Show Notes

Emily is a Director of Product Management and Design at Wayfair. She has a passion for organizational behavior--frequently writing and speaking about the role trust and psychological safety play in organizational creativity, risk-tolerance, and resilience. Prior to joining Wayfair, Emily had a career in professional theatre production.

SHARED WISDOM:

WISDOM #1 When we recognize that a problem will not get solved in our lifetime, we can acknowledge that we can’t seek satisfaction for solving the problem.

We can’t boil an ocean. We can heat a small portion of it. We can give ourselves permission to just do our best with what's in front of us.

WISDOM #2 To accomplish any task or goal, the amount of communication that you need is inversely related to the amount of trust in the relationship(s).

If you have little trust, then you need a lot of communication for success.

WISDOM #3 One of the reasons why things get better when we have friends in a community is the shared mutual concern for one another.

We have someone to ask for help and the asking itself can strengthen the relationship.

CONNECT WITH EMILY: Linkedin | Twitter

Transcription

Intro 0:03

To accomplish any task or goal, the amount of communication that you need is dependent on the amount of trust that you have in a relationship. And so if you have little trust, you need a lot of communication. And if you have a lot of trust, then you don't need to have communication.

Charles Vogl 0:21

Welcome to the old wisdom New Era podcast. Here we explore the life changing lessons that form us and give our lives meaning through both desperate and happy times. We consider the experiences and insights that lead us toward maturity. Embrace wisdom informs us all in the majority of life where information alone cannot direct our best choices. Here, wisdom refers to the enduring lessons that aren't only helpful to us personally in our own time, but also true for others in many times. My name is Charles Vogel, among many things, I study religion, I think some connection, I advise a handful of organizations, and I'm the author of three books, including the art of community. So today, on this pilot episode, I have my good friend Emily levada with me. Emily is the Director of Product Management and design at wayfair, at least professionally, and she's been at wayfair, since the company had less than 800 employees some years ago. And now she's still there and employs over 17,000 full time employees. So she's been quite a rocket ship watching a company reach a much, much bigger audience. And Emily, you have a passion for organizational behavior, you frequently write and speak about trust and psychological safety in organizational culture, and how that influences creativity, risk tolerance, and resilience. And I know that prior to joining wayfair, and this rocket ship of success of the company, you had a whole separate career in professional theater production. We've been friends since we met in graduate school literally sitting next to each other in class. Welcome to our pilot episode. Thank you. Thank you for having me,

Charles Vogl 1:55

I invited you here because that idea of this podcast is we want to create a venue where we can bridge some of the enduring lessons that we you and I and everyone else will invite on this show to share those lessons have been passed on to us when we needed to learn them. I'm aware that we're living in a time where millions of Americans and not just Americans are working to make this country and even other places more just and more fair and safer. And we're also living in the most age segregated era of at least American history. And what that means is there's largely a generation that doesn't have access to the hard one and learn lessons that informed and formed those who came before and their success and their failure. So hopefully, as we create these podcasts and invite people to share their wisdom, we can do that. And of course, you and I have ideas we'd like to share now that we've had a couple decades and being adults and figuring out what works and doesn't work for us. So the way we're going to structure this is I want to share an idea that I wanted to share more widely. And then I'll invite you to do that sounds good. So the opening idea I want to just put on my mind, Emily is this idea of what success looks like. I know that I worked on human rights in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in northern Zambia. And I remember leaving Zambia both burned out and cynical. After working so hard to work on justice after my best friend, the village had been kidnapped and beaten for some days for working with me. The local authorities didn't like that I was looking to where the monies went for the clinic that I was working on. They were afraid to kidnap me. And so they kidnap my best friend. And that sent me on a trip to make a difference. And though I spent many, many days on that and traveled hundreds of miles, I thought I got nothing done on that. And then I got back to United States. And after a lot of healing. I was a genocide education activists and a big part of that project was producing what became an independent PBS documentary film about a Cambodian family surviving the Cambodian genocide and becoming American. And that meant I had a lot more conversations about genocide and the legacy of genocide, the cause genocides I never wanted to ever thought it would have, I just remember, it was a really sober time in my life, as you can imagine. And also just the sense that a lot of people are harming a lot of people, and it might not ever end and all of my work just seems so insignificant. And even though we would have small wins, and maybe even sometimes things that could cause envy in other people in the kind of words you would get or funding we would get, there was a sense that I was never making either a significant difference or a big enough difference, or going to handle what was in hand. And then I remember speaking to a mentor of mine named Ed, who was at the time an elderly monk, and he's the one who shared with me what I'm going to interpret as the wisdom success may always look like failure, and it may never ever look any better. What I mean by that is when we take on an issue, a challenge, a social ill, that really needs attention, and maybe it's everywhere, like the resurgence of genocide, time and time again, or the desperate need for food by millions of hungry kids around the world. We're taking these things off because they need a lot of attention. But they're so big that very often, there are challenges that are never going to get solved in our lifetime. I'm really confident that when I'm gone, there will probably be a lot of people harming a lot of people that would meet the standard of genocide. I am aware that when I'm gone, no probably be wealth inequities that mean, a lot of kids are hungry. That doesn't mean I shouldn't work on these issues. It doesn't mean that what I did was meaningless. But it meant that I was never going to wake up. And there would be a day when it was clear that my work had solved the problem. And when we understand that a problem is not going to get solved in our lifetime, it means we need to acknowledge that we're never going to wake up one day and have that satisfaction, maybe we want. And when we look at our heroes, I certainly when I look at my heroes, we noticed that for them, there was probably never a day that they woke up. And they thought, oh my goodness, thank goodness, I've been working on this for years that solved, we can go home now. Or thank God, nobody has to worry about that. Again, all the people are going to be safe for all these people get enough health care, all these people are going to be housed what a good career, what a good life I had, which is to say that if we emulate our heroes whatever century or a place that they were working in, in our emulation, we may also be committing ourselves to a life where we never have that day, and it never looks like success. And so two things need to happen, if we're going to hold up. And during work of making a difference. The first one is we need to acknowledge that the small successes totally count, they don't count in just some kind of superficial self tricking, make yourself feel better kind of way, that may be all we have in our lifetime, if all kids aren't gonna be safe all the time, when we can make some kids safe for some time. Or we can change a law that make some kids safer some of the time, that's maybe we're all going to get and we got to embrace those. And the other thing that goes along with this is, in order to keep on keeping on, we need to adopt a humility in the face of the challenge we're taking on when we know we're not going to solve it, then let's not wake up every day pretending that we're going to do that or pretending that we're the person who can do it or pretending that any day. Now, it's our genius that's going to dress what's been going on for centuries, maybe millennia. And when we adopt that humility, it allows us to give up a whole bunch of stress and maybe even self criticism about how we're not effective enough of talking to a younger man today who's working on some pretty big stuff in our culture. And he's really worried that he's not getting enough done, or he won't get enough done. And when we talked about the fact that the world is not going to be solved of the problems that he's addressing, by the time he's gone, it gave him permission to just calm down, just understand that all he's got is what's in front of him. And all he can do is what's in front of him said differently, we can't boil an ocean, maybe the ocean needs to be heat up. But we can't do it. And when we start acknowledging that we can't do it, then we can give ourselves permission to just heat the water that's in front of us. And when I think of this in my life, I tell people look, I'm just boiling the tea cup in front of me. And maybe in time, I'll get to two cups and maybe three tea cups. And maybe I'll teach others to boil tea cups. But at the end of the day, there's a big ocean, I can't boil it. So I'm just going to work on the tea cup in front of me. And that's what keeps me going for the long haul. So thanks for listening.

Emily Levada 8:14

Thank you for sharing. Charles, I'm curious, when you first heard that wisdom from your mentor, what the impact was on you at the time?

Charles Vogl 8:22

Well, I heard this from Ed. And I think I was in my mid 30s at the time. And it was such a relief. And I realized, wow, he's right. his exact words were you're trying to hold the ocean and you can't, the only thing you can do is let it go. And when I had this vision of me in this kind of silly way trying to hold an ocean that everybody including me knew I couldn't my silliness became apparent, and how much I just needed to let go and acknowledge how small I was and how silly this aspiration was. And I think partly was going on as I was trying to hold the ocean I was trying to handle and that time I was working on genocide education work. I think it gave me meaning. And it made me feel important. And it wasn't that I wasn't important. But the sense that I was taking on something big was really important to me. And he just helped me see how silly it was. And the relief allowed me to calm down and then also focus on smaller things and not try to be distracted of the next bigger thing that I should be handling.

Charles Vogl 9:19

So I'm curious what advice you would give to someone who's trying to be humble about the role that they can and should play in sort of big issues. But maybe it's feeling unmotivated by the idea that success is gonna look like failure. Any thoughts on how you stayed motivated through that?

Emily Levada 9:37

Well, hopefully we're not motivated by having success. Hopefully, we're motivated when we tried to do something generous and making difference for others. And the way I interpret this wisdom that I needed to hear was reframing what I was taking on a way that gave me a way to approach it more powerfully, that gave me enduring emotional relationship to it. While the challenges ahead were no smaller and my work was no worse or Better, I could calm down and focus on what I needed to do, as opposed to worried about handling all genocide everywhere or the fact that there was a lot of it out there and I could reach everybody I need to reach or make a difference. Hopefully this idea isn't motivating. Hopefully, you're motivated by what you think is important the world that you want the world to be a healthier, safer, more just placed into this now. And this is just acknowledging that all you've got is what you've got, and you've got no more. And we can just embrace that and appreciate that and see what we can get done in this lifetime.

Emily Levada 10:30

I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how this wisdom may need to be interpreted or reinterpreted in this era?

Charles Vogl 10:39

Oh, my goodness, Emily, absolutely. Oh, fly around the country, or at least I did before COVID. And I still, I guess, talk around the country on zoom to organizations that want me to talk to people leadership roles. And one of the themes I see is this really misplaced? Officially, the term has a dogmatic assumptions, the thing we believe, and we just believe it, people can't talk us into it or talk us out of it this dogmatic assumption that bigger is always better. And that if something is any good than it really is only good if we can scale it up. Or we can test how good it is by how quickly we can scale it up. And that's just not true. Hopefully, most people who listen to me have a mother that gave them a hug. And hopefully that mother gave them a hot meal when they needed to get it on a cold day or after a tiring experience. That meal. And that hug would not be better. If your mother said, Wow, how can I scale up these hugs? You liked it? How can I give 1000 hugs and it's somehow less good a hug if it can't be scaled? And somehow that meal would be better? If your mom thought what meal can I provide? If I can scale it up? Our mothers cannot feed all kids or 1000 kids? And if they could, the meal that we got would probably be less special and probably made differently. If the consideration was well, what meals can we serve? If we have to do 1000, then if we do 1000, it's less good if we can't do 10,000 it's just a miss place assumption or misplaced understanding about what makes things good. Hey, if you're being a mom, go make that hot meal good. And if another kid shows up, make another hot meal. But we don't need to be thinking, How big do we got to get. Now if you want to feed more hot kids, if you want to feed more kids hot meals, if you want to make other people feel better, at the end of the day, we can think about investments we can make to do that. But even if we do that the same rules apply figures aren't necessarily gonna be better a program that feeds 30 million kids isn't fundamentally a better program than feeds 10 kids when they're called and having a cold day, right? Maybe it's better to start feeding 10 kids, and then seeing how that goes and see if opportunity shows up to something else. So I think the wisdom rejects this really stultifying, depression inducing assumption that we got to go faster and make everything bigger. And if we don't, somehow we're failing. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for listening. So Emily, I know that you're joining us, and there's something in your mind that you wanted to share. And I'm very curious to hear what it is you want to share.

Emily Levada 12:54

My story starts about five years ago, I was managing a software development team. And that software development team owned an important piece of that wayfarers ecommerce website. And because of the way that our code is structured, that part of the website was also used to power a different part of the website. And this is the equivalent, you have hundreds of engineers at wayfarer at this point in time. And they're essentially trying to write and edit a book in one word document. And there's all sorts of things that can go wrong can imagine you've defined a term now someone copies and pastes that you said that term too before the point where you've defined it. Now your book doesn't read, right. And it's essentially the same types of things, the same types of errors can get introduced into software code when multiple engineers are writing in the same part of the code at the same time. And so my team, this other team tended to have problems like this, where we would make a change, and we would potentially disrupt or break something of theirs, and vice versa. And this was sort of a known and common undercurrent of what was happening was that we were sometimes stepping on each other's toes. And in this particular instance, this was late in 2016, I believe we had been working on something that was really critical to our strategy for the q4 sort of retail peak experience, and wait a couple weeks to collect data about how customers were shopping on the website, and then make a strategic decision about what we want to do going forward. We were a few weeks into this. And we had started looking at the data that was coming back and it wasn't making a lot of sense. And we were trying to figure out what was happening. And I remember very clearly this day where my engineering partner, one of my engineering partners, was sitting at his desk and all of a sudden he exploded, his hands hit the desk and he stood up and he started yelling and something to the effect of like those idiots Don't they know how to do their job, something along those lines. And it was way beyond what I would consider acceptable certainly not normal behavior in the workplace. And All the alarm bells went off in my head about sort of what's going on, or, wow, this situation where these two teams are trying to work in this interconnected way. And having miscommunications or creating problems for one another is now sort of way beyond the tolerance that we would have for such things. And the solution at the time, which I think is a common solution that managers employ is we made the teams talk to each other. So myself and my partner leader that oversaw the other team, we started meeting where these teams got into a room every two weeks, and every two weeks, they would go through what all the things we did in the last two weeks, with everything we're going to do next two weeks. That's very high cost, very high effort, high communication, high touch. And of course, the value in that is not just the rote recitation of what's been done, or what's going to be done, it's the access to the underlying thought processes. What's important to this team? Why did they prioritize what they are doing? How are they thinking about the value that they're going to generate? What's the customer problem that they're trying to solve underlying values and goals that are driving what's happening. And over time, that created a system where the teams were much more aware of each other, they were much more aware of the goals and the efforts that were under in a team, they were doing a much better job of thinking ahead about how what they were going to do was going to impact the other team. And over time, we were able to basically phase out that set a meeting. So it went from every other week, to once a month to once a quarter to once every six months, right. And I think that this is very common that we focus on the communication that's happening, we talk about things as miscommunications, when things aren't going well, we say that the solution is to over communicate. At the same time, there's this tension, that everybody's always struggling with there being way too much communication, there's too many emails, there's too many meetings, there's too many slack channels, there's way more communication that we can handle. But somehow the solution to every problem is to communicate more. And for me, I felt, in this middle of this experience, watching these teams struggle, watching them try to figure out how to work successfully together for the good of their shared customer. And to build the kind of relationship with each other that most teams at wayfair have, all the time, I felt there's got to be more going on here. And the aha moment for me, was actually a quote from the book hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz, that someone brought to my attention. And the quote goes like this, if I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions whatsoever. Because I know that whatever you were doing is in my best interest. And for me, I had this light bulb moment reflecting on this experience and other similar experiences in my professional career, and also my personal relationships, that to accomplish any task or goal, the amount of communication that you need, is dependent on the amount of trust that you have in a relationship. And so if you have little trust, you need a lot of communication. And if you have a lot of trust, as Ben Horowitz describes, then you don't need to have communication. And that relationship has been really enduring for me in my experiences in business and as a leader and also in other relationships. And I think that the next most important point is that those things are not equal, if you imagine, you can essentially accomplish your task or your goal in a low trust high communication scenario that really sucks. Or you can accomplish your goal in a high trust low communication scenario. And that is much better, much more optimal. And the critical part there is that in order to make that transition, you have to build trust. And so we go through these cycles as leaders, when we see a problem, we add communication, then things get better. And then we subtract communication, we say, hey, maybe we don't need to have this meeting anymore, right? Or maybe I don't need a weekly email update from you, or whatever it may be. And we miss the fact that that mechanism that creates that ability to remove communication, to remove what we would call coordination costs in business, that underlying mechanism is trust. So for me, when I think about what that team was doing five years ago, in all those meetings as they were building that trust, and then we were able to subtract out the communication. I think for me right now, where this has been the most salient has been in the response to working from home. I think this is one of those times when the wisdom that you hear being expressed from everyone is that the solution to all your problems is to over communicate, so you're not getting the kind of hallway interactions or you're not having the normal touch bases or you just are spending less time that the solution is going to be over communicate. We know that people are spending, getting invited to more meetings, spending time doing more documentation, and I think that the problem with that Is that if we think that over communication alone is the solution, we will all end up burned out in what is effectively a lower trust high communication situation. And that it's really important that we focus on building trust in these new ways of working and these new team structures and start to subtract out that effort that's going into communication, replace it with trust,

Charles Vogl 20:23

yes, I can see that this is a death spiral, where we see something's not working. So we throw in more communication, and you have more communication with people who don't get trust. And they're missing the fact that what's really missing is trust and communication can help with trust. But if you're not investing in communication that builds trust, all you're doing is perpetuating a nightmare relationship that nobody wants more of it,

Emily Levada 20:45

Right. And there's another trap that I see people fall into, which is they happen to build trust. Now they're in a place where they're high trust and high communication. And that just feels super bureaucratic. And so then they missed the step where they actually need to pull that communication back out. And then even if you've been successful at building trust, you need to be really careful to protect that trust. Trust is something that's really easy to destroy. And so once you're in that situation where function of high trust or low communication, you need to protect it, or if you have an increase in complexity and what you're trying to accomplish, or you have new members of the team, you potentially have gone back to a state where there's less trust, and you may need to add some communication temporarily. But I think it's really important that everybody understand that building trust is the mechanism that's going to allow you to get back to the place that you are,

Charles Vogl 21:30

is this talk to us something that comes up in my work MLA organizations want to know, why should we invest in community? What's the ROI on that? And the answer is, well, I don't know yet, right? Because there could be many kinds of ROI. And why are you talking to me now? And why do you think this matters, right. And according to research that I looked at, certainly some stuff coming out of Yale, it looks like making a friend at work is a silver bullet. Or if there is a silver bullet, the biggest silver bullet is having a friend at work regarding burnout, and accidents and absenteeism. A team that doesn't have friends at work has more absenteeism, more accidents, and more burnout. And that includes your surgeon, and the person fixing your car, neither of whom we want high accident, high burnout, right when we show up. And one of the reasons that things get better at work, when you have friends, when teams or departments have community they share mutual concern for one another is when somebody has a problem, they have someone to ask. It's not rocket science, right. And we know that when formal lines of communication, sending a ticket making appointment, when that fails, because the tickets are backed up, or the appointments can't all be met. If there aren't relationships there, then there's no way for someone to get the communication up or down around or clarified in the informal network. But if there is community built, there's belonging there, that's going to pick up the phone and say, I have a quick question. Right? Did you mean the North office or the South office before we pack this up, right. And an organization that doesn't acknowledge we need that informal communication that comes out of these informal relationships that come because somebody invested to make them means they're losing all of the responsiveness and the effectiveness that comes when someone can ask for help? and clarify, and I and you cannot quantify what is the value when the shipping department can clarify, is that going to north and south, right? Or does that have to be wrapped in plastic or paper? Right? We don't know. But here's what we do know, when people don't ask the questions. And they guess, or they don't do it, because they don't have the communication. Or they don't ask for help, because I think it'll make them look stupid. And so they just create a dangerous environment that gets really expensive quickly. And I'm sure you know, from wayfair, you're in a very dynamic industry, how people buy where people buy, what people buy, who they're buying it from is changing all the time. And if you think what's true today was what was trading months ago, you are on the way to irrelevance, no question about it. If you have a team that can't talk each other informally with that trust, because I'm invested in it, or they don't have enough communication, or they're bogged down by the communication, because it's trying to get their work done. You're guaranteed to give your competitors all kinds of advantage be that philanthropic, artistic, commercial or political efforts.

Emily Levada 24:12

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think you're right, that there's lots of different kinds of costs in here. And one of the ones that you talked about, I think one of the most dangerous is when we try to substitute formal process formal communication when we have a trust problem. So I see this, sometimes someone will say, Hey, I don't really trust that when this team have relinquishes ownership of this thing, that they're gonna transition it well. And so what stand up a formal process where everybody has to fill in all this information before we can possibly do this thing, right? And that might be fine. It probably would work. But when I hear that the red flag goes up for me, like you're trying to process you're trying to use communication to solve what is inherently a trust issue that you think somebody else is going to drop the ball you want to protect against that, but instead of addressing the trust issue, head on it Did you add a communication layer? And I think that that's one version, I think you touched on another, which is you need to have not just high trust, but high psychological safety. And those two things are related, but not entirely the same concept in order to get a set of behaviors that really are what drive innovation. So that is creativity, which as we know, good ideas don't spring from people's brains. A good idea is a bad idea layered on top of a bad idea layered on top of a bad idea that all of a sudden starts to look maybe like a good idea, followed by experimentation and failure. And so you need the ability to express that ideas in order to get creative thinking. And so creativity is one of them. risk tolerance is another, you know, if you want to kind of move quickly or fail fast is sort of the older version of that adage, fail early fail, often, you need to have high risk tolerance. And all of those things are things that require the same thing that you said, the ability to be vulnerable to fail to take risks. And that also requires you to ask for help, and requires everybody to be working for the benefit of everybody else, as you said, independent with mutual concern.

Charles Vogl 26:05

Yeah, I think next time we ought to talk about then what it takes to start building trust where it's not, or it's not big enough, because obviously, that isn't always easy and obvious, because it was every would have it. What I really love about the wisdom you're sharing is, we can be distracted with putting in more communication, just volume and formal communication. And while that might be a bandaid for the crisis at hand, it's not what's going to get us home for what we want, that we have invested in a different thing. And if someone is distracted with material outcomes, what's going to come out of this conversation, then they're not going to invest in just what looks to them, like a waste of time building relationship of trust, which I'm assuming you would agree with me is going to include finding points of empathy, discovering points of commonality. And then in the best case scenario, revealing vulnerability, so that everybody involved understands that everybody else through Him is not only fallible, but that we are all aware that we are fallible, and until that's in the room, it's very hard to have any trust at hand or even to acknowledge then how failures harm others and it makes them wary to participate at a deeper level. Well, thanks so much for this experimental pilot episode. So today, we talked about two ideas that have other ideas attached to them. The first one is that no matter how successful we are working on really big challenges and issues, it may always look like failure, because we're never going to completely handle it. That may be what success looks like. And along with that the idea that we need to remain humble in the face of the challenge we're taking on otherwise you just burn out because we're not going to conquer it. And then you're really helpful insight that often people add communication when they really need to do is be investing in trust. And when we have a relationship often communication has a dependent relationship on trust and we have to attend to the trust. Thank you, Emily for this time, and I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Until then, by the old wisdom new Aaron podcast associate producer is Margot Madonna. post production by podcast Fast Track theme music light patterns is written and produced by Gil Tell me courtesy of constant music. I'm your host Charles Vogel and until next time, take it slower than you think you should.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai