Adrian Gostick: Top 10 Ranked Leadership & Organizational Culture Speaker & NYT Bestselling Business Author

A conversation with Adrian Gostick, a distinguished author and thought leader on corporate culture, leadership, and employee engagement. 

Gostick shares his transformative journey from working in a mid-sized consultancy to becoming a globally recognized author and speaker. He discusses the significant evolution of coaching from a primarily remedial tool to a crucial development instrument for executives and leaders across industries.

Gostick’s influential works, such as "The Carrot Principle" and "Leading with Gratitude," serve as the foundation for his discussion, emphasizing the pivotal role of recognition and gratitude within leadership practices. 

He elaborates on how effective acknowledgment and appreciation of employees' contributions can dramatically enhance job satisfaction and engagement levels. Through his insights, Gostick advocates for a leadership paradigm that is deeply rooted in empathy, understanding, and gratitude, highlighting the shift towards more human-centric and appreciative leadership methodologies in contemporary corporate culture.

His dialogue with host Alex Pascal not only sheds light on the nuances of fostering a positive workplace environment but also offers practical strategies for leaders aiming to cultivate a culture of appreciation and recognition. 

Gostick’s perspective underscores the transformative power of gratitude in leadership, suggesting that the key to unlocking employee potential and driving organizational success lies in genuinely valuing and appreciating the workforce.

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Adrian: The idea of the carrot was the old Aesop’s Fable, it’s better to lead our people with a carrot than it is to beat them with a stick.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a global thought leader in the field of corporate culture, leadership, and employee engagement. He’s the founder of the workplace training and consulting company, The Culture Works. In 2023, he was ranked in the top 10 global gurus in leadership and organizational culture. He’s also an author of several bestselling books, including All In, The Carrot Principle, and Leading with Gratitude. Please welcome Adrian Gostick.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Adrian.

Adrian: Hi, Alex. Thanks for having me on today. 

Alex: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure. Great to have you. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Adrian: Now, we’re drinking Diet Pepsi. Pepsi’s been a part of ours for many years and it wake me up in the morning.

Alex: It certainly will do. I haven’t had a Diet Pepsi, can’t even remember. I don’t want to date myself by telling you how long it’s been. Nice. Well, it’s great to have you. I would love for you to take me through your journey. How did you end up being a coach and doing all the great work that you do today? 

Adrian: Well, thanks, yeah. About 20 odd years ago or so, my co-author, Chester Elton, and I were working in a mid-sized consultancy and doing work in employee engagement, employee recognition. We started writing books, one that took off was called The Carrot Principle. It was one of those books that launched us and sold a half million copies here in the US and so, all of a sudden, we started speaking and consulting with different organizations. Hadn’t even thought of really coaching, didn’t even know that it was a thing 20 years ago, and back then, honestly, coaching was more you got coached if you were about to be on the outs. Slowly, it started developing coaching into a practice for up-and-coming executives or executives who maybe needed to make that leap to the next level. And that’s where we started getting involved where people asked us, man, would you take on maybe a little challenging executive that we’re working with and it evolved to more working with just some amazing people where we began learning more than others. So, after all these years, Chester and I, we’ve written 15 books, we’ve worked with people around the world from just about every continent except Antarctica, and we’ve really had a lot of amazing experiences, helping not only leaders but their entire organizations really define their culture and who they are and where they’re going as organizations and also leaders.

Alex: I want to learn a little bit more about before you wrote The Carrot Principle, tell me a little bit about that journey and also let’s break down The Carrot Principle after you do that.

Adrian: Yeah. Well, my background, I worked in newspapers, magazines, and then I got into the corporate world, I started out as doing investor relations and corporate communications for a big bank, big oil and gas company, and then I went to work for this consultancy doing employee engagement. Now, so Chester, when I joined, it was interesting, I joined the company and one of my employees said, “You gotta meet this guy, Chester Elton. He runs sales up in the Northeast and he’ll just change your life.” And it was actually prescient because Chester did. Chester had an idea to write a book. I’d written a few fiction books but I’ve never thought about writing a nonfiction book so he said, “You know, we’ve done some really interesting things with these clients up there and we’re working with J&J, working with some interesting companies, and why don’t we try writing a book on what we’re doing with these organizations in employee engagement?” So we wrote a book called Managing with Carrots. It was our first foray into this carrot world and we didn’t have any idea what we were doing so I found a local publisher in Utah, where I’m in Park City, Utah. We went to their offices and over on a park bench out front because their offices were in a barn, we wrote this little contract out and they put our book out. Well, it ended up selling 40,000 copies. We thought, oh, that’s kind of normal for book. They said, “No, no, no, that’s like in the top 1 percent of all books. Do another one.” Well, we thought that would be it. We’d write this book and then we could go back to our normal jobs. So we wrote a parable book called The 24-Carrot Manager, and parable books at the time, 20 years ago, were quite hot and Lencioni and others were writing them and they were actually really popular in Asia. And we started speaking quite often in China. And one day, Chester was speaking in China, he’s up on stage and he just gets mobbed afterwards and there was a reporter in the audience who wrote for The New York Times and the next day on the front page of the business section in New York Times, there’s the story about Chester Elton and other authors from America getting mobbed in China and we got a call that day from a guy named Fred Hills who had discovered Marcus Buckingham and others at Simon and Schuster and Fred owned the Covey library at Simon & Schuster so he had published Stephen Covey years ago and he said, “What’s happening to you in China, I can do for you in the US,” and he says, “Do you have another book?” We said, “Well, we want to write a data book on recognition and employee engagement and we wanna call it The Carrot Principle,” and he says, “That’s the book for us.” And so he published that book for Simon & Schuster and that was the book that took off and really put us on the map and helped us go around the world speaking and coaching and consulting with organizations.

Alex: That’s a fascinating story. Getting mobbed in China, launching your career. I love it. So tell me about The Carrot Principle.

Adrian: Well, what’s interesting is that we’ve written, as I mentioned, a parable book, Managing with Carrots was a case study book of what we were doing with different organizations, but what we found was that when we wrote The Carrot Principle, we teamed with Willis Towers Watson, and they opened up their database to us of millions of people in their databases and we started looking with their statisticians and their PhDs to analyze what really made a great leader, what made a great manager, and what we found was that great leaders have five characteristics in common. They’re good goal setters, they hold people accountable, etc. One of the things that nobody had really talked about before was they are better at recognizing than their peers and they’re a lot better at it. And that’s what we found on The Carrot Principle was that there’s data to back up that if you’re good at recognizing and appreciating your employees, well, then, you’re going to see higher levels of customer satisfaction, employee engagement, all the things we’re looking for, employee loyalty, etc., and yet, it’s one of those things that, unfortunately, so few managers do well. So that was really the impetus of the book, and the idea, the carrot, was the old Aesop’s Fable, it’s better to lead our people with a carrot than it is to beat them with a stick. So I just remember talking to people who said, I was walking through the airport and I saw that carrot on the cover and they go, “I had to know what that was about,” so it was very intriguing, I think, for people.

Alex: Yeah, it really is. Everyone has heard about the carrot and the stick and I think most people would probably prefer the carrot.

Adrian: Yeah. Yeah. And then we forget that when we become leaders. We forget what it was like back in the day when we weren’t the leader, where we were motivated by different things over our careers and we’ve done a lot of studying now, 20 years later, in human behavior. If I’m a senior manager or an executive, I’m motivated in very different things. I may be motivated by money and people say money is not a motivator. Well, when you’re making a lot of money, it actually can be. But when you’re not, when you’re making a set amount of money, there are other things that are a lot more motivating to you, because you know you’re not going to get big bonuses or stock options. Those things are very specific thank you, that somebody actually knows the value that I’m creating here at work is very meaningful. Now, two years ago, we updated The Carrot Principle with a new book called Leading with Gratitude and that’s the latest thinking, the latest data on recognition and we took it from recognition to gratitude because gratitude is bigger. Gratitude is actually seeing the behavior that’s being created around you and then recognizing it afterward. 

Alex: Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. So let’s unpack that one, that book, because employee recognition and rewards and software for them really exploded, let’s say, in the 2010 to 2020 period and then you have the pandemic where organizations are adjusting to working in a dispersed way globally. You want to keep people engaged, you want to retain them, so this is very timely topic and it’s been timely for a long time. So let’s unpack that. And I like the frame around gratitude because I think it is more all-encompassing, I definitely agree.

Adrian: You know, one of the things we say, when we started writing Leading with Gratitude, we were doing a lot of work with Marshall Goldsmith, as you know, you know Marshall well, Alex, and Marshall and Chester and I were sitting around one day and Marshall said, “You know, isn’t it interesting?” He says, “With all the executives I work with,” he says the thing that’s typically missing with them when he starts coaching he says is a lack of gratitude. They are so focused in on shareholder value and driving this, this and this, and other initiatives that they don’t see the work that’s being done to lift them up and to elevate them below them. And he says, “Isn’t it interesting?” And so we bring — and Chester said to Marshall, he says, “We should read a book on this, about gratitude,” so we started, we were all working on it together, and then Marshall’s publisher said, “No, no, no, no, you’re about to write The Earned Life,” and he said, “So you can’t write this one too,” so it’s like okay, we’re fine. Marshall wrote the foreword and gave us lots of great feedback. But that was the beginning of it. It was that so few leaders get this right and the idea with gratitude, we saw — we did an analysis of the behaviors and, again, another research study, but we looked at the behaviors that were missing and, first off, we saw that they don’t see, a lot of leaders don’t see, they don’t see the behaviors that are going on around them. They don’t walk in people shoes. And so we had lots of examples within the book of ways to see the behaviors that are happening that are creating value within the organization, those values that you want to keep going. And the second part of the book is about expressing so it’s seeing and then expressing things, but doing it in a way that’s meaningful, not in a way that — one manager recently told me, he says, “I’m the Starbucks guy. Anybody does something great around here, they get the Starbucks card,” so they clean out the supply cabinet, they get the Starbucks card, they save a million-dollar client, they get the Starbucks card, and so I asked him, I said, “Let me challenge you,” I said, “Go talk to your people about this. Ask them what they do with those cards, if they like them or not, and if and if I’m wrong, then I’ll eat my hat.” I said, “But I have a feeling you’re gonna hear some interesting things.” And he came back and he said, “Well,” he says, “It was interesting.” He says, “About half my employees said, ‘I don’t even drink coffee so I ended up giving them away.’ One of my employees, she said, ‘I actually give them to my neighbor because he goes by Starbucks every day on the way in so he loves it.’” And so this guy said, “I have been recognizing my employee’s neighbor for years.” But he loves Starbucks and he loved the cards and I’ve nothing against that, if that is what your employee values. And what we find is that we tailor to the individual. We recognize things that are meaningful in a meaningful way. We recognize based on our values. We get others involved so it’s not just me, the manager, we get the whole team involved and there’s lots of case studies within Leading with Gratitude about organizations that make this an entire team event and so it’s not just on the manager. So there’s a lot in this but it really is about seeing the great behaviors that are happening and then expressing your thanks in a very meaningful way.

Alex: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s interesting, we tend to reward people that way we want to be rewarded, right? Like you’re saying, but not everyone wants to be rewarded in the same way so a little bit more expansive thinking around how do you show your gratitude to other people and just having that space to kind of think a little bit about what would that person appreciate. 

Adrian: Yeah, it’s a great way to say — Chester and I, we learned this ourselves too, and 20 years ago, when we started writing the first books for this consultancy we were working with, before we went independent, he wanted to get me recognized. I’d written the company’s first book and so Chester goes to the CEO and says, “Let’s get Adrian recognized,” and he says, “Let’s give him a watch because I noticed he doesn’t have a watch and he’d love to watch,” because Chester loves watches and he says, “Well invite him to the big gala banquet with all the salespeople.” Well, Chester is one of the salespeople, he loves things like that, interacting with people. For me, it was like, wait a minute, I have to go to some meeting with people I don’t — and on weeknight and sit for four hours watching other people get awards and then at the end, I get up and I get this watch that’s still on the box over in my corner here gathering dust? No, and I knew they meant well but it just missed the mark because, like you said, it was what Chester valued. Now, of course, later, we laughed about it and we’ve realized and we actually have written books about this, you got to get to know your people. What I’m motivated are ideas like creativity and autonomy and family. So if they had to use those ideas, hey, let’s give Adrian something to do with his family, or a chance to be creative on his own, autonomy, I would probably have even done more work for them if they’d have really figured out a reward that would have been more meaningful. And so, again, meant well but kind of missed the mark.

Alex: How has the world changed since you wrote that first book? 

Adrian: Yeah.

Alex: And what aspects of it when you look back, you’re like, “Wow, maybe it doesn’t apply as much,” and what aspects of it you think are still very applicable?

Adrian: Yeah, that’s a great question because with human behavior and, sometimes, we’ll have a reporter call us and say, “Look, hey, we’re the Wall Street Journal, we need new fresh data on…,” and what I can tell them is we have employee engagement surveys that began in the 1940s and the numbers are almost exactly the same as the data we’re seeing in 2023 is that we are humans and we need certain things. So what has changed is, unfortunately, very little. People still need to be recognized, they still need to feel valued. Now, what has changed is a few interesting things through the pandemic, especially, and also with social media. More people are using electronic means, social media, etc., to recognize their people, that’s all great, that’s all positive. The big trend that we’re seeing in the last couple of years is the tail from the pandemic, is that there is still a mental health tail that’s coming and I’m sure we’ll chat about Anxiety at Work, our book, in a minute as well, but that’s the big thing we’re seeing is empathy. That any book that is being written right now, whether it’s on the carrot principle, whether it’s leading with gratitude, whether it’s any book that any other author is writing, has to acknowledge that our people need more empathy than ever before. I write a column every month for Forbes and if you’d have asked me a few years ago what are the great leadership characteristics of great leaders that we should be coaching people on, I would have talked about vision and communication, teamwork, etc. Now, there’s really just one word and that’s empathy. Because if you don’t have that, your people won’t follow you. If you have that, then the rest matters. So that’s the big change that we’re seeing that we didn’t talk about even five, ten years ago. 

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a new competence for managers to develop and to be mindful about. I mean, the world’s becoming a much more complex world and things like these that before would be like, wow, that’s such an interesting area for a manager to develop, maybe some people are good at that and some are not, but now it becomes an essential component of being a good manager and the dynamics that we experience today. I

Adrian: I was coaching one manager, he’s an engineer, typically, he’s the smartest guy in any room, he’s got a master’s from MIT and I’m coaching him and I told him, look, as if they’re doing his 360, you gotta develop your empathetic side, and he says, “Look, Adrian, I just don’t care about that at all,” and it’s just what you said, Alex, and as I — if you want to raise to the next level and you do, then you’ve got to develop this. And it was interesting, a couple of years later, as we kept working and working, how much he had changed and didn’t want to. He was completely an engineer at heart, and yet saw the need for this in his work, especially if he wanted to elevate to the highest levels of his organization. 

Alex: Right. Yeah, it’s interesting coaching engineers because, typically, they’re very smart and, in some cases, that intelligence is difficult to apply to some kind of human oriented or people oriented, and I’m not saying every engineer is like that, I think we can generalize that when you’re coaching an engineer, typically, they have a different perspective on people or their energies play somewhere else. So it’s always — I always find coaching engineers a really cool, interesting challenge because, in my experience, they’re usually very well meaning and they want to do the right thing around having expanded perspective on how to think about the way they interact with others. It’s always a fun challenging thing, yeah. So I used to coach a lot of engineers and I work with a lot of engineers as well. It’s an interesting area for coaching. One of the things that, when I think about coaching and engineering, I always think about how interesting it is in organizations that the typical kind of go up the ladder approach doesn’t really work for engineering roles as much. 

Adrian: Yeah. 

Alex: Because as you go up the ladder, you probably want to get kind of this broader competence around your expertise, technology or whatever engineering you’re doing, but the traditional way of going up the ladder in organization was to become a manager. So there’s so many organizations today that have really evolved the way they think about promoting people in different facets of work. And I actually think that’s one of the most fascinating areas in organizations, how to create pathways for people to grow and to move outside of the, oh, well, you’re growing, then you’re going to have a larger team, like some people could be individual contributors and be really up the organizational ladder so that’s something that I always find fascinating.

Adrian: Yeah, no, I remember reading an HBR article about a pump company in Brazil and the CEO said, “The highest paid person in our company is the guy who knows when we put a pump in a boat that goes into the Arctic, how much it needs to pump out there, he’s just one of our people, but he has a skill that nobody else in the world has in figuring out what pump each ship needs to be able to stay afloat during different conditions, he’s developed the skill, and because of that, he is the highest paid person — he makes more than I do because he has that unique skill.” How refreshing that is to know that there’s different skill sets and managing is just another skill set within the organization, it may be as valuable or more or less. It’s good to see those types of organizations thriving that are creating parallel paths for people to succeed.

Alex: Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about anxiety. I know it’s an area of focus for you and, I mean, we’re in these post-pandemic years, even the word “pandemic” is I think we all kind of don’t even want to hear that anymore, but the reality is we are in those post years, post-blank years, and anxiety was really accentuated, both in our experience of life and we were a little bit more anxious and then a recognition of anxiety and wellness and just general kind of wellbeing and how it applies to work. This is a very timely topic and I know it’s one that is important to you so would love to talk a little bit about that. 

Adrian: No, thanks, yeah. The pandemic, like you said, we’re years past now and we may not realize the impact that that had on all of us. It really disrupted a lot of our lives. Like, for instance, before the pandemic, we would go out to dinners, we would have social connections and they sort of got interrupted. And for many people, they never started again or didn’t in the same way. And so this is why we have our own podcast on anxiety at work, we interview psychiatrists, psychologists, we interview a lot of people in the mental health community who tell us their works has skyrocketed and it hasn’t gone down because people are looking for ways to fill what community used to do for them. Now, they’re looking for mental health professionals to help them with this. So it really has created a tail on the dog, this pandemic, and the tail is this mental health that we knew would be continuing for several years after the pandemic, that we may not even notice the disruption. Now, the reason we wrote Anxiety at Work, my son has had anxiety since he was a little guy, he’s now 28, he’s worked in high tech, he’s worked in genetics labs, he’s got his advanced degree from USC down in LA and stem cell research so he’s a smart guy and he asked me probably four or five years ago, he says, “As I’m working in these different labs,” he says, “Some managers get me and some don’t.” He says, “I may work 80 hours in a week but I need a mental health day now and then. Some of my managers just don’t get that at all and some are very empathetic and understanding.” He says, “Do you ever write about that?” I go, “Oh, no, no, we never ever talk about mental health in the workplace. Oh, gosh, no.” And he says, “That’s interesting.” He says, “Because I’m in my 20s,” he says, “In every conversation people in their 20s have with each other, we ask each other about our mental health and we’re serious about it. ‘How are you doing? Really, Alex? No, no, really, how are you doing? Because this is what I’m feeling.’” He says, “We do that every conversation with each other.” He says, “You hold these? You never talk about it?” And he says, “And we never talked about it with you because you don’t get it.” And so I started seeing these trends. I was working with — a few weeks after that, I was with a big defense contractor, 300 top executives, and we opened it up to Q&A afterwards, and it was every question they were asking me were about these younger employees and how come they don’t get it. How come they don’t get how we work around here, and after four or five of these questions, I had to stop and say, “Have you thought about doing things maybe a little differently that you’re needing to think maybe a little bit differently about things in this new world and meet in the middle? Because maybe what they’re pushing you on isn’t so bad.” Then the pandemic hit and I’ve been starting to work on this book and my publisher called, HarperCollins, and they called and said, “How soon can you get that book out?” That was March of 2020 and we moved fast and we had the book out, really it was one of the first books to talk about anxiety in the workplace. It’s written for managers but anybody can pick it up and get a lot of ideas but it’s really how you bring down stress in a team, how you bring down anxiety in a team, because 70 percent of a typical person’s anxiety comes from their boss.

Alex: That makes sense. That’s why I tried to be a good boss. The relationship you have with your boss is definitely, just like outside of my professional experience, with my friend, the ones that tend to be happier are the ones that have no boss and love it or the ones that have a great boss. If you have a bad boss, it guarantees that your existence will be painful.

Adrian: Absolutely. You take it home with you, don’t you? Yeah, you’re mumbling on your commute and you’re hoping that something terrible happens to your boss on the weekend. It’s not a healthy place to be. And so, yeah, the boss makes a huge difference in the work experience. And this is what we talked about earlier with that idea of empathy and that’s different than sympathy. Sympathy is, “Oh, bummer, Alex, you got a problem? Yeah, well, let me help you fix that.” That’s not really actually that helpful. “I’m strong, you’re weak, let me help you.” Empathy is, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve got something kind of tough going on,” you get to a place where you remember that feeling as a boss or as a leader or a colleague, that’s empathy. That’s when you can actually be helpful, even if it’s just nine times out of ten, you’re just listening, you’re just providing some support.

Alex: A hundred percent, and this whole segue of our conversation reminded me of John Hoover’s book on How to Work for an Idiot. That’s so funny. But I think a lot of the work that we do in coaching, it supports people development because, oftentimes, when you really look into a bad boss or you look into someone that comes across as an idiot in the workforce, I think my experience is that most people can develop and the way they’re coming across is not how they want to come across but the world’s complex, there might be a myriad of reasons why someone comes across like that, but they’re stuck and part of what we do is just help people get unstuck and also help organizational systems recognize how to get their people unstuck. But it is shocking the amount of bad bosses out there. And sometimes you maybe are really good at sales or you’re really good at politics but having a bad boss really has this cascading negative impact in the organization. Because, oftentimes, you just don’t have the right people in command and sometimes some of the reports would be a much better lead for that group and there’s still a lot of inefficiencies organizationally and that’s why one of the things I love about coaching is like, well, there’s someone that’s not a great boss, how do you turn them into a great boss? And if you’re working in the broader organizational system, how do you help organizations recognize how development can open up that pipeline? So exciting things, but specifically around anxiety, what an interesting time to be writing that book through the pandemic, right? So March 2020, and, suddenly, you have all this time, anxiety kind of is reduced but at the same time, we know that it’s coming and we are actually pretty anxious because we think we’re going to get these killer buyers, if you go to the grocery, like March 2020, now we know that it wasn’t maybe — and it was terrible for so many people but, at that point, we were thinking that it could be terrible for anyone that gets it. It was terrifying. 

Adrian: Yeah. It wasn’t just for ourselves but any of us who have older parents, we were worried for them. There wasn’t just, yeah, most of us were kind of thinking, “Oh, look, I’m pretty healthy,” though we all have stories of somebody in their 40s, 50s that were taken by the virus but, yeah, we were worried about many others. But what we saw over time, again, it was this disruption in our regular flow. So we bring in hybrid work now, which everybody’s still trying to figure out. How do we get people back in the office now because there’s so many good things, but people liked it.

Alex: I’m glad you’re bringing this up because I wanted to ask you about this. So, let’s explore, coming back to — should companies come back to the workplace? Are hybrid strategies, can you be successful? I run a remote company so I like it but a lot of companies are struggling with this. Tell me your — I want to learn all your insights from this because it’s fascinating.

Adrian: Well, there’s some — and this is what I tell when my coachees ask what should I do with hybrid work and remote work is everybody is trying to figure this out. Nobody has all the answers. You got Jamie Dimon saying everybody needs to come back in. You’ve got others that are saying, “Well, we’re gonna do this part time, I want you back three days a week.” So what I can say, this is what’s worked best for the most of the organizations that I’m working with is they’ve realized people really like this flexibility idea. They like being able to work from home a couple of days a week and it’s a benefit that has — it’s one of those silver linings from the pandemic that we kind of went, Yeah, we can be just as productive.” Now, with that said, I’m working with a big bank up in the Northwest and they’re trying to lure people back in and what they figured out is, look, come back in a couple of days a week but it’s the same days for everyone. Now, they’re kind of — first, they kind of said, well, we want to resist that because then we would have too many people at once, but if you’re not all there at once, there’s not really a benefit, that you’re not there with your team. So they’re trying to say — the best teams that I’m studying doing this are saying, let’s do this on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and you need to be in the office those days even though there may be a crunch and everything and it’s not just parallel work, we used to call it, where we’re all just kind of working but I’d have no idea what you’re doing in the next cubicle, we’re actually going to make work more meaningful. We’re going to have regular team meetings. We’re going to do brainstorming session. We’re going to make the time that we’re together more meaningful when you are in the office. And what they’re finding too is also, okay, on those days when you’re not in the office, that many of my clients are now saying, Look, Friday mornings, it’s no meet Friday, or we’re going to let you get your work done, maybe it’s Monday afternoon, whatever the day is that they’re actually blocking time where there’s no meetings allowed, the people can actually get work done. So they’re coming up with different ways to make it work but everybody’s figuring this out still, everybody’s seeing what will work for them, but those are a couple of the best practices that I’m seeing.

Alex: Thank you for that. I’m in LA so when you say no-meet Fridays, I just think it’s like a vegan luncheon or something like that.

Adrian: I love it.

Alex: That’s funny. Yeah, I think kind of playing around with what works is powerful. I can’t imagine going back. I used to be one of those people that were like I want you in the office, don’t get here after 9, and let’s work together, sometimes I would look at someone’s monitor and see what are they doing, and I cannot imagine going back to that. It’s remote work — there’s ways in which you can structure a fully remote or a hybrid culture that is high performance. I do feel like getting together in person is important. 

Adrian: Absolutely.

Alex: We have a global team so, in my case, we get together, but the people that live close to each other, we do get together once in a while and we try to do a team trip, so I think that, for companies that were structured locally before, I think hybrid approach of having a couple days a week where people come back together is incredibly powerful. And it’s so nice when you go to the office Monday and Wednesday and then Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday or something, you’re able to just work from home, I mean, it was unfathomable before the pandemic, wasn’t it?

Adrian: It’s interesting too, I rent — I’m in a little office here and I rent from this telecom company here near Park City. When the pandemic hit, it’s interesting, I was watching the parking lot. The customer service, they sent everybody home, because it was March 2020, they sent everybody home. The customer service people were sent home and they were hugging each other, they were crying, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I won’t get to see you,” and then they sent the IT guys out and they were like high-fiving each other, “We don’t have to deal with people ever again, this is the best thing that’s ever happened,” and so it’s know your audience too. If you have people that are more people people, like customer service, they’re going to — salespeople, especially, where I told them during the pandemic, you’re going to have to find ways to bring people back together again, they’re desperate for that. The IT guys, again, if they never see another human being, I think they’ll be thrilled. My IT guys in my telecom company here. And so, yeah, get to know your team, know what will work for them and what won’t, but you’re exactly right, everybody does need to come together at some point because that human connection is still really vital.

Alex: Absolutely. We’re in that time of the year during this episode of recording that we’re thinking about the year ahead and so, thinking about that, I want to ask you what you’re excited about for next year?

Adrian: Well, I’m excited that I’m actually helping my son launch his coaching career and his name’s Anthony Gostick, he helped us write Anxiety at Work so he is starting to become a speaker and a coach, he’s working on his own book, Emotions at Work.

Alex: I love the plug here for your son, that’s awesome.

Adrian: Yeah, that’s, again, you asked me what I’m excited about, I really am excited to help mentor the next generation. It’s amazing how many people during the year that I’ll help launch books or give them advice and so I have reached that point in my career where I get more satisfaction out of helping others than, yeah, writing another book, that’s fine, it’s always good, but now with ghost writing books and books that Chester and I have written, I have books that I’ve written by myself, I’ve written, I don’t know, 25, 30 books, so, at this point, what gets me excited is seeing others succeed.

Alex: That’s incredible. Most leadership thinkers and writers that I know, their kids don’t do this kind of work so, for some reason, it’s not one of those — no one grows up saying, “I wanna be a leadership thinker.”

Adrian: Exactly, yeah.

Alex: Maybe a guru or a Simon Sinek or a Tony Robbins, a little bit of motivational speaking, but, yeah, that’s awesome that your kid’s following your footsteps and he’s probably not a kid anymore and he even helped you write your book.

Adrian: That’s great.

Alex: That’s awesome. Cool, Adrian. Well, thank you so much for joining me today in this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, it was great connecting.

Adrian: It was wonderful. Time flew. Any time, Alex. Look forward to talking again.

Alex: Likewise.