Startup to Last

Tyler: In this episode, we're going to talk about impostor syndrome. Do you want to kind of explain what you had in mind here?Rick: Yeah. So you know this. I left PeopleKeep after 11 years. For most of the time, I was the leader of the company under various titles, most recently CEO. I left in October. So it's been about nine months now.Rick: One of the big reflections I had was sometimes how I treated people. Sometimes I was super impatient with people and put certain immediate business goals over really trying to make people feel good about what we were doing or where we were going. And I regret those moments because it was so short sighted, right? And so, as I look back and analyze why did I do that? I think a lot of those situations where fear-based. I was scared of missing a short-term goal, or I was scared of what I want to talk to you today about. Feeling like I might be found out as a fraud, as a CEO. And so I want to talk to you about this because I wonder if you ever feel this way? I guess impostor syndrome could be defined as a fear of being found out as a fraud. But I would go a step further and say, do you ever feel like a fraud in your job or catch yourself making decisions not based on what's right but out of fear?Tyler: Yeah, I mean, okay. So I definitely feel like a fraud all the time. I'm of the opinion that the only people who aren't are sociopaths. Everyone I've ever talked to no matter how accomplished they are, everyone's like, “Oh, I don't belong here. Everyone's smarter than me,” and all that. I definitely feel that way just constantly, yeah. It's surprising to me to hear that you did so much.Rick: Oh, yeah. Constantly. And I think it caused me to work a lot more than I needed to. That's the fear of failure. It caused me to stress and worry about things that were outside of my control unproductively, and I think it caused me in certain situations to make the wrong decision.Tyler: Interesting. Yeah. Well, so the reason I was surprised to hear that is because on the surface maybe more than anyone I've ever met you seem like the classic CEO type.Rick: Are you calling me a sociopath?Tyler: No, no. What I mean is you're type A personality. Do you agree with that?Rick: Define a type A personality?Tyler: Like you... Well, yeah, maybe I don't have the best definition. But I interpret that to mean like, you aren't afraid of conflict. You kind of say what you mean. You're just kind of a person who's in control and likes being in control. And maybe this was me just not seeing what's beneath the surface, but you work really hard. You read a million books, you network, you make connections. To be honest, half my impostor syndrome comes from looking at you and being like, oh, no, that's what a CEO looks like. I'm not doing any of that stuff.Fear-based decisions and regretRick: The interesting thing to me isn't to discuss whether people feel this way because I think everyone does. I think what's scary is... I think what I reflected on was not necessarily that I had this, it's how I dealt with it.Tyler: Okay.Rick: And so, I think that, let's assume for purposes of this part of the conversation that everyone has some feelings of impostor syndrome or being fraud. And that's a fear thing. What I think in certain situations I did was, let that dominate my emotions. And that could have resulted in me not being thoughtful about how I was communicating with someone in a moment, or making a decision that was fear-based versus opportunistic. I hypothesize that a lot of decisions leaders make, they make out of fear and maybe those are the decisions that they regret the most. Does that resonate with you?Tyler: Yeah. I think I have a very different reaction to it than you do. I think that using kind of generic words like fear and regretting a decision, I think those still apply, but like, it takes a very different form for me. But yeah, definitely. I'm trying to think of the worst decisions that I've made.Tyler: The number one worst one was certainly made out of fear, although I'm not sure it's a fear that was rooted in feeling like an impostor. And that was that I had an employee that I needed to fire. It was obvious to me that I did but I was just like, oh, I'll make it work, this or that. And I just waited for him to quit and he did eventually, thankfully, because it could have dragged on forever. But that's by far when I look back at myself as a leader. That's my weakest moment ever. It was fear-based. I don't think it was impostor syndrome based for me.Rick: What was the fear?Tyler: Well, first of all, I just hate confrontation. I guess this is maybe a little different from impostor syndrome. Part of it is that I took a big risk hiring him and I convinced him to take a big risk accepting the offer. And you're admitting you failed is one of the things. Now, I'm normally not too afraid of failure, but when it's really impacting another person's livelihood or something like that, the pressure is really high. And I think I was just afraid to say, I'm putting an end to this. I don't know.Tyler: I've definitely had other moments though, where... The thing is, I think my reaction to impostor syndrome is to remove all of the things that I feel unconfident about. And so it's less. I think maybe it sounds like you were saying you kind of lash out almost. I do the opposite. I withdraw and say, "Oh, well. I don't think I'm good enough of a leader to do this thing. I'm just not going to do it." The company doesn't do that. That's not in our core competency.Rick: Interesting. So yeah, maybe it kind of gets into fight or flight.Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Rick: I have a fight response, while you have a flight response.Tyler: Yeah, when you were talking I was thinking exactly that. You're one of those animals that gets real violent when they're backed into a corner.Rick: Yeah, when I've been under the anesthesia for surgeries before, and I had to learn this, I always forget because I don't get surgeries very often, but I do know this now. Before I go under, I have to tell them when they bring me out of the anesthesia they have to tie me down because… Tyler: Wow.Rick: ... I come out and I come out swinging. Which isn't great when you're getting a shoulder surgery.Tyler: Yeah, seriously. Wow. I didn't even know that was a thing. But yeah, I mean, I don't want to...Rick: You probably come out going boohoohoo!Tyler: Yeah, probably crying about something awkward I did in third grade. But yeah, okay. So I think we're saying we experience the same things, but we have very different reactions to them.Rick: Yeah, but do you regret that reaction? I guess, do you feel like you're missing out on... Are you fleeing from something and making decisions for the company that are fear-based, flight-based that aren't the right decisions?Tyler: This may be taking...

In this episode, we discussed salary transparency. After some back and forth, we concluded that a company’s salary transparency policy should be based on its personnel strategy. In other words, how you handle salary transparency, whether it's no transparency, partial transparency or full transparency, entirely depends on the people you have and more importantly the people you want to attract.Before you decide on a compensation strategy, you should identify the people you need to hire to execute your business plan. This includes what the job functions are and who you want to recruit. If some version of salary transparency will help you recruit and retain those people, go for it! If not, it might be best to shy away.The philosophical idea of transparency vs application in the real worldTyler: So today we're going to talk about salary transparency and I mean, who knows where this will go. But, this has been on my mind recently. I recently gave a presentation to our company about how we think about salary and how people get raises and that type of thing. The question I'm posing here is, should companies tell everybody, “here's what every single person at the company makes” (full salary transparency), or should they not be transparent at all so that each person only knows their own salary. Or is there something in between? Rick: Yeah, so when you mentioned this is going to be the deep dive today, my initial reaction was, “I love it.” But then I started thinking about how this conversation could go and the way I look at this is that, philosophically, I believe in full transparency with most things in life, if not all things. I just don't think people can handle it. Most people are not equipped emotionally, myself included in a lot of cases, to handle the burden of transparency.Tyler: And so when you say they can't handle it, I assume what you mean is you hear that the person next to you makes 5% more. And then it's just like in the back of your mind, like, "Well, why is that person better than me?" Or something like that?Rick: The best way to summarize it is “ignorance is bliss”, right? And new information causes change cycles to happen. And when you go through a change cycle, you become an evil person. You become the worst person you are when you have to deal with change because it creates this fear and it brings out all these primal emotions and people do really crazy things when they have that type of change cycle.Rick: So from a philosophical standpoint, I love it. I want all people in the world to be able to talk about all things and have a really good conversation about it and make the best decision together without emotion being a negative factor.Tyler: Yeah. But there is emotion.Rick: That rarely plays out when I see full transparency happening. Most people take it personally.What does salary transparency accomplish for an organization?Tyler: Okay. So if I hear what you're saying, you're basically, it's philosophical belief versus what happens in reality and they kind of clash with each other. But there's a reality on the other side, which is even if you don't have transparency, in this day and age, can you actually keep it a secret? And if not, maybe the reality goes in the other direction where it's like, “I agree with all the problems you have, but if it's going to come out anyway, don't you want to control that message?”Rick: So I guess the question is what do we want to accomplish as an organization and what are we trying to do? So I would say if I had my way in the world, I would go, "Let's do full transparency with everything to cash balance.” I would start there and my main goal with that is let's have full trust, number one, so that everyone knows where they stand and two, let's provide everyone context, or the same information I have as the CEO, so that people are more empowered to make the right decisions across the organization. That's the core goal with transparency for me.Rick: Now when you start going, "Oh, well, there are all these other problems that salary transparency can solve," I'd rather talk about those problems as the topic and say, "Okay, well let's figure out how we solved that." And maybe salary transparency is a way to go about that. But when I think about salary transparency and a problem, I'm thinking about, "Okay, I'm going to increase trust with employees. I'm going to give them information to help them make better decisions."Tyler: Maybe these are subsets of what you just said, but there's definitely an element of equity and fairness in it, which statistics say basically some people are more likely to negotiate on their behalf. And so if you don't give this information to people, what you end up with is what looks like things like a gender pay gap or a racial pay gap and things like that, which is very real, but it's really because people don't even know that they should have gone to negotiate or something like that.Rick: Yeah, so that's a good example of a problem I would say that I would not first go to salary transparency to solve that problem because of the cons of salary transparency. In my opinion, the person who, and I'm interested in your opinion on this because you always have a different view on this type of stuff than me. My opinion is let's train the person how to talk about money confidently before we give them all the information about all the money people are making. If they aren't comfortable negotiating, what are they going to do with information that they don't even feel comfortable talking about their own information about? In other words, if they're uncomfortable talking about their own pay, imagine how their brain is going to discuss internally with themselves other people's pay relative to theirs.Tyler: Well, it may not be that they aren't comfortable talking about their pay. It may be that they don't even know that they need to. Like they may think they're fairly paid and they're not.Rick: Then what's the problem we're trying to solve?Tyler: Well, the company, A, might care about fairness just for personal values, setting aside business, but B, you're sitting on a landmine when they do find out. What effectively happened is you've been underpaying them for a long time and they didn't know it.Rick: Well, who's saying underpaid? I guess this is the philosophical question related to this problem: what is fairness and when you say someone is being underpaid, what does that mean?Tyler: So what I'm talking about, I'll put this in very like dollars and cents capitalist terms here. If you have two people who are providing equal value to the business, they should probably be paid the same amount. But if one went and negotiated and the other one didn't even realize that they were not paid what their full market rate was, you're creating this scenario where effectively the company's kind of taking advantage of this person because they're uninformed. Now maybe they can get away with it forever and one might argue that's fine. But to my landmine comment, as soon as it comes out, and especially if it comes out and then you find out, "Oh, there's demographic trends here," that's a real bad look for the company.Rick: I react to that as, “why does t...