ProductiviTree: Cultivating Efficiency, Harvesting Joy

ProductiviTree#6 Why Job Hopping, Pivots & AI Are Changing Success with Stephen Shortt

• Santiago Tacoronte • Season 1 • Episode 6

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In this conversation, Santiago Tacoronte and Stephen Shortt explore the evolving landscape of careers, focusing on job hopping, career pivoting, and the role of leadership in employee satisfaction. They discuss the implications of AI on productivity and the future of work, emphasizing the importance of curiosity in leadership and the need for open communication. The conversation also touches on the challenges of corporate culture and the phenomenon of corporate cruising, highlighting the factors contributing to career dissatisfaction. In this conversation, Santiago Tacoronte and Stephen Shortt delve into the complexities of toxic leadership, hiring practices, and the dynamics of workplace productivity. They explore the impact of leadership styles on employee morale, the importance of curiosity in leadership, and the necessity of understanding different employee ambitions. The discussion also highlights the significance of team dynamics versus group dynamics, the myth of individual productivity, and the essence of finding happiness at work through progress toward purpose. 

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Hi Stephen and welcome to ProductiviTree. Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Steven, today we have a very exciting topic which is career moves, job hopping. So I wanna start directly with the first question aimed to job hopping. Is job hopping the new power move? Some people say that staying in one job for too long, it's a career killer. Some other says like you must be loyal to your company if you wanna grow. Where are we now? So I am going to give the ultimate consultant answer. It depends. So I mean, there are people who, once they've done kind of nine months in a job, they go, I've done everything I can in this job. And I go to another job. And then they bounce around and then they end up in front of you saying, I'm not getting any, like, I can't get promoted or I can't get ahead from my position where I am now. And I think a lot of employers, if they're not in that kind of cutting edge tech sector where they're just looking for fresh blood and fresh ideas and fresh perspectives all the time, it can be a little daunting for somebody who they might say, look, we want somebody for the long haul. We want somebody who's here for the next three to five years at least to really get a feel for it. it can be a red flag for some of them because their argument is you don't have six years of experience in this field. You have one year of experience six times, which is a little bit different from what people are looking for. Having said that, there are lots of tech firms and what they want is fresh ideas, fresh blood. They thrive on innovation. They thrive on different perspectives and people bringing something from one place and merging it with somebody else. So it really depends on the career. It also depends on the person because Let's be honest, there's a lot of people out there who they go into a job, they go into a career thinking this is what I want to do. And they have a very romanticized version of what that career is. Then when they actually are at the cold face and they discover, this is what this job is. I don't like this at all. I want to go do something else. But then they might feel a little bit stuck. They don't want to do a full 180 and go in a completely different direction. So they try to go piecemeal by piecemeal to move into another direction. So really, it depends so much on the person, the career and the industry. You are a defender of career pivoting. Yet career pivoting is many times look a bit down on, right? I mean, I have been in selections and processes where you hear comments like, he's an interesting profile, but he wasn't HR most of his life. So how can professionals switch careers multiple times as you advise? without hurting their credibility or feeling like they're starting again and again. So everything, whenever you're interviewing for a position, whenever you're, whenever somebody is talking to you about a job, whether they're on a panel, whether they're using an ATS, whether they're using AI to assess your intonation and your body language, and whether you're sitting up or slouching or sitting forward or whatever. Ultimately, what people want to know when they're interviewing somebody is just two things. Can they do this job? And do they want to do this job? Because ultimately they don't want people don't want to spend their time interviewing people. They want to be getting on with stuff. So when you're sitting in front of a person, they're subconsciously, if nothing else, praying that you're the one that they can go, at last, Santiago, just come start work on Monday and we're done and we can get back to work. So ultimately what we tell people is when you're interviewed, like there's a couple of things. That people, think sometimes get wrong as to why they, what they're doing on their LinkedIn, what they're doing on their CV and what they're doing on their interview, like the different roles and the different jobs that each of those have in the process. But when you're talking to somebody, if you make sure that you are spending about 60 % of your time either relating or enthusing, relating your previous experience, whether it's a directly experiential or not, to the job at hand. if you've managed people in one role, you can probably manage people in another role. If you've dealt with deadlines and projects and you've dealt with, even if you've dealt with tech, you might not have dealt with this tech. But you've dealt with it. for the example that you gave, if you're switching into HR from a technical role, have you led teams before you've had people under you before you've had you've led sprints, you've done project management, you've coached people, you have an awful lot of skills that are easily transferable and identifiably transferable into something like HR. Once you're able to show you're relating your previous experience to the role and you're showing enthusiasm for look, I actually want this job because find that this is something that's appealing to me, this industry, this role, this job, whatever it is, spending your time relating and enthusing will help you to, to showcase to people that actually, even though you don't have direct experience in this industry, you have the related experience and you have the enthusiasm. Is there any specific threshold you recommend people to keep before switching careers? So it doesn't look like, well, this guy or this person is doing trial and error here. yeah I would never advise somebody stays in a career that they hate. Like even if they, even if they discover after three months, having said that, if you've gone for three months and then another one for six months and another one for three months and another one for six months, maybe you need to spend a bit more time thinking about which direction you want to go in and maybe going and speaking to a career coach or career counselor or doing some assessments to be able to figure out what it is that you're looking for as opposed to having this romanticized version of, I want to get into this or I want to get into that. Hmm. One of the things that I see though is people who they spend a little bit of time in a company or they spend a little bit of time, let's say in some kind of customer service role. and they decide, customer service is not for me. I hate it. I love dealing with people and I love helping people with their problems, but customer service is just not for me. One thing that I would advise rather than ditching the industry and ditching the career is maybe have a look at the culture because if you're in the right industry, but the wrong company, that can still be a game changer for you. So to be able to move and understand, okay, I enjoy the concept of the work. just don't understand. I don't enjoy the values of the culture that we have in this organization. But actually, if I can move to another organization staying in the same area and being perfectly honest, if you're going for if you're values based, if you're really values driven and you're looking to work in a values based organization, a lot of them, so long as you're not. I mean, we've had people who have interviewed for places with us and they've spent almost the entire interview giving out and complaining about their previous bosses and their previous jobs. Like that's a bit of a red flag. But so long as you're not doing that and you're able to say, look, the values just weren't there, the culture wasn't there. From my research, I really think that I would be a good addition to your team. Then I think that's a non-issue. What about from the other side, companies? How often do you recommend companies to encourage their people, leaders, encourage the people to look into something else, right? I don't know. You've been in IT for 15 years, Santiago. Maybe it's time for you to look somewhere else. Again, depends on, so, Santi Ayo, you've been IT for a long time. Do you still enjoy it? Are you still, do you still come up, come to work every day? Or sorry, do I feel like as your line manager or as your HR manager or something that you're coming in to work every day, virtually or in person or whatever, and you're engaging and you're curious and you're happy? Or do I feel, yeah, maybe Santi's a little bit burnt out here or a little bit bored or feels a little bit stuck. But we have a kind of a ceiling of like, you've reached as high as you can in this organization and maybe going to another organization and having that conversation, do you want to move? Pushing somebody else, dangerous role, but sitting somebody down and going, look, is this really for you? Every onboarding that I do with every team member that I have and have done for 20 years. One of the first things I say to them is it only makes sense for you to be here every day, so long as you're happy and we're happy. Once one of those things isn't the case, I would rather work with you to get the most out of you for like six months to then set you on your way, so long as you're not going to my direct competitor. But I'd rather have that open and honest conversation with you. It seems though that some managers are either blind to see that or they don't want to see that. What's your recommendation for managers to be aware of the happiness of your team or individual team members and how to detect that someone is not happy any longer coming to work every day? For me, the most important quality in leadership, in any kind of leadership is curiosity. If you are curious about stuff and you have an interest in it, then you'll learn more and you'll develop more. I would argue that, there are, by the sheer nature of a bell curve of averages, there are amazing managers and there are terrible managers, but most people are pretty good. Like in the middle of 80%, most people are above average, below average, whatever. I would say there are probably a lot of managers who a lot, not the majority, but a lot of people who don't understand their people or don't connect with their people. But I would. I guess is the wrong word, but from my experience of interacting with a lot of these HR managers, especially when they bring us in for coaching or for things like this, it's not that they don't recognize that their team is maybe not too happy or not too thrilled. It's either they don't have the authority to be able to make those changes and they know that the team is in a bad place because of course they are because corporate or management or whatever has said that this needs to be done and I got to drive them. Or more often than not, they don't know how to have those difficult conversations. They don't know how to have the tricky conversations and they're not confident in their own abilities to be able to have those crucial conversations. And there's a fantastic book called Crucial Conversations. which I would encourage every manager to read. It is a really simple seven step process to be able to. Sorry, my camera for. yep something happened there that's all right we will cut this part sorry. Seems like you switch cameras. Yeah, I switched camera. For some reason, this, unit, just went completely dead. Let me log out and log back in. Does that work for you? Because I think my audio is not coming through there as well either then. So hang on. Sorry, I'm very sorry about this. This doesn't normally happen. It happens. Happens all the time. Ahem. There you are. Hi, really sorry about that. That's very unusual. to me also often. I have an external camera that sometimes is pfff. You want to pick it up on the book, Crucial Conversations, and then I insert this part after the cut. Perfect. So one of the things that I often recommend that managers get their hands on to start with is this book called Crucial Conversations, a fantastic book, really simple to follow seven step framework that helps you to understand the process of having that crucial conversation and being able to then have the conversation with the person who's having the issue and then. move past it and actually move the two of you or move the whole situation past. And it's a simple seven step process that starts with you understanding your story and understanding where you are in your perspective, then understanding that they may have a different perspective and they might have a different viewpoint. And how do you have a conversation that's safe for them and safe for you to be able to explore that? And then you come to a realization. the we've all seen, I suppose, this meme of two people looking at a six on the ground. and one of them is looking from the top and one of them is looking from the bottom and the idea being well it is possible for both people to be right. Yes, in that instance they can both be seeing what they're seeing but actually in a business and in life you should be able to zoom out a little bit and you'll be able to see whether that's in the middle of a five and a seven or if it's in the middle of an eight and a 10, then you'll be able to see actually which one is correct. understanding, yes, you can have a different perspective on the same thing, but ultimately there is a solution. There is a way out. There is something that you can do. And even though the exit, how you get past that conversation might be that you split, might be that the person is no longer a fit because of what reason. But the book is a really, really useful tool and something that I recommend all managers and leaders familiarise themselves with. Steven, you speak a lot about the future of work. How to prepare for jobs that doesn't exist yet. I want to link this to productivity. What do you think individual productivity to start with will mean in 10 years? 10 years is very, far away. So five years, if I was to extrapolate out to 10 years, I reckon we're all gonna have four day work weeks. I reckon we're all going to be using, I mean, we're gonna be using AI like we use email right now. And AI is gonna be able to do... A lot of the general day-to-day tasks that does take up a lot of our time, and I've seen some phenomenal examples of how AI can actually make the tasks of our day-to-day life easier. The longer you use it, the more it learns from you. Now, over the last two days, I've been playing with DeepSeq and seeing the differences between that and OpenAI and kind of similar, but obviously there's all the scaremongering and it's a new thing and it's a new tool. So it'll be interesting to what happens there, but there are going to be stronger and stronger and more powerful and more powerful AIs that are going to help us in every facet of our lives. But when we have that four day week, think, so when I talk about this, people sometimes say, they're just going to make you do as much work in the four days. So if you're able to do in four days, If you're currently, if you do, if you have a five day week and you're able to do, let's say two projects a week, they'll either make you allow you to work a four day week and still make you do the two projects, which is fair enough, or they'll make you work a five day week and work and do three projects because you can do them quicker. I think it will come down to people power and people will be going, look, we are able to do this. We are able to have a better quality of life. So let's go with the four day week. And I think that will be a cultural shift. don't think it's something that will come as a result of companies optimizing for productivity. I think it will come as a result of people going, you know what, the next generation, the, the gen alphas and things like that, they, are looking for this better quality of life. They don't have the same focus as we had on. owning a home, being stuck in one place, the idea of travel and having these side hustles and having an Etsy store and having a Twitch stream and all these things for their community. I think it will move in that way that if you want to hire, if you want the top talent, it's going to be in this four day week scenario to give them time to do, to have their other passions because Again, the other thing, is there's been a lot of documentation around this. People are because people are getting more and more of being a relying on their companies and their jobs more and more to get all of the facets that used to come from community. Like my friends are here, my hobbies are here, my values are here. I think people will be more in line with I want to work in a company that shares the same values as I do. But then I also have my hobbies. Like I'm into archery. I'm not going to be shooting arrows in the office or I'm into playing the saxophone and I'm really bad at it. So I need do that at home instead of being in the office. and if you see just the sheer breadth of companies now that are sorry countries that are giving these remote working visas where you don't have to register and pay taxes locally for a year, people are going to be traveling and getting and having this work life balance in a way that just wasn't possible before. And I think that's what's going to drive the four day work week. You mentioned AI before. I've been developing some thoughts about AI. In fact, we're putting an episode fully dedicated to AI because the question I have in my mind is, is AI making us smarter or lazier? So I have a good friend who he argues that we shouldn't be using AI to make our lives easier. We should be using AI to make our work better. So putting in the same amount of work. I have, if I'm perfectly honest, I have found myself in the last kind of two months when I'm preparing videos or blog posts or something like that. Maybe not as studiously going through how I would write a sentence or how I would write that paragraph and lifting it just from the AI. I'd say it was about maybe two weeks ago that I caught myself going, hang on, this is like, okay, I've trained it in my voice and all this, but this is what AI thinks, not what I think. And having to then spend that time and go, okay, I need to go back into this because it's been so easy. But again, it was easy to create an email back in the day. People got lazy about writing. When you use something like Grammarly for years, it's easier to not pay attention to what you're writing and have something else check it. I think people will start to build that muscle of making sure that they have their... their voice in it. I did hear this really interesting thing that over the next 10 years, there's going to be, what did they call it? A digital churn where if I'm writing an email to you, I need to say like one thing, but I'm to put it into an AI and go here, make this a really nice fancy sounding email. And it's going to write, 500 word email that just basically has that one line in it, is fluffed out. I'm going to send that email to you. You're going to look at the email and go, I'm not reading that. AI summarized that and it's going to come out with just the sentence that I wanted to send to you. So there's going to be this churn that only AI is looking at because we're going to be using this to make ourselves sound smarter and then to save ourselves time. That's going to be interesting. Steven, you run a very interesting website also called why you hate your job dot com. Amazing domain. What are the top career killers that ruins people's work experience? So again, largely it depends, but in general, it's people. And we talked about managers earlier on, we talked about bad managers, we talked about people not having those conversations, either not recognizing that people are happy, not recognizing that people maybe are getting a little bit burnt out. So poor leadership and people like you've heard of the Peter principle, people rising to the point that they're in confidence. So I think there's a lot of that. There's a lot of people who are in leadership positions who are not their leaders in title as opposed to in... in actuality and I think that has a real demoralizing impact on people. One of the things that we look at in using some of our psychometric assessments is how there's a difference between being an effective leader and an emergent leader. And an emergent leader are people who are very good at promoting themselves and very good at making sure that they get face time with the boss when something goes well and they're able to claim everything else, but they might not be the most effective team players and the most effective leaders. So people suffering from poor leadership and decisions that are made from politicking. It's in larger corporations. There is probably it's it's more prevalent because there's just more people. But at the same time, in smaller organizations, a little bit of politicking can have a much more dramatic impact on the percentage of the team. So it can have a real impact on headcount and turnover when people en masse decide. Jenny's our new CMO. she's a tyrant. We're all leaving to go to the competition or something like that. So that poor, poor leadership. But part of the poor leadership then is also whether people are able to progress in their career. Because there are bad leaders who... don't want other people to progress and don't they see other people as a threat. So they have this high competition or they have this high secrecy or things like that. So people are not able to progress, not able to level up their career, not able to level up their training, not able to level up their money. And they get stuck in that. Those are two the well, mean, the other one that we talked about at the very beginning is just in the wrong career. Like you're just doing the wrong thing. And people are stuck to not have a clear idea of what's actually involved in that role. We talked about this earlier, having a romanticized version of what it is to be a chief technical officer or marketing executive or customer service agent or something like that. They have this romanticized version of it and actually it doesn't fit in with what they're wanting to do and what they're wanting to develop for themselves. So it doesn't matter how great the culture is, it doesn't matter how great your leadership is, if you're coming into work every day going I just don't like this job, I don't like this career, I don't like this direction for me, you're gonna be miserable. Is this the reason? I've been reading recently about the concept of corporate cruising. Yeah, corporate cruising and quiet quitting. a lot of this, people just... Corporate cruising, think, is a fan. It's easier to cruise in corporate, I suppose, when you get to a certain kind of middle level, you just don't rock the boat because there's so many, such a big head count. But it happens in smaller companies as well, people who kind of get stuck and go, hmm. I don't like what I'm doing, but I don't hate it so much that I'm going to go through the pain of having to step away, maybe retrain, get a lower job for lower salary for a year or two to earn my way back up. they just kind of. toxic leadership or bad hiring? Who is to blame? Do terrible bosses create miserable employees? Or do companies just hire the wrong people for the jobs? Both and neither because if you have a toxic boss that boss has been hired at some point so they were taken on. There's both and I've experienced both. I've experienced terrible bosses. There's a great book actually as well on this called multipliers by a woman called Liz Wiseman. If you've ever heard of it, it's been around for a long time. Liz, I think lives in America and there's another lady in Dubai who does her talks, Hazel Jackson. But it's this idea of there are accidental diminishers and accidental multipliers. there's somebody can be working for one boss and can feel like they can do 110 % and they can give it their all and everything they do seems right and then they can change department doing the same thing or a different manager comes in and they feel completely undermined and diminished and those they might be accidental diminishers I think they're they're nice to to the people as assuming positive intent and assuming the people aren't coming in with malevolence in their heart So understanding one of those traits and one of those habits that can lead to people being a toxic boss or a diminisher or whatever label you want to put on it. think people can change and I think people can adapt. Sometimes it's out of, in my opinion, it's out of fear that they have this Peter principle or imposter syndrome that they think, gee, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to make it look like I'm powerful and all the rest of it. But when it comes to selecting, the reason that a lot of these people are selected in roles in general is that the people who are selecting them and who are hiring don't actually know what they're looking for. And they don't know what are they, they don't break it down from a... What's the person spec? What's the job spec? What's the culture? What's the, what are we looking for? What does success looks like? To really understand what, not just what that body is right now, but this person who's going to be a leader that's going to take us to the next level. What does that person look like? That's who we need to be looking for. That sounds familiar, Stephen. I can tell you from a very close person to me who went to a job interview and when she asked, okay, so what I'm going to do in my job? And the answer from the hiring manager was like, we will look about that later. We have the head count and we need to fill it up. that was a, for her was like an eye opener. said, I don't want to work here. people don't know what I want me for. We had a conversation with a potential client who was hiring a CFO for a huge semi-state company here. And they were saying, yeah, we want to hire a new CFO. Our old guy is going, okay, what are you looking for? What kind of person and what are you hoping for in the direction? And their answer was, we don't know yet. We're gonna see who shows up and then we'll see which direction we go in. Okay, we are not the solution for you. Best of luck. What is the most toxic leadership mistake you see happening over and over again and how does it impact workplace productivity? toxic Well, mean, curiosity is my number one thing. I suppose if we go in the other direction, I suppose it's a kind of a sense of arrogance or entitlement of going, well, I know everything and I know who you to tell me what to do. And they become the bottleneck and they become this power trap or this this information value of death where they want to make sure that everything flows through them because they're afraid of. anybody else getting any sliver of authority or recognition. So I suppose for me it's probably that and it's the polar opposite then of the curiosity and the interest. Hmm. You know something that is, it keeps happening. I think it's, I don't know if it's Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who said that you hire smart people to tell you what to do, not to tell them what to do. But that's still happening a lot, Steve. I see a lot of new hires, brilliant people that then are told, don't do this, don't do that. You're not here to invent anything. Just follow my orders. Why does this happen? So I work with a lot of family businesses and multi-generational businesses. And what I always try and get the current generation, the next generation to look at is they're looking at the same problem with a different set, not perspectives, they both want the company to succeed, they both have drive and everything else, but the current generation has more to lose right now. So there's more risk involved for them. the senior managers who are in there, they are potentially being judged on or being being managed, rewarded, punished, whatever on don't rock the boat. Whereas the young people that are coming in or the new hires that are coming in are going, wow, this is, we have the potential to do this and maybe try this in this direction and maybe sprout this out. And from the managers who have been ingrained and keep the boat steady, that's risky. And that could cause all kinds of problems. So there's two concepts here. One is. the S curve of innovation. I don't know if you've ever heard of this. if you imagine an S curve on a graph, so it kind of starts here, dips down a little bit as it moves along the time, and then it goes up in hopefully a steady fashion as it progresses up towards optimization. So if we imagine a company, a project, anything, when we start off and we're a startup, we're down the bottom left. We have no real optimizing. We're just going with the flow. We're seeing what we can build and we're being scrappy. We're probably going to drop down a little bit out of profitability and out of optimization because we're trying new things and we're scrambling. But at some point it turns and starts to come up along this S curve. The higher along that S curve you get, the more optimizing you need to be as opposed to experimenting. You're experimenting down the bottom. You're optimizing up the top. Every business goes through this. Every business needs to, over time, be less about the experimenting and more about the optimizing to maximize their business. The problem is when people who are naturally good at the bottom of the S curve, the exploration people, the people who have the ideas and they're all about taking risks and taking chances, when they're getting dragged up along risk mitigation and optimization and processes, They're miserable. The same way as the people who are big on the process and optimization will be miserable in the churn and the ambiguity of further down the S curve. So that's why for entrepreneurs, I tell them once they get to a certain point, whether they keep the business or not, I'm always in favor of people keeping the business, but they need to jump to the next S curve. They need to jump to the next thing where they can start building something afresh and then have people, they need to have a team of people that are optimizing and keeping it maintained. But then the people who are the R &D department or the people with the crazy ideas who want to try doing new things, they need to get to the next S-curve. And if we're talking about in a business, if we're talking about leaders that are looking to develop this and take people in, I call this an inside hustle. So we've all, you know, side hustle and the thing that you do on the side to make money. What can you do within the organization that uses a little bit of the resources of the organization and uses the knowledge of the organization that you try it, you build it as a little. side project or a side project within the organization. If it goes well, brilliant. It can be folded into the main corporate or it can even become the new thing or it can be spun out to its own event. There are plenty of examples of times when the side project, the inside hustle becomes bigger than the main project and they sell off the main thing and keep focusing on the inside hustle. But if it doesn't work, you don't kill the whole company, but you can still take some learnings from it. Steven, I've worked for a good number of years in corporate. There is one of the people-related ceremonies that I find more absurd and awkward is the famous calibration, right? And yeah, where everyone gets ranked at the end of the year among peers. A frequent comment is, this person is not ambitious enough. is not going for more. It's coasting. How do we put in the head of leaders that not everybody want to be the next Sam Altman or the next Elon Musk and that some people is there for the paycheck, do the best that they can, but they don't have an ambition to climb the corporate ladder. So to me, this is a real unconscious bias that a lot of these leaders have. So unconscious bias is everybody has it. There's no point in saying we don't. It's how the human brain works. We have to have labels that we put on things as an easy way of being able to figure out, is this person going to fight me or are they going to be my friend? Am I going to be able to sleep in my cave with this person in the next village or are we going to... go hunting together, whatever it is. We all need to have this. It's the way that the brain works. The problem comes when people don't address those unconscious biases. And unconscious biases can be like the most horrendous, wide ranging things. You were told as a kid, this type of people or this ethnicity is lesser than us. mean, there's horrendous things. But more often than not, our unconscious biases come from a... for want of a better expression, a good place. So we need to believe as humans, our brains need to believe that our actions are correct, are the right thing. Because if we're showing up to work every day, what we're doing, the way we're behaving, the way we're showing up, the traits that we bring are correct. Which means if somebody else comes with a different set, they must be wrong. Because if they're in a fundamental lizard brain, if they're right, we can't be right. Whereas actually, everybody can be right. So I've worked with a lot of startup leadership teams who are high ambition, high drive, pushing, expanding, new locations, new products, new everything else. And they worked with customer service people or food and beverage people or hospitality people. And I keep telling them, you need to have a manager between you and them because you will kill these people because you're driving and you're pushing and your focus is building and building and building and getting ahead and getting ahead and getting ahead. And you don't understand that there are people who are the other end of that spectrum. It's not a negative. It's just the other end of that spectrum or the other side of that spectrum. And understanding that every company and every organization and every culture needs both sides. Everybody needs a balance. Otherwise you become Wall Street bros and everybody burns out and ends up driving their Ferrari off a bridge. So understanding that there are people who don't have that drive, but they still have the ambition to work in your organization, to do a good job, to take pride in their work, but they don't necessarily want to be gunning for your job in five years time. Those are people that you want. Those are people that you want to be rewarding and nurturing. But there might also be some young guns that are wanting to drive and implement as we talked about AI and really drive that into the organization. Like, okay, we need both. But we need to, like, we can't treat the two the same. The other thing that a lot of companies, I think, they miss out on is they call, they say, we're a team here. Like, we're a great team. We're not a team. We're a group. And there's a big difference between a team and a group. Like, people say that they have a sales team, but each sales member has different unique targets. Three people can win and two people can lose. That's not a team. That's a group of individuals that have individual targets. If you have a team, like you imagine a football team, if the goalkeeper lets in three goals and the striker scores six, the team wins. But in a sales team, if one person gets two and another person gets six, that person wins. Understanding the dynamic of a team and a group is very different and understanding that different people play different roles in that team is incredibly important. What is the biggest, you're a very productive guy. I've been following you for a while. You do so much and you do so much of quality. So what do you think is the biggest, this is a classic in this show already, the biggest productivity myth. that can do it all yourself. Even with AI, can't, need people, you need, you need a solid team of people with different skillsets and different interests and different strengths who look at the problem in different ways to make sure that you're addressing it in the right way and being able to rely on those people and to make sure that you have their back the same way as they have yours. it's everything is people. Steven, rapid fire, 30 seconds answer questions. Ready? Annual performance reviews, useful or outdated? In the existing format of checkbox, useless. yearly goal setting. Is it useful? Yeah. So long as everybody's agreed and aligned on them. Yes. Very useful. Do you think the year time frame is a bit long or it's okay? we do a year planning and we also do quarterlies and the quarterlies feed into that. when we do the quarterlies, we make sure that they're feeding into the year because 90 days is about as long as the human brain. when our team at about 80 days in, we're all like, can we get to this quarterly so we can regenerate ourselves again? a year, absolutely having a goal that's a bit of a stretch that realistic, but a stretch that everybody can believe in. It's not like, The CEO wants a third yacht, that's not a goal, but having those metrics that make sense to the drive of the organization is really, really important. Best way to spot a future leader in a company. Curiosity. You're big in curiosity, Stephen. I, but it is, I mean, everything to me comes down to interest. have this argument, like I have a company called Talent Select. Technically, I don't believe there is like talent the way that it is described at the moment. think talent is really focused interest and interest comes from curiosity. brilliant. The number one sign that a company's culture is broken. If I come into a company and I say, who can I talk to? And they have a list of, we can talk to one or two of these people, the leaders, but they don't let you talk to anybody else. Something's wrong there. So not having, how will we define this accessibility to? Not being open to anybody in your team talking and talking about your culture and talking about your real culture. What is the biggest red flag in an interview? The biggest. from the point of view of an interviewee or an interviewer. If I'm interviewing you for a job, what's the biggest red flag that you can have? Complaining about your previous people in a very personal way. What do you recommend people to do if they had a bad experience? Say I had a bad experience, I didn't like the culture, didn't like we had a clash, I'm looking to move on to something and what am I looking for? Steven, you work, your tagline is I'm making lives people happier or something like that if I remember well. I'm on a mission to make the world a better place with happy people and fulfilling rewarding careers. But then tell us, what's the secret to staying happy at work? So the secret to staying happy at anything. So happiness boils down to progress towards purpose. So long as you have a purpose, so long as you have something that you're working towards, whether that's in your personal life, your business life, whatever it is, so long as you have a purpose and you can have multiple purposes. I'm not talking about your core purpose. I mean, I have a mission, have a core purpose, but I have lots of things that I'm interested in. So long as you are making progress towards that. that to me is happiness. So you could say, of my purposes is to have a loving home and a loving family. So actually, sitting on a Sunday afternoon and doing nothing and just having a coffee and watching a movie with my wife and kids, that's making progress towards that purpose. That's fulfilling what I want to do. Or if I'm saying I want to learn how to play the saxophone or archery, I want to shoot in a different competition and I'm practicing and I'm getting better. Or I want to be a better public speaker or I want to be a manager in a certain size company so as I can have a team of X number of people because I want to see if I have it in me to do it. Whatever it is that you have as your purpose, so long as you're making progress towards it, in my opinion, that's where happiness comes from. Steven, thank you so much for being with us here today. How can people get in touch with you? So pretty much everything is on my site, stevenshort.com. If you're looking for finding your ideal career, you can go to findingyouridealcareer.com, which has lots of information about how you do that. Or if you're looking to hiring the right people, then hiringtherightpeople.com has lots of information how we can help you with Stephen, thank you again for number one, helping people to be happier and for teaching us, me and the audience, how to be a bit better at work. Tomorrow, how to treat people better, how to be aware of others and yeah, how to make corporate a bit better. Santi it's been my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.