Fractional
Fractional
Greg Storey: On not having a job and toxic people
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Greg Storey, of Airbag Industries joined Joshua Wold and Lance Robbins on the podcast today as we talked about several thought provoking articles he's been writing about toxic work cultures and never having a job if you have the choice.
Links to Greg's work:
Resources we mentioned:
Welcome to Fractional. This is episode, what is this, 26, Lance? I need to check. It's been a long day. Yeah, this is 26. We're making it through. This is a show where we like to talk about what it means to work with other people, what it means to be part of a remote culture, primarily or hybrid. My co-host is Lance Robbins, with me to my top. Say hi, Lance. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_01I'm looking for that mute button.
SPEAKER_00And then we have an amazing guest on with us today, Craig Story. Is it correct? pronounce story, Greg? It is. Good. Awesome. I wasn't entirely sure. I was following a couple posts that you wrote on Mastodon over the last couple of weeks, and they kept just resonating with me and maybe getting me a little bit angry or a little bit excited at times. So I reached out to you and asked if you'd come on the show and thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's nice to be here. Good to meet you too. I want to start off with a question that's not even in the show notes um hopefully you won't have to jump too much when you don't have to have a computer screen in front of you and you could have four hours to do anything you want what what comes to your mind like oh i'm looking forward to doing some things in that category i
SPEAKER_02mean four hours is a that's a long time right like the best thing i could think of is uh i don't know find myself stranded in the woods and i have to be doing something for four hours right otherwise um my hdd is just too too strong so i would choose like reading a book taking a walk playing pinball uh probably just having a beer with some friends
SPEAKER_00right after this podcast uh lance knows i'm gonna stop recording and i'm gonna put on my running shoes and disappear into there's a 500 acre city woods next door to me and that is one of my the best ways that i Can just recover every day after a long day of work. So I resonate with a lot of the things you shared, but especially that one. I'd love if you could just share a little bit about yourself as little or as much as you want. And then I want to get into asking you some questions.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sure. So I've been in design for a very long time. I've been in digital design. the web, as we used to call it, since 1996, 97, and have been primarily in just designing things online. And most of that time has been in leadership, or I guess what all the people are saying, kind of coaching. player coach positions where I'm leading teams, building people, but also I've always had my sleeves rolled up and I've always been in design and kept it up. I have a love for typography, just love geeking out on type. I buy more type than I could ever need just so I can play with it. And yeah, I've also started my own studio, work for myself, Um, have, have had employees, had remote employees, uh, hybrid, you know, kind of set up. Uh, I've worked at IBM design where we had 2,500, uh, plus designers and we're onboarding them 50 and 75 at a time. So I've worked in all range of scale, all kinds of size and shapes of operations and, um, leadership positions. And so,
SPEAKER_00yeah, I've, I've kind of like done all the things I'm a designer. But one of the things I've always felt that I did not fully connect with is good typography. There's probably a number of reasons for that. There's a little site which I learned about a decade ago called Practical Typography from a lawyer where he just makes his own fonts and sells them for a couple hundred bucks a piece. And when you look at these... I want to just go design something with the fonts that they're that good. I think what would a book set in this typeface look like? What would a website like this look like? Looking at that product made me realize this is what it can be like when you're not just picking a default from Adobe when you first started designing as a kid. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02and you're going to be doing that probably for the rest of your life, your career, right? So yeah, if you haven't read it yet, read Don't Steal the Sheep from Eric Speakerman. It's a fantastic book. It'll give you all the basics, all the fundamentals of typography, selecting type, pairing type. And it's just in a great read. Eric is a very, very German designer and a font designer. And so it's
SPEAKER_00just a great book to even have on the shelf. I'm going to take a look at that. And I'm pretty sure that's the type of book I'd love to buy because even still, I've been doing this now for 15 plus years. When I'm working on an app or a site, I still have this... shoot, I want to pair some fonts together. And what's my baseline?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was just talking to some some design leaders earlier this week about how they too have been in the industry for for a bit. And kind of looking back at what's been going on with design in the last couple of years, and it seems pretty clear that the craft is missing the fundamentals. That there's a lot of quote designers who have indexed on the UX side, which there's nothing wrong with that, but when they're asked to go do UI work, it just kind of falls apart. Unfortunately, the industry is in a place where there are a lot of these types of folks, and even in the leadership kind of cast, whether that's design leadership product leadership or even like engineering IT. And the unfortunate thing is nobody knows how to have a conversation around this. They don't have the language. They don't have the upbringing. They don't share the fundamentals. And so they don't know how to have even the most basic conversations about design. I applaud you looking at practical typography, like being aware of it because it's one of the fundamentals of design. Where's that baseline? And it all kind of extrapolates or kind
SPEAKER_00of expands from there. I'm starting to realize that the generation below me that's starting to work, so I'm 36 years old, right? Old and young, both in the same sentence. I purchased a course a couple of years ago called Learn UI Design from Eric Kennedy for that purpose, right? To try and figure out what are the fundamentals of UI design. Greg, just to put you on the spot, are there speakers, authors, courses, books you would recommend to help someone?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I'm actually working on this problem now. It's on my to-do list because I've got to get back to some of these leaders in, I believe you, we need to teach fundamentals. Now, how do we go about doing that? I think some of it is, I don't have a book off the top of my head because I've got to look into that, but there are things like this, from, who is this? Rockport. Yeah. I don't even know if they're around anymore, but Digital Design Essentials, it kind of goes through. It's one of those books that shows you design and what's important. It points to things. And for anybody listening, I'm paging
SPEAKER_00through the book if you can't hear that. But I saw a checkout page from Amazon. Here's the pieces that you should have for this to work well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And along the lines too, there used to be a fantastic magazine back in the desktop publishing days called Before and After. And I believe the books are still around. And honestly, if that's the book, I believe... there's one or two collected versions of that. And that's nothing but fundamentals. And what's great about that is it would show you, here's how someone would typically create a brochure or an annual report, or, you know, this was paper, this was desktop publishing, right? But all of that can be used, you know, just translates right over to the web. And before and after it was really good in saying like, here's Here's the before. Here's how people basically lay this stuff out and it looks awful. And here's an idea of how to take the same information and make it much more interesting, readable, scannable. And they always looked beautiful. So it was not only were you learning fundamentals, but also having an idea of how to look at the visual problem of how do I arrange these elements and what should the composition of this look like and do that in a much more interesting way that's going to grab attention. So there you go. Before and after, I know it existed at some point. I don't know if it still does, but hunt those down. That's going to be a good source for you.
SPEAKER_00One of the things I remember doing as a teenager is buying a number of books from a list apart and from other sources like that and sitting those down in front of my desktop computer and pouring through them, bending them back and forth to try to figure out what does it mean to work on the web. To this day, there is still something about referencing a physical book to have your brain associates a location with a thought that you can't get with purely digital sources. So I love that you're recommending books and I'm going to look those up afterward.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So as you can see, this is actually a 10th of what my library used to be. I got tired of packing books around, but the books that I've kept that pertain to the web, they're all from the early, like, 95 through probably about 2014, 2015. And what's great about them is they, too, they're fundamentals there where, yes, it's not going to feature all the wonderful things we can do today with our technology, but, you know, a reading experience is a reading experience. A checkout experience is a checkout experience. experience. And there's just some of those things that are just good, not even industry best practices. They're just good best design practices. And so you talk about Jeffrey's book. I'm pretty, yeah, I think I've got all the versions of that because it was interesting to see like how it evolved. But I mean, going back to that, I would even argue even in the simplicity of the CSS and HTML, is a really good refresher in we used to do a lot of things with very little. And we have competitions now where people are trying to make insanely crazy cool things with just the least code possible. And I think if you go back to some of those early books, you're going to find what I used to call pickup truck simple code. In other words, like a truck before sensors and electronics, and you could just open up the hood, there was an engine, it looked like an engine, you knew how to check the oil, you knew how to replace the spark plug, and it worked. It functioned. I'll give it back to you, but books don't go out of
SPEAKER_00functionality. dabble in programming and i understand that there are also principles there that if you understand them the syntax may change certain things may change but how you think about building a thing will last and my um web design front-end skills stopped in 2015 when i joined a company that lance also joined because there was a bunch of front-end developers there so i didn't do any more coding and i started trying to code again last year so this is 2015 to 2022 And the entire landscape shifted where it's not like a pickup truck anymore. I struggle to analyze and look and understand working with React or just trying to figure out what is this code saying to me? It's so abstracted that I struggle to do anything. And it's been a learning curve to try to pick that back up again.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And that's, again, I think there's been this kind of generational skip of, so I used to work with this one guy at IBM. He was insanely extremely smart as were as everybody there and he was an engineer he was a front-end dev and I remember that his team needed to deploy a simple content site and so he was using WordPress it's like okay great easy like who doesn't and then I remember him saying it's going to take me a month to build out this very simple very simple site and I thought uh why And he then went into like, well, I've got to build in the front end and react and using some words I hadn't heard in a while, if at all. And I said, dude, WordPress does all those things out of the box. Why not just use WordPress? And his response to me was, I was hired to be a front end engineer here. That's not front end engineering. And so I remember at the time, this guy didn't report to me. So I just kind of shrugged, went, okay, dude, that's UBU. But I remember thinking, wow, that's the way wrong way reason to go about adding all that complexity to something that out of the box just does that. Had nothing to do with security or compliance or anything. It's just, I need to do what my label says, what my job badge says. and that's what I'm gonna do, right? And I think that's where a lot of the things that have been going on in the web, not to knock anybody who's made things better or more efficient, but I feel like there's a lot of times where I see stuff and it just seems like complete overkill.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you said, Greg, it's not about security, but I think it's about security for that person. Their personal security of, if I don't make it look like this requires a complex engineer, Am I still relevant? Am I still important? I think that's a question sometimes folks are struggling with internally.
SPEAKER_02Well, I don't think you have to struggle anymore because all you have to do is look at Twitter, right? And I'm not saying I liked what's happened at Twitter. I don't agree with what's happened at Twitter. It's still running. And, you know, those people who may have had that mindset of, you know, they can't get rid of me. This place won't run. And we all now have a very textbook story of like, well, that's not true anymore because obviously they've been able to make it work. So I think I'm hoping that forces people to make some better choices about not just in technology, but just in design
SPEAKER_00in their careers, all of it. I've been following the saga of Twitter, now X, but I think we'll just call it Twitter. It's interesting, having been in a number of tech circles, I've never worked at one of the big tech companies, but I've had friends now who have. You start to realize that someone has a six-figure job to do the tiniest possible thing that you and I could imagine. If I work at a startup with two or three other people, My hats are many. I have 10 hats and we just get something built. If I go into a company with a hundred thousand other tech workers, there's no practical way, even if I want to, for me to do that. So I think what happens is I put on the tiniest single little hat I have, I put my head down and I hope for the best. That's what I'm starting to realize and seeing threads that the new app that came out had a 50-person team over four months that built it. That kind of speaks to you do not need thousands of people to build apps. So it's going to be interesting in the coming years. Maybe some of those brilliant people will go build a bunch of tiny companies that haven't been in our ecosystem because they've all been sucked up into the massive companies. So I'm curious what's going to happen over the coming years. I think you're going to, I'm hoping anyway.
SPEAKER_02You're going to see a lot of people give it the old college try, right? And I think you're going to start to see people who you mentioned like tiny companies, you know, used to be too that, okay, if a Twitter competitor came around, you didn't bother. You might go get, grab a new account just to kick the tires, but you've never ever serious of like not using Twitter and using something else. Now that's gone. Now you've got people who are like, I'm bye, see you later. I've had it with this. I'm going to go to a smaller community or I'm going to go to one that resonates with me. And I feel that that's where you just got a lot of people right now that have some form of disillusionment of, what's happened, what just happened, what's going on now, and what they want to do in the future. And whether that's starting tiny companies or new services, when I talk to my peers, people I've known for a while, they'll tend to have the same view of the future, which is there's going to be a lot of folks who don't want to go back to big corporations. They don't want to go back to big companies. They want to do the work they're doing but they don't want to be feeding these huge beasts anymore. So whether the economy calls for it or not, or the marketplace calls for it, I think you're going to see a lot of people
SPEAKER_00try. This will lead really well into the post that I reached out to you about. It was, if you have a choice, never have a job. And I'll link it in the show notes. And there's right off the bat, two things that stand out to me about that post. I'll ask you maybe to summarize it in a second. But what I'm kind of wondering is, if you have to have a job, is there a mentality you can approach to feel autonomous? That's kind of something I'm digging at here. And then is it possible, Is it possible to do your best work when you feel that weight of pain for your mortgage? And I'll let you kind of summarize what you think your article was intended to be about, and then I'll ask you more questions. Sure. So
SPEAKER_02that article is one in a series of 10 that I'm still in the process of writing. And there was a very world-famous designer, Milton Glaser. And Milton worked all the way up until he died in his 80s. The man loved going into work, loved design. And this is the guy that designed the Bob Dylan poster that everybody has likely seen at some point in their life amongst a huge catalog of work that is... some of the foundation of graphic design, American design, you name it, that guy's a fixture. And Milton gave a lecture a while back about the 10 things that he's kind of learned in life. And I called it Milton's axioms, right? Of this is how I think and take it or leave it, but this is how I roll, right? And in this one particular lecture, thought that he had. It was, if you're able to, don't have a job. And I think even back when he gave this is recognizing that there's privilege in not having to have a job. And I don't mean be unemployed, be very clear about this. It was work, but don't have to go work for somebody else. In other words, don't be employed. And the reason being is when you're employed, there's somebody else that has some form of control over you, right? And more importantly, one day they can come in and say, you're no longer employed and there's nothing likely that you can do about that. And so for Milton, his independence was not one of those, I can't work for anybody else. And there are a lot of people like that out there, right? I've met a lot of them. This guy was basically, I'm not going to trust somebody else to keep me gainfully employed, to keep food on my table and my ability to pay a mortgage. And I think that that message likely is going to resonate with a lot of people because as we just talked about, a ton, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people have lost their job at no fault of their own. Layoffs. It's one thing to be fired for a cause or whatever that cause may be. It's another to be let go, laid off because the company didn't work or the company made some financial decision. Or in some cases, the company's maliciously laying people off under the guise of one thing when what they're really trying to do is get rid of people so they can rebuild the company under a new vision. And that's happened at IBM, pockets of IBM. It happened most recently at Grindr. So Milton's approach to this is I want to be accountable to myself. I want to have more control over how I make money, where I make money, and that I can make money.
SPEAKER_00This resonates a lot with why Lance and I started this podcast. And one of the things I've noticed is when my income has come from multiple sources, I'm more candid and open with founders. I'm able to push back on them. Earlier this year, I was working with some founders and I disagreed with them. And for one of the first times in my career, I spoke up. I said, hey, I actually think this is immoral the way that this thing is being handled. I disagree with it heavily. Here's how I think we should modify it. And they halfway did based on that feedback. And they said later, thank you. We didn't realize how this was looking and they respected me more for it. I felt that I could only do that because they represented a third of my income instead of 95%. And I guess my question back to you is, Is it possible to have that mindset when someone is 95% of your income? Is it possible to put yourself into that way of thinking? If
SPEAKER_02you can, good for you. That's a privilege that a lot of people just aren't, they're either not going to have it or they're not going to allow them to have it for fear, right? And that's okay. I've been there. There's a lot of people that are there that they want to say something um but they're afraid of the repercussions and i don't mean that that means you're fired on the spot but it could damage whatever relationship you had with these people and you know in those situations where you can't simply walk away or you can't speak you know what's on your mind um typically in my experience anyway um those relationships are very hard to repair to really to get back to what it was. And in some cases, they're never repaired. On that day, you didn't know it, but your relationship took a fork in the road and it's going to be different from then on out. So I think if you have a job and to be able to speak your mind, I think that's why people are looking at things like unionizing. So they don't have to do it by themselves, but they can do it through the union. The union can do that and have potentially more power behind what the response or the reaction or the advice, whatever that is. Yeah, either that or you're just not afraid. Maybe you don't have kids, you don't have a mortgage. There's other ways to kind of control that, what might be the repercussion, which is to live certain lifestyles. But I think for most people, That's a very hard thing to do. That's very well put.
SPEAKER_01Go ahead, Lance. A very unique culture that would embrace that kind of communication. Very few companies would have that.
SPEAKER_02Well, and it's funny as those same companies are the ones that when Radical Candor came out, they're like, hey, everybody, read this book. We can speak our minds and it's okay if I tell you whatever you don't want to hear. We're all going to learn how to accept that input. We're not going to get mad or respond. And we're going to somehow be productive about it. And it's like, great book. Nobody does it. It's one of those books that, yes, it's true. If you did that, But the if statement is grounded in human behavior and the need for human, some type of transformation and good luck with that, right? Like a book isn't going to do it. And it takes a certain culture to kind of accept that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate. So I have not finished this book, so I can't speak to the full premise, but radical candor. I really liked it. And I bought into, Oh, I, As an IC, individual contributor, sweet, we're going to all do this now. But Kim Scott wrote a follow-up, which is called Just Work. I haven't finished reading it, but she started the book by saying, oh, shoot, I was not even thinking about racial prejudice, bias, ways that people... can't always speak up because of injustice, because of institutional challenges against them. And I really appreciate actually that she essentially has a follow-up to it to recognize there are times where you cannot be candid because it's not safe. And a lot of people fall into that situation.
SPEAKER_02This is why I say, if you can do this and feel like you're going to come out unscathed, like that's extremely privileged right and and i'm i'm a white male right and i i recognize that like there are times where i couldn't do that so i can't imagine uh somebody who has to deal with an array of biases not even the fact that you know the person they report into is a jerk it's i i've learned the hard way through my own even though i thought not anything bad but but Just not seeing that those biases were there. But there's also a different form of this too, which I've worked with people, you probably have too, who just seem really just angry and pissed off all the time. They don't hold back. They'll tell you, speak to your face. And yet that same person who feels like extremely... rough, not around the edges, just rough. You know, the type of person where, you know, it's like, I don't want to meet with this person. I just know they're going to grill me over and like, just rake me over the coals over the simplest question. And I've, I've had to learn that those folks, that's not who they are. That's who they feel they have to be in order to get ahead. Right. And so it's just this, like, it's this weird thing. almost like yin yang of there's people who are afraid to speak up, but there are also people who are afraid that if they don't present that very rough personality, like that is their way to kind of counter all the biases that they deal with. Right. And I used to come at this saying that, My wife works at home now. And so I would overhear her. She's an engineer. And I would overhear her talking to her fellow engineers. And at the time, she's working in the oil industry. Young female working for a lot of really old white dudes. Like a lot. And it's been that way for a long time. So when I hear her talking to these folks, I'm like, holy shit. My wife is, she's mean. Like I would want to work for her. And I kind of jokingly wrote about this and and uh on on airbag on my blog about how i don't know how people can do it i don't know how people can be two different types of people you know kind of your work face and or your work self and and your home self i don't know how to do that because and it was kind of written from a perspective of wow bravo i wish i could do that sometimes because but i can't And I got nailed from some of my friends and rightly so, but they helped me understand that, hey, yeah, I might fit in that category, but I don't want to do it. But that's the only way I know how to survive here and actually to get promoted, to get up the ladder. that's what i feel like i have to do and and i say feel i need to write put air quotes on that because it's not what they feel they have to do it's it's probably what they do have to do because of all the crap that they have to endure at work
SPEAKER_00all right this ties pretty well into another article you wrote which will link some people are toxic and avoid them how is this person who's having to put on this kind of persona and create a shield essentially to protect themselves, how is that different than a toxic person that you try to have nothing to do with if you can?
SPEAKER_02Toxicity comes in a couple of different forms. I think the one that for me is not the necessarily angry, gruff person. It's like if it's that person and they don't welcome input, they don't listen to you. I have a podcast called Sprints and Milestones that I record with Brett Harned. And this last season, we dedicated all the episodes on failure. So we specifically asked our guests to come and talk about a time when they experienced some type of horrific failure at work that they were a part of. and talk about, you know, what happened more importantly, what were they feeling? What were they thinking when this is, you know, the failure is, is happening. And then when they got through it, what did they learn? What was their takeaways from that? Right. And it was really interesting because we thought we were just going to get a bunch of people talking about project failure, right? Like, well, it's one time when you delivered a logo and it didn't work or, you know, whatever. Instead, we got people who were coming back and this one story, which is why I bring this up, from Galen Lowe. And he talks about the time that he found out that he was extremely toxic at work. The people that reported into him had just got to a point where it's like, listen, he wasn't necessarily doing this full time. It was like, there's a fun Galen, and then there's like a hide Galen. Right. Where you just turn into a complete jerk. And they had had enough of kind of like, we don't understand, you know, like maybe seek medical help or, you know, are you doing this on purpose? And he just was unaware. He was unaware of this own behavior that essentially when, when he got stressed out and he felt that people might not be doing what they're supposed to be doing, he turned into a different person. And they helped kind of expose that. And Galen's story is great because he's grateful that that happened, right? And he even told us the reason that he kind of shared this seemingly embarrassing story is for his newborn son, who he didn't want his son to ever have to go through that himself, right? Dealing with toxic people to me are the ones that even after you've made them aware that, hey, not everything is right here with the way that you're interacting with people or things that you're doing at work. And if they don't step back and be like, oh, okay, tell me more. And again, in my experience, there's a lot of these folks who are like, what? No, that's not me. You got it wrong. There's something about that day or they just don't see it. And a lot of those times, sadly, they're not going to see it. I've rarely seen anybody who has toxic behavior ever really make a change, a lasting change anyway. They maybe get a good couple of days, a good couple of weeks in, but give them a month, they're going to be right back to whatever it was that they're doing, whether that's And to me, toxic is when you've got people that are throwing other people under the bus. Why didn't you deliver this? It's that person's help or that person's fault. I once tried to help a coworker take responsibilities off their plate. I was volunteering to do more work because I felt like that they were overworked. We were peers. She had way more on her plate than I did. And when I went to my boss to volunteer, what if I take a couple of their teams and help out? Sounded like a great idea. My boss was like, that's fantastic. Thank you so much. When the person found out about it, when she found out about it, she raised all kinds of hell. And from then on there, it was like knives in my back. And it's just like, it was crazy. Like nothing I could do was going to change that. It was just always going to be, you know, the knives or throwing me under the bus or whatever that is. And so I want to be really clear what toxic means. And I don't, I think there's times where you get that rough, rough person and they can be toxic. I'm talking about a very kind of different person here that unfortunately has to kind of bounce from job to job to job because they just, they're not getting the help they need to change.
SPEAKER_00I like the way they, I'll paraphrase, but the way you define it in the article is if on the whole, they are extracting energy more than they are providing positive energy to the room. Yes. So it's not that you can't have a bad day. It's not that you can't maybe blow up. It's, are you a net negative to your colleagues? And I think that to me is a really great way of thinking about it.
SPEAKER_02But it's also friends, right? It's anybody you have to interact with, right? It could be people in your community, people at your church, people at work, friends. I have friends in the family where it's like, this is not equitable. And I don't mean, I give you something, you give me something. It's more of, you're an energy vampire, right? You're literally sucking the life out of me. And that's okay if you give it back. Anyway, thank you for bringing up that definition because that's even more basic and even just the better rule of measure here of a toxic person. Now, it can get a lot worse, right? But that, yes, that rule of, are they providing energy? Are they at least replacing the energy that they take? Or are they just take, take, take, and I never get anything back. And if it's the latter, run away from those people that you don't need them in your life.
SPEAKER_00That's a great way of describing it. And something came up recently where I know I've been draining on Lance because I've been kind of venting about something. but I also know we're friends in the net. Hopefully the net is that it's positive for both of us, right? So it's okay. I think of my wife, she is absolutely a positive for me. So if she's having a bad day, that does not reflect at all on all the amazing, just generosity she provides in our friendship. So yeah, I love that definition. I guess my follow-up question to this is what if the toxicity comes from the top you defined, right? If someone's an employee and they're toxic, they're going to bounce around. What if they are running a toxic organization or they're the person?
SPEAKER_02My experience is if your mileage is likely going to vary, but I'd like to think that most folks will at least hear what you have to say, especially if you're diplomatic. If you come in saying like, you are a complete jerk, you're mean, nobody likes you, whatever. you know, cuss words. I think most folks are going to be receptive. They may not change completely, but they're going to be receptive. But also if the company is big enough, there should be an HR department. There should be a way to provide feedback that doesn't necessarily tie it back to you. And the only thing I'd add to that is if you are in that situation, I would say don't, and this is, I think a problem that a lot of people have just in with, you know, interpersonal relationships is don't come to that person with just a problem. And one of the things that I appreciate about Galen's story, going back to him, his employees were, his team members, his employees were telling him about the problem, but also sharing like, but over here, you're not toxic. So they helped to kind of frame that, not just coming with pitchforks and saying like, you're toxic all the time. So I guess what I'm saying or trying to get to is, Don't just come with the problem. Come with some examples. Come when maybe the behavior's not there, that they're a different person. And also maybe a suggestion of what you might be observing and how they could do things different that wouldn't be so toxic.
SPEAKER_01Do you think the higher someone sits in a hierarchical organization, the more senior someone is, the less likely they are going to receive feedback? And another way of saying that is, the less likely it is that someone will approach them with feedback, and then you get in a little bit of your ivory tower and no one dares to tell you.
SPEAKER_02To me, well, it's really going to depend on the company culture, right? And I'm doing some study on that now where there are kind of identifiable cultures that would help answer that question of not only is it possible to get feedback to the top, but what's the best way to approach it? From the places I've been, there's always been an avenue to the top. And typically, you'll know if you're at a good company just by, is there a way for me to, if not talk to the CEO or the leader or whatever, give them information, give them feedback? And does the leader have prescribed times where they're asking for that feedback? And so if the answer to those two questions is no, then try to go get a job somewhere else as fast as possible because you're likely in a toxic culture. There should be a way to talk to the top and pass feedback between each other. And if there's not, maybe go to the work of trying to implement that change in the workplace, right? A culture of feedback, a culture of candor, but I'd say good luck to you. And go brush up that resume on LinkedIn.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for being here today, Greg. This has been so fantastic. You're hitting on points that Lance and I have brushed on a lot over the last couple of months. So it's so cool to hear someone else who has been thinking about this, is trying to help, is trying to make a difference in companies. Is there anything you'd like to share about that you're working on that we can include in the show notes?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's two things I'm working on right now. One is Jump Ship with Ryan Rumsey. And That's a business that we are standing up later this fall. We've been testing it throughout this year, and it's where we want to teach people who have been in tech to put all of their hard work, experience, and skills and to go to work for themselves. And specifically, doing what it sounds like the two of you have done, which is get out into business on your own and do the thing that you love to do, but don't take the job, go sell a service. And there's a lot of folks that have thought about it, but just have never gone through the process. And so at Jump Ship, we're focusing on not how to stand up a business, not how to get a business license and that stuff, but to actually take your idea and really consider what is it you're going to provide and who you're going to sell to. And what I mean by sell to is who actually has the money to pay for it. And sometimes those are not the same person. So we have a program that we've been working on this year and it's testing well of helping individuals go in and help create their niche, create their niche audience, and then go through the process of building the artifacts and the things you need to actually go pitch business and go win business. So that's one. Another I've got coming out this fall, it's called Same Team. And that's where Brett Harned and I, from the podcast I mentioned earlier, he and I have been doing a lot of coaching, leadership coaching, team coaching. tasked with coming in and taking a look at organizations and how they operate. And we've been asked a number of times to come in and help clean things up, help teams function better, help companies run better. And so we've decided to put a shingle out and turn this into a team. Like we do this as individuals. Now we want to work together. And so same teams coming out to a website near you in the weeks ahead. Thank you. I'm looking forward to seeing those as they come out. What's
SPEAKER_01the best way for someone to find you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. My blog that's been there for 20 plus years, airbag industries. So airbagindustries.com will likely always be the way to find
SPEAKER_00me. Perfect. I'll make sure to include that too. We'll wrap up here for now. If anyone has any feedback, feel free to email us email at fractional.fm and we'll be back next week. Thank you.
