Welcome to Hal leaders lead where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple that you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today's guest is Juliette Funt, the CEO of the Juliette Funt Group, where she's a tough love advisor to Fortune 500 companies like Google, Costco, Nike and Spotify. She's also an author and we're going to talk about her book, A Minute to Think throughout the conversation. Now, when was the last time you actually had a minute to think? Because if you're like a lot of leaders, your calendars are just jam-packed and when you're not meeting, you can hardly keep up with constant emails and a task list that seems to have no end. So what are we supposed to do about the kind of work where we need to stop and think before we respond? Or when we need to strategize about a crisis that's imminent? Or we just simply need to have that quiet time where we really understand where we need to take the business. There just doesn't seem to be time and it's costing us in more ways than we can ever imagine. Juliette is about to teach us how we can get rid of some of that busyness that shows up in all of us and help us become a better leader. There's so many practical takeaways in this episode and I can't wait for you to listen in. Here's my conversation with my new friend and soon to be yours, Juliette Funt. You know, I heard you do this once and I want to ask you to do it for us. I'm about to turn on Flight of the Bumblebee. And I want you to describe for me the work environment most of us are living in these days. Okay. All right, ready? Yeah. All right. You, if you're a typical worker, probably, wake up in the morning, hit the snoo ze button, you sleep for five more minutes and you're up, you're at the grocery brush, get into the kitchen looking for breakfast, maybe scrambled eggs, maybe French toast, ha ha, yeah, right? You get into the car, you got a power barn, one hand a cell phone and the other and you're driving with your knees. You get into the office, you start flag prioritizing your email read for emergency yellow for time sensitive and green for this can wait. You end up with 227 reds and a green. You go to a meeting and another meeting and another meeting and another meeting and another meeting and finally a lunch conference call on which you have to spend the entire time listening to the typing and sandwich eating of the one person who doesn't hit mute and I could go on, but we're on a podcast. So I'll probably stop there, but that's how work feels for people every day. It's amazing. We're all still standing. I agree. And that was great. You know, and you have the opportunity to consult with a lot of leaders as the CEO of Juliet Funt Group. Tell me about the work that you do and the problem you're really trying to help companies solve. Yeah, we all center around this critical metaphor of building a fire. And if I explain that to you, then everything else will fall into place. So I grew up in Manhattan. I never learned how to build a fire as a kid, but I learned along the way. And it seems that whatever ingredients you have, if you have good wood and you have a fire starter and pine cones, nothing that you do will ever be complete. If you forget one critical ingredient and that is the space. It's the space in between the combustibles that lets a fire draw that spark into a burning blaze and it turns out that people and talent and ideas are the same. But if they are oxygenated, then they can roar and yet most people do what we just did, that satirical fast day and they walk in and their spark is immediately extinguished by emails, meetings, decks, paperwork. So we go in with a twofold goal. One is to create space and the others to eliminate waste because we have to dec rapify the workday so that people can have that oxygenating space. And we're seeing a million ways now post pandemic with burnout and resignation that the space deficit is coming to a head. It really is. I love that decrapify the work. That really gives you a great word picture of what the problem is. What a great concept you have here. How did you come up with that basic concept as a leader? So many years ago in the book we talk about there are basically three things that came together to create the foundational term. We call that space white space. And the reason that we call it white space is back in the day of private coaching executives. I'd sit with them and we would open up their day planner and we would literally look for white space on each page that if there was white paper showing that meant that the day still had possibility and flexibility and that there could be creative runway. But most days now if you open a digital calendar, mostly it is, the day looks like a paint swatch. Just color, color, color, color, color, color. And there is a grand presumption that high value work could possibly be done in that arena. And it doesn't work. It can't be. And that's why everyone works at night and on the weekend and early in the morning and in a torturous extra shift after the kids go to bed because they know that's the only place that real work can get done. And that's not a sustainable pattern. You're absolutely right. And when I was running young brands, I always tried to really carve out quiet time. I love my times on the airplane when I was traveling. A lot of times I would just block out some time where I could literally look out the window and reflect and hopefully generate some fresh ideas. Is this a common practice for leaders? What do you see people doing today? Well, I think that you and I are about the same age and I think that there is a generational respect for thoughtful time because we remember when you walked into the boss's office and they had their feet up and they were looking out a window and your immediate response at that time was, oh, this is the golden hour. They're cooking the future of the business. They're writing our story and you'd sneak out. And now the response to thoughtfulness is just plain different. It's a shameful hidden thing that people do around the corner because if you try to think in a regular office, somebody is going to come up to you and say, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? And so we have to begin first with the general posture of thoughtfulness and replacing that on its status level where it should have been, which is how great work gets done. I do think that there are leaders that as you go up the chain that give themselves more and more permission to do that. I think leaders forget because busyness is very seductive, but they don't often empathize with how impossible it is right below them and then right below that and right below that to ever have a sip of oxygen. And so our work, we always work with an intact population. We won't even train leaders without their people because we want an entire community liberated by space, by permission to recuperate and think and ponder and create . And when that becomes a norm, then everybody within that group feels free and safe to try and understand. Oh, that makes so much sense to get everybody together and really understand what the problem is and then come up with solution to attack it. I used to teach a leadership program for years and one of the things that I found is that everybody loved it when I really talked about the real struggles I had, the mistakes that I made in my career so that they could learn from them as well. Can you tell us a story that will give us a glimpse of what your life was like when you first started this framework around all that you're doing to help companies today? I think you might know my father, Alan Fund, from Candy Camera. Absolutely, you know, the Candy Camera, and I have to tell you, when I was a kid, we just gathered around the television set and we watched Candy Camera, my two sisters, my mom and dad, and we loved your father, Alan Fund. We just laughed. It was our favorite show of the week. Yeah. So I was going to talk to you about that later. But yeah, I made the connection and it's a great connection. It is and some of your younger listeners may need a little decoding here. It was basically punked back when taste was in style, which is what we like to say, but it was the first ever reality television show. And so I come from a very high achieving family looking at this famous daddy as a template. I am a go-go, fast-paced lady and the summary of what you're asking me is I eventually wrote the book that I needed to read. But one of the things about my naturally driven personality is that I met people along the way who were similar to me in their drive and pressure and perfectionism, but who were more trapped because they weren't entrepreneurial. They didn't drive their own ship. They couldn't pull it back when they wanted to. And that corporate portrait of the person at work tolerating the misery of work , that was what really fired me up to write this book. I wanted them to know that they were not alone and I wanted them to know that there was a manageable path out. And there are lots of stories in the book. I love this one woman named Mindy. We call her the peanut butter manager because after her promotion in her sales department, she became so overloaded that she just said, "Lunches for other people. I'm going to just keep a jar of peanut butter on my desk and I'll take a spoon ful every time my blood sugar gets low." And this is the way she lived and worked. She is one of hundreds of stories of just the things that we put up with in the name of being employees. And so those people needed a specific framework. It took us really 20 years to perfect it, but then we wrote it down, a specific framework to exit the paradigm of misery at work. And that's really why I do the work I do. I'll tell you a story on the flip side that I just heard yesterday. If you want a beautiful experience of what space can feel like way over on the other side, we were doing some work with these GE executives who run the power grid. And I think they might get this wrong, but I think they've run something like a third of the world's power grids from this group of 17 people. And one of the guys Brendan told me a story. We're talking about space and creativity and we're great ideas blossom when you have sufficient oxygen. He said they would put them in his earlier career into task forces to solve creative problems. And we basically lock six or seven guys in a hotel room for weeks on end. And you stay as long as it takes and you get up early and you just keep pounding on the problem. He said Thursday's were the day where there was always this aha game changing breakthrough idea. And so I finally asked him why Thursday? And he said because on Wednesdays we did laundry. And that's the day that we stepped back and we folded and we watched the dryer and all that beautiful stuff could cook and percolate. And so if someone came in on Thursday and they weren't on their game they would say what's the matter didn't do your laundry. Oh I love that story. And yes and this is what we have possible for us if we can just give permission for that kind of space. So you do a lot of consulting with all these high powered companies and outstanding leaders. But you also run a company yourself. And a lot of times people when they run companies they have a hard time practice in what they preach. What do you do consistently to reduce overload in your own business or how do you do the laundry? Because I imagine for you the work never stops and there's a lot of time demand on you as a leader. Your clients want to see you all the time. You got a lot of pressure on you. I do. I have pretty samurai boundaries at this point I will say but is it easier because of the team agreements that we live within. And that's why we only change communities we don't change just leaders because when you have team agreements things become much easier. So as an example we have a team agreement at our company that we are what's called a row a results only work environment. And because everybody knows that they know that the only thing that matters in the wide world of our employing them is their results. We don't care where they work when they work. We just care that at the end they move the right needle. It just remind me I hired this woman away from a very typical corporate environment. She was so unused to that team agreement. She'd come in and say my husband and I it's our anniversary and we were thinking of going a little early to dinner. And I would say fine it's a results only work environment. She'd say my youngest needs to go the pediatrician and I had to keep reassuring her over and over and over that sitting in a particular chair for a particular duration of time was not the value system. And when we finally broke her of that old philosophy it was very empowering. You can have team agreements around so many things. Email, communication, notifications, saying no, family, prioritization. And when you make those team agreements you kind of sew them all together and boom you've made a quilt that is your culture. What's the process you use Juliet to really get a team agreement? I mean I guess there is honestly sort of a top down essence with us where we're small and nimble enough that we were basically living the philosophy of the book. So for us the double checking every day is is there anything in this book? Is there anything in our teaching that we don't earnestly live? And everybody's just checking against that IP to be specific and not every company has it. They have mission statements and visions and values but they sit on the wall. In fact I was on the phone this morning with a client in Nigeria and they're very proud of this thing they call BEQED which is an acronym that stands for all the things they want their culture to be. I can't remember what they are. Brave, engaged, empowered, etc. And the buyer was very proud that every single employee could say the word, the acronym BEQED and knew what it meant. And I asked her how does that show up behaviorally? What are the things that they actually do to live into a reality of BEQED and there was silence? Because we don't translate those mission and vision statements down into here's what this looks like in the movie of your life. I want you to do this. I'll give you another example I was just on with a large tech company and they are doing something that is also a problem about translating team agreements down. They're trying to do it through narrative which means they have a big organization and all the leaders are running around saying send less emails, say no to meetings but it's just what they're saying. There's no framework. So there's an awful lot of potential pitfalls that people fall into. I think that team agreements do tend to stem from the leaders personality and usually it's the most senior leader that people are mimicking and following. I don't think team agreements are as easy to organizationally build from the bottom up. Yeah, so you really believe it's the shadow. You cast as the leader that other people are basically following when it relates to the kind of culture you're creating in your company. And the culture and the values. If you're a big super duper giant senior executive and you say I'm leaving at 345 for a dance recital, you've changed thousands of people's lives from that inadvert ent modeling. Conversely, if you're sending emails at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning and a little pissed when you don't get a fast response, then you're setting the opposite tone. I went to my daughter's field hockey games, always scheduled them, made sure I went. I always used to say, hey, look, if you've got something important like that in your family, go do it. But if there's work that needs to be done, you figure out how to get that done. But make sure you make what you think is a priority for your family, a true priority. How do you feel about that kind of statement, that kind of approach? I think it's beautiful as long as it's true. So there's a really tempting, dualistic message where a leader might say, and I don't think this would be you because I've heard about your heart-centered approach. But if there's a leader who runs the party line and says, please take off for family, but then when people do take off for family, they get a scowl or a little mini- eyeroll or a little bit of a silent message that you are not a team player. And that duality, that gap between the leader, what they say and what they actually live into drives people a little bit crazy, I have to say. I've heard you talk about, and I've read you your thinking about what you call the thieves of productivity. Could you walk us through those and explain why they're so important to be aware of as we lead our teams? Let me give the context, and then I'll teach the thieves because context is so important. So that word you loved, "decrapify," is about waste. It's all, did the junk, the CCZ emails, the reports that nobody reads. That sense of wasteful work has a dollarizable number to it. And the reason I know that is we do this, we take salary data, we find the value of one hour, we find out what people report as waste, we cut the waste number in half because people like to complain, and then we dollarize it, and we tend to see about a million dollars of waste for every 50 people in an organization. What is that waste? That's low value work taking talent time. So in order to change that, you have to find out where the leak is coming from. What's the source of all of this sort of swirling busyness? And what we found is that it comes from four places. And what's ironic about the thieves, these four things, is that they are good things. They are assets, and they have just accidentally run amok. They're drive, excellence, information, and activity. And all of them are things that you'd look for, you'd hire for, drive, excellence, being informed, being active. But in the age of overload, they morph, and drive becomes overdrive. Success turns into perfectionism. Information slides into information overload. And then activity just becomes frenzy. They are the reason that we keep aggregating all of this nonsense work. And so you have to understand them so that you can cut them off at the source. And that's a big part of our framework is what is the methodology after being aware of that, and how do you begin to tame the thieves? I would think about when I look at myself, I'd say drive would probably be my issue, particularly when I was coming up in my career. I would go from drive to overdrive, and really try to show everybody how ambitious I was, what I was trying to get done. And I worked round the clock. So drive was a great thing, but I probably took it too far. Do you have a thief that you have to fight every day? Oh, absolutely mine is excellence. I'm a rabid wild perfectionist. I'm watching these three boys. I have grown up 12, 14, 16, just praying that somehow they've avoided it, but they have two perfectionistic parents and they're absolutely, you know, apple to the tree . And that can be a beautiful thing. Now maybe when I'm doing four iterations of a business card and sending it back as the teal is not right. That's not quite what we want. But they all have beautiful qualities. My perfectionism is responsible for so much specificity, beauty, thoughtfulness in my work, but it also can tie me to unnecessary overkill in lots of directions. And your drive is beautiful got you where you are. It makes things happen. It can create scope, but if misused, it can exhaust and it can overwhelm and it can also have too many different plates spinning at the same time. I'll tell you a thieves story. This guy named Steve Martin. It's not the Steve Martin, but that was his name was a data scientist at Microsoft. And they came to him. But we need a whole bunch of collateral for the sales team. Can you explain all your smart guy stuff to the sales team with a bunch of decks and PDFs? And he had a sense that it was unimportant work. He had a sense that it was the thief of information just poking at him, but he decided to comply with the request. And what he did is he built all the stuff, but he played, my father would have been proud, one of the greatest efficiency pranks of all time in every piece of collateral on the third page. He put a nice box, not sneaky, that said, if you're actually reading this far, email me and I'll send you an Amazon gift card for 50 bucks. And nobody ever wrote him because nobody ever got that far in any of the stuff. And then the team came back to him and they said, we need more stuff for the following year. And he was able to say, no, you don't. And by the way, none of you guys in your pre program review who requested the material even made it to the page where these offers were hidden. So it's so rife in our environment, but we can begin to exercise it one thing at a time. In your book, you also write that at work, expectations around pace are so ingrained in us. We similarly did not see them. Faster is better and work is competition where speed is a prime category to be judged. Talk to me about the idea of what you call hallucinated urgency. I think people need there's so much going on. They just need something that catches their attention and boy, the hallucinated urgency thing makes them say, Amen, that is me. It's everywhere. It's every element of time sensitivity is flattened. And there's just this sense of as soon as possible is the timeframe for every single touch. So how do we unwind that? Well, we teach this is a team agreement that you can teach. You teach that there are three levels of urgency in the real world when you're not tripping. And here's what they are. Something can be not time sensitive. If you're a leader, you have to shine a giant spotlight on that because no one will ever know that you intend for something to be not time sensitive, but it does exist. Then things can be tactically time sensitive and this is the subset where how fast you go actually does in fact influence a business result. This is where we care about speed. But then there's this giant catch all that's so interesting of emotionally time sensitive and emotionally time sensitive simply means it's masquerading as tactically time sensitive. And in reality, I'm just curious or I'm anxious or I really want to get a response right away. None of those things have a tactical tie to getting good work done. And so when you have this language, you can kind of begin to check in with each other and say, is there an element of emotional time sensitivity here? Is it possible this is actually not time sensitive? Is there really a tactical urgency here? And it gives teams wonderful ways to talk about it. Well, you have to I'm sure create shared experiences within your team so that you can get this alignment. Is that a critical component of your training? Yes, we train companies in a one business quarter process. It's about 12 weeks. We teach from the leaders down and then we teach everybody together. So when everybody is in a cadence learning something, let's say we're we got a thousand people and this week we're all talking about hallucinated urgency. Even if it's just a small amount of time, it's amazing to see the viral activity of a huge group of people or even a small group of people who are thinking about the same thing at the same time that has previously been unaddressed. A lot of things we teach are not even novel. They're just an excuse for common sense to turn into common practice and for people to say, listen, we have to stop doing this or we have to start doing that. You'd be amazed at how smart people can solve some of this when they slow down and when they have the space. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Juliette Funt in just a moment. As a leader, you influence your company's culture more than you realize. The man I've learned the most from when it comes to scaling the right kind of culture is Larry Sin, the chairman of Sin Delaney and the actual father and founder of the idea of corporate culture. How do you change habits of adults? How do you get successful people who may be too territorial or too controlling or want in power? People need epiphanies. They need aha moments in order to change behaviors. So I said, hey, I'm an engineer. Why do my engineer a series of exercises which create epiphanies around things like accountability, collaboration, positive spirit, coaching and feedback? So that's the heart of what we call inside-based or experiential learning, which is really the engine that drives our culture shaping work. So what kind of culture are you creating and how can you improve that part of your leadership? Go back and listen to my conversation with Larry Sin, episode 71, here on How Leaders Lead. You also have a strategy for leaders that you call a wedge. Talking about how that can help us in the fast-paced environments that we obviously all work in these days. Yes, we should talk about the wedge and then we should segue into the wedge for meetings because I think post-COVID, we have to touch meetings. People are in such pain, but the wedge is the foundational tool of getting white space to be real for you. It's a big problem even for leaders when people think, "I need 15, 30, 60 minutes of space. It might not happen for you." But if you start with interstitial, you imagine if you could see my fingers, they're pointed together like a church steeple pointing upwards. Imagine a wedge of space, 30 seconds, 10 seconds a minute, inserted in between activities that previously were connected. So between a project and picking up the next one or between getting a difficult email and responding to it or between driving into your driveway and stepping out to family, you're opening your Addys little minutes, a minute, a few seconds, two minutes, five minutes. And now you're oxygenating the day without the scary prospect of, "I'm going to block 60 minutes of white space," which I'll tell you in the beginning and even later can be hard for people. So the wedge is super accessible and everyone can do it. That totally makes sense. And how does it work in this hopefully post-COVID environment? I'll tell you that probably the most popular rule post-COVID is a use of the wedge. And it's a meeting where we should talk a little bit about these meetings. Meetings used to have a little bit of a time frame. Now, of course, the workday has expanded. Bloomberg's telling us two and a half hours longer is what we're working every day because we've lost the edges. We don't have the boundary in the morning. We don't have the boundary in the evening. Global teams even worse, more of an excuse to talk to China and Australia at insane times of the day and night. So we are going to have to, as a leadership community globally, rewrite the norms of COVID. We're going to have to replace the brackets at the beginning and the end of the day. Then we're going to have to change that paint swatch. Remember I said it was like color, color, color, color, color, color. And the foundational rule that you can play with, really easy one to try and teach is never let the colors touch. Because if you're looking at your, if we opened our outlook right now and we looked at one day, you'd probably see all the colors touching. But if you were to follow the rule of never let the colors touch, what that means is you would see stripes. There'd be white stripes of five, 10, 15 minute breaks in between each and every meeting, following the rule, never let the colors touch. If I could for a second, I'd like to go back a little bit and dive deeper into your background. You mentioned that your father was Alan Fon. Tell us about your upbringing. And if you could tell us a story about when you were a kid that really influenced the type of leader you are today. My parents had a lot of what we would call "service" in the Jewish community. There's a lot of difficulty before they got divorced. And there was a specific day, I don't know honestly whether this is a positive or negative, but my dad, like a lot of creatives, had a temper. And it was part of his genius just exploding out in a lot of different directions. And my mother took me aside one day and said she was trying to figure out a way to calm things down as the divorce was approaching. I don't think it was the greatest advice, but she was reaching. She said, "We're the nurses and he's a patient. We just have to keep the patient comfortable." And I think that this played into my leadership, but in a negative way, which is there are many, many years where I would keep another person happy at my own expense. I think in the early years of my career, I figured out what others might want from me as a leader. And I became a good chameleon at molding into that. And if I was with people who were a little bit more conservative, maybe I wouldn't ever change my truth or what I would say in content, but I would just sort of dress a little bit more conservative. Or maybe if I was with my hippie friends from our alternative school, I would lean a little bit more in that direction. And that chameleoning, honestly, I think, I've never spoken about this on a podcast, but I think came out of this idea of it's your responsibility to make other people comfortable. And I think that there was a time around 10 years ago where I began to really, really break with that and as part of aging and part of confidence. And it's been so positive to have enough objectivity to see that that was a trend for me. I know you meant to say a positive leadership trait, but it was a difficult period. And I look back on it, grateful to have clarity. I think it's actually ended up being a positive leadership trait for you. I mean, it actually took you a while to realize that. But did you have an aha moment where you said, hey, this isn't really right for me? Yes, I did. And it was pretty funny. I used to teach a lot of kids in the very early years. I was doing a lot of youth and education stuff. Anna Middle School asked me to write a curriculum about authenticity. And I wrote this piece that we still use to this day about what is the grad ation between being authentic, what we call purposeful authentic, which is your real self, but plus a filter to be appropriate and then contrived, which is where you completely lose yourself. And I don't know if you're familiar with this, but sometimes you can write a teaching that sounds really good, even if you're not good at the thing, because you're a good writer and a good speaker. And I sat there talking to these nine-year-olds, and I was thinking authentic, purposeful authentic, contrived. And where am I on that gradation? And I really think that needing to write that Xeroxed handout for a bunch of middle schoolers was when I started noticing that I'm very, very sensitive. If I ever teach anything that isn't true for me, I said that earlier in our team agreements, it sits with me like a rash. And I don't think it was true for me. And I think that that was a moment where I began to make it more true. So that was a great learning for you. It took you a while, but I think in life, we all have to kind of work through those issues that we struggle with. And you got there and you seem to be doing pretty well now, Juliet. And I understand that you take your family all over the world to experience different cultures, and you've been really doing this the past few years. What was the genesis of that idea? Oh, goodie. Let's talk about travel. So there is a thing a lot of people don't know about, called world schooling. And it's actually a movement. They have websites. There are conferences. And we came across that about three and a half years ago. We decided to go out and trade school for travel. And we took our kids to, we lived in about 14 countries over the course of two and a half years before the pandemic hit. And it was just, it was so fascinating from a leadership point of view. Talk about confidence and authenticity. In the beginning, I thought, can I tell big shots at Microsoft and Nike that I 'm calling in from Bali or Croatia or wherever the heck we were or from a sailboat or a beach. And I found that as you started being, it's like actually another lesson in authenticity. When we started talking about it, it became the alluring white space victory story of all time. That if you could live this way and still run a team that was doing active high level work and still get work done and have that kind of flexibility, then it really became a very magnetic, exciting story for people and there was no need to hide it. But we had a marvelous time, we did, we called it skill chill. So we would pick different skills that we wanted the boys to learn or that I, we wanted to learn. And then in the middle between the skills, we would chill. We did leather working in Italy. We did sailing in Croatia. We did charity work in Myanmar. We went on this really fascinating trip before Myanmar was too dangerous to go there. And COVID did cut us short, but it's probably the greatest thing that I ever had a chance to do. That is just incredible. And I hope a lot of listeners take that into account and figure out how they can do it in whatever way that can work for them in their lives. What are you working on right now, Juliet, that you're most excited about? What's really got your juices flowing? Okay. Good question. Because it's very, very clear to me. We had announced in December after we launched a giant book with Harper Collins and read it every course that we owned and built a whole bunch of new courses during COVID that 2022 is going to be the year of no new things. And this year, we are doing nothing new. We are just doubling down and enjoying and perfecting and new on saying the things that we already have. And I have to tell you that this boundary of the year of no new things has turned into such a liberating concept that I have a very strong thought that 2022 is going to be the sequel of the year of no new things part two because it gives you away a really great way, but right now this new partnership right now, this new mastermind, not right now, this new hire, this new product, the crutch of it has really shown me how much depth we want to and can create and things that we've already built instead of just skipping a rock to the next goal or project or request from a client. And it's hardest when they do come to you and say, we want this, will you build it? But I'm pretty strong and we've been saying no and it's going fantastic. You and I have, I think maybe something in common. I like to think of myself as a creative person and you're obviously a very creative person. And I used to say that sometimes a worst thing that could happen to the organization is if I actually had a day when I didn't have anything to do, okay, because I would come up with new things to do before we'd actually done the things that needed to be done. When you saying no new things, was that a big challenge for you? Oh, it was huge, it was huge. And I think three days later or something, the first week in January, some big client from Vanguard came in and said, will you build this, you know, Shmati Shmat for us? And I had to say no. But we had not even touched the depth of things that we'd already started. And I don't know what that comes from that skittering along the top of quantity of ideas that are not really plumbed and not really nurtured. And I'm not kidding, we may extend it to next year because it's just been wonderful. And everybody's been able to calm down and think about what they care about and think about how things could just be better and better and better. The little things that we already have talked about being a perfectionist to look at the coursework, the way we talk to clients, the way we're sharing the book, you get that kind of freedom, business is better than it's ever been, and we're doing nothing new , nothing. What trends are you seeing right now in the successful companies you get to consult with it that we can really learn from? I think the biggest trend that I care about right now is who is in charge of the hybrid direction. I think that hybrid is such a worrisome phase that we're about to go into. I think real human beings, they were comfortable at work, then they got comfortable at home, now we're going to rip them out of their newly established home offices and ask them to come in a little here and a little there. And then they're going to make the schlep in and they'll be all by themselves on Zoom all day long because the other people who've literally didn't have to be in are not in, it's just a mess. So I have a real bias that employees have to drive hybrid design and that employee surveys and employee questioning and skip level meetings have to drive hybrid design. Now I will tell you my truth. I've actually never said this on a podcast because we were just deciding whether I could commit to this or not. But my real advice to these companies that we're talking to, you have to understand also this is very tied to the great resignation. People are just sick of this and they're finally leaving. So it's a retention issue also. My advice is to find certain days and certain memorable moments that are mandatory and then let everybody choose everything else on their own. If you say we're going to be in the office Tuesday and Thursday, but everybody gets to decide if they come in or not, it's just turning out to be a mess. And if you say that we have to be in all the time, you're going to lose a lot of good people. If you say we're going to be home all the time, all your boomers are going to be too cut off from the intimacy that they require with their peers. So my belief is that the way out of the woods is to really pick our battles. Maybe it's one day a week. Maybe it's one day a week plus certain events. And on those times, everybody's in. And then the rest of the time, it's an autonomy question. The part of it that we have to think through and we're actually consulting with some corporate realtor towels of ours is, you know, if you did that, you'd be leaving a lot of real estate pretty empty for a very expensive part of the week. But it may just be worth it to give people a feeling of freedom in such a difficult time. And this is the issue that where I wouldn't say we're through it yet, but we're talking and talking and talking about it. You know, Juliet, this has been so much fun. And I'd like to have a little bit more with you with some rapid fire questions. Are you ready for this? Oh, fun. Okay. Good. The three words that best describe you. Perky smart open. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be and why? Marie Forleo, because I have a giant fan girl crush on her. Your biggest pet peeve. Oh, biggest pet peeve husband half finishing the dishes at night, leaving three items mysteriously undone when the rest of kitchen is clean. The favorite country you visited. Oh, my gosh. New Zealand hands down. No contest. A book about leadership that you've learned the most from. Oh, my God. There are so many. I'm in love with at your best right now, Carrie Newhoff. I'll have to just give you current instead of forever. That's something about you that few people would know. That I was bitten by a tiger. Really? Okay. Out of that happened. My husband is a travel photographer. We were doing a photo shoot with the studios with these two baby tigers and I have a little tiger scar. It's my proudest moment. The best pizza place in New York City. Well, Ray is duh. And your favorite candid camera moment. Oh, Cinderella. You'll have to look it up. Google candid camera Cinderella. And what's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to improve as a leader? Take a minute to think. And you know, Juliet, I have to ask you one last question because, you know, I 've heard you talk about this and it's very, very powerful. There's a story in your book that reminds us why doing work to build the habit of pause is so important. And you actually called the story the ride. I'd like to wrap this up if you could just tell us about the ride. I often think that my entire life's work is to facilitate a corporate company that just gets me to the point where I get to share that one story. So I'm glad that you asked that. That's very touching. There's a woman who came up to me after an event. She said she wanted to tell me a story and she said that when she was a little girl, her father came to her and said, let's pack a picnic and let's go get mama and let 's go for a good old fashioned joy ride in the country. And they went into the kitchen and they made ham and cheese sandwiches and pink lemonade and they went to get mama who was busy. And mama said, I'm too busy, but you guys have a great time. And they did. They had a really marvelous time and they drove and drove until the sun went down and he died two days later. And she told me that her mother talked about that choice for the rest of her life. And she would be kind of found in little corners of the house talking to herself saying, I didn't take the ride. And I had little kids at the time, only had two. I didn't tell that story for a little while. It was sort of just becoming ready inside of me. And one day I was sitting at the kitchen table, I'm pounding away at my laptop. And my husband is in the backyard. He has a two year old and four year old. They're both naked. They each have their own hose and they're washing the car. And he texted me in the kitchen, I'm pounding away on the laptop. He says, pretty cute out here if you have a second. And I texted back really fast. No busy. And then that story came to visit and it lifted me out of the chair. I got so nervous that I knocked the chair over trying to get out there. And that story is the reason that we are supposed to be doing everything. It's the reason that work is supposed to be put to bed at some point so that the rest of life can occur and what's really sad about the extension of the workday is this less and less time for that to happen. I know that COVID has let people also spend more time with their family. But the focus time is what's really important to me. So I hope that that story does as much for people as it does for me over and over when I think about it. Well, Julia, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you giving us your focus time this past hour. I think any leader could just glean so many insights on how to lead, how to leverage your time, how to create a better work environment for your people from this conversation. So I thank you very much. Nice to meet you too. Ooh, I got to tell you as a father, that closing story really touched my heart. And it really showed me what's a stake if we don't apply what we heard from Juliet in this conversation. And the good news is we can learn to fight against business and take control of our lives again. What's great is we can start small. One minute at a time. This week as part of your weekly personal development plan, here's what I want you to do. Take a look at that calendar of yours. Is there any white space or are the colors touching? And if it's all filled up, see if you can make some adjustments and build in some white spaces. If it's at all possible, carve an hour out to reflect on your own leadership in the business and just see what you can come up with. Get some real quiet time where you can actually take the time to look out the window and reflect. Like I mentioned in this episode, that was one of my favorite rituals as a CEO. I like to get in my office, be alone and look out the window and just think about what we needed to do, what I needed to do to better the business and better myself. Believe me, it was a difference maker for me. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders take a minute to think. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make an appointment to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the very best leader you can be. I'll see you next week. 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