LaVerne:
Welcome to Brilliant in 20, a new podcast from the Scoop News Group, where we celebrate the unique brilliance of today’s leaders and share their greatest lessons with you in just about 20 minutes.

Hi, I’m LaVerne Council, Chief Executive Officer of Emerald One. Joining me today is Laszlo Bock, the former senior vice president of People’s Operations for Google and now CEO and cofounder of Humu. Laszlo has cultivated a career building positive trust at workplaces for both leaders and employees. During Laszlo’s tenure, Google was named the best company to work for 30 times by organizations like Forbes and Bloomberg and many others. He’s received over 100 awards as a top employer. In 2015, Laszlo published his New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Work Rules!, a practical guide to helping people find meaning in work and improve the way they live and lead.
Laszlo is now the chief executive for Humu. Humu’s purpose is to make work and culture better everywhere through machine learning, science and a little bit of love. I always like that part. Laszlo, welcome to Brilliant and 20. [crosstalk 00:01:27].

Laszlo:
LaVerne, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you.

LaVerne:
I’m really happy you’re here. I have to tell you guys, I had a chance, it was more than a chance, it was really a privilege to spend some time with Laszlo and his team. I’ve come to know that Humu’s mission statement is to make work better everywhere, everywhere, make work better everywhere. What does that mean to you?

Laszlo:
Well, I had the, I guess kind of the blessing of coming to the US as a refugee and having a bunch of miserable jobs before I ended up at a place like Google. I worked as a waiter, I worked as a lifeguard. I worked in a bagel shop making bagels and baking all day. I had all kinds of jobs where I got yelled at, where I got screamed at, where I saw awful things happen kind of behind the scenes. I realized there’s 4 billion people on this planet who work. For most of them work is not a great experience. Work is a means to an end. If there’s some way to make that experience better for those people, that is a calling, that is important work for me to do. That is what eventually led to Humu and the team we built and everything we do, but it’s as simple as work doesn’t have to be as bad as it is. I don’t want to wait another 200 years or 400 years for things to get better.

LaVerne:
I can really appreciate that Laszlo. Many times people will ask, “Well, how you learn how to lead?” I said, “You know, I can’t always say that people lead me the way I wanted to be led. But what they did teach me was what I didn’t want to do many times.” I learned how to treat people sometimes based on how people didn’t treat me, and this was the right way to treat people, this what he meant the right relationship and the right feeling.
Something I’ve noticed in my career is that leaders really focus on culture, but they do it without really necessarily understanding the culture they have. They’ll tell you their vision and they’ll say our culture is this, but that’s really what they want it to be, really not what it is. What’s been your philosophy when setting the vision for your team’s culture? How have you gone about it?

Laszlo:
Well, I couldn’t agree with you more. My first corporate job, the way, it was a small company, 50 people, when the owner would want my opinion, want my opinion in quotes, he would say, “Laszlo, you’re an effing kid. What do you think?” That’s how he would bring me in. That’s how he was inclusive.
Then when I was in consulting, I was at a firm where their principle was, you have an obligation of descent. If you see something, say something. If you disagree, you got to say something. The first time you say something, the senior partner says, “That’s a very interesting point.” The second time, and I remember on this project, “Is this the right thing?” [inaudible 00:04:27] partner was like, “No, we talked about it. It’s fine.” A third time he said, “Just get back to work. You got a spreadsheet to do so I don’t need to hear your input.”

That gap between what people say they believe and how they believe is everything, how they behave. I’ve been lucky enough to get to build this with some great cofounders. We have a few values that we believe are core to what we do. One is empathy, to really listen and understand and start from a position of really trying to know where people come from. What we found and we’ve been blessed to find this, is every single person in our company has a story. That story, whether they grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, whether … We had one guy who was from Mexico originally, and he came to the US and so we got to experience what it’s like to have that background in the US, but he was from a very privileged background in Mexico so he had no idea that all these kinds of issues exist around class and race and things like that. It’s an amazing journey. So understanding that helps us work better together.
A second value is amplified. I think it’s really important to find what’s special and good in people and make that bigger. It’s obviously what we do on the product side, but on a human side, it means you got to dig deep and really find how to build and grow the best things about people.
Then we also believe, honestly, in just in love. We’re all human beings. We’re all going through a lot, particularly today, as everybody’s working from home and is now starting to know people who have gotten COVID, who have passed away as a result of it. You got to start from a place of just caring for the human being and things kind of follow from that. I mean, why is it natural to say that at home, but you can’t bring any part of that into the workplace. I mean, the most you can say is I love the sandwich I ate. It was such a good sandwich.

LaVerne:
I think most people too, I’ve actually had this conversation when I said, “I’ve realized a long time ago that most people have not heard good things about themselves.” It was always frightening because they only had heard sometimes really negative things about themselves. If it really becomes my part of helping them enjoy their workplace, to say something good, to remind them of what’s good about them, to see what’s good about them and I think, as you say, to amplify what’s good about them.

Those are the things that help people reach their best selves. It’s not that you’re telling them things that aren’t true, it’s that you’re telling them their true clearly and without any other expectation other than making sure they hear it. I appreciate you for that.

Laszlo:
Well, and often we’re our worst critics. Social psychologists talk about something called the spotlight effect, which is, we kind of go through life thinking we’re in the spotlight all the time. I’m sure everyone remembers this from high school. You always think everyone’s looking at me, how do I look, are my clothes cool, am I listening to the right music? You’re acutely [inaudible 00:07:43]. We carry that our whole lives. The reality is most of the time people aren’t actually paying attention. Most of the time they’re not that critical as we are of ourselves. To have somebody like you telling somebody here’s a good thing about you, that’s a game changer.

LaVerne:
I agree with you. The spotlight is not always on us. When it is, you just got to be ready to shine. Let everybody else see what someone else saw. With that, what are some of the biggest trends and challenges you’ve noticed when it comes to the workplace culture and how a leader can shape it? What’s going on? What are the things Humu’s enforcing people to think about it?

Laszlo:
Well, I think from a leadership perspective, the three biggest things that we’re seeing are what I like to call the three Cs. There’s a need for these because every leader is out there being human. Leaders are subject to the same stress and distractions and pain as everybody else. We’re also worrying about our spouses and kids offscreen homeschooling in the background, or the fact that we haven’t been outdoors in three weeks, so leaders experiencing that too.
The biggest thing leaders can do though, are keep calm when they interact with their teams. You don’t have to have all the answers, but you cannot look freaked out. Even if on the inside you’re panicking, you cannot because the people on your team are looking to you for leadership and consistency and calm and reassurance. What that means is as a leader, you need to find an outlet for that stress. Could be exercise, could be friends, could be family. It’s probably not your boss, but you need someone to go to so that when you’re with your team you can protect calm.

The second C is consistency. What’s important is to be consistent in your messaging to your team, even if you’re saying the same simple thing again and again. It may feel like you’re repeating yourself, but it’s actually reassuring for your team to hear from you, and something as simple as a daily 15 minute lunchtime video where you get the whole team together. We do this at Humu. Everyone shows up, anyone has anything to share, quick message from one of the leadership team about like, “Hey, hang in there. We’re doing [inaudible 00:09:56],” you move on. But that consistency matters because human beings draw comfort from ritual, from predictability.

The third, which we’ve touched on already, is compassion. In a crisis, like the one we’re facing, and we’ve gone from kind of this urgent house on fire, everybody panicking to what feels to many people like the new normal, but underneath that is a tremendous amount of stress that people are sublimating. They’re not letting themselves feel, they’re not letting into the workplace. In a way everyone’s a little bit of the walking wounded, where we’re carrying all this stress but still trying to show up and be happy and smile. That empathy for what people are going through has to come before productivity because people who are scared and feeling that stress are just not going to be productive. They’re just not.

Each meeting, if you’re a leader, you should release your agenda and start with a check-in, how’s everyone doing, everyone okay? Anybody got any big distractions on your mind? Lululemon does this cool thing where they actually start meetings with something they call clearing your intentions, where they go around the room and everyone says like, “What’s on your mind, what’s distracting you. Okay, let’s leave that outside and let’s focus on the work.” But it’s a way of validating and recognizing that, so calm and consistency and compassion are what leaders need to show.

LaVerne:
When you think about, and I agree with you on all those points, because I think it brings the human out of people when you sort of have these moments where people are really saying, “Be human. Tell us how you feel. Tell us what’s bothering you. Tell us what you have great gratitude for.”
We start all our meetings at Emerald One with a moment of gratitude. It just reminds you what to be thankful for. It could be a little thing like a Sunday, a sunlight, or it could be a big thing, someone overcoming COVID-19. But whatever it is, you have great gratitude for it in a moment to take that in and to share it. Because I think we all end up having the same gratitudes when it comes down to it.

But when you think about calm, consistency, and compassion, and then you tie that with love, and you say, “In this workplace we can do so much more because we embrace these terms or we live this way,” are people really ready for that?

Laszlo:
No, not everyone. No. It turns out one of the most powerful things you can do if you’re trying to drive change in an organization as a leader, is to play against [time 00:00:12:35]. If you’re the CIO or the CFO, the last thing people expect you to talk about are feelings. If you do, it carries a lot more weight and you don’t need to go in with the full XOXO hugs and kisses and all that kind of stuff. But if you start from like, “We’ve got this big implementation to do, but let’s just first have a conversation on how everyone’s doing.” That’s incredibly powerful. You don’t need to go full Valentine’s Day, but you do need to recognize everyone’s fundamental humanity. Again, part of what makes Humu work, part of what made the stuff we did at Google work, was we married all this with science.

There’s a professor at Yale named Amy Wrzesniewski, and she talks about helping people find meaning in their work, and that relates to empathy and love and compassion. She said, “Only about a third of people find their work to be meaningful.” That’s true of lawyers, finance people. It’s also true of doctors, of nurses, of clergy. Somebody who was in the clergy actually once told me what happens is you remember the duty, but forget the joy.
Across professions people lose this connection. But if people do find the work meaning meaningful, they’re 21% more productive, which is enormous. Finding a way to connect to the human being and make that work meaningful, I’m not processing transactions, I’m not writing code, I’m not filling out requisitions. I’m actually impacting a human being’s life on the end of that. That has a huge impact on performance.
The starting point is actually just recognizing what does this human being need, either at the very end of this value chain or the one sitting on the other side of this video conference who works with me or for me.

LaVerne:
As we’re going through COVID-19 and we’re taping this podcast at this time, it’s a very stressful time for people. You’ve mentioned being cooped up and trying to operate culturally across an expanse. Frankly, many people probably feeling like they don’t have much control, but when you think about it, usually something comes out of this kind of chaos, this kind of a negativeness and it becomes something new and something normal. What do you think the new normal will be after this?

Laszlo:
I think there may be two … I mean, I don’t want to say good things to come out of this, but I think two things. One is I happened to have a conversation earlier this week with Professor Cass Sunstein who helped inspire our company kind of inventor of the nudge. He said, “What the science shows …” We’re talking about how do you get people to kind of stay home, stay six feet apart, do kind of all those social things. He said, “What science shows is, regardless of background, regardless of where you live, if you ask people to do something to protect themselves, they may do it. If you ask people to do something to protect the people around them, they’re way more likely to do it.”

I’m going to go out. I don’t care if I get sick, I’m going to be okay. If you tell somebody, “Well, don’t go out because your neighbor’s grandmother might get sick.” They tend not to go out as much. I think there’s a real opportunity globally for people to care a little more about their neighbors and come together. You read the stories about in Italy, people singing outside, leaning out their windows and singing and Manhattan. I haven’t been there since this all started, but in New York City at 7:00 people cheer for the first responders, the [inaudible 00:16:24]. That’s a beautiful thing if we can hold onto it.

LaVerne:
Isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Laszlo:
That’s an amazing thing.

LaVerne:
I use a term called the quiet giants. There’s a whole lot of quiet giants out there sort of keeping everything running so we can stay in and stay safe. They go unnoticed, from everybody who picks up the garbage to the people that clean the hospital. They don’t necessarily called out, but they’re the quiet giants in all this. They’re stocking those shelves so that we can bake and make cookies that we haven’t baked in a long time and put on 10 pounds. I’m not saying that happened to me, but it could because of those people doing the great things that they’re doing.

I do agree. I do believe that one of the new normals probably be that we will miss the hug. We will miss … We will understand the real value of having connectiveness with another human being and how important it is. I suspect that when we hang out and see each other again, there’ll be a lot of dancing going on.

Laszlo:
I guarantee it, absolutely.

LaVerne:
I believe people that said they didn’t like to dance will dance. That’s what I think. Now Laszlo, I’ve been to your space and I know that you maintain a open space concept. Everybody’s sort of in the mood. Your team is just infectious. I love them. I thought they had a lot of energy. I thought they were open to share each other. They look really inquisitive. But since your shelter in place with COVID-19, I’m curious though, so I know you have a home office and I’m just curious and asking this question of my guests, and the question is, what’s on your desk?

Laszlo:
What’s on my desk? Well, first I got to say, thank you for your visit because no surprise to anybody who’s watched you or knows you, but you were real, you were honest, you were tough. You really inspired a lot of the folks there. You gave particularly the folks who are in their careers, a real sense of what’s possible and what you can achieve, so thank you for that.

LaVerne:
Thank you for having me. I’ve never felt so old in my life. No [crosstalk 00:18:41] they’re doing all kinds of stuff. And then I was like, they were looking at me being really respectful. They were treating me like their mother. I did not like it Laszlo. I did not like it. But I do [inaudible 00:18:54]. I was like, “What do you meant? I’m just like you.” I’ve been this a long time. You have put together a really great group of professionals, some of the most interesting work and people that really, really have great compassion and passion for what they’re doing. This is not just a job for them, this is a lifestyle. I came back singing the praises of Humu and looking for my nudge. Tell me now, what’s on that desk?

Laszlo:
I promise I wasn’t trying to dodge. Let’s see.

LaVerne:
A magnifying glass.

Laszlo:
This was my grandmother … I only knew one of my grandmothers, one of my grandparents, because we snuck out of Romania and we were only able to bring one of my grandparents with us. My grandmother was in her 90s when she passed away. But she used to sit and do crosswords in Hungarian. She never learned English and she was old so this was her magnifying glass.

LaVerne:[crosstalk 00:00:20:01].

Laszlo:
Never showed anybody this before. I didn’t know you were going to ask this question, but this, I’ve got to line it up.

LaVerne:
[crosstalk 00:20:09].

Laszlo:
Giant hourglass, when Google was small, one of the problems we had was the management team meetings would go on forever, forever. People would talk and talk and talk. Eventually we got this hourglass so whenever a topic started, we’d flip it over and we’d have to be done by the time the hourglass ran out.

LaVerne:
How long is that?

Laszlo:
I don’t know, probably 15 minutes, something like that.

LaVerne:
15 minutes?

Laszlo:
We actually, in fact, at one of our board meetings, we had a really packed agenda and I had the team get 12 different size hourglasses because on the agenda we said, “Okay, we’re going to have five minutes for this, seven minutes for this topic, 10 minutes,” and we literally had a dozen hourglasses. When we got to that section, we flipped the hourglass to make sure we got through everything.

LaVerne:
Well we talk about time compression at Emerald One, so that’s time compression. You have the time you got, make it work for you. Right?

Laszlo:
Exactly.

LaVerne:[crosstalk 00:21:14] that last bead of sand goes through, you’re done. There is no more grains to share.

Laszlo:
That’s right. Well, that’s like life. You only got so many grains, you got to make the most of them.

LaVerne:
I agree. I love it. I love the idea of a magnifying glass and an hourglass. Now think about both of those things, Laszlo. Those are not new inventions. They’ve been around a very, very, very long time, hundreds of years actually, and they still are needed and they still meet their intent. That’s pretty cool. I know what’s on your desk now.

It’s meant a lot to me to have you on today, Laszlo. Thank you so much for all that you bring to everybody’s lives. It’s one thing to be human resource, it’s another thing to be a human resource. You are a human resource. I thank you for that. I thank you for joining Brilliant in 20. This is a joint production of Scoop News Group and Emerald One. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you, so stay brilliant and stay Laszlo. Thanks for being here, Mr. Bock.

Laszlo:
Thanks for having me. Take care.

LaVerne:
Bye-bye.