The Future of the Workplace

Andy Yen: Founder/CEO @ProtonMail & @ProtonVPN.

---

At Forward Thinking Workplaces, we are discovering the people, insights, and strategies that lead to Forward Thinking minds, leaders, and workplaces of the future — today. 

---

Few CEOs have the courage to engage with me in the Forward Thinking Workplaces interviews.

Andy Yen, CEO at ProtonMail, is one of the exceptions. He is a global leader in creating spaces where people can speak honestly and in online privacy.

Because this interview is published in The Future of the Workplace, I can’t share the full content.

However, I can share the key takeaways and his responses to the first two opening questions.

• Having a relatively flat hierarchy allows everybody to contribute ideas no matter what their level is in the organization.
• The open sharing of knowledge and ideas helps organizations be more innovative as well as change and adapt more quickly.
• Getting the best performance and full attention means getting the right job fit for people.
• It’s important to tailor people’s duties to leverage their strengths and weaknesses.
• Make sure that everybody has a lot of meaning in their work, so people can see the impact their work has on the world.
• Leaders should ask employees, “How can you do your job better?”
• It’s important for people to have the right motivation, so they can learn faster, adapt faster, and work harder.
• The main question we should ask ourselves is, “Are we proud of our work?”
• It’s a very poor business model for society when we remove the privacy, confidentiality, and security required to have an honest discussion.

If you’d like to read the full interview with Andy Yen, more information on the book is available at thefutureoftheworkplacebook.com.

To your forward thinking life & great success!

—Bill

Bill Fox, Founder, Forward Thinking Workplaces

---

How can we create workplaces where every voice matters, everyone thrives and finds meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally?

Andy Yen: Inside our company, one thing that’s helped us a lot is having a rather flat hierarchy. Everybody can contribute ideas no matter what their level is in the organization.

The open sharing of knowledge and ideas helps us be more innovative and allows us to change and adapt more quickly.

We have a culture where anybody who wants to talk to the upper management can. This allows everyone to have a sense that their voice matters. It also allows ideas to come from any corner of the organization. Even ideas for one department can come from a different department. This open sharing of knowledge and ideas helps us be more innovative and allows us to change and adapt more quickly.

What does it take to get an employee’s full attention and best performance?

Andy: You need to have an efficient workforce to be competitive. For getting the best performance and full attention, it’s getting the right fit for people.

Getting the best performance and full attention means getting the right fit for people.

There’s always a job description, but it’s very rare when someone is 100% a perfect fit down to the last detail. Everybody has their individual quirks, habits, strengths, and weaknesses. It’s important to tailor people’s duties to leverage their strengths and weaknesses. This requires management to be more flexible and tentative at the beginning. When you get people into a role where they fit, you see that the results become dramatically better.

Note: This is a preview of the full interview. The complete interview was selected by Apress for publication and continues in The Future of the Workplace.

David Marquet: president at Intent-Based Leadership International and author of Turn the Ship Around!. David also publishes a popular 1-minute series called Leadership Nudges on YouTube. 

---

At Forward Thinking Workplaces, we are discovering the people, insights, and strategies that lead to Forward Thinking minds, leaders, and workplaces of the future — today. 

---

How can we create workplaces where every voice matters, everyone thrives and finds meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally?

David: My short answer is that we give people more control. It’s all about giving control. Anytime you give control, it’s giving control within the structure and giving control within bounds. But fundamentally it’s all about giving people control. 

Give people more control. Control over how they work, where they work, and what they work on.

Do you believe the experience you had aboard the USS Santa Fe that was featured in your book, Turn the Ship Around!, accomplished the question we are asking here?

David: Yes, but we were driven there not from a desire to change things but out of survival. There was this idea that it really sucks to work here, and we need to make things better just from an ethical point of view. But it was really more about survival.

We were driven there out of survival instinct. I just physically couldn’t run around and manage people on a machine as complex as a nuclear submarine. If people are just going to give orders (including me), some of them will work and some of them won’t work. People will try to follow orders and we’re going to make a mistake.

We all know the situation where the leader gave an order and there’s this foreboding sense of this is perhaps not right or maybe we’ll get away with it. Then the organization does it and then it turns out that people die. It’s a legitimate fear. I tell people you don’t need to be pushed into it out of fear, I hope you are not. I much rather you see this as “the light on the hill” and move in that direction not from a place of fear but from a place of aspiration.

How do we give people more control?

David: The way we talk about giving people more control is there are two things. One is giving people the control part and the other one is the change that’s wrapped up in a change management structure. 

But basically, the way we give people control is by changing the language.

For example, we use a device called the Ladder of Leadership. Basically, there are seven layers and the safest path of least resistance is when someone comes to you and says, “Tell me what to do,” and when there’s an applied tell me what to do you just tell them what to do. It takes psychological strength to resist telling them what to do and to say instead, “Well, what’s your take on the situation or what do you see here or what would you do if you were me?” You need to jump track to the next higher level.

We say push authority to information as opposed to information to authority.

We have a very language-based approach to it. We say philosophically you want to push authority to information as opposed to information to authority, but the mechanisms are the interactions that happen all day long. You can have a hundred of them all day long with all your people. They happen in email. They happen in meetings. They happen on the phone. They happen face-to-face. And in all those interactions, just be attuned to where the other person is and resist falling into the trap of telling them what to do.

It also requires knowing who owns what. Ownership is very important. Instead of focusing on past achievement, leaders focus on task ownership. In a traditional organization, we say, “Bill you’re responsible for this, and on Tuesday I’m going to come down to your office with my little checklist and see how are you doing on steps 1, 2, and 3.” In that situation, we call it stealing ownership.

Even though I said it’s yours, my actions are really stealing the ownership, creativity and authority over it in the end because now you’re feeling, “Oh crap, now I need to answer a bunch of questions.”

So the onus is on ownership. “Go, this is yours. Let me know what you need.” But this is also a message that many times the workers and followers in the organization love to hear. Then I say, “But it puts a greater onus on you, a responsibility on you being transparent and visible to your boss about what you’re doing.” You say, “Oh great, I’m in charge of it,” then we go disappear into our cubby hole and come out in two months. No, no, that’s not going to work. You are going to lose the right to be in control of your life. Transparency is what gives you the right to be in control of your life.

Note: This is a preview of the full interview. The complete interview was selected by Apress for publication and continues in The Future of the Workplace.

John Bell: Former CEO, Jacobs Suchard. John reflects on leadership, branding, and life at the CEO Afterlife. He also is the author of Do, Less Better. Read our review of John’s book at What’s Stopping You from Doing Less Better?

---

At Forward Thinking Workplaces, we are discovering the people, insights, and strategies that lead to Forward Thinking minds, leaders, and workplaces of the future — today!‌

---

‌How can we create workplaces where every voice matters, everyone thrives and finds meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally?

John Bell: I read this question three times before realizing that the answer can be found within the question. Voices will matter, people will thrive, and innovation will become ingrained in the culture if—people find meaning. So if people can find meaning, you can satisfy the question. But that begs another question, “How do people find this elusive meaning in their work?”

Voices will matter, people will thrive, and innovation will become ingrained in the culture if—people find meaning.

In my experience, the starting place is a corporate purpose that not only resonates with employees but binds them together. Sure, we’d all prefer a moral purpose, such as working for a company that saves lives or saves the planet. But that’s not to say that people can’t be inspired by a company vision that thrills customers, pleases people, and brings fulfillment.

For example, I’ll share my experience with Apple. When you are a tech neophyte like me, you can spend a lot of time talking on the phone to technical support people. When I got my iPhone, I spent a lot of time talking to the techies at Apple. I was blown away by their work ethic and their desire to help. They can’t do enough for you, so I asked one of the reps about their process, “Are you not on a quota because you’re not rushing me here or anything.” The rep said, “No, there are no quotas at all. The satisfaction of the customer judges us.” He went on to say that if you do an excellent job, you get a better choice of work hours and schedule. Now, there’s a voice that matters.

At L.L. Bean, the idea of selling outstanding apparel and outdoor equipment at a reasonable profit and treating customers like human beings is worth the effort. For Wegmans Food Markets, it’s all about caring, respect, empowerment, and making a difference. Organizations that walk the talk create Work that Matters. And when you have work that matters, you have more voices that matter and people that thrive personally and professionally.

Note: This is a preview of the full interview. The complete interview was selected by Apress for publication and continues in The Future of the Workplace.

Howard Behar: President (Retired), Starbucks.

---

At Forward Thinking Workplaces, we are discovering the people, insights, and strategies that lead to Forward Thinking minds, leaders, and workplaces of the future — today. 

---

How can we create workplaces where more voices matter, people thrive and find meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally?

Howard Behar: I have this little saying, “The person who sweeps the floor chooses the broom.” What I mean by that is the person who has a responsibility in certain areas is given authority, responsibility, and accountability. That means you’ve got to give them room to make mistakes and to grow primarily as people first, and then as employees.

The keyword here is trust. What makes a family healthy? What makes it so the kids can strike out on their own? What makes it so our partners can stretch out on their own? It’s the trust we build with each other—that’s what has to happen in organizations too. When you have trust, it’s amazing what can happen.

When there’s trust, it’s amazing how people can begin to use their own creativity because they lose that fear of being judged. They lose the fear of making mistakes.

They go out there and do things that serve each other and serve their customers. It’s not complicated. It’s half building trust and caring about each other while encouraging each other. As a leader, it’s giving them responsibility and accountability to let them “choose their broom.”

You know it’s not really employees and customers. That’s a word we all use to describe who we work and do business with. It’s one human being serving another human being. That’s what it is. At the end of the day, that’s what we were put on the earth to do. It doesn’t make any difference in your job description or your title; we’re all servers of human beings.

Note: This is a preview of the full interview. The complete interview was selected by Apress for publication and continues in The Future of the Workplace.