369 Democratizing Leadership Development: Transforming Workplace Culture with James Lawrence of Happy Companies

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: . James Lawrence, welcome to partnering leadership.

I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:05] James Lawrence: Yeah, me too. 

[00:00:07] Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to talk about what you do at Happy Companies, your insights on AI powered coaching, but before we get to some of that and your leadership insights, James, we'd love to know a little bit more about you, whereabouts you grew up, and how your upbringing helped contribute to who you've become.

[00:00:23] James Lawrence: Oh, my gosh. . I grew up in Los Angeles, you might feel sorry for me or intrigued. Both of my parents were psychologists. So I'm one of the rare birds that had to psychologist parents. They weren't just psychologists, but they were psychoanalysts. So you can imagine how thrilling the dining room conversation was around my house.

[00:00:42] Mahan Tavakoli: I can just imagine , . You've started a lot of different businesses, James, throughout your career. We'll touch on a couple of aspects of that, but what you are doing now with Happy Companies, there is an element of behavioral science in it. So I wonder, do any of the insights or influences of your parents psychoanalysis contribute to you doing some of what you're doing right now?

[00:01:09] James Lawrence: Oh, yeah, for sure., wasn't just my parents, but, I come from a family of teachers. And I've always been an entrepreneur my whole life. So I think that intersection that, synergy between, a little bit of the psychology background and then just really, a passion for leadership.

, I think that leading people is an art, it's an art and a science, right? And, I've taken a lot from what I learned growing up about how to improve relationships with people. And, that intersection with leadership, it's funny, I talked with a lot of CEOs And one of the things that I like to talk about is the relationship between an employee or an individual contributor and their manager data shows is by far the most important relationship that exists.

And when that's wrong, that relationship's not right. It usually doesn't matter how much meaningful alignment there is with the organization. If that relationship sick and conversely, if that relationships intact and strong and meaningful and fruitful, it can weather a lot of storms in a large organization when that relationships really intact.

And think there's really no more important relationship. And that kind of relationship management. It doesn't matter whether you're really even talking about a personal relationship. You have a lot of the things that you learn about how to become more emotionally intelligent and how to interact with others can be used across the whole spectrum of relationships you have, but especially at work.

Because, even, relationship at home is complicated, but the same kind of power dynamics exist inside an organization that they do in a personal relationship. And so it's really important. I think for. Both parties to learn how to work together. 

[00:02:43] Mahan Tavakoli: I couldn't agree with you more that managerial relationship is one of the most important influencers to whether it's employee engagement, satisfaction, turnover, you name it.

There's lots of data supporting that. Now, one of the things that I find interesting, James. Is that quite often entrepreneurs have strengths and characteristics that don't align well with leadership and management. How were you able to shift? You have been an entrepreneur your entire life, having started half a dozen companies.

When did the shift happen for you in terms of your leadership? 

[00:03:24] James Lawrence: I always cared about people, but  lived by the golden rule and, that was due unto others as.

You would do under yourself, right? And so it took me through my whole 20s to really realize that what I wanted was not the same thing as others and what I needed in a relationship was not the same thing. And that most principally how I behaved at work was not the same as how others behave natively.

And so whether you're talking about what I've learned through being the CEO of Happy or any of these different businesses, I would say really in my mid 30s is really when I started to recognize. The things that fill my bucket are different than maybe somebody that might work for me. And I really needed to tune my leadership approach to the people that worked with me.

One of the most fatal things , and I hate this, and you hear this all the time this is how I do things, or, the famous, somebody thinks everybody works just like them. And so they're like, they don't necessarily believe that someone's putting in the effort or the work or they expect their employees to meet them where they are like they just don't get it.

The truth is for example, I come in every day and I'm a big picture thinker and I like challenges and I like new things and I like change and these are things that are important to me. But, I have people in my organization now that are all about data and they're strategists and they don't necessarily want to spend a bunch of time with other people.

They're more comfortable with tasks or data. And for me, a nightmare situation is you put me in a cold office, a dark cubicle, a closet, basically, and hand me a spreadsheet and go, James. For the next week, we need you to sit in this dark closet and calculate algorithms in Excel. And I'm like, that sounds like hell.

And my co founder Megan would be like, I get to be by myself with a computer and a spreadsheet done heaven. And I'm like, what the heck, but she's not like me. And so the thing she wants. Not that she can't interact in her personally, but like she wants different things than I do. And I didn't really fully appreciate that, in my twenties and thirties and some people naturally do, but I didn't get it.

[00:05:36] Mahan Tavakoli: I continue both having that challenge myself, James, and seeing a lot of my clients have the same challenge as well. On some level, they get it. Someone might like to be by themselves or might be more of a numbers person or process information differently. But often times, we assume people want the same things we want and some of their drivers are the same.

How do you then guide clients work with organizations, work with managers to change, not their understanding of that, but their behaviors as a result of that understanding.

[00:06:15] James Lawrence: I think there's two parts to that. Is obviously a technology solution. 

But I want to answer that from the frame of an individual, whether you're a C level executive, you're, mid level employee or an individual contributor.  I think it, starts by recognizing how can I get better both for myself and my organization? And, am I highly motivated get better?

, ideally, what I would like to see is an organization, impute into the team that getting better is an organizational objective. And that starts with me. And I think that starts with the leadership, if the leadership is committed to understanding people better and their people better, their people.

All the way down, to the individual contributor goes, wow. My manager, my leader, my CEO is really interested in how they can work better with me. I'm going to reciprocate and I'm gonna spend time learning my manager, my leader, my CEO, my COO, whoever, depending on how big the organization is.

And so I think it starts with what I like to call your organizational DNA. Frankly, do you care about your people? I know that sounds like maybe that's too aspirational, but a lot of organizations every day, wake up in the morning and their CEOs, like people are disposable and they won't use these words, but in essence.

People are hassle and they care about the numbers. Like I care about my business performance, my PNL, I don't time for people. Like people are a necessary evil and that works maybe for a while, but it doesn't work for very long, in my opinion. Like it doesn't create sustained organizational health.

So I gave you a sideways answer, but I think it really comes down to, is the leadership team interested in thinking of their people as an actual organizational resource, part of their competitive advantage. How much are they going to invest in their people? I'm not talking about money. I'm talking about just time, right?

Do we care about investing in our team? Or do we look at them largely as just another resource that needs to be harnessed like everything else? And I think that A lot of organizations, I wish they would just come out and say all we give, all we care about is our sales numbers. Like guys, that's our pure focus.

Like we don't we are all about sales. We don't care about anything else this year. And it's funny, I've told CEOs something about that would land poorly. I'm like actually they already know that. So they would actually go, okay, God, I think, gosh, she just said that because we all know that nobody gives an S about anything other than.

Then the numbers, because that's what we see by every decision that's being made. So you're better off going we're going to think about our people next year, but this year we need to hit our numbers and everybody would be like, thank God someone just admitted that. 

[00:08:52] Mahan Tavakoli: I find many of us have learned the language to use with respect to the importance of people, value of a growth mindset, you name it, it's through the actions that we take. and where the priorities really lie, that people find out what is most important to us, what we value. So I couldn't agree with you more on that.

 So part of it is leadership is example. And you're saying that the example that the leadership sets through their behaviors, through wanting to understand the motivators of their people makes a difference. Now, happy is An AI powered coaching platform. What role does happy play in this process?

[00:09:36] James Lawrence: I think part of this is just describing a little bit about what's the purpose behind happy. And How the tech works is maybe secondary. first part is just this overarching idea that in most organizations, coaching, consulting a lot of what we traditionally focus on is getting the executive and leadership team, better.

And there's very little that's traditionally invested in the individual contributor or the mid levels of the organization, because Frankly, for the most part, most organizations are not going to spend hundreds of dollars an hour investing in , maybe like a first time manager or an individual contributor or an assistant or a coordinator or any of that level of employee.

And so the concept behind happy is Relatively simple, which is how we democratize coaching across your organization. And how do we provide resources and supported insights to help individual contributors, first time managers that maybe don't know how to build the manager employee relationship, because frankly, like I said, most of the high end coaching is going to.

The leadership team or the senior manager. And so that's the premise behind, and so happy provides insights, not just coaching and resources and really manager development for the entire organization. And so that was like the problem we were trying to solve.

And it's a new concept in some ways, because nobody wakes up in the morning and says we need to coach the entire organization. 

[00:11:00] Mahan Tavakoli: How does your approach at happy take advantage of generative AI but also some of the structure that might be of benefit to an organization. 

[00:11:14] James Lawrence: So typically there's really two, different ways.

Happy works. In essence, the way the technology works is that HAPI learns how let's say for example, if you and I had a company and we were in HAPI together you and I would take a very quick assessment when we went into HAPI.

It is modeled on disk or based on disk. We have our own behavioral science, but it is modeled on the principles of the disk assessment. So HAPI learns how you like to work and communicate. And once, and it learns how I like to work and communicate and imagine we had a hundred employees. And so everybody was in the platform.

And so happy would understand your work style and would understand, quite a bit about you, but then happy uses that information to provide personalized insights and coaching to every one of us. On our coworkers. And so unlike a traditional disc assessment, which is static, I'm sure if you've taken assessments before you get this 40 page PDF, and it's really useful you get this thing and you're like, Okay, this is really great and you read it and you maybe you have a couple of those like aha moments or.

I call them, goat on the mountaintop moments where you're like, the sun's shining. You're like, wow, I've learned something about myself. It takes that same thing, but it actually applies it every single day in a personalized way. So if you were to look me up and happy, it would give you personalized insights and nudges on how to work best with me, but they're actually personalized for you.

So it considers the science considers your work style, and then it considers my work style and it provides that advice to me if I look you up, but it didn't just. Do it inside happy. It utilizes slack. It utilizes Microsoft teams. It utilizes email zoom. It's able to use these tools and it delivers these inside and nudges every day.

And so if you're in Microsoft teams, it's. Sending you insights and nudges on your coworkers it's all personalized to you. 

[00:13:00] Mahan Tavakoli: I can see that reducing a lot of the friction that sometimes happens when we don't know how best to interact with our colleagues. And even understanding our own personality profile is really hard, let alone understanding and adjusting with other people's personality profiles. The one challenge that I see, James, and I wonder how you tackle this, is most of the organizations that I deal with, they have so many different systems, tools,

There is an overwhelm with that as well. How do you make sure that this is something that is incorporated, that is of value, that is not seen as just another communications tool or another thing on top of all the many layers of technology that many people have to deal with now?

[00:13:49] James Lawrence: So I would say that , there's tool saturation. So that's partly why we're operating through Slack and teams, these flow of work tools that employees are already using. So for example, if you've got a meeting tomorrow, if you and I have a meeting tomorrow at 10 o'clock, Happy could send you a Slack at 9am with some meeting tips for me.

 It's already natively working inside the tools that your organization already uses. And so that's. 100 percent what you said is that, if you add too many other dedicated tools now, that being said, somebody might want to take a deeper dive. For example, if you were my manager and, I was going to have a review with you.

Sure. I might go into Slack and get some tips, but I might want to jump in and do a deep dive with you. And so reading like a couple of pages about how you might do a review, which happy does have a whole, like coaching interface where I could go in and I can get some deeper dive in a bunch of there's 70 or 80 coaching topics right now.

So I would say like for the most part, the daily use would be inside Slack or teams. Or email if you didn't have those tools, but there are a lot of scenarios where people are like wanting to resolve a conflict at work or improve communication. And so they might opt into some episodic coaching that would be available.

And so what I like to sometimes talk about is like the individual contributor look, let's say someone comes out of graduate school. They're 24 years old. They go get their 1st job, within a year they get in, maybe they get promoted and they get 2 employees that work underneath them.

Typically when that person is like running into a frustrating situation or running into some conflict, they don't have, they may or may not have a lot of resources to tap to help them through that management challenge, depending on the organization. So that's where someone might be using  tool like happy to go in and get some individualized coaching on those people that you're already working with. We use some social media algorithms to understand the connectivity inside the organization. So we're automatically sending you coaching and insights on the people you're working with. And it just happens dynamically. , it's got some kind of smart suggestions where if you're suddenly working with Amanda a bunch, it's going to just start sending you some coaching on Amanda.

[00:16:07] Mahan Tavakoli: . I see the approaches to leadership changing as a result of all this additional insights and information that we are getting and is accessible to us to coach and develop people or get people to collaborate, how do you see the information or the technology changing how we lead,

[00:16:25] James Lawrence: yeah, that's an interesting question. I'm going to give you a hot take on this, there's two things. First off, if you look at any organization, there's going to be a percentage of people that are highly motivated and interested in self development.

And let's say you had a thousand employees, some people, let's call a subset, wake up thinking how can I get better every day?, But then there's a portion of the organization,, regardless of what you do that are probably like the ship sail they're demotivated.

They're not that interested. You lost them., and there could be a bunch of reasons for that. But then I think you have this middle, Yeah. Yeah. Which is maybe isn't better better every day, but does care about their role and they need to be motivated, inspired, engaged.

They need the organization to invest in them first. So ultimately I think it's leadership's job to say relationships are a priority in this organization. Now, when you ask about AI and tools and all that, What I'm trying to say is if the leadership hasn't done that if leadership hasn't set the tone, I don't care how many tools are there.

 If you don't like locks and bagels, it doesn't matter. This is amazing. I'm going to bring in a platter of the best locks ever. And you're like I don't even like locks, I didn't care. So I don't care what that tool set is. If the organization Doesn't care if the leadership hasn't prioritized people relationships.

And so it's if the tools come along and the people in the organization starting with the leadership go, wow, people are really important to us getting our people better. We invest in our people. Here's some tools that we as an organization can use to do this. Then the organization's like gobbling up those tools, right?

If the leadership team or the CEO or just the ethos of the organization, that organizational culture doesn't prioritize and invest in people. That to me, the tools don't matter. And so I realized I answered your question with something completely different than maybe what you're expecting, but it all starts with the intent of the organization.

Now, if the organization has led by example, cares about people, relationships, invest in their people, cares about improving their organizational culture, cares about their one on one manager relationships, and then you bring in some really useful tools and happy could be one of them but there could be others.

Then I think the organization stands up and takes notice and says, Wow. This company is talking about it and they're walking the talk, like they're investing in their people. They're actually doing what they said they were going to do. And they're, and so they're setting the tone and then they're providing tools to do it.

And so do I think the tools can help? Sure. But I think the foundation's got to be there before the tools come in. 

[00:19:06] Mahan Tavakoli: I love the way you frame that James, and I appreciate it most, especially since you Do have a tool that you provide, but part of what I'm hearing from you is that if that leadership example and that culture isn't there, regardless of how effective the tool is, it is not going to serve your needs.

The right tool serves the needs. When the example, when the right culture is there in the organization and couldn't agree with you more. I also love the framing that you mentioned. There are some people, whether it's with respect to development or other aspects, experimentation, there are some. gung ho, learn it all's out there doing it for themselves.

There are some people that you have to bring on dragging and kicking. They never want to take on challenges. They're happy with the quote unquote nine to five approach, but part of the potential is with that middle group who are willing to be coached, to learn, to grow, but a lot of times they aren't given the opportunities to in organizations.

[00:20:14] James Lawrence: Yeah, for sure. I think the key in what you just said is, when there's meaningful alignment with anybody, any employee, whether that's quality of the work or the organization, and you really care and you feel cared for, you're much more apt to want to get better.. When we built happy. It was like let's just look at what the best coaches do. And so the best coaches listen, and then they adapt their advice based on context, the situation, who you are, who the other person is , if I'm coaching you and you go, I'm having a huge problem with my executive assistant.

I'm going to go tell me about your executive assistant. And then I'll learn about him or her. And I know about you. And then I might give you some coaching and it's got context, right? It's got okay what's important to your executive assistant? Oh he wants all the details before he starts.

And I'm like, oh, okay. And you start learning the two people and you like, realize that you're not really a detail person. So you're giving your executive assistant like a project with no instructions. And then it's okay what does your executive assistant need from you?

And then it's that's what a good coach doesn't then they'll say have you ever considered like maybe giving them more information or, have you ever tried that? So that would be how a bird flies. Right? And then like, how does a great coach work? That's how what happy is really using technology to do is it's not a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

It's just what does a good coach do? A good coach applies context, good coach knows who you are, knows who the other person is, gives you good advice okay happy knows who you are, learns what the other person's gives you some advice that's personalized, right? We just really learned from how good humans interact, and then figured out, like, how do we take that approach and just personalize it?

Using some behavioral science and technology. 

[00:22:02] Mahan Tavakoli: It is the democratization to a certain extent of that coaching.

, whether it's Khan Academy or other educational AI tools, it is not going to replace the individualized teaching or coaching and those opportunities, but it will democratize and it is democratizing it for the masses, for lots of people to be able to access, which is wonderful.

Now, one of the Other elements that is important in organizations, and I know you're a big believer of, is that you need to have the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats on the bus. What is your thinking with respect to how leaders can approach that when they are looking at their teams and organizations?

[00:22:49] James Lawrence: You're speaking my language. That's literally one of the first things that I preach, which is not everybody should be on the bus. So that's the first thing is I've spent a lot of my career trying to , force people to, I don't want to say force people, but to force myself to Oh my gosh, like John, just a random name.

John's not happy. And what can I do to get John happy and get the right role for John and John's and I got to, I spend all this like time trying to make it work. And the reality is that John just shouldn't even be on the bus because John loves surfing. And I have a company that makes skateboards.

And he doesn't really give two S's about skateboards. He just loves surfing. And he doesn't, he's not really like a salesperson, but he's doing a sales. So it's I've got him selling a product in a market. He doesn't even care about. When he really loves like he would be a better customer service person in like a total another role.

And I know these are like fake examples, but I challenge a lot of CEOs. And this obviously has nothing to do with happy, but there's 3 things that I go off of. And the 1st thing is. How motivated is someone so like I go through three things, highly motivated, highly capable, highly effective, so highly motivated.

Is there meaningful alignment with that person in the organization? Do they like, are they highly motivated when they walk in every day? Are they highly motivated? Some of that could be natural, like how motivated are they just as a human, but are like, Are they motivated because they love the subject matter?

They love the company. They love what they do. And if the answer is no, like it's a lot easier just to go Hey man, look, this isn't working where it gave you like three months to go find another job because you don't love the company. You don't love what we do. You're not a good fit for this.

Or maybe you're just like, you're just not a good, fit for, the organization because. We don't have, we don't fit the thing that you're looking for, whatever that thing is, right? So it's I want someone that wants to come and compete every day and comes in and says, I'm highly motivated to just get better, but I love this, and this super motivated.

And then the question becomes what's the right seat on the bus for you? Because you're highly motivated, you're highly capable. Capability would be like intelligence, skills, experience, effective, right? Are you effective? And a lot of that can be trained, but motivation is like hard to train. So that's why I look at that first.

But then the second question is like, what seat on the bus? Cause then it's you get the right, you're like this person should be on the bus, but like what role should they have? And I don't know if you've read the world's great managers are different than my, I forgot the name first break, all the rules, the Marcus Buckingham book.

Have you read that? It was like, it's 15, 20 years old, but it's all about most people get promoted to their position of incompetence. And so it's like a lot of people are in the wrong spot for one reason or another. And they're, they don't even love what they do because , they've been promoted into something they don't even like anymore.

And so I think you just have to be able to look at these things and just ask yourself as a manager, as a leader, are my people in the right spot, right seat, right bus, and If you just do that, you're farther along than most people. 

[00:26:01] Mahan Tavakoli: Oh, absolutely. I find that even for a lot of leadership teams, that most of my work is with CEOs and leadership teams in a lot of leadership teams, the right people aren't on the bus first off.

So even within that leadership team, and in many instances, it could be that the right person is not in the right seat, it requires the analysis that you're talking about, looking at it, but it also does require making some hard decisions when it's not the right people on the bus, that it would be beneficial to everyone involved to move them along.

So I find that the CEOs that I deal with have an easier time recognizing that they might not have all the right people on the bus. But the challenge of recruitment, getting other people, the transitions, all of those things keep them from wanting to have the right people. 

[00:26:58] James Lawrence: Yeah, for sure. I didn't say it was easy.

Look, this is one of those things where I think it's on the leadership division, head CEO or whatever. I think you have to also just create permission to say, Hey, this is what we're doing.

And if this doesn't track for you, , you don't have to leave tomorrow, but . Go find something else that's going to work for you. And even if that takes a couple months, we want you happy. 

[00:27:20] Mahan Tavakoli: One of the challenge that I see, James, as you lead different organizations and work with clients in different industries is the fact that the average tenure of individuals within organizations is shrinking.

And in many instances, the. executives, managers, or CEOs are struggling with wanting to keep people around longer because of all the knowledge gain, expertise gain, the time and effort that goes into recruiting. But that cycle is shrinking. What are you seeing and how can leaders approach a shifting marketplace where people aren't looking to stay within their roles and in the same organization for long periods of time?

[00:28:09] James Lawrence: I get asked that a lot, really about, this next generation of employees, they talk about a lack of loyalty, right? I very mixed feelings about that intellectually. My generation, We sit around and talk about work life balance and then we have no work life balance, right?

We're just like, , work life balance is super important. I was the office till seven o'clock. I took all my work home. I put my kids to bed and I worked some more. Yeah, I went on vacation, but I brought my laptop. I got my glued to my cell phone, and then it's CEO who's I can't believe this, alpha generation, Gen Z generation, insert name, but generation, they want to go surfing in the morning and then come into work. Who are these people? And it's wait a second. You spent last 10 years talking about work life balance.

Someone else actually wants it. And you're like this is a bunch of BS, I think there's a different question, which is If we build a trusted relationship with our people, and we count on them to do what's in the business's best interest, because we care about them.

And we say, Hey, let's act in, in happy's best interest. Let's act in IBM's best interest, but get your work done. But if you want to go surfing in the morning, that's okay. But maybe you can't do that every morning. Cause we got to call it eight in the morning. We got to call it seven. And so I think part of it is like, How can the organization adapt around being more flexible?

I think that's the bigger question is how do we create an environment that's just more attractive to people? And maybe someone that's 48. What if you went to work for a company? My question to you is who would you want to work for? Do you really want to work for a company that like you have to work seven, in the morning till seven?

Like really, we do it but is that really what we would want? And I've been really attracted to Netflix and their model for quite some time. And I run another organization other than happy and, it's got 30 or 40 employees. It's another, a different company I own. And we were like looking at the the travel and expense policy at the teeny policy is like from 10 years ago.

And it's there was like a dress code for going to business meetings. That was like, it was like, literally like a page long. And it was probably totally appropriate and very detailed and not wrong to have a dress code. And I think we like. Got rid of the whole dress code and we just put in a line that said dress like a professional represent the company properly.

And you can come up with all these rules, or you can just communicate what you're looking for. And I think that's the difference of what a new generation wants , they want more freedom, they want more autonomy, but then the organization needs to be able to adapt and create an environment around that, and I think it's not for every company, , if you're working in a manufacturing job that your shift starts at eight, you probably can't go surfing, cause you're running a CNC machine. But, hopefully organizations can match themselves to the changing needs of the workforce.

[00:30:55] Mahan Tavakoli: It is a challenge though, James, just this past Saturday night was at friend's house and we were having a friendly debate around this issue, a couple of CEOs and another executive at the table. And one of the challenges is the mindset of understanding that You need to have an environment where people seek to contribute and are willing to contribute.

And it's okay. As you said, if they go surfing in the morning, this executive was talking about people walking their dogs and wanting to work hybrid. They go walk their dogs and therefore they're less productive. . So from a mindset perspective and from a systems perspective, what do you see it takes to make a hybrid, flexible, , work environment, work for the organization.

[00:31:47] James Lawrence: I've got an interesting take on this. The 1st thing is that I think that every CEO has a different perspective on, what works best for the organization.

And then every CEO or every leadership team has different data, 

here's my thing. I actually prefer in person work myself, but here's my perspective. My perspective is Every organization gets to choose how they want to set up their work environment, in person, hybrid, remote, and that's a choice that they make. And then the flip side, this is that every employee, for the most part, gets to look at what the company's culture is around work and go, that's for me.

I find there's a lot of people that prefer in person work. There's some people that prefer remote work, but there's a lot of people like, Hey, I actually working together or I like hybrid, right? And so the first thing is, the organization should be able to articulate its philosophy in a consistent way, and then employees should be able to decide, do I want to participate in that organizational culture?

I think what with Amazon is they changed. And that's what caused a lot of the issue is like employees felt like a bait and switch. Like I came in as a remote employee. Now I'm being asked to come to the office and that change management is hard. But if you take away the change management, I think that it's perfectly acceptable for an organization to say, Hey, we're, we work in person or we primarily work in person.

I think you're going to lose some employees from that because I think some employees prefer hybrid work, but there's a lot of ways to think about it. And so it happy, for example our actual work policy says, we primarily want you working in the office. You can work where you want and you're an adult.

Understand primarily in the office means we'd like you in the office more often than not. But if you want to work from home tomorrow. Work from home tomorrow. If you kids sick, work from home for a few days. If like you want to go fishing on a Friday, then go fishing on Friday, just get your stuff done, understand, the organizational objectives.

But I think it comes down to the thing you were talking about, about like, when you get to scale in a big organization, control becomes a factor of What is the work you're doing? And then how much control does your organization want to exert over it? Netflix has a tremendously different organizational culture than Amazon does.

That's okay. Some people probably like Amazon's culture. Amazon's doing a lot of things, right? So at the end of the day, I think there's a lot of different ways to cut it. I do think that creating culture in hybrid and remote organizations is more difficult than in person work. But if you're intentional about it, even remote cultures can be incredibly vibrant. 

[00:34:26] Mahan Tavakoli: I appreciate the way you put it in that the challenge for Amazon is the transition and the lack of clarity on it. The other thing, just as an aside, is that Paul Bloom has written quite a bit about this.

Amazon's data points don't necessarily support the five day return to office, which is why they're being butchered in that it's the judgment call. of some of the executives that it would be better for the organization. But that's a different conversation for Amazon. Now, you also work with a lot of organizations, James, so you see different cultural challenges.

What are the most significant cultural challenges in workplace besides the challenge between hybrid, remote, in person conflicts?

[00:35:12] James Lawrence: That's a tough question. I want to comment on your thing about Amazon. 

There's a lot of organizations like I work with 1 organization in particular that got a relation with very high level executive that's in the fan group. And 1 of the things that I've consistently heard is engineers that work in the building are 30 percent more productive. In terms of the performance and cleanliness of their code, then remote engineers.

And this person's been with this organization for more than 10 years, and there's more than 10, 000 engineers. So there's a large data pool. He actually likes remote work. But he said from an engineering perspective, their data is very clean, that engineers that work in the office are more productive, but that's their culture.

 It doesn't mean that's a universal thing, maybe they don't manage their remote engineers very effectively, or they don't have the right controls in place. So the right tools in place, or maybe they've got other meaningful problems in the organization with mission alignment and things like that.

I'm a believer. Just start answering your question. Second part is that in organizational transparency. And with, the CEOs that we work with happy is very effective at providing a set of tools that helps remote employees better understand and work together with their managers.

So it is a tool that is highly useful along with other tools to facilitate remote work or hybrid work in a meaningful way. , but. You've got to make sure there's just meaningful organizational alignment.

[00:36:35] Mahan Tavakoli: I couldn't agree with you more in that. Alignment, the culture, the example of the leadership is the base that the tools can then support and take advantage of the tools by themselves, cannot replace those existing relationships, cultures, some of those elements that need to be there.

[00:36:55] James Lawrence: Yeah, exactly. You look at someone like Gallup's data. Is employees want more coaching, but their managers don't have time to give it to them. It was like 70 percent or something of employees wanted more insights and more feedback, and their managers don't have enough time.

Those are things that I think, regardless of maybe the organizational culture, Yeah. An employee does want more coaching. And I want to stop short of saying we've seen happy be highly effective in all kinds of organizations, including ones in which, where even the employees are somewhat disengaged because they do want more coaching.

But really to maximize the value, I think leadership's perspective needs to be one of continuing to invest in their human capital. And I think when you have a company that's really cares about investing in their human capital. You can get probably like 2x the results because now it's not just you're better, better, better employees that are power users of this tool, but it's a much broader swath of employees are like, wow, I want to get better.

My manager's investing in me. I'm going to invest in myself too. 

[00:38:02] Mahan Tavakoli: The knowledge base that. Is built off of these interactions. Is that a knowledge base that resides with the team and the organization, or is it a knowledge base that carries forward with the individual employee?

[00:38:18] James Lawrence: . So the way happy works is that there's an immensely large library of coaching that we've developed. And so that coaching is applied. Contextually, situationally. And then in a personalized manner. And so it's all vetted by humans. For example, if you and I were working together, happy would understand your behavioral style, my behavior is on the behavioral science then renders a match and goes, okay, James, here's a piece of coaching that would help you communicate better

let's say you were a we call a strategist, but someone that likes to focus on data and is more of an analyst and I'm more of a people person, the advice and coaching that we would get, I'd love to tell you that you're a special snowflake. You're one in a million but the reality is humans do follow generally predictable behavior patterns.

And there might be 500 variants of coaching, but There's not a million. And so it doesn't have to adapt to every single person. It would just. Go into the science and go, oh, okay, James, you're this and Laura is this. And so James, here's the advice on how to work better with Laura.

And it's 95 percent accurate, for the most part, humans are predictable once we understand them. 

[00:39:36] Mahan Tavakoli: Now, both in your various businesses and in working with clients, are there any go to references   James? 

[00:39:45] James Lawrence: There are so many great books out there.

There are a lot of books that I'm really passionate about. I like the old school books.

How to win friends and influence people like Dale Carnegie, or the Seven Habits of Effective People. What I like to tell Younger, early stage employees is just being committed to reading is really big I know we live in a culture where you know It's more convenient to watch YouTube video for 10 minutes or be entertained that way But like I think there's a lot of value in being a student being good reader and maybe that's listening to podcasts there's a lot of fascinating podcasts out there, but I think it's just the intellectual curiosity of getting better 

I've got, even today, 48 years old, been a CEO five times. I have plenty of flaws. You can ask people that work for me, I am by no means perfect. But I love the idea of coming in every day and saying I'm gonna get better today. You have to own that. I've had a lot of people through my career have said the company hasn't provided me any tools to improve myself.

And I'm like, let me talk to you. You are responsible for yourself. You are responsible for getting better. Like my son is 12 and he plays tackle football now. And we're going through this whole thing. He doesn't get ready in the morning we go work out twice a week with a trainer.

And he's late. Why? Nobody packed my lunch. I don't know where my shoes are. His name is Jordan. And I'm like, I love you, son. This is you, you have to own it. You need to get your bag ready. Guess what? When you go into a company, when you're 23, 24, 25 years old, nobody's responsible for your development.

Period. Your manager isn't responsible, the company's not responsible, you're responsible. You find books that you like, you watch podcasts, you get committed to being better, you own your career, you have agency over it. Is a great manager help inspire you? Sure. But some of us don't have that luxury.

We have a crappy manager. So what? Still learn, still get better every day. You just have to own it, every single person has to own getting better. And so there's a whole lot of ways to do that.

[00:41:41] Mahan Tavakoli: Oh, I absolutely love that James. Christopher Lockhead who has a couple of great podcasts. He says it's a dumb time to be dumb jokingly. And part of his point is if you want to seek knowledge, information, learning, whether you like watching videos or listening to content or reading.

It's all out there. So you are responsible for your own development. And you also mentioned some of the classics we might've chatted about it. Actually, I spent more than 20 years of my career with Deal Carnegie to love his writing. . Ryan holiday talks about the fact that the longer a book has been around, typically the more value there has been in that book. So there's a lot of insights that you can gain from books that have been around for a long time. But I love your main point, which is. Yes, we need to set up better systems for our organizations, for managers to do a better job coaching their people.

However, the responsibility for that growth and development lies with us. Now, for people to find out more about you, your work, follow Happy Companies, where would you send them to, James? 

[00:42:54] James Lawrence: Just happy companies. com nice, easy, and simple, 

[00:42:59] Mahan Tavakoli: simple enough. I really appreciate your insights, your approach, thank you so much for the conversation. James Lawrence. 

[00:43:07] James Lawrence: Hey, thank you so much.