JOHN: This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab - a modern financial services firm that stands apart from the industry, where you can go as far as your ambition and unique talent take you to create a career worth owning. 

Hi Jyothi, thank you for joining us today. As a person with a tech background, what made you consider working for Schwab?

JYOTHI: I think although it's a financial company, it is technology driven. They are up on all the technologies, and pretty much everything that's out in the market, and the standard to be used, they are there. I think, yes, their domain is finance, but I think they are pretty technologically strong, as well. I would like to tell other programmers who think that Schwab is not a tech company, you are wrong. They have a very complex tech stack, and it is going to be really interesting and very fulfilling to work here.

JOHN: To learn more about the technology career opportunities at Schwab, visit SchwabJobs.com.

ARTY: Hi everyone, and welcome to Episode 132 of Greater Than Code. And I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Sam Livingston-Gray.

SAM: Thank you. Thank you. And I am here to introduce our guest today, Claire Lew. 

Claire is the CEO of Know Your Team, a software tool that helps managers become better leaders. Her company has helped over 15,000 people in 25 countries at companies like Airbnb and Kickstarter. Know Your Team also runs an online leadership community called The Watercooler with 1000+ leaders and thousands of conversations on hiring, firing, business growth, and more. 

Claire's mission in life is to help people become happier at work, which of course fits very well with our show. She speaks internationally on how to create more open, honest workplace environments, and has been published in Harvard Business Review, CNBC, Inc, Fortune, among others. Claire is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at her alma mater, Northwestern University.

Claire, welcome to the show.

CLAIRE: Thank you both so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

SAM: I hope that you were warned about this but we, of course, always opened the show with our very favorite question which is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

CLAIRE: I think what my superpower is, and I sometimes find it difficult to describe, but it's the ability to distill things. So what I mean by that is the ability to pull together a lot of disparate thoughts and ideas and directions and see a pattern or to find a cohesive thread or to say, "You know what? It doesn't really fit." It's something that I find myself doing in my work in terms of running a software company, being able to see, "Here's the market, here are our competitors, here are our hypotheses for what we want to do, here's what our team thinks." And amidst all the noise to sort of find that clarity of 'here's the most important stuff that we actually have to pay attention to' and 'here's how we should move forward'. I also find it happening a lot when I run meetings, especially big groups of people, whether it's served on a few boards, whether it's been for -- I used to live in Chicago. So, I used to be on the road for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and then chaired also something with the School of the Art Institute in Chicago called the MakeWork Council. And in both situations, I always found we've got a roomful of immensely talented and intelligent people sharing a lot, almost like pellets. You can only think of like a hailstorm and all these things just sort of railing at you. And you're like, do you take the umbrella out or do you like take a seat and sort of try to catch all the pellets, or which pellets do you actually care about. I don't know why the pellet analogy is even -- hailstorm or pellets, I don't even know why this analogy is coming to mind. But I'm good at figuring out which ones to capture, which ones to let go, and which ones to actually pay attention to. So, that's my superpower - catching pellets or the right pellets, perhaps. That should be in my Twitter bio now, I'm guessing.

And then the way that I think I got that superpower is two things. One is when I was younger, I moved a ton growing up. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia. I've lived in Washington State, rural Ohio, suburban Minnesota and then spent the last 11 years in Chicago. And most recently, moved to San Francisco. So I'm a bit of everywhere, like north, south, east, west, everything. I've done it. And I think when you are constantly in such different environments and meeting such unique people, you have to find a way to sort of be the observer and to find unlikely connections and to really, really listen. And so, I think the ability to distill to pull together seemingly sort of contradictory ideas and find a way to integrate them is just based off constantly being around new people and being in new situation. So yeah, that would be my answer.

SAM: That's great. I love it.

CLAIRE: What are both of your superpowers? Do you get to answer the question too?

ARTY: I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the superpower question and I think my main gift is in helping to see the gifts in others and bring those to the surface. I have this sort of purple world lens that I look through. And when I see people, I see the pellets in a raining. I start thinking about people as having a certain set of eyes, having a certain set of perspectives and experiences such that they contribute by being able to see the world through a unique lens and through whatever experiences brought them there. It's like their diamond inside is their ability to see the world in a certain way. And so one of the thing I tend to do when I'm trying to bring a team together, you talk about finding ways to integrate all of these contradictory ideas is helping people to recognize the beauty that they bring to the table and the uniqueness and how they see. And then once I help point these things out, I also notice on teams then those same people will go, "This is my special diamond thing, so I'm going to start contributing these sort of things to this puzzle." And then you get people into this mode of recognizing each other's gifts and seeing together.

CLAIRE: That's such an invaluable gift in itself. Sometimes we just need that other person in order to see the good in ourselves. Sometimes we're not even aware of it. For example, I didn't realize that I was good at this, the abilities to have cut through the noise until people started telling me. So, it's because of people like you, Arty, that we even know that we have superpowers.

ARTY: Yeah. I've definitely had that same effect where in just going through figuring out my own identity, and this was something that my friends started bringing up to me, of ways that I help them.

And then when I started realizing that I do this for a whole lot of people, I started thinking back to my experiences with teens and as a leader, how I brought people together. And that it was essentially the same type of thing that I've been able to build really strong collaborative, incredible teams largely by creating a culture where everyone sort of values the unique specialness that everyone brings to the table. And I think if everyone kind of starts shifting to orienting toward that frame of 'hey we've got this problem to solve and this is hard, and we've got all these unique gifts and capabilities here, let's figure out how we can weave together this beautiful fabric of all these amazing people and do something great'. [Inaudible] on you, not me.

CLAIRE: I know. I want to hear it. Sam, I don't know if we have time. But I do want to hear what you think your superpower is very quickly.

SAM: Well, sure. I actually did an episode where I was interviewed some time ago. But very briefly, I have sort of a joke superpower which is being able to spot actors who've been on Babylon 5 even if they were in one episode and have the alien prosthetics. That really, when I think about it is just sort of a subset of the thing that I think of as my actual superpower which is being able to make connections between the shapes of things even if they don't look the same on the surface, which really is sort of a happy side effect of my ADHD. I see connections between things that not everybody appears to see. Sometimes they are just weird and they fall flat and sometimes they go, "Oh well, that's really interesting." So, that's the short version.

CLAIRE: Amazing. Well, I have like a million questions about that but for the sake of time, we'll skip that.

SAM: You mentioned wanting to talk about people's worst boss which could be fun and glorious.

CLAIRE: For the past five years. So, just a quick background. Our company is actually spun off of Basecamp which you're probably maybe familiar with just being Rails folks. And so, we're really unconventional company. We've been a two-person company for the past five years, profitable, bootstrapped since day one, and serving tens of thousands of people all over the world. Through that process, we've collected a lot of data around what really makes for the best leaders. And the question I've always been fascinated by is no one sets out to be a worse boss, like a bad boss, yet there are a lot of them. So, I'm happy to talk about that and to share insights to hear your personal experiences around who's the worst boss you ever had. Did they know they were really that bad? Why don't people know? And most importantly, what can they do? And have you yourself personally, when you've managed people, made mistakes? What were those mistakes? And I can share what, from our data of thousands of people that we've both interviewed and surveyed, what the biggest mistakes -- there are nine of them but we can just go over them. I mean, there's many, many, many. But sort of the biggest ones, that I can share. Who was your worst boss, for both of you? So, we start there.

ARTY: I think back to this experience that I had where I went from a really awesome boss to a massive communication breakdown that destroyed our whole project where we ended up walking out and in Project Exodus days and what happened on that. Essentially, it was during this time where in the company I was working at split in two. So, our project got moved under different management and it was a highly political project. We had a very lightweight process. We were doing continuous delivery from day one. I was Team Lead on the project at the time but I was working there as a contractor on this contract project. At the time, the new management was very much in this drive cost to the bottom thing, make all the vendors compete against one another, and didn't understand the benefits of kind of lightweight continuous delivery mode. We're very concerned about our lack of dotting I's and crossing T's and writing. "You're not writing requirements documents. What's wrong with you?" And I'm like, "We're delivering every day. Our customers are happy." We'd sit in a room with our product folks and be able to like hash out what we're going to build and we did together in a week and plan out the next week together. And I had never seen such better collaboration come together where all these walls came down. It's one of the awesomest teams I ever worked on. And because I brought the team and myself and I was all emotionally attached to it, what turned into sort of management by threat was if you don't comply with our way of doing things, that your company and all the people working here, we're going to cut them off and go with a different vendor. And so, as things started falling apart from the tension of that, we'd end up working 60, 70 hour week sometimes. And because I was Team Lead, I ended up setting a precedent for the other people on my team to work crazy hours and stuff and to shift the gears into this emergency mode and throwing principles out the window. We started all -- like super TDD zealot type. And then by the end of the project, I was deploying code to production without even executing it. They'll probably fix it. I mean, it's like you start seeing how far you come when you get so exhausted and you just don't care anymore. And I was trying to explain technical debt and all these things and it was just like massive communication breakdown and we couldn't get on the same page. I learned a lot from that experience. It was the heartbreak of that experience that ended up driving me to write a book.

CLAIRE: Well, there you go. Silver lining in some ways. I think, Arty, one of the things that comes to mind when you're sharing that is just how -- and this is a trend that we've noticed in the hundreds and hundreds of leaders that we've worked with is how pressure begets pressure begets pressure begets pressure which is that if the CEO is feeling pressure from the market or from competitors or deadlines, whatever it is, he passes that down on to the executives who pass it down onto the managers, the team leads like yourself who then pass it onto the team. And then everyone goes, "Wait, why are we also like freaking out and rushed?" It's because whoever that leader is at the top, they're getting influenced by something and it just trickles all the way, all the way through unintentionally.

ARTY: Yeah. I think one of the big things I learned was just that the humans sort of lost their ability to see one another as opposed to looking at the whole situation from a situation of 'these are bad people' of realizing kind of the context of pressure, realizing that the culture of objectification is sort of a duty. Like we have to be cold and make calculated decisions because it's our job. And a lot of the message of what we're trying to say, I used words like pain and you put on your cold [inaudible] pain, why do I care about pain? And so, what I ended up writing a book about was breaking down what is pain and why should we care about it and how can I translate this into some kind of objective metrics to measure what pain is, such that we can bridge this communication gap and find ways to bring people together on the same side? Because at the end of the day, we're all trying to make the organization successful. 

CLAIRE: Exactly. [Inaudible] that gets lost so easily.

ARTY: Yeah.

CLAIRE: Interesting. We lose sight of that so quickly. How about for yourself, Sam? Who is your worst boss? 

SAM: I have so many to choose from. 

[Laughter]

SAM: I had thought about this before and I was pretty sure of where I was going to go with that but actually, already hearing you talk about that experience, I'm actually going to pick a different example that dovetails, I think, with what you were saying. I used to work at a company that was, while I was there the first time, it was like probably the most high functioning agile team that I've been on. And it was a really good tech team embedded within a financial company that didn't quite understand how to be a tech company and didn't understand that they were, as so many don't. So, I left that company and went somewhere else for a while and then when I got tired of that job, I actually wound up going back to that same company again. It was interesting to see how things had moved on and things were sort of going pretty well for a month or two after I came back. And then, they hired a new CEO and that new CEO, within a few weeks, came to the office where all of the tech team was and delivered what he probably thought was this great motivational speech about how we really need to dominate this market and that requires firm decisive action. And so, we're just going to have to do this thing. Like, "If I tell you to take that hill, you're going to go take that hill." And I almost quit on the spot. [Chuckles] I actually made it a few more months.

CLAIRE: I'm just cringing over here with the language, like the war language that you just used. 

SAM: I thought about this at the time. My thought at the time was like, that was probably what somebody could get away with in their career as a motivational technique for managing sales people whose job is based on hustle. In a lot of cases, your "success" as a salesperson depends on how many people you can go out and talk to because if you have a certain percentage of your contacts work out, then if you just have lots and lots of contacts, then you'll have more successes.

And here's a connection that I hadn't made because I hadn't read this until a couple of days ago. I was reading a really great book called 'Okay Fine Whatever'. And it's a very personal memoir about somebody with anxiety problems and a few other issues as well. She's a hilarious writer. Her name is Courtenay Hameister, I'll put that in the show notes. But she has this chapter towards the end where she talks about cortisol which is a hormone that your body releases under stress, and how cortisol gets your body ready to fight or flee. And in doing that, it shuts down things like digestion and unfortunately, it also shuts down your ability to be particularly creative. The connection that I only really just made as we were talking about this just now is that not only was that not a great way, I mean, maybe not the best way to motivate sales people but it might have been effective, it really was a terrible way to motivate developers and other people in tech because our jobs depend on our ability to be creative, to find solutions to problems that don't necessarily require brute force to implement. So, that was not only counterproductive, it was really counterproductive, I guess. [Chuckles]

CLAIRE: What it reminds me of is, and there's so much research that's been done on this, is that it sort of harkens back to a very traditional framework of leadership that is widely adopted especially in the military because it is effective to your point which is command and control. So, do this, say this or because I say this. And if I tell you to go take this hill, you'll take this hill. And what's fascinating about that framework that a lot of research has shown, particularly there is this seminal researcher named Edward Deci who did a lot of studies in the 1980's and 1990's around specifically intrinsic motivation. And the problem with command and control leadership is that it completely disregards the potential or the belief that people are intrinsically motivated by things. And what Deci's research really revealed was that when your motivation is extrinsic -- so, it's because someone is telling you to do something that's why you're doing something -- a few things happen. Your performance is worse, results are not as good. You learn less in the process and you don't actually enjoy it as well. It's like everything that could possibly be bad happens when you exert external control. And this is probably somewhat conventional knowledge in the business setting. More and more folks are coming around to this idea, "Yeah, command and control isn't good. You have to inspire people. You have to tap into their motivation." You hear that, as well? But that still is implicitly referencing control. We have to empower people. I actually hate the word empower. I hate that word when people say, "You have to empower your employees." It's actually not true. Because what empower means...

SAM: You just have to get out of their way.

CLAIRE: Exactly, Sam. Because if you look up the definition of empower, it means to give power to someone. And here's the thing. People already have power. People already intrinsically have motivation, ideas, skills, talents, gifts, is what we were talking about earlier. So, your job as a leader is exactly what Sam says is to get out of their way. And actually, what the true job of what the best managers do is they have the ability to simply create an environment for people to do their best work. It's to create an environment for them to realize their own intrinsic motivation.

I mean, that's what I've spent sort of my life's work doing for the past 10 years is researching, studying, writing, and speaking on this topic and building a product around it. And funnily enough, it's because eight years ago, I had my worst boss. That is what has kick-started this whole journey. That's actually why I ask the question to both of you, is about seven or eight years ago, I was working at a very small startup eCommerce startup. I'd started a company coming out of school. Before then, had left the company and was very young and just had thought, "I would love to start another company someday but I've never worked for someone, so I should go work for someone." So, I went to go work for this person. It was, like I was saying, six people. I loved the work. I learned a lot. I loved my co-workers and hated my job because of my boss at the time. He was one of those leaders who was a great person, very good person, had a lot of integrity, and he would look you in the eye and he's one of those leaders where you go, "Wow! So charismatic. His vision is so good. I can't wait to come onboard." And then in terms of action, he's playing favorites, not fair to other folks in the company, really unclear about vision, didn't follow through on a lot of things he promised. poor communicator. And I was like, "Wow, this is shocking." Here's the thing. He is a terrible boss even though he's a good person. And then, here's the most shocking part of the whole thing which is I don't think he had any idea. I think he thought he was actually a great leader. And so, this is what kick-started this whole idea behind, "How does a leader become better?" Well, they have to first know that they should become better. And so how do they get to know their team better? How do they get to know themselves better. So, that's where this idea came about. 

I quit my job about seven or eight years ago. I started my own consulting practice working with CEOs, one-on-one, because I felt like I couldn't do it internally. Who am I? This employee, literally 22, 23 years old to say what the CEO should be doing. I'm going to try to first study the topic and help other folks first. So, I started my own consulting practice. My first client was actually the CEO of Basecamp. Both of you are familiar with Basecamp and then for folks who are listening, they make one of the world's most popular project management software. Their CEO, Jason Fried, felt like the biggest problem he was facing as a CEO was this exact same problem - do I really know my company? Do I really know if I'm being a good leader? And so, I did a great project for them as a consultant and it worked really well. And then ironically enough, they were building their own software tool to get this feedback and to get to know their company. And that was actually Know Your Team. Back then, it was called Know Your Company. We've since changed the name since then. So, Jason approached me after the project and said, "We've never done this before. But what if we spun out," what was then Know Your Company, "To be its own separate standalone company, separate LLC. We'll split equity 50/50. Basecamp will just be on the board, but Claire, you be the CEO. You build the team, run it, grow it. What do you think?" And I was like, "Oh!" Work on the problem that I've committed my life to solving and with a product that is already built, like, "Yes, please. Done. Sign me up." But it goes back to this question like, the thing that gets me up every day is the fact that there are so many unfortunately bad bosses out there and so much of the time we don't know. And then here's the last thing I'll add and then I'd love to get your input on this is, what is most fascinating about this question and this problem of, "People who are bad bosses, they don't know." We're talking about who are worst bosses. How's this for sort of a self check which is, do we ever ask ourselves if we in fact might be someone else's worst boss? So that is the thing that I think a lot about is, you look at the statistics. 

So for example, Gallup does this survey with millions of people and 84,000 business units where they found that 82% of managers are actually promoted and chosen in companies for the wrong reason. Eighty two percent. And then, they also found that they identified certain traits and talents that managers who are good happen to have. They said only one in 10 managers actually possess the talent to be a good manager. It doesn't mean they can't learn those skills, but it means that only one in 10 people actually have these skills coming out of the gate. So when you look at those numbers you go, "OK, 82% of people are chosen for the wrong reason. Only one in 10 people actually have this talent." The likelihood that the three of us here talking about, "Oh, bad bosses," and, "Gosh, this is my worst bosses." The likelihood that we ourselves might be in fact someone else's worst boss or commit mistakes around leadership that we might know about, is quite high. And so, I've spent, like I was saying, my life's work trying to uncover what are those blind spots? Why do they exist? What are the biggest mistakes that leaders make? So that personally, I don't end up accidentally becoming the worst boss that inspired me on this whole journey and to help other people who, all of us, have good intentions or for the most part, [inaudible] have good intentions, want to be great leaders, and yet in fact as the statistics show, most of us are not.

SAM: You said something really interesting a moment ago which is that one in 10 people have the talent required to be a good manager.

CLAIRE: Yes.

SAM: I'd like to talk a little bit about how you define talent versus skill.

CLAIRE: Absolutely. Gallup what they did is they identified traits that people are predisposed to and have just at the beginning of their career. So, it doesn't mean that you can't have them and can't develop them. Skill is the product of work. And so, traits and talent is the product of sort of inherent, "Oh, I sort of showed up like this." Sometimes we confuse the two because we see someone who is really talented at something and 99% of the time, it's actually skill, like they worked at it really hard. But on the surface, we're like, "Oh, they're just really madly talented." And so in this case, Gallup simply identified, I believe it was around six to eight traits, around communication, accountability, decision making. Again, these are things that every single person can absolutely learn. Leadership, it's been studied is learnable in the sense that it's a choice. Here's the catch, though. Do certain people sort of start off a bit higher in the sense that they're predisposed to it based off certain traits that they have? Absolutely. But it doesn't mean that you can't learn those things. So, all of Gallup's work that they did was around understanding that the idea that we just sort of, because we're promoted, show up and just because we now have this new job title, all of a sudden have the predisposed traits is just not true. And that actually only one in 10 of the people sort of show up on the job, predisposed to becoming a good leader or being a great leader.

Would you agree with that, just sort of anecdotally, curious based off your experience? Do you feel like you had to work to become a better leader or do you felt like it came naturally?

SAM: This is something I've struggled with for a few years actually is that I find that I'm pretty comfortable at this point in my career with a form of authority that comes from expertise. I started out with a lot of talent in the air in some areas that lend themselves well to programming. And then, I spent a lot of time developing skills. And so at this point, I'm pretty good at a few things. And I feel comfortable leading in areas where I'm talking about those things that I'm good at. At the same time, I'm really deeply uncomfortable with positional authority. I'm sort of skittish about the whole management track and I've been saying that I want to stay on the individual contributor track because I don't want to deal with that stuff. I might mess somebody up.

ARTY: I'm kind of thinking about this, too. In addition to building up skill and having aptitude of certain kinds of things from, maybe you pick up almost kind of by osmosis in a way from people and habits of the folks that you hang around. I think a lot of the aptitudes we build up are some mixture of culture, upbringing, self mix of things, certainly influences talent and aptitude. There's also this aspect of inertia, I guess you could say, of some kinds of skills are more difficult to develop than others. I found that if I have a better understanding of my own strengths and the things that I'm able to bring to the table and then focus on finding partners that are really good at the things that I'm not, and developing a good relationship with figuring out how to communicate and work better and understand our differences and things, I think you end up taking up some of those skills by hanging around those folks that are good at those sorts of things. But there's also a magic to, I think this is why too I started spending a lot of time going, "Oh, these are what your gifts are and these are what your gifts are." And I sort of look at it almost like a puzzle of weaving different people together that have different sorts of aptitudes and strength. And one of the things that I found myself shifting in these days, I've got an incredible amount of inward sense, I guess like inside sensors. I can take ethereal models inside myself and draw pictures of things. So, I'm really good at modeling. But part of being super inward focused is also having a lack of sort of reflexive outward sensors of kind of being able to feel the room, see all the things in the hailstorm and pick those things out and weave the threads together. And so, I have a whole lot of outward creative flow and I can pull people into this creative mode, but my way of empathizing is largely listening to these patterns. And I can build a good mental model of what someone's inward experience is through projection. But I cannot do that really well on a one-on-one kind of basis. But trying to do that in a room context like the things that you're talking about, I would be like, "It would be so awesome to pair up with you and then we could [inaudible] our cool abilities and you could figure out the threads in the hailstorm. And I could give you the hail and you could figure out how it all goes together."

CLAIRE: I want all the hail.

SAM: [Laughs]

CLAIRE: I mean, I think that's the beauty of teams, that I think when we're part of teams and when we lead teams, the diversity of thought and the disparate strengths and distinct strengths on paper sound good. But in reality, can feel quite frustrating. I mean, how many times have the three of us been in meetings or conversations before? We're like, "If only they just know. Why can't they just see it the way that I do. If only they..." It's constant. We, as humans, we like people to be like us and to agree with us. But to your point, Arty, that is so beautiful, is the complementary and contrasting abilities that people have. And just the acceptance that some of us are going to be predisposed to some things than others. And for example, like Arty, I loved what you said about -- I mean, you just know yourself." Sam, you're like, "I don't want to mess people up. I want to stay on the individual contributor track because I've heard what managers do and that's just not interesting to me." I think it's brilliant. And I think actually not asking that question is one of the biggest reasons why we actually have so many bad managers, why 82% of the time companies choose the wrong managers. Actually, Gallup revealed this as they said that 82% of the time, people are choosing the wrong managers because they're promoting them off being successful individual contributors. They're saying, "Oh, you were on time." "You were really articulate in this meeting." "You put an extra effort," whatever those things are. And when it comes to management, it doesn't transfer over. And why do we hold management up on high as being this golden track that that's how you're progressing in your career? I mean, that's why a lot of people choose it. It's not because they actually want to or because they're gifts and they're what their predecessors are aligned with what they want to be doing. It's in many ways because we've inflated the role. And so, I try a lot really hard in the work that we do to help also aspiring managers ask themselves the real questions of, for example, how much do you like being in flow? 

SAM: [Laughs]

CLAIRE: Because when you're a manager, you are never in flow. Honestly, you are meeting with people. You're not coding, you're not designing, you're not making sales calls. You were meeting one-on-one with your employees. You are talking with clients. You're resolving interpersonal issues. And to be frank, of course, everyone enjoys being in flow. But how much do you have to have that in your job because if you are obsessed with it, you shouldn't be a manager. Sorry. You shouldn't be a manager, unfortunately. So, that's one of the questions.

Another question, if you're an aspiring manager or thinking, "This is what I want to do. I think this is me," is to ask yourself how much do you like repeating yourself?

[Laughter]

CLAIRE: Because when you're a manager, 50% of your job is communicating. No, 80% of your job, I would say, is communicating. And when you're communicating most of that time, you are just saying the same thing over and over again to different people in different forums because people forget, because the organization changes, you hire new people. You're just repeating yourself constantly. So, if you get annoyed by that, management is not for you.

And then another question I always like to pose to aspiring managers is, how much do you enjoy being a detective about people? There's a wonderful book written by Brian Little, a Harvard professor, who's the sort of foremost expert on personality science. One of his books, it's called 'Me, Myself, and Us'. He says that there are two types of people. There are thing specialists and there are people specialists. If you are a thing specialist, you love the thing. If you're a specialist about writing, you love the words. If you're a thing specialist about engineering, you love the code. That's if you're a thing specialist. If you're a person specialist, you love people, you love understanding motivation and thinking, "Oh, I wonder why that person's doing that?" 

And so, if you want to become a manager, you better be a person specialist. You can't be a thing specialist. You have to love playing detective about people. So, that's another thing to ask your self. But yeah, those are just some of the questions around, if you're an aspiring manager, it's like how much do you enjoy being in flow? How much do you enjoy repeating yourself? And do you like to play detective about people?  Some people are annoyed by that. It's like, "Oh gosh, I have to understand. That's so much cognitive overload to understand every single person's motive, individual motivation." And so, if you feel that way, that's fine. Totally fine. But it also means you probably shouldn't be a manager.

ARTY: At this point in the show, we usually like to wrap up and do reflections, kind of think about what are some of the key takeaways of things that we heard on the show, wrap up any kind of final thoughts. I'll let you go first, Sam.

SAM: For me, one of the things that's really sticking out to me from this call is a quote from you, Claire, that I wrote down in my notes which is 'do we ever think about ourselves that we might be someone else's worst boss'. And for me, the interesting part of that question is not the idea of us being somebody else's worst boss. The idea is do we ever think that about ourselves. One thing that I've noted is that a lot of people simply are unwilling to even ask questions that challenge themselves. And that's something that certainly I struggle with from time to time and I have a really hard problem with certain shapes of questions. But I think that the ability to ask that question at all and to sit with it and to hold it and to live with that cognitive dissonance, even for just a few minutes to be willing to sit with that discomfort, to think what could be different. How am I impacting the world instead of how is the world impacting me, all of those things. Even if you don't come up with a very good answer, the fact that you're willing to do them and to try them, I think is a really good indicator of somebody who has the ability to change and improve. So, thank you for that reminder.

CLAIRE: Anytime. I remind myself of it daily, trust me.

ARTY: One of the things I found really interesting, just contrasting this call with other interviews we've done, is a whole lot of this segment was you asking us questions. [Laughs] And so, we'd ask you a question, you'd be like, "Hold on, wait a minute. I want to know what your answers are." And then we end up comparing and contrasting our different stories. And the nature of the conversation was very different. And then, when Sam and I then told a story, I heard you pick out and basically exercise your superpower of this ability to sort of distill things as disparate thoughts and find cohesive threads in this and use these examples stories as a way to demonstrate your superpower. I notice some of the things you pulled out like when Sam was talking, you said, "I hear this war language in your words." And I can tell there's these things that you've learned to listen for when you hear other people share their stories. And so, just seeing you work your magic in that way and pick out and distill those things, and the shift in the conversation flow that happened, just having your presence here, was a pretty amazing thing.

CLAIRE: Arty, that's like the nicest thing someone said to me all week. I'm going to have to replay the podcast when it comes out before I go to bed at night, just boost up my ego. That was just the nicest thing. Thank you so much. And it's so funny because you displayed your superpower of recognizing people's gifts. How funny [and meta] is that?

ARTY: [Laughs] There you go. 

[Laughter]

CLAIRE: Oh, man. So, I have the challenge of going last. Two things. One, blown away by the depth of thinking that both of you shared and your willingness to challenge yourselves and saying, "Yeah, I was kind of pressuring my team unnecessarily," or, "I have trouble wrestling with that question because it creates some cognitive dissonance." Just like the willingness to say like 'I'm not always great and here's in what forms'. And I think the other piece is around -- I mean, what I'll be walking away from this is just the different forms and threads that real leadership can take. We often think of, Sam, you mentioned this earlier, as leadership, as positional leadership, it's the title. It's when you have a certain number of direct reports. And from both of what you shared in your experiences, both your discomfort and comfort, your version and your draw to different parts of leadership, your experience with both bad -- well, mainly, we talked about bad leaders, I was about say 'and good leaders'. But we have been talking about bad leaders, didn't have no time to talk about the good ones. Is this stuff is hard. It's hard and it's not what you always see as sort of where to think of, looking up what a leader is in the dictionary, and what you would sort of see as the definition. A leader is, as you know, both of you mentioned creating and we talked about creating environment for people to do their best work and just getting out of their way.

And so, I think my big takeaway is just the different forms that it can take. And just the lovely -- it's like so encouraging that there are people both like yourselves who admit mistakes, admit what you're unsure about, and understand that it's actually just letting people be and do their best work and shine themselves, and recognizing the gifts that they give. So, thank you both so much for having me. I feel like I could talk to you for hours. It could be a day long podcast, if we wanted to do that.

SAM: Maybe we should try it some time.

ARTY: See? This is what happened to me. I came on this show and I'm like, "I love these people and I want to stay here and do more episodes." Yeah, I got pretty sucked in.

CLAIRE: I can see why. 

ARTY: Well, thank you Claire. This has been a lot of fun. It's been really great to have you.

CLAIRE: Seriously, thank you both. And I really meant what I said. I was just sort of blown away by like, just you went there. Some conversations, you don't really get to that depth. And both of you, unafraid in getting there.

SAM: That's the fun for me of showing up when I do and getting to overcome that feeling of, "Ahhh, do I want to talk to any other person again?" 

[Laughter]

SAM: It really becomes this fascinating thing that I'm always happy that I did. I hope that's the same for you, listeners.