Stop Hiring “Superstars” - They Might Be Office Vampires 🧛♂️
In this haunted edition of the HR Leaders Podcast, behavioral scientist and Founder & Host at Influencers: Jon Levy joins us to reveal the chilling science behind why some teams rise from the dead and others crumble into dusty skeletons.
We explore what truly drives high-performing teams in a world where hybrid work can feel like a ghost town 👻
Jon explains why organizations must stop obsessing over lone “superstars” and instead invest in glue people, belonging, and intentional connection.
We also unpack how psychological safety, shared rituals, and team norms bring culture to life, and how to protect your organization from “energy vampires” that drain morale 🎃
🎓 In this episode, Jon discusses:
How belonging and trust fuel performance
Why teams outperform superstar individuals
Rituals leaders can use to bring culture to life
The impact of glue people vs energy-drainers
Why hybrid work fails without intentional connection
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Jon Levy 0:00
John, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you? Chris, I am so happy to be here. Are you kidding? I, after our first conversation, I was like, That guy gets it, and I can't wait to keep going.
Chris Rainey 0:12
Yeah, we've done like, one and a half 1000 episodes, but I feel like you, if we if we had an award for the best microphone, I think you would win.
Jon Levy 0:21
I was hoping best ideas.
Chris Rainey 0:24
Well, we have, like, we haven't got into the show yet, so maybe you'll win that at the end. So
Jon Levy 0:28
So you should know I, I My first book was an award winning book, and it won the award for best designed book. So it was literally the only thing I had absolutely no involvement in and you're like, Great, thanks, thanks. So I kind of feel like you've put me in that same
Chris Rainey 0:48
situation. I'm sorry, man,
Jon Levy 0:50
yeah, no, I'll take what I can get. Yeah, before we
Chris Rainey 0:53
jump in, like, tell everyone a little bit more about you personally and sort of your background and journey to where we are today.
Jon Levy 0:59
Oh, sure. So I grew up really, really geeky in 80s and 90s, before there were.com billionaires, and it was cool to like comic books. And so as you can imagine, I wasn't what you would call popular. And so I figured if I became a behavioral scientist and studied human behavior, maybe I could figure out a way to get people to hang out with me, and so I spent quite a bit of time looking at the science of trust and connection, and using that research I did, Chris, literally the weirdest thing you could imagine, I convinced people to come to my home, cook me dinner, wash my dishes and clean my floors. And the weirdest thing is they thanked me for the
Chris Rainey 1:42
experience. Okay, elaborate. Elaborate on that.
Jon Levy 1:47
Before you start thinking, I'm like, stealing people's kidneys or something, convincing them over I started a secret dining experience where 12 people are invited. They're not allowed to talk about what they do or give their last name so it's anonymous. They cook what can only be described as the most mediocre meal you've ever had, and when they sit down to eat, you find out they're sitting with Olympians and astronauts and Nobel laureates and C suite and everybody from you know, Malala and Trevor Noah to the guy who won a Grammy for barking on Who let the dogs out, you know, the song, yeah, super nice guy that's actually by the least of his accomplishments, but it's really funny to talk about. So this ended up proving out my theories and getting a lot of attention. It was on the cover the Style section The New York Times and Forbes, and you name it, it was covered, and there's even a TED talk about it. And what ended up happening was that companies started approaching me asking the question, what causes us to connect deeply with our employees, with our customers, and so especially throughout the pandemic, I was the go to person for a lot of companies on how do we have really effective, distributed teams? How do we handle the anxiety and depression that people are experiencing alone, and then, as we were coming out of it, how do we make a return to Office announcement so that people don't hate us? Or how do we get our teams and leaders to be really effective? And so I wrote a book about my research called you're invited. I'm fortunate enough that it hit the New York Times Wall Street Journal, like all the big things in the US that give status to a book. And then I have a new book coming out, or at this point, it's probably out, called Team intelligence, about what makes brilliant leaders unlock collective genius of their
Speaker 1 3:50
teams. Love that, man. I mean, first and foremost, just rewind to the dinners. Yeah, sure. So firstly, like, how? I mean, the idea is incredible. How do you do you give like, because if you So, you can't talk about your job or what you do, right? What are then people typically tend to lean towards. Because normally that's people's go to, right? Like, oh, yeah, especially when you're that success, yes, exactly. You're like, defined by you being an athlete, right? And, you know, and a lot of athletes, when they don't, when they stop becoming athletes, really struggle, because that's sort of how
Jon Levy 4:28
I think, yeah, that's also, I think, especially true for people who who have had these huge jobs, and then they retire, and they're like, yeah, what am i Exactly? And the interesting thing about all this is that it's the things that you talk to your closest friends about. So when you're haven't seen a friend in a long time and you're catching up, it's like, oh, did you go on vacation? Oh, how are the kids? Oh, you have. It's how many right? And so we are able to create a sense of familiarity very quickly by creating rules like this, because ultimately, I have about 45 minutes to bond people so deeply that I hope they will hang out together for the rest of their lives. And in order to do that, we have to kind of apply a whole bunch of behavioral science.
Chris Rainey 5:23
What are the type of I mean, I went to a leadership retreat many years ago where we did, like, a crucible story. Wow, like, I'm, like, two hours into this meeting, and I'm sharing these five people the most challenging times of my entire life, right? And I am actually friends with all of those people to this day, 10 years later, and spend a lot of time with those people so I can, if you told me that going in, I wouldn't believe you.
Jon Levy 5:51
Yeah, in fact, it would be uncomfortable to even hear something like that, and you'd be like, that's about multi or
Speaker 1 5:57
something. Yeah, I wouldn't have went if I would have known that that was what I would have been doing so that, yeah, that would have been pretty, pretty intense. So how have you now moved that model into the work you do with organizations?
Jon Levy 6:12
Oh, fantastic. So I think that what we need to understand is that just about every problem organizations face aren't choosing the perfect technology of which AI model should we use? Right? It's human issues keeping people engaged or stopping them from feeling lonely and depressed and using tons of company resources to for mental health services to how do we handle promotions or AI uncertainty or return to Office? All of our major problems are really the human side of work. And so when you understand the mechanics of human behavior and how people respond to communication, you can actually tackle those in a meaningful way. Now, when you look at how most people give advice or consultancies come in, they're selling a pre existing product, and we don't actually know if it's based on any real research. Their job is to sell that product. They make a product every so often, just so they have something new to sell you once you're done with that last one, and they're keeping you on a treadmill, and as long as you have problems, they're going to make money, yeah, and so they're not necessarily incentivized to solve everything, not that we ever will, right? But when we tackle the human aspect of stuff, when we can reduce burnout because we understand, oh, burnout isn't being tired, burnout is actually something else, then we can fundamentally shift the experience of your workforce, yeah. Or how do we look at your C suite and get them to have all these that C suite that might have all these really big personalities, and there's this thing called the too much down problem. When you pack a team with too much top tier talent, they underperform massively. So how do you actually get a C suite to not be as selfish? How do you get them to actually share resources, support each other? There's like three or four different strategies that research has actually proven work, you know, but it's not just, Oh, we're going to have a 45 minute keynote. There's additional things that we need to take into account.
Chris Rainey 8:46
Yeah, what would be one practical thing for people listening that they can do to break down those silos?
Jon Levy 8:52
So there's actually, this is so fantastic. It turns out that a group of researchers from Brigham Young University, we're trying to figure out if they're something like a spillover player, like somebody on your team, that when they interact with the other people on your team, it causes a multiplier effect. We know this exists if, like, you put your fastest cash register attendee in front of everyone, then they kind of set the pace, and everybody else works harder, and it didn't cost you anything else, right? Sound like it was more expensive to place them at the front. And so they were curious. Were there employees like that on the in the company that caused everybody else to perform better? And what they found was they used basketball data and found that if you have a star basketball player, right, somebody who scores a lot, they get paid a ton. If you have somebody who scores a lot and has a massively negative impact on the team, they still get paid a lot. But then there's a entire group of players who don't. Or very much, but they literally multiply everybody else's ai, ai, s by a factor of 1.6
Chris Rainey 10:07
that's huge, yeah,
Jon Levy 10:10
and when I looked at it, what we found was that these people have three major characteristics. The first is incredibly high emotional intelligence. They're the ones that know when to push on a topic, when not to who to go to for what they've mentally mapped, like the connections and unwritten rules in an organization, and that way, they know how to maneuver between the big personalities. The second thing is, they're incredibly team oriented. They're the ones that will say, Take Me Out coach, rather than put me in. That way, we can bring somebody else in who's really good at this thing. And this means that the really egotistical individuals don't feel competitive for them. They feel them like they're a resource that makes it's like their superpower that helps them succeed. Yeah, and the third is that they're forward thinking, meaning they take the actions that nobody asked them to. They're the ones that like over the weekend, took the PowerPoint deck and standardized the fonts so that, you know, everybody else looks good when they're presenting, or they read two books on the topic that you're trying to figure something out at, just so that they have more insights for the next conversation. And so the by adding somebody like this, a glue player, to a group of of, let's call them more egotistically potentially oriented people or self centered, then it actually causes everybody to perform better. They function as a social cohesion to multiply results.
Chris Rainey 11:55
Yeah. Do you think that that group is undervalued in most organizations and unrecognized?
Jon Levy 12:01
Oh, the glue player. 100% one is it's really easy to measure what's easy to see, right? So, like, we see the number one sales person?
Chris Rainey 12:13
Yeah, I was just thinking exactly the same thing. And I worked in a sales environment for 20 years. I was literally seeing all of the glue players, as you were talking in my head that I didn't recognize, but all of the top sales people and exact that I that were bringing in a lot of money, but also were toxic to the business. So I was just envisioning all of that while she was saying,
Jon Levy 12:36
Yeah, we're really, really good at seeing what's obvious rather than what's useful. I'll give you an example. In basketball, there's one stat that predicts a player's salary. It's the number of points the player scores. Yes. Now think about this, if you're incentivized to score points, then you're incentivized to be selfish. Yeah. Why are you going to pass the ball exactly. Now there's also only one stat that predicts an effective coach. It is the increase in the rate of passing under that coach, Chris, you're my coach. I go from passing 50% of the time to 80% of the time. Now the ball can get to the player that can actually get at it. I've gone from thinking about myself to the team. The job of a leader, quite simply, is to maximize the intelligence of the team so that it can solve problems as quickly as possible. And the first pillar of Team intelligence is the ability to create alignment so that we're all going in the same direction. Yeah, glue players really help unlock that, because they care more about the team than themselves, and because their forward thinking attitude, they're able to take the steps nobody ever thought of taking to keep things moving
Chris Rainey 13:57
forward, to keep passing the ball, yeah, do you need both, though, in an organization to be successful?
Jon Levy 14:05
So there are glue players who are superstars. You probably came across them. Yeah, they're more rare. It's just not because it can't exist. It's just because they're different incentivized skills, right? Like the and since we're like little kids, we're taught to compete a compete against each other, and that's where we get a lot of the stars. We aren't necessarily taught to bring people together. It turns out that, or at least the stats suggest that the best teams are a combination of both. If you just have glue players that aren't necessarily high scores, then you're multiplying very small numbers right. Zero times zero is still zero right, or even a million times zero is right. So if they're multiplier, whereas if you can be a multiplier for LeBron James or Michael Jordan or Steph Curry. Okay, then suddenly you're seeing really big numbers.
Chris Rainey 15:03
Yeah, I did that on my sales team. So when I worked for a conference business, and I had at one time, maybe 13 different teams across different conferences and events, so you're talking about eight to 12 team members per pod, let's say right. And I noticed if I placed the high performing sales person in each pod that they lifted every pod sales, right? And you could see, if you didn't have one in there, then everyone's sales dropped down. What I didn't recognize until just today was the importance of the glue players on those teams that now I can even see them, their names, who they are, what they did, which I probably, at the time, just didn't recognize, because the whole culture was everyone to outsell everyone, everyone versus everyone. You know, that was the type of culture they you know. Oh yeah, it's everyone versus everyone. You know, there's a there's literally a white ball you eat, what you kill. Yeah, exactly. So even as managers, you weren't even, you know, incentivized to even help other managers, which is crazy. It was like you have to beat your fellow managers on the sales floor.
Jon Levy 16:11
So frankly, it's kind of toxic that we've developed this. Yeah, we just kept thinking, Oh, social Darwinism, right? The best will rise to the top. The problem is it produces what's called the Super chicken problem. Have you
Chris Rainey 16:23
ever heard, oh, I've never bought. Definitely a fun name. Want to hear more. This
Jon Levy 16:27
is so weird in the I think it was like 70s or 80s, the top chicken in the world for egg laying was, that was bread. Was called the DeKalb XL. Company's decal models the XL. It's like the Ferrari of chickens. I mean, this thing could outlay anything pound for pound more eggs than any chicken out there. Here's my question for you, if you are bred for pure competition, you're going to need more resources to lay more eggs. So if you're in a chicken hen house with a bunch of chickens, what's eventually going to happen?
Speaker 1 17:06
You're gonna just get overwhelmed with too much. Oh, they're the only
Jon Levy 17:10
way I can lay more eggs is by attacking you.
Speaker 1 17:14
Oh, oh, wow. They started. So they started because, oh, my God, I didn't see that coming, okay, but that's exactly what happened in the sales environment. You're right, yeah, 100% and it was just like, we're all supposed we're all pretending that we're all getting along and happy, but everyone's like, literally even the way we were incentivized from a bonus and commission perspective is, if I beat you, I get paid more at the end of the month, right? So obviously it's driving those behaviors.
Jon Levy 17:43
Now, here's what's interesting. At a certain point in corporate America, you get to this area where you're, we've like, you know, always the top 10% get extra bonus and all that, right? So now you're already, you've been promoted four times. You're ready among all these exceptional people, right? It's not like you're you've got any lazy individuals who are underperforming at that level. So now the only way I can end up in the top 10% is if I make sure you end up in the bottom 90. Yeah. And so what I'm incentivized to do, what you as a company, have literally said, John, if you're smart, what you're going to do is you're going to make sure that Chris looks like a fool half the time. Yeah, now, rather than lifting each other up, we're incentivized to pull each other down.
Chris Rainey 18:35
Yeah, I remember vividly, like I had a sales methodology and strategy that I built a lot of it was around social selling, which 20 years ago, wasn't even a thing, where my team was selling through LinkedIn before anyone was doing this. So instead of doing two and a half hours on the phone and 150 dials, my team was doing half of that, but doing four extra revenue, and no one knew why, and I didn't share it with anyone because, to your point, I didn't share it with anyone in the company. Like, why this is happening. And my my director, was like, looking at the numbers, like, this doesn't make sense, like you're doing half the amount of calls. And I was like, What I didn't realize is it was pre qualifying and messaging other calls, yeah, through LinkedIn and like messaging, CHROs, setting up calls through LinkedIn. No one was doing that back then. And and we even bought a marketing suite. We so we had a market in the park, automated it and automated it ourselves. So I was buying it. I was buying in 10s of 1000s of leads a month for our own money, but we were making it back through commission, right? Yeah. And it was so efficient. Yeah, and no one
Jon Levy 19:41
for years. That's absolutely brilliant. Here's what's funny. There was this evolutionary biologist. His name is William Muir, and he thought that this chicken thing was just not okay. He thought, why don't we just create a bunch of chickens that i. Are both highly productive and pro social, both. And so what he ended up doing was he took a bunch of crossbred chickens, put them in small coops together, so they're really close, right? And he created 200 of these coops the top 10% or it was 20% I don't remember this point, he would re breed for a new generation, only rewarding the ones that produced the most eggs as a group. And then he did this generation after generation, after six generations. He said, let's see what we have. He took a chicken out of a group, put it against its standard crossbred chicken, and they found absolutely no difference. You'd think, like, these are top performers, right? When you put it back in the group, the group once again,
Chris Rainey 20:56
yeah, oh, I saw that. Yeah, sorry. Oh, geez, Karen, oh.
Jon Levy 21:00
Then last part was he compared the decal back cells to these Kindler gentler birds, right, the ones that were pro social, and ran an experiment, and what he found was that the Kindler gentler birds far outperformed the decalbeck cells, mostly because the decalback cells poked each other to death, and there were only three left at the end of the experiment. And so what he found was something that should be quite obvious, whatever behavior we promote and reward is what people will demonstrate for human beings, we experience that through social status. For chickens, it's about breeding rights, which frankly what social status means to most of us in our human lives. And so what we need to look at as leaders is have or as cultural definers, right? And creators is, how do we create a culture that's both pro social and results oriented?
Chris Rainey 22:09
Yeah, and that's the balance, right? Because some companies are going one way or the other, which is kind of causing burnout in some places, which is a very real thing, especially in HR community,
Jon Levy 22:22
oh, my god, yeah, CHROs, take everybody's problems and have to touch everything, yes, and find and the weirdest thing is that there, I don't know if there's any other job, that there's this expectation to have answers for the impossible at the same level, Like, Oh, we have never had to go remote work as an entire planet, yeah. What should we do? And you're like, I'm tired for this. I was really good at benefits, so I got promoted. Like, I know how to deal with legal when somebody's being a jerk. Like, yeah, there's no
Chris Rainey 22:59
no. I also say just before we go on to another topic, like, you, made me think back to when I was building up those teams. One of the things that we I was there for 10 years, I was there since 17 years old, is that our team was known for if you had a low performer on the sales floor, you would put them in our team, and you'd be like you had a guy called Omri who went a few different across a few different teams, was actually on paper, smashing out all of the KPIs, the most cores, the most pitches, but just nothing was converting, right? So it didn't make sense, right? Yes, it comes over to my team. Kind of sit down, you know, acclimates to the culture of the team. And our team was really one way it was. Everyone helps everyone win. And if you know AJ, two deals away from getting his bonus, we'll all stay behind and make dials to get him over the line, even if it means me closing a deal for him and handing that deal over right. Within weeks, he became the top sales executive in the whole company, and in fact, outperformed everyone, and actually went on to, about six months later, start his own business. So he went from literally nearly getting fired to basically coming to the team, and he was just, it was a confidence thing, right? And I was listening into his pitches, and I realized he didn't. He lacked a confidence to ask for the deal, so he was doing like 99% of the of the of the right thing, and at the end, just fumbled the I remember
Jon Levy 24:29
in sales training years and years ago. This is over 20 years ago. Rule number one was, you know, ask for the sale always, yeah. Rule number two was, don't forget to ask for the sale, yeah. And rule number three was, never forget to always remember to ask for the sale, yeah.
Chris Rainey 24:47
And he just didn't do that. And I think also, he doesn't have a team around him where he felt like everyone was trying to pull him down to the point earlier. And yeah, just went on to absolutely kill it. And I could never, I never understood why that. People would can't come on to La T our team and succeed, and I think I have a bit more. I was so young. Then I was like, 19 years old, and a manager of of hundreds of people, and pure not because I was a good manager, but because I was a good sales person. And apparently, now I'm a good manager. I was a terrible manager. That's called the Peter Principle. Yeah. Have you ever come across I have. I have come across that before. Yeah. And
Jon Levy 25:21
it turns out that this was researched really in depth. And basically, if you are the top sales person, you are most likely to get promoted to sales manager, yeah. And in general, that person is the lowest rated sales manager,
Chris Rainey 25:39
yeah, because they're the most competitive self. Like, you know, I'm I care about my performance, me my wins, right? And now I'm responsible for everyone else. Like, honestly, I was like, when I got promoted, I was excited for about two days, and so I realized I'm now responsible for everyone else's performance. And I was like, Oh, really different skill set. I dude. I was like, please get me back on the phone. I'd rather just be responsible. I'd rather be just responsible for me, because at least I can control that. That's how I felt at the time, right? But listen, we've got loads more to get into, and I'm so excited by because we're on our first call. I was like, left with a million different things I wanted to ask you. So one of the big challenges we're seeing right now, especially from our HR community, is, is, is why culture is shifting to the manager level, right? Historically, the SAT, sort of an office level, you know, in the in the hallways, in the in buildings, as it were, your perspectives when we last spoke was really interesting. So I wanted to share that with everyone. Oh,
Jon Levy 26:41
absolutely. So this is we started looking at, how do we handle this problem that when the pandemic came, people were sent home, and there wasn't this sense of culture when you started a company, you're often indoctrinated into the company's values or culture by walking through the hallways, interacting with people, some of it's your manager, but you get vibes basically right, like you stop by the cafeteria and you see how people interact, and you get your social cues. Learning is fundamentally social, and if the only point of contact you have is with your manager and their reports, then your manager is the representation of what the culture is. And so the question is, what do we do about that? Because those managers were not hired because they're great camp counselors. They were hired because they're great at ad sales, or they were great at marketing, or my, you know, chip design, or they know how to program sales force. And so they, you know, the entire sales force, instance that you have, is being managed by them, all of these things. And so how do we figure out a way to perpetuate company culture, have quality control and reduce the strain on our managers, because we just keep asking more and more and more of them, and that's not why they got into the game, and it's not fair. They can't be all things to all people. Yeah, and so that was like the big question that we had to solve for. And we actually came up with a pretty simple and elegant solution. Fire them all. No, I'm kidding. The answer is,
Chris Rainey 28:33
give them more work. Yeah, yeah,
Jon Levy 28:36
totally kidding. Quit. So it's not your problem. The The answer is, we developed something called turnkey teams. And turnkey teams is a collection of 1530, and one hour long activities that are consistent with company culture, that bond teams at distance. So what do I mean by that? Overwhelmingly, if you have the manager in charge of culture, then they say, oh, let's do a virtual happy hour or something. And there's eye rolling, and then the extroverts talk over everyone, and the introverts and the other people pretend to pay attention while they try to clear their inbox, and that's really a waste of everybody's time, so let's take the responsibility out of their hands. So we created games like get to know you bingo, where in about five minutes, you discover more about your colleagues than from months of calls and human beings have this kind of funny characteristic, Chris, you know, you were in sales. I was in sales. Back in the day, everything that we share in common becomes this point of connection between us. You know, you were not the traditionally educated kid. Like I grew up dyslexic, right? Another point of commonality, everything that's different between us, becomes a point that creates depth of character. So we created this five by five bingo board, and people play it in five minutes in breakout rooms of four to six people, and then they come back into the main room. And the objective is figure out all the things you have in common, or all the things you have different, whichever version you want. And that might feel to like 20% of people a waste of stupid, eye rolling, team building time. But then what we did was be explained that science behind it. It's called the mere exposure effect, and so on and so forth. And this is how you use it to be a better salesperson. Here's how you use it to create better products, whatever it is. And so suddenly people feel like they're upskilling in 15 to 20 minutes, and they've just bonded in this really clever way, super fast. And so you have this cultural experience that's quality controlled, because it's scripted, and you can pass it to literally everyone in the company. And instead of requiring happy hours or whatever, which we should be questioning, why we're encouraging people to drink alone at home, right? Yeah. The then what you have is something that's consistent with whatever the company's values are, and at any moment, you can release one of these to do a cultural update. So if right, I'm sure you've spoken to CHROs and it's like, oh, this week, the CEO is like, Oh, are we doing something on this topic? And it's like, Wait, we we just started planning the last thing you asked about, and it takes three months to roll out. No, you can roll out an activity every month, and suddenly you can bring ideas to the entire company in really palatable ways. And so it was a huge success. We rolled it out with a lot of companies that you probably know by name and know their CHROs and and we found that it handles upskilling quality control on culture, reduces stress on the manager, increases trust and belonging among employees and a whole slew of other positive effects.
Chris Rainey 32:26
Firstly, I love that, and I think some companies just tend to really over complicate some of this stuff. Oh my god as well. It's like so unnecessary and all these big programs and spend months building. It's like something as simple as that, I accidentally did something early in my days as a manager, which I didn't realize would be so impactful, where at home, I had a vision board, and, you know, my wife would see it, and I'd put, and we've been together 20 years, and I would put on my little I'd cut out things and put them on my vision board, and then one day, I just took it in to the office. Oh, cool, right? And then it never went home again. It stayed and I had it on the wall. And then my team members started creating vision boards. And then we had a whole we had a whole wall, like a huge wall, of every single person on the teams vision boards so everyone knew what everyone was working towards whether it was like that house deposit or the holiday or something for their kids, and it created this kind of similar to what you're talking about, this sort of trust, and this this level of connection amongst people that have worked together for years but didn't know any about of this stuff about their colleague. If that makes sense, yeah, and it makes perfect sense of you wouldn't
Jon Levy 33:41
even know if people had kids, you wouldn't know that they were married, right? Like now it's like, Oh, why do you want to do this? Oh, my wife. The other thing I love about this is that one of the biggest mistakes that managers make, actually even call it a mistake, because it would suggest that they would have the wherewithal to do this is and we we talked about how people who have alignment, or organizations that have alignment, outperform everybody at the company. Needs to know what the company's mission is. Clear. They need to know how their team fits into that larger mission. They need to know how their person personal results fit into the team results. But there's a fourth step that nobody takes into account. They need to know how their personal goals align with their work. And the reason is that if what they're trying to do, you give the example of putting the deposit down the house, if they want to buy a house and they don't see a path to accomplishing that through the company, then they're what they're looking at is like, oh, do I make extra money on Uber? Am I going to be a twitch person? Like, where am I going to make that money up? And now all of their excess energy is going into a different company, right? Rather than yours. But if you can have that conversation that says, I see what your vision is is to buy that house, if you hit sales numbers, we can hit bonus right, the stock value of the company that and your options are going to be worth so much that you can put down a huge deposit on your house. Yeah, can I count on you to really just put it all in? Yeah, this quarter, right? And suddenly they're not thinking about that side gig. They're thinking, How do I get this done?
Chris Rainey 35:34
I think what compounds that is when everyone else knows everyone's focus and mission and purpose, and that's what that I think now, and that's where I said to you, I actually asked my CEO at the time, which was very didn't go down well, to move my entire sales team off of that sales floor, because I wanted to recreate our own culture, not the Kill or be killed. And everyone was like, you know, who the hell do you think you are? Do you deserve your own flaw? And I was like, I need to get away from this, because I was trying to build I could see the beginnings of what you're describing. And I was like, wow, this is insane, that my team are staying late on a Friday evening to help one of my team members get one more deal. So they hit their commission bracket to achieve what they want in their vision board, and everyone stayed behind, and we ordered Domino's Pizza. That's like the opposite of what I did for like, my first couple of years, right? I would like,
Jon Levy 36:37
well, it is Domino's Pizza, yeah.
Chris Rainey 36:41
So we did move to, not the new floor, but like a section, yeah, a corner that was sectioned off, basically. And I bought a little table, tennis table, a pool table, and made a little, you know, our own little sub little culture in the corner, in the corner as well. But it took a lot, because it was like everything around us was fighting to pull us into that kill or be killed mentality again as well. I want to switch gears, because I got so much want to ask you, and I want to appreciate your time talk to everyone about the the airport problem.
Jon Levy 37:18
Oh yeah, this is one of these things that really should have been obvious to us as a as professionals, but we kind of overlooked it, and it works like this. Culture happens at the office, at least that's how we related to it. We're not experiencing culture. So what we need to do is get everybody back into the office. There's a few problems with this. The first is that we hired a ton of people and a lot of people left over the years of the pandemic, and so you're just inviting a bunch of strangers that have never come across each other into a building. So Chris, if you're going on a trip and you're sitting at the airport or in your seat on the plane, you're surrounded by strangers, you might all be going to the same place. Have the same leaders, the same captain and crew. Are you going to talk to the people around you? No. Most of us just want to be left alone answering some emails. So what makes us think that if we take all of our employees and shove them into a building that they're actually going to talk to each other? They won't. That's the airport problem. It's completely ridiculous. So what we've done is we've invited people, invited people back into the office just to be surrounded. By strangers, and we made as a work community, no effort to make sure that they had any social ties ahead of time. Now, before the pandemic, you come into an office, there are pre existing social norms, habits, behaviors. The glue players are fully active. They're welcoming people. They're inviting them to lunch. But if you come into a ghost town with a bunch of strangers, it's going to remain a ghost town. And so what we actually have to do is connect everybody before they come in, because then it becomes a reunion, as opposed to an uncomfortable punishment where the introverts are freaking the heck out.
Speaker 1 39:27
Yeah, yeah, I was in a large company. Firstly, I love the analogy, by the way, and I'm sure everyone listening. When you first said that to me, I was like, it really stuck with me since our last conversation. Like, whenever I think about that people returning, I think about that the airport problem. So congrats. Did that come to you whilst you was in an airport? Randomly?
Jon Levy 39:53
It's funny. I originally was going to call it the bus station problem, and then I was like, there is not a ca. HRO out there, like, the past 20 years, like, who does that, right? So I really quickly had to pivot.
Chris Rainey 40:09
But it's so true. I just traveled to Vegas, and it just, you know, it's definitely the airport problem. I was actually a company recently. You would all know the company, but I'm not going to say the name, very, very large organization. And I was having a meeting there, and as was walking down the hallway, someone bumped into one of the executives. I was, oh my god. I had no idea that you're in the office today. I can't believe it. And then they're like, Oh yeah, I've been here all day. I've been here and these, these were two executives are on the same team, and had no idea each other. I'd been, by the way, and they'd been consistently coming in on that day. And it just never had just happened to never know, you know this, even though they're on Zoom calls out in this at the same time, insane. And it just just highlighted to me the inefficiency of that, I was like, they had no idea. So ridiculous.
Jon Levy 41:05
It's not ridiculous because any one person is doing something. No, no, no, no,
Chris Rainey 41:12
yeah, before I let you go, I just wanted to talk a little bit more about kind of how do you see this playing out right? Like you're seeing more and more companies now ask, I think every week there's a new company announcing that everyone needs to come back to the office.
Jon Levy 41:32
So if I'm really honest about this, I predicted it back in 2021 I wrote an article for the Boston Globe. My last book had just come out, you're invited, which is the one that hit the it wasn't the one with the nicest design, it was the one that hit the New York Times list, the Wall Street Journal. And actually have a whole bunch of new articles coming up, because I have a new book called Team intelligence coming up October 7. But I I wrote this up and titled The hybrid workplace probably won't last, and here's why. And the problem was that when you actually look at the things that allow work to work, it's the really human aspects of it, and we have to take them into account, like connection, distance between desks, all these things. You can have fantastic distributed work, but companies really have to be intentional in the way that they have policy and the way they connect people. Since they weren't going to do that anyway, I said, Okay, you're just going to end up ordering everybody back into the office. And nobody wanted to hear it. And nobody believed me. Twitter had just said, Oh, nobody ever has to come back to the office. Ever. We're going to save on office space, and now everybody is going to probably end up somewhere around four days, is the reality, yeah. And if we were honest and really looked at the data, that's probably where we were before the pandemic. It just wasn't official, which four days. And the reason is that, you know, the sales people were never in the office, and the or they were sporadically. The marketing people would have to go meet with agencies, you know, so on and so forth. People were out of the office constantly, or maybe you just had a doctor's appointment or a sick kid and you had to work from home that day. And so that's, I think, kind of what we're going to expect, especially as the implementation of AI causes employees to feel less secure in their positions at work, and then feeling more obligated to be seen in person. Ah, I
Chris Rainey 43:51
don't even think about that. That's that make that makes sense. Yeah, so. But
Jon Levy 43:57
here's the thing I told everybody, and they laughed when I said it, if you want to predict a company's office policy, measure the distance from the CEO's favorite home to the office. If their favorite home is in Jackson Hole Wyoming and their office is in New York City, that's a remote first company.
Chris Rainey 44:17
It's a good predictor. If you run the numbers on that, it'd be pretty
Jon Levy 44:21
oh my god, yeah. There's no way, because they don't want to get on planes, and then they're like, I'm just as productive at home. I mean, sure, whatever. Here's the point. Productivity is a BS, reason to have people come into the office, because there's no real way to measure productivity. You can maybe measure it on the sales team, yeah, but when you actually look at productivity, what we're really trying to say is, how quickly can we get our teams to solve problems? And the truth is that some cultures have developed really well distributed in some. Them have it. And if you know how to manage at distance, which is different than managing in person, or you know how to create distributed culture where problems get solved fast, right? You can probably be remote. Otherwise, what ends up happening is you get people answering like a 50 email chain that could have been solved just stepping five feet over to
Chris Rainey 45:25
hi Jasmine same day, or just or just picking up the phone for 10 seconds and just having a quick call. Yeah,
Jon Levy 45:31
the problem is that if you try to manage people at distance, it means lots of meetings and then people burning out because they have to do work in the evenings and weekends. If you know how to manage for outcomes, then you can actually gift your employees something called bursty communication. The second pillar of an intelligent team is that they come together. They might argue it out, but when they're done, they know what the next steps are and where to find the information they need. They do not need to interrupt each other constantly. You want to make a team stupider, distract people at every opportunity. Yeah, yeah. And so if you're working well in a distributed fashion, you have bursty communication. But if trust is low, then managers are going to constantly be setting up calls, and then you're burning your people out. And so you might say, oh, oh, I'm more productive at home, an employee's responsibility, and this is possibly an unpopular perspective, is not about being productive. The employees responsibility is to contribute what is necessary to move the ball forward, because ultimately, the smallest unit of effectiveness is not person, but team, which means that we need the employees to contribute what is needed for the team to solve the problem. That's it. So I don't really care about individual productivity. If you know, simple example is, have you ever seen the those, any of those Marvel movies?
Chris Rainey 47:12
Of course, yeah. They're Avengers, right? They're not. Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Jon Levy 47:18
And so in the like the productions of the films, they'll have like a single person whose responsibility is one microphone that is in one spot. And you might say, Oh, that's such an inefficient use of time that one person is maybe called on three times during the day to move the angle of that microphone. Yeah. But if we had to send somebody up there every time, it would take a half hour. And so it makes much more sense from the team's ability to solve the problem fast, which, in that case, is getting the scene. So it's not about that employees productivity. It's about is the team accomplishing what it needs to Yeah,
Speaker 1 48:07
well, listen, man, I could talk to you forever. We were never. There was no possibility that we was ever going to do that in half an hour, 3% and I still got more questions, but um, before I let you go, where can people grab a copy of the book? And I think, also, importantly, I think there's gonna be probably a lot of people listening that would love to work with you on some What are you doing? Where's the best place for people to
Jon Levy 48:30
reach out? So my name is John Levy, J, o, n, l, e, v, as in Victor, y, as in yellow. So John levy.com I'm super easy to get a hold of. The book is called The new one is called Team intelligence, how brilliant leaders unlock collective genius. And it's everywhere. So I don't know what the stores are called in England, but in the US, it's like Amazon, Amazon, yeah, Books a Million. And book shop.org and, you know, it's like a released by Harper business. So it's gone everywhere. In the last book did well, so I'm sure that it's being distributed well, and I'm super easy to get a hold of. Feel free to reach out. I answer just about every message that comes in through the site, unless it's really crazy.
Speaker 1 49:17
Yeah. Don't say that. Yeah. Well, for everyone listen, as always, those links are already below. So wherever you're watching, listening right now, if you click link in the description, all those links will be there to connect with John. But honestly, I appreciate the time, man. I love the work that you're doing, super impactful. So congratulations, and I'm looking forward to doing this again soon. Wish all the best, me too,
Jon Levy 49:38
and thanks for being the type of interviewer that actually does research. Holy cow, the number of times I get on a show or something and they're like, what's your name? Okay, let's do this. It was this. You are so good at this, Chris, it's like an absolute joy.
Chris Rainey 49:52
You made my job. You made my job very easy. So I appreciate you. Thanks, man, for sure. Bye.
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Jon Levy, Founder & Host of Influencers.