Our guest today on The Burleson Box is Ashley Goodall, a renowned leadership expert and co-author of the bestseller Nine Lies About Work. Ashley has spent over two decades leading HR organizations at global companies like Cisco and Deloitte, and his latest book, The Problem with Change, challenges the widespread belief that change is always good. He delves into the hidden costs of constant disruption and offers a fresh perspective on how leaders can create stability, allowing their teams to thrive.
In this insightful episode, Dustin Burleson interviews Ashley Goodall, author of The Problem with Change and co-author of Nine Lies About Work. They explore the pitfalls of constant organizational change and its negative impact on human performance, uncovering practical strategies to create stability and empower teams. Ashley draws from decades of experience at Cisco and Deloitte to offer a fresh perspective on leadership, team culture, and performance management.
Ashley doesn’t hold back as he explains how organizations often confuse improvement with change, assuming that one naturally leads to the other. He points out how relentless transformations—whether they’re mergers, reorgs, or new systems—disrupt employees’ sense of certainty, control, and belonging. These disruptions can leave people feeling untethered, like they’re just waiting for the next upheaval to arrive. It’s no wonder, he notes, that employees often roll their eyes when leaders announce, “We’re so excited about this new change!”
Dustin then steers the conversation toward solutions, exploring why teams—not companies—are the real heart of an organization. Ashley explains that while it’s easy to talk about “company culture,” the truth is, culture happens on a much smaller scale. It’s in the teams where people feel connected, supported, and motivated—or not. He makes a compelling case for investing in team leaders, those unsung heroes who create environments where employees can do their best work.
The two also dig into Ashley’s innovative approach to performance management, which he implemented at Deloitte and Cisco. Instead of the usual annual reviews that focus on ratings and past performance, Ashley championed a weekly check-in system. This simple yet powerful shift helps employees get the guidance and support they need in real time, not six months too late. Dustin marvels at how such a small change can have such a big impact, strengthening engagement, performance, and trust within teams.
Toward the end, the discussion takes a broader view. Ashley emphasizes the importance of giving employees “running room”—a term borrowed from Bob Woodward—that speaks to the space and trust leaders can provide. It’s not about micromanaging or constant prodding; it’s about creating an environment where employees feel empowered to do their best work. For Ashley, this starts with treating employees as human beings, not just numbers on a spreadsheet. Dustin wholeheartedly agrees, sharing how these insights can help leaders rethink their approach to change and performance in their own organizations.
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Dustin Burleson:
For decades, disruption and change have been seen as essential to business growth and success. But constant change is actually bad for business because it's bad for human performance. Hey, it's Dustin and you're listening to the Burleson Box. Today on the show I have Ashley Goodall. Ashley's the author of The Problem With Change in the essential Nature of Human Performance, whether it's a merger or reorganization or even a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders. We pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on our employees. The result is what Ashley calls Life and the Blender, the perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease. Drawing on decades spent leading HR organizations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall reveals the truth about human performance. And luckily for us, he offers a radical new alternative to the constant turbulence that defines life and any corporation. I'm so excited again to welcome you and Ashley to the show where we'll challenge the widespread belief. The change is always good. We'll talk about the hidden cost of constant disruption, and Ashley will offer a fresh perspective on how we can create stability and allowing our teams to thrive. I'm so excited again that you're here and can't wait to dig in inside another episode of the Births Box.
I am so thrilled to have Ashley Goodall on the program. Ashley, thank you for being here.
Ashley Goodall:
Dustin. Thanks for having me.
Dustin Burleson:
Your book is brilliant. It's the problem with change and the essential nature of human performance. I read it just giddily, it's got notes scribbled all over the margins, but I'm thrilled to talk to you about it. I'm kind of curious as I usually start, what inspired you to write it and to tackle such a huge topic?
Ashley Goodall:
Well, the question of what inspires one to write a book is actually a non straightforward one, at least for me because in many ways, writing a book is an act of complete insanity. It takes up a huge amount of time. It's a very hard thing to do. It's a very hard thing to launch into the world. And so it takes a lot of, I think you've got to feel certainly in nonfiction, fiction's a whole different world. But for someone like me, you've got to feel very strongly about something to want to invest the time and energy to make your argument at the scale of 75,000 words, which is what this book is, and the things that have activated me in my career have been things where I looked at the world and said, particularly the world of business, and said to myself, well, that doesn't make any sense, does it?
That's weird. I don't understand why. And then got very curious about the particular topic. So I got curious years and years ago about why anyone thought that doing performance rankings in large companies where you get your annual review and your one through five ranking, why anyone thought that was a useful exercise because I'd been the person who decided the ratings and a person who'd received the ratings. And neither of those exercises I found remotely to have anything to do with performance at work. So that was weird. So I got interested in that. I got interested in the whole topic of feedback, which again, people are like, you have to give radically candid feedback to people. And my thought always when hearing that was, please don't give any to me because I'm trying to get my job done here. And radically candid sounds weird and cult-like I'm really not sure what that would be.
What I really need is help and assistance and guidance, but feedback isn't that. So I got curious about that. And then I suppose this one is this current curiosity of mine or perplexity of mine came from a lot of time living in organizations where the leaders would go, changes is a fabulous thing, isn't it? Oh, I'm so excited that we're going to change now and there's a big change coming and we'll do a transformation and then we'll do a reboot and then we'll do a reorg and then we'll reimagine who we are and we'll revision what we're going on and it'll change and transform and transmogrify ossify. And that's just fabulous, isn't it? And the people on the front line would roll their eyes or would go, oh, not again. We just learned the way the old thing worked. Really, we're going to do this. Why are we doing this again? Why is this so ongoing? Why is it so pervasive? And why have we convinced ourselves that it is necessarily a good thing? So I got curious about that and I decided to investigate, and that turned into the book The Problem with Change.
Dustin Burleson:
It's so good. As I read it, I thought finally someone is speaking the truth to this what you call a cult of disruption and this constant desire for new and change and just disrupt yourselves. It's like it's exhausting, but you go into great lengths and great depths with the literature and the evidence and not just that you're someone curious on the sidelines writing about this. You were an executive at Cisco since, if I get the math right, since you implemented a different way of evaluating performance, which is really nebulous. I think they've done like 11 million of these and you are also at Deloitte for almost 15 years. So for our listeners who don't know, Ashley is not just someone curious about this. He's actually been just living it, right?
Ashley Goodall:
Yes. I didn't just wander in off the street with my curiosity,
Dustin Burleson:
So why are we so obsessed with change? And I guess you cover that in depth in the book, but for those of our listeners who go, okay, yeah, I've kind of been skeptical about this whole disrupt yourself mantra. I guess let's get into some of the pitfalls. What happens when employees obviously roll their eyes when you say, I'm so excited we're going to merge with this other group, or we're going to take in, you and I were speaking before we started, we're going to take in private equity investment, it's going to be great. And the employees go, oh God, here we go.
Ashley Goodall:
Oh God, here we go. So there's a lot to unpack. I mean, the question of why are we so fascinated with or why are we so enamored? Enamored is the better word, why are we so enamored with change? And by the way, it's not one-off constant change. That's the thing that really gets people. If you just did it once and then left them alone for a couple of years, folks would be fine. We have a new leader and they have the change, and then this leader comes in and does this change and then we do this one because we haven't done one for 14 minutes and then we're going to do another. So it's that thing. Why are we so enamored with? That's a very complicated question. There are many things in human life where a good idea, badly understood leads to problems. And a good idea is we can make the world a better place. Badly understood is that means constant change,
But it's not a million miles away. If you're going to make the world a better place, then you do have to make the world a different place than it is now. In other words, you have to have some sort of change. But just because improvement requires change does not mean that change implies improvement. So it works one way and it doesn't work the other way. And the trickiness about organizational life is actually, it's very hard to see improvement. Of course, you can see the big balance sheet metrics and you can see the financials and you can see the market share and you can see a lot of stuff that's mainly financial. It's much harder to see the experience of people every day. It's very hard to actually get your hands around that. It's much harder to see or sense whether you've created the sort of culture in your organization that you want to.
So there's a lot about organizational leadership that is very amorphous, very intangible. So improvement's actually hard to get to, but change is easy. Did I launch the big change initiative? Did I hire the consultants? Did I bring in the private equity money and the expertise to shake things all up? Have I listened to my activist investor? Change is change is fairly straightforward. It's just not the same thing as improvement. And I think that's really where we get into trouble. And then add a little bit by the way, of sort of fetishizing change as we have done over the years, so that we sort of say to ourselves that the people who are brave enough to disrupt everything are the new superheroes of our society, and they're magnificent and they're bold and they're better than the rest of us. And so of course, if you want to be considered a visionary leader, the thing you learn to do very early on is keep changing everything the whole time.
Dustin Burleson:
Exactly.
Ashley Goodall:
But again, that's actually not rigidly connected to whether you're making anything any better and to understand whether this stuff makes people's lives better. Now you have to think about the psychological consequences of constant change.
Dustin Burleson:
Let's talk about that because you do a brilliant job digging into the diagnosis, but I love that you turn the page and go into prescription. We'll get there later. But what happens as a leader when we latch onto this idea of constant change or we are enamored with, ooh, something new, what happens to our teams? Let's talk about stress, let's talk about uncertainty. Let's talk about all the things that happen inside organizations when we don't understand this downside.
Ashley Goodall:
The way that I frame this in the book, and I think it's very helpful, is to think of constant change as a series of severing. It might be that at the time I was writing the book, the Apple TV series, severance was playing. So I had this idea of being cut off from things in my head, but it's a fairly useful and sort of easy model to say what does change sever and human thriving human performance, human mental health requires some connections to be maintained. And so by severing these connections, this is essentially the harm that constant change does to us. I've talked about it in five categories. The first is uncertainty. So change will sever the connection between us and what will happen next. That sounds maybe a little abstract, but when you get the email saying, we've sold our practice to the private equity company or private equity firm, instantly that change is here and nothing about what that will mean for you.
So your sense of certainty about where I'm going to be in the future and what life and what work is going to be like is upset by that. Fairly shortly on the heels of severing our sense of certainty, we sever our sense of control. So we're now dealing with lack of control, which is enormously psychologically harmful to people. And folks have been studying this for half a century and more. And of course you lack control because you didn't get to choose that the change was coming. And so the change reminds you that your agency at work is circumscribed and may even tell you that your agency at work is smaller than you thought it was and is decreasing in size. And again, control agency is fundamental to human performance basically because we want to know that our effort will connect to some outcome outside of us.
And if you take away the link between effort and outcome, then we just give up. It's called learned helplessness. It's been documented for decades as I said, and if nothing I do leads to anything or if I'm not sure that what I do will lead to anything sooner or later, I just phone it in. So organizations don't in the main set out to have their employees phoning it in, that's not a good state. Again, it's one of these things, it's very hard to measure whether people are phoning it in or not these days it's called quiet quitting, I suppose. But it's a real thing and we can keep going. There are a few more. We sever our sense of belonging when we shuffle all the teams around in an organization or change what the organization is all about in some way, we disrupt our sense of belonging.
Humans are very social creatures. Our sense of belonging is fundamental. Our sense of social connection is fundamental to how we define our identities, how we get stuff done, how we think. The groupness of humanity and human habit is fundamental to how we do things in the world. And so when you are forever changing the groupness, you are disrupting all of that. We get attached to places. I was chatting on the phone earlier this week with a former colleague from Cisco, and Cisco has just agreed to exit the headquarters buildings in San Jose. That was the Cisco HQ when I was there. And they're moving to a different set of office buildings. And there is a great sense of sadness when you talk about this, not for everybody, but for many people. We get attached to the places we work. And when change comes along and says, okay, we're going to work someplace else.
Or by the way, when change comes along and says, the rituals that you used to do in this place can no longer be done either because we're changing the rituals or changing the place, then that disorients us as well. And then lastly, change severs our sense of coherence about the world around us. Things don't make sense anymore. The company used to be about this, now it's about this. Or My leader used to do this, and now you are doing something else and I don't understand what something else is. It doesn't make sense anymore. This is of course foundational to meaning. And we are very well aware that meaningful work and a sense of meaning in what we do every day is important to us. A lot of change. Cloth itself in meaning it says because we're an innovative, changing, great, awesome company, we're going to do the change.
But actually at the same time, it pulls the skids out from coherence of work. Nothing makes sense anymore. And if it doesn't make any sense, it can't make a particular sense. If without coherence, there is no significance of work or of a job or of an organization. So that's a pretty long list. I'm sorry the answer's a long answer because there's a lot to unpack here. But uncertainty, lack of control, unbe belonging, if you like, displacement, loss of meaning. That's what we do to our people when we inflict constant change on them. And from that recitation, I hope it's clear to the folks listening that that's a pretty heavy load for employees to carry. And I spoke to people around the world when I was putting the book together, they told me about all of those things. But then the other thing they said to me was, and by the way, that's just at work.
The world outside work, in case anyone has failed to notice, has not been a stable place in the last five years. So people arrive at the office on a Monday morning or log into their computers on a Monday morning, and they are already in the middle of uncertainty, lack of control and belonging, displacement, lack of meaning. They're already experiencing all of this. And then we say, welcome back, hope you had a nice weekend. Here's the latest change initiative. And we're turning the dial up from nine to 11 on all of these things. And it really is, it makes it very hard for people to do their best work, which is I think what we're hoping that they do every day.
Dustin Burleson:
Exactly. If change severs those, and I agree, I've witnessed it and I work with groups that are going through it, you advocate that perhaps these could be bolstered in teams. And I've really seen that in my own career, the power of small teams. Can we talk about why culture really and everything good really happens at the team level? You say in the book, companies really can't have a culture, but teams have a lot of culture and companies really can't have value, but people inside of teams have a tremendous amount of personal value. Can we talk about and kind of shift gears into what happens at the team level to help maybe fight against a lot of these things that gets severed?
Ashley Goodall:
Yeah, and it's funny, a lot of the discussion about work lives in very large abstractions. One of them, funnily enough, is a company. So particularly when a company gets to a particular size, and I used to say to people at Deloitte and Cisco, by the way, a similar size at least when I was at those places, and I used to say to people, how many people do here? And folks would go, I dunno, I've probably got 50. I know really well and another a hundred I know a little bit. And I was like, great, how many people don't here? How many people don't at this company? And the answer was in the 70 thousands in each case. And then the question is, well, when you say I have a sense of this company, and what's it like? What are you referring to? Because you can't be referring to what it's like to know 70,000 people because you just told me you don't know them.
So actually our experiences of work, and of course our experiences of the world are much more local than we perhaps acknowledge. Our experience of society is actually weirdly also very, very local. Now, what we are very comfortable doing is saying, well, the local thing is like this, therefore I'll extrapolate and assume that everything beyond the local team I'm on or the town I live in looks pretty much like this. But that's not always a good assumption. But the main point is that our experience of the world is small, firsthand, intimate. And if you want to understand that at work, you go to teams, that's where the experience of work lives. Now we quantified this at Deloitte, I quantified it again, at Cisco, you can do all sorts of interesting studies. And of course the most interesting thing to look at is what happens when someone moves from one team to another?
And in particular, do they think differently of their company when they change teams? Now, you could make a sort of argument from first principles. Well, of course they shouldn't because they're in the same company. So they haven't changed companies. So they thought their company was like something on Monday and now we put them in a different team on Tuesday, the company's still the same company. So their impression of that company, their experience of that company shouldn't change. But the truth is it does. It always does. And what's happening is that actually the distant abstraction of the company is refracted through the up close and vivid experience of the team. And so if you are thinking about whether your work has meaning, and I take you from a team where when you do something, no one says thank you to a team where when you do something, people say, Hey, that made my life much easier.
Then you feel your work has meaning. Sometimes we ascribe that meaningless to the company, not to the team weirdly, but it's made on the team. It's generated on the team. If you ask people about their confidence in the future, you can move them from a team where they say, I have no confidence in the future to a team where they say, I have very high confidence in the future. The future is the same damn future. All we've done is surround you with people who give you a different way of thinking about that future, give you a different way of facing into it, give you a different sense of support, give you a different sense of belongingness. So a lot of human health resides in our local groups and a lot of organizational health resides in the teams that we form. So that obviously the sensible thing to do for any organization trying to bolster itself against change, trying to allow people to keep going because sometimes we have to change because sometimes the world forces us to change.
So I'm not advocating for a world that is static. I am advocating for a world that is intelligent in the face of change. And so one of the things we could do is honor the teams, keep the teams together. As long as we can teach people the essence of what a great team is, select team leaders for their proven ability to build the sorts of teams where you do feel confident in the future, you do feel you get to do your best work every day. You do feel support, you do feel excited about what you're going to do next. So teams are at the middle of organizational life. If you ask employees about their best experiences or their worst experiences at work, they'll very often tell you about a team they were on. If you ask leaders about what they're doing to strengthen their organization, sadly they very seldom talk about teams. So I think one of the things we've got to get our heads around as a society is let's get smarter about small groups of people. Let's build the skills to have lots of great teams.
Dustin Burleson:
I'd love it. I want to talk about the leaders inside of those teams. And in the book, you give a great analogy of how most companies promote leaders would be like airlines promoting the head flight attendant to come up to the flight deck and fly the plane. And I just laughed through that whole couple.
Ashley Goodall:
We've all seen it, right? We've all seen it where old team leader goes or leaves or goes somebody somewhere else and we need a new team leader. And we look around and go, well, which of the team members is best at doing the team member job? Alright, you can be the team leader. And sort of embedded in that is a very lazy thought about what team leadership is. It sort of says, well, team leadership is the same job as what the team members are doing just with a better title and a higher pay grade. And so obviously the qualification to be team leader is to be the best team member. That's what it is. And so I was sort of playing around with this and I'm like, alright, what would happen? So firstly, this is part of the argument that because teams are so important, team leader is a really important job.
And if we're cavalier about who we make the team leader, we're going to create all sorts, sorts of problems. And so we should select team leaders much more carefully because we should consider team leadership to be a sort of life or death job in a way for the health of our organizations. So I was thinking about other life or death jobs and I'm like, well, flying a plane is certainly a life or death job. So how do you choose a pilot? And of course if you want to get in the front of a plane and fly people around, we don't just let you do that. We make you go through years of very expensive training. We make you fly little planes before you can fly big planes. We make you practice in a simulator for all sorts of abnormal situations so that you know how to deal with situations when things go wrong.
We make you do a check flight every year where somebody sits behind you and make sure you can fly the plane. So that's how we do pilots, that's how we select and support by the way, pilots. And so I was sort of asking myself, well what would happen if instead of doing that we chose pilots the way we chose team leaders? Well, we'd just go, well, who's the best flight attendant? Who's the best flight? You are the, okay, Jane, you are the best flight attendant. Alright, come and fly the plane and we're not going to give you any training upfront because we're a little busy, but there'll be a training course in six weeks time and you can log in online and it'll be a couple of hours of training. So you can do that. And by the way, you still have to do your old job. We don't think flying the plane is a separate job. So most team leaders still have to do some chunk of their prior job. So Jane, someone will need a cup of tea in the back. We just want you to pop back and help out with that and the fly itself for a few minutes. This is how we think of team leaders. And of course if you selected pilots like that, the outcome wouldn't be very good.
It's a humorous example, but it is actually what we do and it is actually how we select and prepare people for what I would argue is the most important organizational role because So go the teams, Sogo is the company.
Dustin Burleson:
Absolutely. Yeah. We talk about this a lot and there were some great experts at Wharton School of Business talking about scaling healthcare and we tend to think we can scale healthcare like you can scale a fast food franchise. And it turns out that's not the case and it rides on the back of exceptional people. And those exceptional people are the team leaders. And so I really encourage everyone listening to get into the book and dig through the area on how we select, but also how we train team leaders. I want to shift gears into maybe you're listening to this and you're the head of one of these private equity groups, or you have a company with 7,000 employees working four or 500 dental clinics across the United States and you are constantly tempted to change, change, change. How do we give space? You gave a great example from Bob Woodward, one of my favorite authors and journalists from Washington Post on how his boss gave him space and time and how can leaders support their teams and the leaders in those teams by slowing the pace of change. What does that do to the team? What's it do to the company? I guess we'll just talk about pace a little bit.
Ashley Goodall:
Firstly, it requires thinking very differently about all of this. So the obvious prescription, the first obvious thing to say when you review all of the evidence and you think about how change has become sort of a cult is okay, the first thing to do is do less of it. It's a harmful thing done badly, it's a very harmful thing. Sometimes it's necessary. Change the definition of what necessary looks like at the moment. I think it's probably fair to say that we think of change as something with only upside and our downside, I think we would do better by our employees and therefore our companies. If we thought about change with a balance of pros and cons, and actually this is something where I would love it if in some executive boardroom somewhere around the country, a group of people were saying, you know what? It's the right change in the wrong time and we shouldn't do it now because we just did the other one or we just did the other one or we're not ready and we need to stay the courts a little while longer.
I think those conversations are rare. I think they should be more frequent for sure. But to think like that in a way you have to understand that the job of a leader is to create a space for other people to do their work. And again, this is not something I think we're super clear about. We sort of imagine that leaders are the ones doing all of the stuff and that employees sit around waiting to be prodded by leaders and then leaders come in and prod the employees in all sorts of different ways and change the incentives and create structures and then the employees do the new stuff. And if the leaders don't do a bunch of prodding, the employees will do nothing. This is not my experience of humans at work. A most of us show up at the office wanting to do useful things, not because of the incentives by the way, but because that's an incentive in itself.
There is an intrinsic incentive to want to do something useful in the world. We don't need that put into us by a leader. We need a leader who helps us express that, who helps us share that, who helps put that into practice. So you have to start thinking about leadership as not a forcing function, but an enabling function, a supporting function and unlocking function. And one of the ways that you can unlock performance in other people is to give them space. So the wonderful Bob Woodward quote that I came across that you referred to talks about an editor who Ben Bradley at the Washington Post, who he felt gave him what he called running room. And running room is just, it's a lovely phrase. I argue elsewhere in the book that words really matter. Sometimes you find a phrase and the phrase resonates and that's a special thing.
But what employees want is running room because running room is like, Hey, listen, roughly where we're trying to go. You figure out how to get there. And obviously there are some guardrails. Don't do anything illegal, don't do anything illicit, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's not a bunch of, I want you to follow these steps in the Gantt chart. I want you to execute on the project in this way. I've got a bullet point list and your job is to do all the things on the bullet point list. It is a transfer of trust, a transfer of openness, a signal of possibility, and it is a leader saying, Hey, you've got a good mind, put your mind to work on this thing and I'm sure it'll be good and if I can help, call me. So that's what space making is an organization undergoing constant change is of course has all that space sucked out of it because people are waiting to be told what to do next and what the next job is.
And you've told them that the old ways are now invalid, but you haven't told them what the new way is and you've sort of signaled to them that they can't invent the new way because you've got a secret master plan of this whole stuff. So space making, whether you are asking somebody, whether you're framing the problem rather than the solution or whether you're asking questions rather than giving answers or whether in fact rather than saying what new thing do we need, you are asking what old thing can we get rid of? Space making is a super important skill for enabling leadership.
Dustin Burleson:
But to highlight your point, again, it requires a rethink, right? You call it skew man. And again, I just kind of laughed. I'm like, that gets it. I've worked at places where they treat the employees like they're a skew, they can just move 'em around and plug 'em in. They're pieces of equipment. What's the difference between for a leader going, I've got a rethink what humans are versus what I thought human capital is and what human resources role is. We're going to get to performance reviews. That is a mind blowing transformational change I think our listeners could deploy tomorrow. But let's talk about what is SKU man and how should we be treating our teams?
Ashley Goodall:
Well, I mean the metaphor is a skew is SKU is a stock keeping unit. And if you are in the retail industry, every product sitting on a shelf somewhere has a skew attached to it and it tells you a few things about the product. Not very many, but a few things about the product. And we kind of think of people like this in large organizations, certainly that there are a few characteristics that we put in the database and the characteristics tend to be when you joined, how much we pay you, what your social security number is, what degrees you have, how long you've been in role, sort of demographic, stuff like that. And then maybe to your point, last time we did your performance rating on a one through five scale, what number did we give you? And those things actually have very little to say about how you a human like to do work.
Now once we've put all of the SKU and things into the system and it's time to do the change or the reorg, we pull up a big list of people and go, well, we could slot you in here and we could move you here. And you unfortunately are a not very good skew, so you are going to have to go in the layoff. And that's how we move people around. Like we're playing a weird version of chess where all the pieces are very, very similar to one another and we think our job is to move the people around the board, but we don't describe the people in ways that are human.
If I try and describe a human at work, here are some of the things I want to know. Do you like large teams or small teams? Do you like long meetings or short meetings? Do you like to look at lots of options and spend time living with lots of options or do you like to narrow down options very quickly? Do you like playfulness at work? What makes you smile? Do you like to imagine the future or do you like to sit in the concreteness of now? What's the silliest thing you've ever done at the office? I can keep going, I'm making these questions up, but if you knew this about somebody at work, you would know about a human at work, you wouldn't know about a kuman at work. And I think it's easy for us to continue to inflict constant change on people because we look at our employee logs and what we actually see are a bunch of humans, not really humans.
We don't see people at work in a very sad way. Now, of course, the best place to our prior conversation, the best place to see all of those things in a human is on a team because that's where people can express those and teams can figure out, okay, you are the person who loves to build the complicated spreadsheet and you are the person who would run a million miles before you opened Excel. So we'll give you the spreadsheet task and we'll give you a different task. And teams can do that the whole time. Teams can refract the work into the humans because teams actually see humans. Organizations for the most part struggle to see humans, but we could do an awful lot better, I think.
Dustin Burleson:
Oh, absolutely. And I think that's why, and I'm curious your thoughts around this question of sorts. If we're treating our humans like humans, then it's really easy to latch onto performance assessments and try to measure them like dollars in a bank account. So I am dying to get to this because this is worth its weight in gold in the book. And I want to dig into what is the problem with feedback? How did you change the feedback at Deloitte and at Cisco and what can our listeners gain from changing their mind about how we evaluate teams and the people inside of those teams?
Ashley Goodall:
Well, so I suppose we should start by defining or just putting out there what the traditional approach to performance management is. So in many large companies there is a thing called performance management. It usually has most if not all of the following characteristics at some point at the beginning of the year because of course while in the real world performance is a constant thing in the sort of fictional world of performance management, it ends on one day and the new year begins the next day. So at the beginning of the performance year when all prior performances somehow vanished and invisible and we're starting at zero again, you do a thing called cascaded goals where somebody at the top of the organization says, I'm going to try and do these five things and then the people below them have to write their goals to match up with the five things and it all cascades down.
And then you on the bottom get to write your little goals and then somebody tells you whether your goals fit with the goals of the level above and so on and so forth. All of this is happening before any performance occurs and it takes months. But anyway, we do cascaded goals and then by which during which time, by the way, the work changes and the world changes and people get on with it. So we do, that's a sort of strange kabuki thing. And then halfway through the year you'll get a midyear review against your cascaded goals, which are now six months old, and your manager will say how many of the goals you are meeting and how many you're failing at. And then at the end of the year there'll be a performance review where people tell you how you've done against your five or six goals and they give you feedback on how you've done during the course of the year, and they give you a number from one to five that says how good of a human you are. And by the way, it's no one ever says your performance was a three. They say you are a three.
So you get told how good of a human you are, not how good of a performance your performance was. This is traditional performance management. If you go to organizations and say, why do you do this? They say, well, the cascaded goals make sure everybody's on the same page and the feedback helps people get better, and the ranking system helps us understand who the good employees are and gives people a sense of where they stand. If you go to employees at large organizations and say, does any of this help you do a better job? They say no.
If you then say to employers at large organizations or at any size organizations, what would help you do a better job? What would help manage your performance upwards? What would be useful for you? They go, oh, it's a simple list. What I would like is more clarity on decision making from senior leaders, more clarity on the direction that we're all going together. So stop changing it every 15 minutes, stay the course a little bit and explain it to me vividly so I can understand how to help move the organization in the direction you all want it to go. I would like more resources to do my job. I would like some stability so that I can understand that my effort today will still have an impact tomorrow and that the world I live in this week will still exist next week. And I would like attention from my team leader. I would like help and attention from my team leader. The list is usually something like that. None of these things are provided by traditional performance management. What does provide those things is something that we introduced at Deloitte and at Cisco called a check-in. And a check-in is a very, very simple thing. You say to each employee or the team leader says to each employee, I want you to answer four questions.
I want you to answer four questions. What are your priorities for the next week? What help do you need from me? What did you love about last week's work? Was there anything you loathed about last week's work? Answer those four questions. Send me the answers. When you've sent me the answers, we'll talk about them. And the conversation then is a conversation focused on the employee. So the four questions help shape the attention of the team leader to things that we know are generally useful for employees. They don't constrain the attention of the team leader of those things, of course, but it gets you going in the right place. And so you begin a checking conversation and typically the team leader's looking at the list and saying, well, explain to me why this is a priority. I didn't expect to see that on the list. And so you have a conversation about that.
I wasn't aware you needed help with this. Explain to me what help would look like. Oh, okay, that's good. I can do that. Why did you love this so much? I didn't realize you loved those sorts of things. So it's a series of questions that get the team leader to start paying attention to the team member in their work. We've discovered that if you do that every two weeks, engagement goes up. If you do that every one week, engagement goes up significantly at Cisco over the course of doing this, as you said, 11 million checking conversations when I stopped counting, team engagement went up 10% over the course of four years by conducting weekly, I mean it was a few things, but I think the most significant driver was weekly attention from team leaders to team members that it makes a huge difference because what we actually want to do a good job, and if we are helped in doing a good job or guided by somebody who has a not necessarily greater skill than us, but a different perspective in the organization who can see a little further because they're involved at a different level, then that's enormously helpful and it gives us the help we need and performance actually increases as a result of that, not just engagement performance increases as a result of that in a way that it never does by giving people strange feedback on what they did six months ago if either of us can remember what that was.
Anyway,
Dustin Burleson:
What I think about how smart this is, the weekly check-in for several reasons. First, I think it gives the employee and the team leader space to bolster all those things that change severs and that if you're listening to this and seeking change in the pursuit of some improvement, that's going to happen. And if you are waiting six months to check in, I think of all the employees who would love to be in front of their team leader more often, but only reach out when something really bad has happened. And so I just think it's really smart.
Ashley Goodall:
And then I've done this for years now. What happens over time is that the conversations expand. Now, I think there are many organizations today that want to help people with more than work somehow that want to be a place where people, the saying is, bring your whole self to work. But the question is, well, how do you do that? You can print a bunch of T-shirts saying bring your whole self to work, but then if you can't do anything differently, your whole self has not been brought to work in any sort of meaningful way. What I've discovered is that it's fantastically hard to make an appointment with your boss to discuss a personal issue. Who sends the Outlook meeting invitation to say, Ashley needs to talk to Dustin about medical issue that came up in the last week. That's a little tricky to discuss. You don't schedule those conversations.
They're difficult to do. You don't block time with a leader to talk about a family issue or a health issue or any number of things that impinge on our lives. But when the conversation has already been scheduled and you know it's going to happen anyway because your team leader, by the way understands how important it is and never cancels them, which is a really important part of the process, then you start keeping lists. You go, well, my check-in. Okay, I've got a check-in coming up. So I'll have my answers to the four questions, but actually I want to discuss the following three or four items as well. So you start keeping lists, and then when something comes up that where the world outside is going to have some impact on how you are able to do at work, or you just want to talk to somebody about it because your boss is an important person in your life and you need a friendly set of ears, you write it on your list and it shows up in the check-ins. And so over time, not in the first one or the second one, but maybe the 40th one or the 50th one over time, check-ins become a place for two humans to talk to one another through the medium of work, but not limited to work. And it becomes a beautiful human touchpoint in the week and sort of transcends at that point its original purpose and becomes a beautiful, beautiful way to make work a little bit more human for all the humans in it.
Dustin Burleson:
Absolutely Brilliant. Ashley, I could talk to you all day about this topic. I know our time is limited. I want to give our listeners a chance to learn more about you, to follow you. You are the co-author of another brilliant book, nine Lies About Work, but today we're talking about the problem with change and the essential nature of human performance. Everyone listening should have this in their library. I hope they teach at business schools who are busy trying to disrupt themselves and build future cult leaders of disruption. So thank you for writing the book. It's brilliant. But where can listeners go to learn more about you, to follow you online and to see what's coming next?
Ashley Goodall:
Well, you can find out about me, find out more about me and what I'm up to at ashleygoodall.com and also on LinkedIn. And of course you can find the problem with Change Anywhere Books is sold. Ashley, thank you so much. It's such an honor. Thank you for having me. It's a great conversation.
Dustin Burleson:
Thanks for listening to another episode of The Broin Box and a special thank you to Ashley Goodall for coming on the show. Had a ton of fun. I hope you enjoy this episode. I think you should go back and re-listen to it, share it with your team leaders, put it in front of leaders inside of your organization, and rethink performance reviews. Rethink the amount of time you give for big change, and always ask whether we're changing for changes sake or if we are actually seeking improvement. And if you like this episode and others, be sure to subscribe on whichever podcast platform you use to consume your podcast, and it would be a great help to us and to sharing the message. If you left a review, pass it along to your friends and colleagues and I can't wait to see you here next time inside. Another episode of Burs Fox.