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This is The Art of Charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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The Art of Charm is where ordinary guys become extraordinary men.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm, I m Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise, packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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We may not have all the answers, but we do have all the questions.
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Make sure to stay up to date with the Art of Charm and get some great stuff that we don t or can t share on the show by signing up for the transformation kit at theartofcharm.com.
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If you like what you hear on the show, come hang out with us on the blog.
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We get really in-depth on these topics and you can engage with the AOC team there as well.
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Or if you re new to the show and you want to find out more about what we teach here at the Art of Charm,
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You can go to the website.
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We ll email you the Fundamentals Toolkit that covers topics like body language, nonverbal communication, dating, attraction, persuasion, business networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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And we ve got our live programs running every single week here in LA.
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In fact, we ve got guys from all over the world, which shows that no matter where you are, you can make it here if you want to learn and grow.
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We re sold out a few months in advance, so if you re thinking about it a little bit, get in touch now.
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I m Jordan at theartofcharm.com.
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Get some info from us so you can plan ahead.
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Looking forward to meeting you here at AOC.
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Today we re talking with my friend Robbie Richman.
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He runs something called Culture Hackers.
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It s also a book that he s given away for free.
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Two listeners to the show, we re gonna talk about how to think like a hacker, how to create great company culture, even if it s not your company.
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and the skill that everyone needs to have in the next several years, as well as some management, meeting hacks, and something called anti-marketing, which I think you ll see is more relevant than ever.
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So enjoy this one with Robbie Richman.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence.
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I am a keynote speaker and a culture architect for big companies.
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Yeah, that s it in a sentence.
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All right, good.
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It s funny, because I ve noticed this trend, and I m not trying to like poop on your Cheerios, but I ve noticed this trend of, and you re an exception to this, which I ll qualify in a second, but there s a lot of people that are like, I m a keynote speaker, and I m like, okay, what else?
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Because I assume if you re a keynote speaker,
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you re keynoting about something with which you have tons of experience and are teaching that in keynote format.
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But I ve noticed there s just a lot of like, I m a keynote speaker, and I m like, okay, and what d you do before that?
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I was a keynote, I ve always been a keynote speaker.
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Or like, yeah, I had a job at a movie theater in the 90s, and you re like, wait a minute.
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unless you re speaking about the business of speaking, it sounds a little bit circular.
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You know, that s so true, and what hits me about that is I realize the reason I do that in most contexts, not this, is because I don t like talking about myself unless somebody wants to know, so when I m in public, I ll just say that, and if they say, oh, what do you speak about, then I ll go into it, but if they re like, oh, that s great, then I don t need to hear myself talk about it, so that s why I usually introduce it that way.
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That s cool, I actually have a similar thing.
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People who I don t know, if I m feeling like I don t need to talk about this for the 80th time this week, I ll say, I m a talk show host.
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And they re like, cool, what do you talk about?
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And then I can put the light on other people.
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But if you say like, oh, we ve got this school in LA and we teach people networking skills and relationship development skills, they re like, oh my god, I got, how does it, where is it, who works with it?
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And you re just like, ah, I wanted to nap on this flight.
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So I totally get you.
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I totally get you.
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Jason just says, I work for this d-bag.
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You can look him up on Twitter.
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What is a culture architect?
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I don t even know what that means.
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I can guess, but since I have you here, I don t have to.
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Yeah, in the book I use the analogy the book is called the culture blueprint And I think about culture the way that you can you can very intentionally design a house That doesn t mean you can really design the people in it.
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You know you can t be controlled You can t control people, but you can really design all the elements around it to create it well So that s why I say you know you you can never really create culture You can really co-create it with people around you But you can design all these elements around it the same way you can design a house for the kind of interactions you want to have
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That s interesting.
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I totally get that now.
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Well, I took a tour of Zappos.
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They re famous for their culture, which I thought was cool, because you did it, and it s funny, because I was like, oh, my friend helped design the culture, and the tour guide was like, whatever, I don t know who that guy is, which is funny, because I guess you re more like ninja behind the scenes, but I don t even think the people that you worked with at that level are there, and they re known for their culture, but they don t care who made it.
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It s like sausage.
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They re like, I don t care who invented this.
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It s like the iPhone.
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Like, this thing is great.
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Well, you know the engineer that, ah, I don t care.
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You know.
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So, it s funny, because it s famous for the culture in that there s, and when you walk in there, there s like toys laying around, and there s movies playing in like the hallway.
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If you need like five minutes to go watch Ferris Bueller and decompress from like an A-hole customer service call or something.
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And there s all kinds of little games and stuff.
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And my first thought was, no one has time to play all this stuff.
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But the fact that it s just there, it changes the whole vibe.
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Like, it doesn t matter if no one opens up Mousetrap and plays it one single time.
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The point is that they know that they can do it and that they re not gonna get in trouble, right?
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Totally, totally.
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I remember the first time I ever walked into Zappos, I saw there was, in the lobby, a Dance Dance Revolution terminal.
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Just the entire setup right there in the lobby.
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Right, and you re like, who s doing this?
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And there s one Asian guy who s crushing it on the lobby.
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Hasn t made a customer service call in a year and a half, but has eight million points.
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He s great for PR.
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Yeah, he s famous for other reasons.
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How are you qualified, to put it bluntly, to go into a big company and make a new culture?
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How did that even happen?
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I am not.
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I am not qualified to make it happen.
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That s actually what I tell people when they re thinking about a job applying for it.
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They ll say, I don t know if I m qualified for this.
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I m like, you re not.
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And they ll say, what?
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You re supposed to cheer me up about this.
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I ll say, no.
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If you were really qualified to do something, you d probably be bored with it and want to do something else.
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The act of doing it gets you qualified.
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Zappos lives by the core values.
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One of them is be passionate and determined.
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And the culture, before I got there, was really thriving.
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But Tony Hsieh, the CEO, had this idea to turn it into a product.
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Like, so many people love Zappos and the culture and the service.
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How do we actually turn that into a product?
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And that was what I was passionate about.
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I was passionate about, we actually had studied the same dating expert, David DeAngelo, who really created a whole product suite around dating products, and he wanted to do that with culture.
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And I just had a lot of passion and ideas around it, and that s what they saw.
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Interesting, yeah, I remember that stuff, the David DeAngelo stuff from like the 90s and early 2000s and being like, this is incomplete, we should look at this and test some of it, and that s one of the ways in which Art of Charm was born.
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I totally understand the being qualified for something and then being bored with it, but for example, I m technically, I m a lawyer in New York State, but my first bit of advice is do not ask me for any type of legal advice whatsoever, because you will regret it.
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It s very true, I think people who are fully, fully qualified to do something and aren t stretching at all are probably very bored and complacent.
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And anytime you see anybody who s like a doctor in their field, a leading physician, they re always working on something else.
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Even if they re not working on something in their field, they re trying to expand the knowledge base.
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Hence the whole theory of PhDs and stuff like that, right?
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So when you started this, I mean, what are you looking at when you start to create a product out of culture?
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And why is this important?
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I mean, why should people who aren t working at Zappos or Amazon even care?
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Amazon might be a bad example given current events.
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Why would people even care?
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I mean, what if I m running a small business?
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What if I m not even running a business?
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I work for a company.
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Why do I care about all this stuff?
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Because it s running everything we do.
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If you think about it, we re all in the same business.
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If an alien were to come down here and watch us, they d say, you all do the same things.
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I see you guys are on these computers, you re on the phone, you re researching on the internet, you re talking to people, you re trying to convince people of stuff.
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It s all, we re not out in the garden with hoes, most of us, we re just.
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Is that a euphemism?
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I was gonna say, I couldn t stop from laughing there for a second.
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But we re all dealing with culture constantly, because culture exists in language, so there s no way that you re not dealing with it.
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So it applies to every single business.
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And to answer your other question with this about how this gets started, like anything good, it started very organically, because Zappos was just giving tours to vendors, and vendors would say, oh my god, this is amazing here, can we bring our friends?
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And then they started bringing friends to the point that thousands of people
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were coming through and saying, hey, can we meet with HR?
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Can we talk to your training group?
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And so Tony said, wait a minute, we ve got to do something here.
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This is clearly a need and wanted to turn into business.
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And his first idea
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was to just do a subscription site of videos.
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And that s what I got called in to do.
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And when we ran our first event, we taped it and it was kind of like romper room.
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I mean, we really didn t know what we were doing, but we just brought people in and got them interacting with the culture and with Tony and asking questions and having a fun time.
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We took them out and partied with them.
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It was just great.
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And at the end, for feedback,
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I asked, okay, how was the content?
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Because we need to videotape this and get it on the web and sell it.
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And they said it was okay.
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And I couldn t believe it was just okay because I had bet my life on this venture and moved everything out to Vegas to do it.
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And they said, hold on, hold on.
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You should know, though, that the experience of being here blew our minds.
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And I said, why?
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And they said, well, we knew all this.
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We studied Zappos.
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We re your super fans.
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That s why we re here.
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So we knew a lot of what you were talking about, but we didn t believe it was possible until we got here and experienced it and saw how everybody s truly living this every single moment.
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We didn t believe it.
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And that s when we pivoted, to use the lean startup kind of sense of the word,
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and shifted the entire business model over to experiences because that s what people really wanted to learn culture.
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What s the point of having the tours?
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It happens on several levels.
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Like I said, it just kind of happened organically for a while.
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But I saw that the value in there is huge.
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One, of course, the PR.
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People go home, they blog, they talk about it all the time.
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That s a lot of free publicity and advertising.
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But the internal benefit that I ve seen, which is why I actually recommend other companies do the same thing, is that when you ve got people going through who are impressed, who are asking questions, who are saying, oh my God, this is fascinating and incredible, and learning about the company,
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suddenly everybody in there doesn t start taking it for granted when every single day somebody is saying, oh, this is really amazing and this is fascinating.
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So bringing people in from the outside and keeps to this day the culture very fresh because nobody takes it for granted.
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Yeah, I think that s very true, because especially when you have that kind of outside eye, you put your game face on, and you think, okay, there s a constant reminder that you are dealing with the public.
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I think it s probably really good for your customer service people, too, because I know from personal experience, you can get an email that s like, hey, this thing s broken, and you want to reply like, who cares, it s free, go fly a kite, what s your problem?
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But if you see the people every day that you work with, which is what I did when I lived at Art of Charm HQ during the boot camps and the live training stuff, you automatically are kind of like, you re looking at the guy sitting on your couch and you re like, this is just another one of those guys.
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So I would never talk to the guy on the couch like that.
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sort of interestingly, it humanizes everything.
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You see the customer, you see the people who are excited to be there, and I feel like you could walk in kind of needing caffeine, and you re like, oh, people really care about what we re doing here, so maybe I should care about what we re doing here.
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That s a great point, humanizing it once all become traffic and eyeballs and conversions and things like that, and culture is so infectious.
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I remember one guy came in from New York, and he started helping out with things we were doing, just lending a hand, and then he just stopped and commented, he goes,
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I m being really nice.
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He s like, I m from New York.
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I m never nice.
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There s something going on here.
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Nice, that s great.
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Yeah, like hey, suddenly I got manners.
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Something s broken.
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It s not just Zappos that does this.
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I mean, this is something that s catching on.
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It s just we only hear about it because Zappos is famous for culture.
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Right, exactly.
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Who else have you been working with and has it worked equally well?
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Well, the interesting thing is this is one of several programs.
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There are very few like this.
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You can t go into Apple and say, hey, let me go tour your campus and talk to anybody that I want and learn from your managers.
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You can t do that.
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But there are a few companies like Zappos, Ritz-Carlton, Disney does it.
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These companies that are deciding to, and you re seeing it online as well, like Netflix sharing their culture decks.
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Spotify sharing how they do management practices.
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This idea of taking what you do well and sharing it and scaling it, it s almost this odd spiritual principle of it, that if you share it, it gets stronger, and if you keep it to yourself, it kind of dies.
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So the companies, even as simple as blogging, a lot of companies just don t even blog to say, hey, this is what we re thinking about, this is what we re doing, this is what we ve got going on.
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But you see it in companies even like Google.
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You re learning about their mindfulness class and how they re using meditation for their engineers, and they re being very public about these things.
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And so I say to companies, you don t have to be a Google or a Zappos to do this.
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Start sharing what s really going on, and you re going to attract a really interesting audience.
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So you ve created a book about this, which is essentially culture hacking.
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Tell us what that is, what that means.
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So what happened was at Zappos, people would come through and they d ask about
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recruiting, training, customer service, leadership, I mean, you name it, all these things exist in culture, and they d get completely overwhelmed, and they d say, I don t know what to do, I don t know where to start, and so I created this blueprint as a plan that maps all those things out, but also, one of the biggest complaints that I heard was, I m not the CEO, or I don t have enough power, or some type of reason why they can t do it, why they can t create a culture change, and what I noticed was,
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If you look at computer hackers, what computer hackers do is they have no authorization whatsoever.
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They are not in the company, they are not allowed there, and yet they get in to a network and they make big changes.
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And so what I did was thought about how can that hacking philosophy and idea apply to culture.
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And the way that hackers work is what they do is they look at the whole network, but they don t try to change the whole thing.
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They look around until they can find a vulnerable spot.
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Where is there an opening where I can get in and do something and try something and play and experiment?
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And once I m in, then I can really be doing all kinds of things once I m in.
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And so what I found was that rather than paying attention
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and getting overwhelmed by the big things, the vision, the values, where are we gonna go, where s the marketing plan, all these things are very important, but they can be so overwhelming and people feel like, oh, I can t even affect those things.
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But the end point is where you find things that aren t working, frustrations.
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That s like a hacker finding a vulnerable point.
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And if we can go into those and make a shift, it actually creates a shift throughout the whole network.
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Ah, and that s the idea, right, is to have that ripple effect through the whole company, not just like make certain people in HR do stuff.
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Right, right.
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Right.
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So how do we change our thinking to be hacker-ish, hacker-esque?
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Well, the way I think about it is a hacker knows that destruction is higher leverage than creation.
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Because you think about like a skyscraper.
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Building a skyscraper, hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of people, it takes a lot of time, energy, and effort.
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And when you re building something new, you better be sure you want that.
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Because as anybody knows, taking on any project, it ends up being a lot more work than you think.
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And it takes longer than you think.
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And so creation is great if you know what you want to do.
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But if you re looking to create change fast and make something happen fast, it s way better to destroy something that s not working the same way destroying a big building takes a moment and it s gone.
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So if you can find things that are not working,
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It s kind of the equivalent of if you ve got an infection on your finger or a really bad canker sore, it s tiny, it seems like nothing, and yet that pain can drive you mad, and it s distracting you from the things you really want to do.
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And that s what frustrations are within culture, is you think
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they re small and tiny and I don t want to focus on that.
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I want to focus on the big picture, but that distraction is getting in the way of that.
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So actually reprogramming your head to think how can I clear up frustrations and distractions rather than to create new things will actually create the space to develop those new things.
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Ah, interesting.
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What are some action steps that we can do to clear up that headspace, or that physical space, or whatever space you re referring to?
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Well, one, for example, with business is, I see the best, Richard Branson being a notable one of these, is he s somebody who actually loves, not just does, but loves reading through customer complaints.
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That is his source of innovation because he knows this, that those frustrations are really getting in the way of the big picture.
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And Tony Shadesappos knows this as well.
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He does 10 hours of customer service every year during the holidays.
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to be on that front line.
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And so, for example, what happened at Zappos was a programmer was taking customer service calls.
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And he noticed on the back end that something was taking five screens to do that should have taken one.
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And when he did that in a QA process, it seemed like, oh, okay, five screens, that s no big deal.
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But when you re doing something day in and day out, you start to realize what other people are going through.
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So one way to do this as a hacker is to get outside of your role.
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Take on other roles in the company, go through it either directly or with the person, and not just for a moment to learn it, but hour after hour, and then you can start to see really what s going on.
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That s K-A-J-A-B-I dot com slash charm.
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Hey Art of Charm listeners, I m excited to share a new podcast I ve been absolutely binging.
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And don t miss President Obama sharing how he deals with pressure by projecting confidence, believing in your team, and taking criticism.
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Listen to Ways to Win wherever you get your podcasts.
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Now back to Robbie Richman.
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That s an interesting idea, sort of jump into somebody else s seat.
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Like do sales, God forbid, if you re not in sales.
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I have other people at AOC record shows, which they hate sometimes.
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I mean, they don t hate it.
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It s just, it s hard when you don t do it all the time, and it s easy enough for me, but.
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they ll have me doing stuff like, hey, why don t you film a video?
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And I m like, oh gosh.
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And it hasn t really necessarily helped us be more efficient per se, maybe it has, but mostly it s given us an appreciation for like, what does that guy do all day?
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He just sits around and talks to people, and it s like, okay, you wanna join me?
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And they re like, okay, this is so much more difficult than it seems.
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And hey, why don t you teach this unit of the class?
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And it s not like you re letting the quality suffer, they re still there, but you go, man, I m wiped out after an hour.
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And that s very interesting.
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I can definitely see how you d be able to increase quality.
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In fact, one of the reasons that producer Jason got hired was because one time I was asking for help with some stuff, and people were like, man, there s so much stuff that you do all the time.
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No wonder you sound a little distracted sometimes.
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Like, yeah, I m doing 20 different things, and I m not just talking here.
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Somebody else needs to actually take over this stuff.
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And it turned out to be a whole full-time job for somebody else.
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And that s made our whole company more efficient and made the show better.
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Fantastic.
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Right now he s probably playing Tetris, but normally he s here, he s present.
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That s what the best do.
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Yeah, exactly.
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They hibernate in Tetris land and then they come out when they need it.
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With a brilliant idea.
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Right, exactly.
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You see I ve got two headsets and headphones now, so I ve got you in one ear and I m editing three shows in the other ear and selling advertising.
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making everything work, but it s fun.
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Yeah, it s good, because that means I don t have to do it.
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But we never would have known these types of things had we not done a little bit of musical chairs with the roles here and there.
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And some of that comes from necessity, right?
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Like, oh man, we need somebody to do this.
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Well, look no further than the nearest business partner who has no choice.
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But after a while, you outsource things, or you hire people to do things, and if you don t go back and look at what they re doing,
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you ll never find those mistakes.
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And until, I ll tell you this right now, people listening right now, if you re listening right now and you ve got like a small business, you know this all too well.
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You fire somebody, they quit, or they re sick or something, and you ve gotta go and do their job, and you go, why the hell are we using this thing?
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What is this program?
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Why is there even this step?
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This is so unnecessary.
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And then every time that happens, it seems like every time we lose someone or someone goes on vacation and I ve got to look at their process, I go, wait a minute, you re logging into three places to write this stuff down?
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Let s delete all of this stuff and import it all over here.
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And they re like, oh, that s much easier.
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I can do it in a third of the time.
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But it s not their job necessarily to innovate and they wouldn t have even thought of it because the way you do stuff is the way you ve always done stuff.
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And I feel like that is true even if you re not running a business.
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You look at your own life, you look at your own habits, and you re doing a lot of things just because that s the way you ve always done it.
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And sometimes you need to take a fresh perspective.
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You hang out with a lot of high-level management people, from bosses to employees really, but a lot of high-level folks.
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and you re consulting at the top levels of culture and things like that, what sort of trends are you seeing?
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Because we get a lot of questions like, what do I study right now?
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Or I m thinking of transitioning careers, what should I focus on in this job to be competitive at these top level companies?
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What are you seeing inside those companies that can be useful for people?
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I m seeing something really interesting, which is that people at the top who are very effective are starting to realize that they re not in control.
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If anything, they ve been under the illusion that they re in control.
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that we can even tell people what to do.
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This may have been the case in a previous era.
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You know, when you went to a job, there was no internet, you didn t have your cell phone with you, you probably didn t even have a landline, and you were just there.
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And maybe in an emergency you d have to reach out or somebody would reach you, but you re there, you re doing your job, and then you go home.
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And then there s this big separation.
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Nowadays, the separation between work and life is getting
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very blurry.
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Everybody s got a cell phone with them, no matter what level they were.
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I actually went to a comedy show last night, I saw a homeless person sleeping on the street, and I saw her on her iPhone, literally.
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Everybody s got an iPhone, a computer, an internet connection, so what that means is,
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you can t watch people all the time.
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So a lot of the time, they can just be doing whatever they want.
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And they might appear to be giving their effort, but it s always their choice, whether they give 100%, whether they give their best ideas, their time, their energy, their passion.
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And so what I m seeing leaders do at the top,
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is realize that, okay, how can I go with this vector rather than against it?
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How can I actually use this to my advantage?
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Because assuming I ve got good people in the door that I want to be there, and I m not trying to get anybody out, if you do, you really should get those people out.
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But if I ve got good people,
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How can I maximize their passion and their talent?
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And the way that they re doing this, we ve been doing this at Intuit, at Capital One, is through these very big self-organized events where the people choose the agenda.
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They actually determine the strategy and say, this is what s going on.
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We are at the front end of things, so here s what we believe we need to do.
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And the leaders, rather than sitting to a silent audience and telling them, this is what we re doing, this is the way that we re going, like a general into battle, they actually get the best information from all their people through meeting technologies, one called OpenSpace.
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OpenSpace technology is a way to organize a meeting to get your best information from people where they self-organize and pick what s important to them.
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They re really listening to what people are saying rather than trying to direct everything themselves.
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Yeah, and that s another trend I m seeing.
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Even in the best cultures, in the best cultures, what I m hearing leaders say is managers are born, not created.
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That as much as people want to learn and grow, it s fantastic, but if they re not a people person, if they re not really having that inherent
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either skill or really strong desire, you can t take somebody who s technical at one point, who s been doing a great job, and turn them into a manager.
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They ve really, in a lot of ways, have to be born managers.
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Because what s happened is, in business and in life, there has become so many different options, so many things we can do, so many projects we can run.
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Tony taught me a great quote when he said that most businesses don t die of starvation,
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they die of indigestion from trying to do too much.
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So there s plenty to do.
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Our to-do lists are huge and they re filled.
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The key skill that any employer or entrepreneur has is not what s the best, not what s the most interesting, but what s actually most relevant, whether it be to my customer, to my boss, to my vendor, and zeroing in on that.
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And the people who develop that as a skill are gonna be the ones who thrive.
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How do we develop relevance then?
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It s really through curiosity and learning and it s like those C-level people who don t assume that they know what s best.
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I think we re moving out of this Steve Jobs era of
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of I know what s best for the customer, they don t, into how are we in such a strong relationship?
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Because if you think about it, if you have a really strong relationship with your people and a really strong relationship with your customers, you could completely screw up and still be fine.
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But if you don t, if you don t have that relationship there, you could have the best product and they still won t really hear you.
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So learning to be curious, like one of the things I recommend people do with a first time employee is to sit them down and learn from them, hey, who s the best boss you ever had?
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What was the best company you ever worked for?
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What was the worst boss you ever had?
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And learning all that before telling them even about your company because it s that one chance before they ve even had the impression of your new place to learn from them.
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Now you re working again with massively innovative companies.
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Is there something you see them doing that other companies are not doing other than getting tons of investment and things like that or creating devices that are must-haves?
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Do you see something that we can apply as maybe small businessmen or even people who work for a corporation?
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Sure, I see this trend that I m calling anti-marketing or the opposite of marketing, which is I noticed that the companies and brands that are really killing it, I look back to how they started as opposed to where they are now.
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People look at companies and try to copy what they do, but it can be more helpful to look at how they started.
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So if you take an example like Facebook, right now they re what, six times, seven times the population of the US, but when they started,
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You couldn t get on it if you tried.
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You had to be at Harvard.
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And then you had to be in a university.
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So only years later did you actually have even the opportunity to get on it.
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So same thing with Tesla is they haven t even introduced their consumer level vehicle yet.
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They started off with that roadster, you had to have 150 grand, you couldn t even finance it, you had to pay cash, and so they started with this very small audience, and then grew it, and grew the mystique from there, which is the opposite of what I see a lot of entrepreneurs and companies doing, which is they have their big launch, and then they re all over Facebook and marketing and saying, here s why we re the best, and you should really use this, and it s for everybody in the world, anybody can use this,
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That type of approach is what I see as the opposite of success, whereas the companies that are really killing it are focused way more on retention than on growth.
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And if you look back to their stories, they start really small.
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So the way that we can use this is no matter how small it is, even if you have three customers, if you re not creating something that they are absolutely loving and dying to tell people about,
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then why is it even going to scale?
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So the idea is to focus, however small it is, and develop something amazing for that small group.
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And if you do that, the brand potential and viral marketing potential is already there and you don t have to do these blasts of Facebook ads or whatever else, spending a lot of time and money for something that might not even work for a lot of people.
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Excellent.
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So you re thinking, yeah, focus on that central tribe that, of course, then becomes evangelists and things like that.
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Exactly.
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And that can work.
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Even if you re an employee at a company, you want to create a change.
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Focus on one or two people who are on your side.
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Don t try to
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you know, convince and get buy-in from the whole organization.
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If you guys can do something small that works really well, people are really attracted to success.
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SPEAKER_01
They want to say, oh wait, you figured out how to hack this meeting?
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You figured out how to do this?
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How did you do that?
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And it scales naturally because you got something that s hot.
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Excellent.
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I do like that a lot.
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I think a lot of people are focused on like, I can t do anything because I d have to convince this guy I can t even talk to at the top of the chain.
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You don t.
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You can create a little grassroots movement and you can show, hey look, the way that we decided to do this as a small team is working better.
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and here s the results, and here s the juice, and here s why it s better for everybody, and that type of thing can take over a company.
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Yeah, and one of the worst type of experiences I ve seen is where a group says, we re gonna roll out this new program, they spend a lot of time marketing it internally, say, hey, this is the next big thing, this is great, nobody ends up using it.
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They didn t bother to start small, they didn t start with a pilot, now they re embarrassed, they spent all this time and money, and guess what?
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SPEAKER_01
The next time they say they re rolling something out, people aren t gonna believe them.
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SPEAKER_01
Whereas if they started really small and then learned those lessons like lean startup style, then that can scale.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, sure, sure.
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SPEAKER_00
Within culture and within creating a new culture, you ve got to handle the meeting problem, right?
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Like there s books about meetings, there are shows about meetings, there are experts about meetings.
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How are you handling this and making that process more efficient for the participants as well as the company as a whole?
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Sure, so meetings people don t realize are games.
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They re actually games, because when we have a great game, everybody s engaged and loves to play.
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And when we have a bad game, people really check out.
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And games are really basic.
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One is you have a goal.
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Everybody wants to get that ball through the hoop.
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And you re all aligned with that.
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So many times you go into a meeting, I ve gone into this in big companies and people say, why are we here?
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And how do we even know when this is over?
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So the goal is unclear.
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Another thing like games is the rules can be unclear.
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If we start playing soccer and I pick up the ball with my hands, it s not that I m a jerk, I m just playing a different game.
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And so, meetings go horribly when one person feels it s okay to be on their cell phone, another person feels it s okay to be late.
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If everybody s in accordance with this, it s great.
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But if we re all on different pages, horrible, horrible meeting.
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Another thing that games do is they have a scoring mechanism.
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You can always see the scoreboard and see how you re doing.
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But so many times we re in a meeting and we re like, are we midway through, are we halfway through?
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And so just even simply taking sticky notes and putting them on the wall and moving them from we need to discuss this to we re discussing this now to we re done is a scoreboard of the meeting where everybody is actually looking at that as well as the clock, like a shot clock timer to say we ve gotta get through these 10 in this amount of time
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let s all get on track.
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And oddly, without even saying anything, everybody wants to accomplish that goal and they re looking at the feedback to do it.
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And the last element of it is games are opt-in.
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Nobody forces somebody to play a game.
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And it s the same thing with a meeting.
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If you actually make meetings completely optional and tell people, if you re in a management position, you say, hey, I know you ve got a lot of other things to do, but I m having a meeting on this, I d love you to come for this reason.
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And then people should only be showing up to meetings if it s either relevant to their job or it s really interesting.
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Otherwise, if we re making people do it, the kind of energy drain that happens when somebody doesn t want to be there is so palpable, it s insane.
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So making it all meetings optional, every kind of meeting, is a huge energizer for culture.
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SPEAKER_00
It seems also like the objection here is people are going, well, what if people don t show up?
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What if some of my key people aren t showing up?
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Or what if other folks aren t showing up?
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If your key people aren t showing up, it s because they have something else that they re doing, right?
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And you can always have, you can always get them the information.
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SPEAKER_00
That part s not gonna be hard, right?
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But if there s a regular culprit who s just not showing up to any meeting, you might have somebody who s just not a good fit for the company.
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You might, but it brings up the question, can they do their job without showing up at that meeting?
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If they can, then why do they have to be there?
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And if it s for team building, then it clearly is not an engaging enough meeting.
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And the meeting owner then has to take the onus and say, OK, how am I failing at running a great meeting that people wouldn t want to be here?
3
SPEAKER_00
Ah, that makes sense.
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SPEAKER_00
Right, like you, instead of saying, this guy doesn t show up, you say, what can I do to make this more of an attractive proposition for the people that should be here?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, excellent.
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And one of the ways that people can do that, this is whether they re in a meeting or giving a workshop or a presentation or anything, I ve found is the killer skill is adding in more silence.
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That people are used to somebody droning on and on, whether it be as a keynote speaker or in a meeting or a pitch.
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And it s amazing what silence can do because it gives people space to think.
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It gives room for questions to come up.
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It gives room for the person presenting to potentially pivot their own speech and notice, take a moment to notice, oh, people are kind of disengaging.
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SPEAKER_01
But that silence, I can kind of bring them back because when I m quiet, they re going to look back up at me.
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I ll reengage them and maybe change to a different topic.
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So silence, I d say, is the number one quickest thing you can do immediately.
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SPEAKER_01
Nice.
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SPEAKER_01
Excellent.
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Is there anything that you want to leave us with that we haven t asked you yet?
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Yeah, I d say two things.
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One is a life hack and management hack, which is that we re oftentimes blind to what s really going on, and we don t know what we don t know.
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And oftentimes when we ask somebody for feedback,
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we don t get the best information, because they don t want to let us down, or they don t want to say something that might make us upset or get us angry, and so they just don t say that.
3
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Whereas if we structure the question, again, culture exists in language, and if we structure our language well, we can alter the culture.
3
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So if we say these specific words, hey, I d love to get some feedback from you, I d like to hear, what is the thing you think I don t want to hear?
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And then in order to answer that, they have to go there.
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They have to say that thing they were uncomfortable with before, and then you get the real information.
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SPEAKER_01
What if they re scared to do it?
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Then that s a larger issue.
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Then you ve got a bigger issue of people who are not feeling safe in the company.
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But oftentimes, it s because they like you.
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that they don t wanna go there, and they don t wanna disappoint you, but if I m saying this earnestly to your face, not by a web survey or SurveyMonkey, but directly to you, and I m honestly, because I want to improve, saying this to you, they re gonna wanna help you improve.
4
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And so it might be uncomfortable for them, but you re creating a zone of safety by phrasing it that way.
4
SPEAKER_00
Ah, I like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think that s huge.
4
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I m envisioning this happening inside my own company, and I m like, oh God, that s scary for the person asking as well.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, true.
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SPEAKER_01
Very, because now you re vulnerable, and now, it wasn t done by an online survey, so you re kind of held accountable to that now, because you looked them in the eye and asked that.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you don t take some kind of action on that, now you re self-motivated rather than a manager motivating you to change.
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SPEAKER_01
Perfect, yeah, definitely.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now you ve got to do it yourself.
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SPEAKER_00
You own it.
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SPEAKER_01
Right, exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
Culture Hackers, Robbie Richman, thank you very much, man.
4
SPEAKER_00
This has been really enlightening.
4
SPEAKER_00
A lot of people who work for businesses, I think, can figure out ways to squeeze this stuff in, and if you run a business, you better be paying attention.
4
SPEAKER_01
My pleasure.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, I ve made the audiobook, the entire unabridged audiobook of The Culture Blueprint, available for free, and something that you can not only have for you, but your entire team.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you can get that at cultureblueprint.com slash audiobook.
4
SPEAKER_01
Great, thanks so much, man.
4
SPEAKER_01
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
4
SPEAKER_00
Interesting stuff, little bit more business-y than usual today, but I think that s cool, especially because most of us have jobs or run businesses, smaller of us, but at the very least, there s something here for everyone, even if it s just an insight into how some top companies actually do business and create the culture within the company.
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Show feedback and guest suggestions.
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The show is a fanarchy.
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SPEAKER_00
It s run by you.
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SPEAKER_00
We rely on you to help keep our finger on the pulse.
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SPEAKER_00
So if you know someone who s a good fit for the show, let us know.
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SPEAKER_00
Guests at theartofcharm.com.
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SPEAKER_00
If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Robbie on Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_00
We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as his book and other resources that you can download right from the show notes.
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You can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes right on your phone.
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SPEAKER_00
I m also on Twitter.
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I post a lot of stuff that never makes it to the show.
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Articles, insights, and other funny stuff.
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I m at theartofcharm on Twitter.
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Bootcamp details.
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Bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Remember, sold out a few months in advance.
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Get in touch now.
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Get the ball rolling.
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Also, check out the blog, subscribe and review us on iTunes and a bunch of other calls to action that probably shouldn t all be in one place, but hopefully you guys take the time, write a review.
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It really helps us stand out, and I will love you forever.
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Special thanks to the Jasons for their help in production of the Art of Charm podcast.
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Go ahead and tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now have a great week, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and everything for the extraordinary man at theartofcharmpodcast.com.