt like I was supposed to be the hero. I was supposed to come up with novel solutions. I was also the exclusive investor in this project. So it's like if we're if we're closed, you know, I'm the one writing the check. So the truth is often when you're in the position where you feel the sense of urgency and the sense of performance anxiety around finding solutions, this is not when you're going to be the most creative, and so I was lucky enough to have my two co founders both step up and start getting really creative about a variety of things we do to pivot the organization. And so within six months after six and a half months after we shut we reopened, not with workshops, we are just now reopening fourth workshops. Because it felt way too intimate and you know, his workshops generally are indoors and just didn't feel good. So we had we create something called a sabbatical sessions, which is people coming in doing like a digital nomad experience where we have like programming all outdoors, that you can just do it yourself. You can choose whatever you want to do. Everything was optional as opposed to going through a very structured week long workshop. And that was hugely successful. And then we created MDA online, which is something I was resisting, which is a very successful program that helps people to, an eight week course to get connected to other people around transitions in their life. Go through all the content out there. And then we created a subscription service to our, for our alumni. And then we decided we're going to go to the United States and open up our first campus in the US. We bought a 2600 acre ranch outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico to create what will be in between three our second location and our first US regenerative community which is a residential community that is sort of like the next alternative to a retirement community because no one wants to live in a retirement community anymore, and want to live in a regenerative community with regenerative farm and regenerative principles. So all of that happened due to our pandemic pivot. And all of that happened, because we really took into account how do we empower our key leaders to come up with ideas to co-create and then how do we go out to our community? All these alumni who love what we've been doing, and ask them how they can be helpful and so for example, even give them an opportunity to donate to our employees fund because we employed all of our employees during COVID even though we were shut down. Everybody got their paycheck. And so our guests, our students, the people who had come for a week's program, gave us $300,000 as a collective group, which helped us to fund a lot of our losses in 2020 because they knew the bulk of that was going to our staff, and they loved the staff. So we went out to our community and said, can you help us?
KATZ KIELY 32:03 That must have been a difficult decision, because it's never easy is it? Go out and ask especially clients, well, essentiall.
CHIP CONLEY 32: 16 You want to put on a happy face and say everything's fine. And but you know, COVID was so it's so serious that it allowed us to, again, I think, you know, maybe the theme here is authenticity, across all three of these is, you know, how how do we go authentically to our community and say, we're in a time of need. We're going to get to the other side of this, but you know, we can use your help. And in the meantime, we kept them aware of all the creative juices that are flowing and all the new things we're gonna do. And so they felt and in some cases, they were the ones who actually said, hey, you should do this. You should go to Santa Fe, New Mexico. That's, you know, you know, as you're looking in the US, that's the place you guys should go. Like, okay, thank you and like guess what, when I went to Santa Fe, the handful of people who said that like, oh, wow, I feel like you did this because I told you to.
Which is not not a bad feeling. But for them, um, and so long story short, is I think, you know, at the end of the day, the most neglected factor in businesses is raw human. It doesn't show up on a balance sheet doesn't show up on your income statement. You know, there's there's no line item that says employee culture. So there's, there's a lot to be said for recognizing that the operating system that defines how do you address humans is psychology. And good old common sense humanity. KATZ KIELY 33:33 Common Sense. Chip, I was just thinking to listeners, how many of you would be brave enough to reach out to your customers and ask them how you could do things better?
And and why would that make you feel uncomfortable? Because actually, if people people like to give, they like to give advice, they like to feel they're part of a community. So it's brilliant. I love that Chip.
So before we leave, it is now customary for you to decide what you would like? To call your episode of Humans needing humans?
CHIP CONLEY 34:14 I'm in the H to H business. I'm in the H to H business.
KATZ KIELY 34:17 Can I steal this off you? Chip, thank you. Thank you so much for dedicating your time because I know that you're kind of busy.
CHIP CONLEY 34:18 I am. So it's great to see you. Thank you for inviting me on and thank you for having this message in the world.
KATZ KIELY 34:44 Oh, lovely Chip. What a wonderful, wise man you are. So what leapt out at me, dear listeners? Oh, God, I don't know where to start. Really.
The wonderful Emily Chang talked about the importance of stepping out of your day to day life of providing intentional space where people can think, where you can look at your life through a new lens.
How incredible that story that for Chip that one of those experiences was flatlining.
It took for him to flatline to see that just because it's the way you do things, does not mean it's the right way.
And I absolutely loved the story about Airbnb. The power of the collision between high tech and high touch wisdom, the power between different minds and different levels of experiences and how that can lead us to success. The power of diversity of age and thought and experience.
And I guess he chose it as his title. We are dear people, whether you've realized it or not, we are all in the age to age business.
And authenticity is not always easy being open can be uncomfortable, but it's always powerful. Connecting at a human level is not always easy, but it does reap rewards. And one thing that really stuck with me, emotions are contagious, the higher up you are, the more contagious they are.
And back to the community part. Success comes from cultures where people feel rewarded and recognized and listened to when they feel part of the community.
And I guess another thing just before I sign off for that for this from this phenomenal episode, don't try and shift your culture from the top. Democratize your culture. One of my previous guests Isabelle Nyedo at FIS has done an astounding job of doing exactly this, democratizing culture, building culture with people.
And absolutely, finally, manifest the behaviors that you want to see.
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Thanks to SuperTerranea for the magical sting of stings
