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Golden Handcuffs
283 Plays3 years ago
Is it possible to be held back in life by work that pays too well and is too easy? The uncommon answer is...of course! This is because what we do isn't just an exchange of time for money, it's an opportunity to pursue passion, to use our gifts and talents in service to the world, and to do something meaningful.
This week, we're talking with Stephen Smith (of Reworc and Cajun Fest fame) about golden handcuffs and how modern day employment is the great domestication of man (c'mon you have to listen to see what that's all about!). Plus, re-thinking strategies that motivate productive work and a key tip for those in the corporate world to kickstart their way to something different without leaving their chair.
To learn more about Stephen you can find him on LinkedIn or at reworc.com.
We'd love to hear your escape from golden handcuffs story! Shoot as an email at podcast@uncommonwealth.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Uncommon Living
00:00:00
Speaker
Everyone dreams of living an uncommon life. And the best asset you have to achieve your dreams is you. Welcome to the Uncommon Wealth Podcast. We're going to introduce you to people who are living uncommonly. We're also going to give you some tools and strategies for building wealth and for pursuing an uncommon path that is uniquely right for you.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello and welcome
Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:27
Speaker
everybody to an episode of the Uncommon Wealth Podcast, where I am your host, Philip Ramsey. And I am Aaron Kramer. Thanks for tuning in. We have a repeat customer, everyone. Yes. Steven Smith. I can't wait to get him on the show. If you've been
Steven Smith's Journey with Rework
00:00:41
Speaker
a longtime listener and a huge fan, which I know that all of your listeners are, you've remembered him from the Cajun Fest. Yeah. He is the creator of the Cajun Fest, but he also, that's like his side gig. Like that's when he puts on a super cape, but he also has a different gig.
00:00:55
Speaker
So tell us your company what it is currently. Yeah. We have a company called Rework. Rework is a software company, a technology, a people analytics platform. Nice. And what we do is measure how an organization actually works. Who do you rely on? What
What are Golden Handcuffs?
00:01:11
Speaker
are your priorities? I mean, it's all about measuring the knowledge worker, which has always been tough for us. Yeah.
00:01:16
Speaker
And yesteryear was very easy with industrial workers to count how many seconds it took you to get from one side of the floor to the other, how many left turns you need to make it right. But now with this knowledge worker thing, it's really hard to do productivity unless you're a sales guy or an IT, right? Yes. That's what we do.
00:01:31
Speaker
Okay, so the reason why we have Steven on the show today is for something that I've been talking about for probably since the podcast started. I call it golden handcuffs. Aaron, I spoke this to Aaron. He was like, there's a specific scientific thing for this and Steven can speak to it.
Corporate Life and Disengagement
00:01:48
Speaker
And so I was like, we got to get him on the show. Well, there's more backstory to this because I was having a debate with somebody about this. And I was talking about how I feel like these big corporations are overpaying people.
00:02:00
Speaker
And for what they're doing for their hours, because I've had a couple of friends be in these big corporations, they go to a smaller corporation and they're actually being required to work like 40 hours or whatever. And they're like, I'm just getting worked, I'm just working so hard. I'm like, are you just now like being required to work the hours that you actually need to work? Yeah. Yeah. And so there's became this big thing and then we're debating about it. I'm like, well,
00:02:23
Speaker
You know who I call? Call my buddy Steven. Cause I know of all this stuff. So let me give you the definition of what I call as gold handcuffs. I used to work a pharmaceutical rep job. That was a golden handcuffs job because they paid me so well and the work that I was doing was so easy. I would probably never leave it.
00:02:40
Speaker
Now I got displaced, like our whole team got cut. So that was like my qualifying event, if you will, to go and like, I gotta go pursue something I'm passionate about. And I'm grateful for that. That's one of the best things that have ever happened to me. But without that, would I have ever left it?
Innovation vs. Corporate Culture
00:02:56
Speaker
I don't know. It's golden handcuffs.
00:02:58
Speaker
So that's what I call golden handcuffs is when you're kind of like, well, it's cush, it's easy, right? And like nothing in life is lukewarm. So I really wanted to speak into this. Steven, I want to give you the platform. Talk as long as you want, buddy. Real quick, customer or listeners. When Steven gets into the analytics of it and the science of it, it does or can, if you're like me, make you a little angry. It's good caveat. Yeah, it's good stuff. Well, you know, sometimes,
00:03:27
Speaker
I'm going to caveat everything I'm about to say. I was corporate as well. Corporate did a lot of great things for me. I learned to fail in a safe environment. I got opportunities to see things I never would have seen before. But also, most of us got exposed to some of the parts that were more like the movie office space. Some of the things we're going to talk about might be controversial.
00:03:53
Speaker
It is what it is, and the data is what the data is, and we can hypothesize why that means, but there are some very well-studied phenomenon that kind of leads to this golden handcuff thing you talked about. Here in Des Moines,
Impact of Disengaged Employees
00:04:06
Speaker
Iowa, I worked in one of the largest organizations here in the Midwest, and ours was we were on a few companies that still had pension.
00:04:13
Speaker
So what happens now is you might be checked out of your job, you might have gotten to the highest level you're gonna get to, you might just be disengaged, but by God, you're gonna sit around for the next couple years and kind of be disengaged and wait for that pension to come around. You mailed it in. Yeah. And what you, there's a ripple effect for that, right? And that's kind of what you were thinking and feeling before the show of like, man, it was miserable. Because the people above, right, above and management are kind of like mailing it in. And you're moving and shaking.
00:04:42
Speaker
I had a leader tell me, and a very high level leader at this organization, that this is a great idea, but I don't want to rock the boat.
00:04:54
Speaker
I have a pension. I'm two years away from going to Florida and doing all the things. He specifically said it. He literally told me, I don't want to rock the boat because I'm at the end now. Please don't, you know, don't mess with my cheese. Yeah. It's frustrating, especially when, you know, in this example, that decision and the things that we were doing was, you know, $400 million worth of spend. Uh, and he said, don't rock the boat and you're doing things because you're pension and you don't want to rock the boat. Yeah, man.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's scary because what we're doing inadvertently, we'll talk about both sides of this from the employee and the employer. But one of the things that happens with the employer now is you are having your organization take five steps back. What
Well-being in Corporate Environments
00:05:34
Speaker
might have been in yesteryear where we want employees to get a gold wash for being around forever because that's loyal family and all those things.
00:05:41
Speaker
That's not the same way anymore. And inadvertently, organizations are shooting themselves in the foot because now you have a bunch of people who aren't willing to take chances or aren't willing to invest in the right things or aren't helping you look around corners. Instead, you've just largely, and we'll talk about this word in a bit, domesticated your own workforce. And we preach innovation all the time. We preach new ideas. We preach all this stuff. But our incentives aren't aligned for that. Our incentives are keeping people the same spot.
00:06:09
Speaker
I mean, this is fascinating, kind of convicting too. Because the things that you thought that would always work, what you're saying is like, might not be the best thing. Yeah, inadvertent, man. It's the unintended consequences. And sometimes you can say it's unintended. But then the other times where I get a little bit more of my controversial side is modern day employment is the great domestication of man.
00:06:31
Speaker
Yes, see, I was just gonna tell you, you say that. When we say golden handcuffs, you say it a lot better. Well, I mean, and I forget who said that quote. No idea, I probably should have attributed it. But it makes sense, right? If I wanna keep people just happy enough to be exactly where I want them to be and not cause problems and not cause anything else, not leave and become a competitor. Yeah, totally. How much does it take, and I'll pay you $1 more than that to kinda keep the muzzle on.
00:06:58
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Keep the uncommon down. Yeah. Keep your uncommon path to just a desk job and a cubicle. Yeah. I mean, we want to talk about the people of power, the people up there. They've designed it to keep them there. Yep. It kind of makes sense. It kind of makes sense, which is scary. And that's like, you said the caveat, like kind of makes you mad. Yeah.
00:07:22
Speaker
Yeah, it makes you super mad. You're like, no, quit your job and go create something. Yeah, and I think, you know, the opportunity here, and first of all, that's why, you know, the greatest innovations have always come from people who are pissed off. Yeah. Yeah. Great and uncomfortable. Ideas came from somebody that's uncomfortable and said, you know what, this is broken.
00:07:42
Speaker
Damn it, I'm gonna go do it. And they're the ones that changed the world. And there are not many of them, right? We worship the Steve Jobs and the professional side. We worship these people that took the chances and made the things, but 90% of us are still in that domesticated role. And
Productivity and Work Efficiency
00:07:57
Speaker
we're finding out, even in career counseling.
00:08:01
Speaker
come 50 years old and the kids move out and all these things, this is when, you know, divorces happen. This is when strokes and health concerns happen. This is when alcohol and drug abuse happen. This is when, you know, people start to become checked out and feel like they lost their life because they're starting to realize
00:08:17
Speaker
Oh shit, I've been investigated. They never had a life and they just kind of slowly got murdered. This is not what I wanted to be in college when I thought about what I was going to do and the impact I was going to have on the world. Instead, going back to the idea of the shirking thing, people will fill the time that you give them. It doesn't mean it's high quality time, but it'll get filled. Largely we see that in what we call bureaucratic waste or legacy waste in these organizations.
00:08:43
Speaker
We just did a study, we've done it two years in a row here in Des Moines, Iowa. We measured 18, well, first one was 18, second one was 20, so 38 organizations across the Midwest and understood from those 10, 20,000 people, what is it that you're filling your time with? How much value does this have in terms of meeting your jobs? People are spending 10, 12, 14% of their labor just stuck in formal meetings.
00:09:07
Speaker
And you break that down, and you say, OK, well, what kind of formal meetings are these? And it's not decision-making meetings. It's not problem-solving meetings. It's regular status check-in on Monday morning. Hey, what are you working on? How's it going?
00:09:18
Speaker
collaboration's great, we know that, but not all collaboration's great, and honestly, a lot of it is actually taken away from the things that get things done. This is a true collaboration, that's my thing, is it just a quick update, like oh, I talked to him, check the box, or is it actually collaboration? It's the dial moving, because if we don't, it's easy to fill our times, and you probably remember, I mean, I was in corporate corporate, so I definitely remember,
00:09:44
Speaker
My calendar of my eight hours was at least six hours in formal meetings. I wasn't doing anything. Talking about doing something. So what does that do? I mean, well, if that happens, then now all of a sudden I still have a job to do mostly. So if I didn't get a, you know, have the ability to do it in one hour a day and it actually required some time, now I'm taking it home.
00:10:03
Speaker
And now I have trouble with the family. And now I'm starting to have that burden on my heart and on my soul about what is work like balanced for this organization mean. And that's where you see all this, this, you know, I mean, this castle of cards start to crumble a little bit, right? Yeah. Wow. That'll preach. Okay.
00:10:22
Speaker
I wanted to ask you this and I want you to think through this, but like, how do you combat this or how do you start evaluating the situation you're in of like, Oh man, like, and what do you do about it? So there's like nine questions there. So let's start with the first one is like, let's, how do you evaluate this? If the listener is in their cube right now and like, what are signs that they can see of like, Oh, this is actually happening or well,
00:10:49
Speaker
You know, my background's in psychology, so I'm gonna give an answer that's probably not the most practical right now, but it is something you start to feel, right? You know it, you just kind of push that voice down and people know what I'm talking about when I say it, right? That's your little inner voice telling you that there's something to check on. I mean, if you're listening to this and then this resonates with you, that means you're feeling something. The voice is calling, man. Yeah.
00:11:13
Speaker
And then number two, not at all preaching
Time Management and Innovation
00:11:17
Speaker
my company, but it's why we created this company. You got to measure. You can't manage what you don't measure in your personal or your professional life. Last time we were here, Venus repeat, you gave me a book which I read. You've talked a lot about taking audits essentially of different parts of your life, your holistic life. That's measurement. It doesn't need to be scientific and all this jazz, but how do we start to have a journal?
00:11:43
Speaker
Or how do we start to have a daily check-in? And you look back over the course of two, three weeks even, you'll very quickly start to see, oh man, my time is being very mismanaged. I'm putting a bunch of chunks into things that aren't moving. My personal, my professional dial. Now what? And that's where we start to talk about action. And that's a whole different conversation. It starts with the feeling, but then you gotta start to audit yourself like your book talked about.
00:12:09
Speaker
measure, get measurements and start, now let's say that they start measuring it and they start seeing like my time is being wasted, a lot of it, like thinking of six hours out of eight hours of your work week being in meetings, like oh heavens to Betsy, I would be sleeping on the other side. So what do you do then?
00:12:26
Speaker
Well, it depends on what situation you're in, right? If you're in this big corporate world, that's going to be very different than if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting to realize that, oh my gosh, I've had time spent in different things. So I'll try to give a general answer. Maybe we can dive into the depths a little bit more.
00:12:42
Speaker
You know, whenever I'm fortunate enough to have a mentee, I like to mentor young kids that are coming up and trying to get their first gig. So I remember someone hooking me up with my first opportunity and I'll be forever grateful. My third rule, and I have three ground rules for every mentee I've ever had. Rule number three is figure out what they want you to do in 40 hours and learn how to do it in 20.
00:13:03
Speaker
take 10 of those extra hours and, you know, work on something that they didn't see coming, because then you're like at the big surprise, aha, look at that wonder kid doing something behind the scenes. I think the last 10 hours to develop yourself professionally. And in today's world, I mean, gosh, we're talking chat GPT, we're talking about all these things. You can, we can figure out, especially on these old folks, we can figure out how to do the old things that they used to do with a calculator. We can start to figure out how to do that much, much faster.
00:13:33
Speaker
You can get that through automation, you can get that through delegation, and honestly, you can get that through elimination. As an example, when I was at this company, my team was responsible for building this big report every quarter to go up to the big dogs about turnover around the department and people and stuff. It took us a long time to do that every quarter. Half of somebody's job was just helping me compile the data.
00:13:56
Speaker
I know nobody's
Balancing Tasks and Personal Projects
00:13:57
Speaker
reading this thing. I have a feeling. And I had a cool boss that would back me up with my little experiment. Support you. I just stopped doing it.
00:14:07
Speaker
and I never got a question. It was like took two and a half quarters before somebody called me, not even a leader, and they said, hey, I noticed I hadn't seen their report like that. Are you still doing that? It's like, no, not really. Do you need anything? Well, actually there was one stat from page three that I really need. Sweet. Perfect. One stat from page three, I can automate that tomorrow. Yep. You will have that on a daily basis if you want. Right. But my God, we are not building this report anymore. We just saved an FTE on our small team. Wow. Yeah. How disheartening, but also awesome.
00:14:33
Speaker
It's freeing because people are scared to take that leap because you know, we all want to get the gold star. Nobody wants to get the, you know, nobody wants to have their boat rocked. Like, right. Like the writers, nobody wants to do that, but man, it will set you free. Once you finally lean into that. We were on a ski trip, a guy's ski trip and somebody mentioned like, Oh, I get overwhelmed with all the emails that I'm going to come back to. And my friend Greg Knudsen, he's like, I just delete them all when I get back. And I was like, wait, come again. He said, yeah, I delete them all. It's like, if it's important, it'll come back to me. And I'm like, you got to be kidding me.
00:15:03
Speaker
Isn't that awesome? There's something about that that's like, man, I want to rock the boat here. And if they come back, oh, I'm sorry. I was on vacation. Yeah, I'll get that for you. Now, I don't know if that's my personality. I don't know if I'm curious about it. We can't really do that in our industry, but yeah. Well, I mean, the same thing. So we found that in this local study with all these thousands of employees that about 10-ish percent of time is stuck in these formal meetings, super low value. Yeah.
00:15:28
Speaker
The other one that was huge, 10% of your time, is corresponding, and it's super low value. And we say, what is that? And I've gone around the world, after doing these analyses, sometimes I will have to explain what this means to the leaders who are reading the reports. I say, sir, ma'am, nine times out of 10, this is because you're ceasing everybody on everything. And that's a trust issue. I want to be heard issue. That's a diffused responsibility issue. There's a couple of things that go into that.
00:15:54
Speaker
But to your point now, that's killing my time by just going through everything and finding out, is there something in here that applies to me? Am I an idiot if I don't read this because someone's going to bring it up in a meeting? And we are just bludgeoning the crap out of each other with paper pushing things that aren't adding value.
00:16:09
Speaker
This is so good. All right, so I want to go back. So 40 hours a week, figure out what they want you to do, and do that in 20 hours. 10 hours is doing what? 10 hours is working on something they didn't see coming from you, right? So developing something else around your job that's going to get you like, oh my god.
00:16:26
Speaker
You've been working on this? Yeah, it's something I'm a new one aside. Okay. Developing or creating. Yep. And then the other 10 is just personal growth. Developing you. Yeah. Being the best professional personal you you can be. Gosh, that's really good. Steven, you're a rock star. Okay. Now my next question, unless you have any, I have one.
00:16:41
Speaker
I have one, but it's going to like, uh, won't keep going here because I don't think it's reached the point. How do I, wow. I like it. How do you, I combat this in this company on Commonwealth, right? Like, or how do people I'm making it about me. But like, what I'm saying is like, if you are a business owner, how do you combat this? That was my question.
00:17:00
Speaker
Dang it. Well, it was good. You know, there's a difference between, you know, what y'all are and like my company, we're, you know, my company is not a hundred million dollar company yet. So we don't have the, you know, years of jackets and coats that we now need to strip off. Yeah. You get to start from like me from ground zero, which is helpful. Uh, first and foremost, I think the reason that these organizations are so, uh, you know,
00:17:24
Speaker
I was going to say lean, but that's exactly it. I mean, we're agile right now, right? You have to be, by necessity, if anything else. Everything matters in the way, in what y'all do as you're growing. So being able to, you know, I'm not even going to talk about literal agile methodology, but yeah, the longer we can keep agile and understand our goals, a measurable goal, well, then we can do something about that.
Challenges of Implementing Change
00:17:46
Speaker
But if you're in these big organizations and you don't have outcomes, it's like the,
00:17:49
Speaker
Well, people are working from home. How do I know they're working? Well, how did you know they're working in the first place? Yeah. Yeah. In a cube. Yeah. Well, just because they came in. Yeah. I saw them working. Well, yeah. But the guy was playing YouTube and picking his nose. He wasn't actually doing work. Yeah. Right? Yeah. He was logged in, but that was it. You assume that my presence means I'm present, and that is absolutely a farce. Wow. So again, going back to that measurement piece, what do we measure and care about? What are our outcomes?
00:18:14
Speaker
And then once we do that to give people the freedom, the flexibility and autonomy to go meet those goals, right? It's amazing what almost seems like a thoughtlessness in the way some corporations set up success. But then they kind of burden you with that micromanagement at the same time, like giving me a vague outcome and you're filling up my own calendar on me. How in the heck am I supposed to
00:18:40
Speaker
How am I supposed to do this, right? I mean, it sounds so simple when you say it. It's like, yeah, you're totally right. Anyway, sorry. Oh, I mean, we talked about this. I know my wife there for a little while got out of teaching and went to Nationwide. And when she got there, she was there for about, I don't know, eight months, nine months, whatever. In that timeframe, when she first showed up, it was pretty good. By the time she left,
00:19:02
Speaker
They were timing the time. Like she had to like log off to go pee. I mean, she was pregnant. This is why it was a big deal. Stop. So it was like micromanaging the players. Like they know how much time that you are away from your desk to even go to the bath, let you click going to the bathroom. Like all these things like, Oh man. And how, I mean, I know we've talked about this and I know the outcome of what it is, but it's like, if you just trust people to do it, the most likely will do it. Yeah. But you start micromanaging them and then it's like,
00:19:29
Speaker
Maybe the outcomes, not the best. It's the distributive and procedural justice, right? There you go. Yeah. You say a lot smarter than I do. I wouldn't be a good analytics guy if I didn't talk around that.
00:19:41
Speaker
You know, we've heard, I'm sure your listeners especially, we've heard of psychological safety, right? Psychological safety, you know, Project Aristotle and Google said that the most important part of building a good team was not expertise, it was not diversity, it was not knowledge, it was not being the same place. It was teams that have high levels of psychological safety, outperform those that don't.
00:20:02
Speaker
And we've seen it all over. But the way we measure needs to be psychologically safe itself. I'll give you an example. I have two actually from my past experience as an HR and corporate real estate guy. In the HR world, you answer surveys. Hey, on a scale of one to five, how good is your boss? Man, I don't know. Is my boss going to see the answer? Yes. Okay. Best boss I ever had. Five, five, five, five, five. Well, now because I have psychological safety issues and I don't know how it's going to be used against me, my boss is going to see the answers.
00:20:27
Speaker
If I do have a problem with that boss, it'll never be uncovered in this assessment now. And now we have an underlying issue that can never be caused. I mean, it's like doing an MRI, that's with a broken machine. So true. And now we're getting buried, okay? Now on the real estate side, here's something even crazier. We were doing a campus renovation and VPs and above get an office, everybody else is out in the open environment, you know, that whole typical, you know, Neanderthal approach to space.
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, sorry. Come on. Friday. It's Friday. So what we did was we set seat sensors on all of the VPs and above desks to understand office utilization. To be a VP in this company, you're making at least 200 a year. So I say it to say, what happens when all these borderline multimillionaires are leaving their office to go to the bathroom, to go to lunch, to go play golf? Who knows where they're going to a meeting?
00:21:20
Speaker
These millionaires are taking big stacks of books, and they're placing them in their chairs when they leave the office every day. No. Why? Because I don't know why you're tracking me. Big brother's watching. You're going to try to take my office? Is this what this is about? OK, I'm going to trick your sensors so that I can have an adverse impact to what I want. Yeah. And here we are thinking, office utilization is great. Give them the things. Like, y'all, we're in psychology. It's called experimental reactivity. Like, when you know you're being watched and you don't feel safe about the measurements,
00:21:47
Speaker
How are you going to get anything out of me? So for us, it's all about psychologically safe measurements. And to do that, it's not about the stopwatch. That's how you measure industrial workers. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the nature of their job. But if you look at the science of measuring and understanding the knowledge worker,
00:22:04
Speaker
have to ask them. It's about priorities. It's about understanding perceptions of value. Because in our world, like it or not, perception is reality, right? And if we ignore that and put our heads in the sand and say, well, they don't get it, well, that is the reality that you're facing right now. And a lot of us aren't, you know,
00:22:22
Speaker
Steve Jobs had to sell iPhones, and he knew he had to make a product or he would sell or he wouldn't. But in corporate, we don't have sales internally like that. We have all this kind of legacy waste, this bureaucracy, and there's no hard metrics for that. And because of that, you get lost in the margin a little bit, right? So how, all right, so not everybody, I know this is my big thing here is like,
00:22:44
Speaker
to motivate people to not have those handcuffs and like get out and go do
Pursuing Passions in Low-Paying Jobs
00:22:47
Speaker
your things. But not everyone's equipped to do that. And we don't want everyone to do that because no one would have any employees. But for like your good business owners that do have people.
00:22:57
Speaker
They want to combat this. How do they combat this? How do they find out what's going on in there? How could you go in and help them to recognize, hey, you got this going on? Two things. My former, like I keep mentioning, big company, we called it big company-itis. Damn near, once you get set at a certain point, you're going to get caught up in this. Your organization is going to get caught up in this.
00:23:22
Speaker
And there's things you can do, but it has to be radical change, which you usually don't see in these big companies. They're conservative. They don't want to run a big ship. They have all the hard deterrent. For the companies, though, regardless of size that are trying to get better is because, A, necessity. We need to grow. And there's no lackadaisicalness.
00:23:43
Speaker
There's no level of complacency like you see in some of these organizations. We've got to go and we are very closely tied to the mission and to the customers. In the big companies, you don't see the customers. You don't see the impacts.
00:23:56
Speaker
But to answer your question more directly, of course, I'm biased. This is my perspective. You can't manage what you don't measure. So how do we understand and how do we crowdsource this information, right? I mean, I want to understand from the janitor, the CEO to the board members, like what are the directions? Where are we at now? Where are we going? How big is the gap?
00:24:15
Speaker
I want to know what matters most to you here. I'm not going to ask you an exhaustive list of questions and run some statistics on it. No, like a person, and we call our thing a digital interview because it's actually conversational. Hey, all these things always matter, but which ones matter most? And then once you tell me how they matter most, tell me more about that. You said leadership. Is it the top of the house? Is it your manager?
00:24:36
Speaker
Is it equitable and fair? Tell me what that means. I want to understand how you prioritize your day. You have a goal to do and a job to meet.
00:24:46
Speaker
You have a job to do and a goal to meet, how about that? And you only have so many hours in the week. Where are you spending your time and how well does that time and that activity support you meeting your goals and how much does it not? Because once you start to have some of these conversations, you can very quickly start to see, oh my gosh, like the golden handcuffs or parachutes, I am creating inadvertently, potentially, I'm creating incentives that are actually getting me the wrong thing. I never even knew it, oh my gosh. I mean, honestly, a lot of this stuff is,
00:25:16
Speaker
honest, just didn't know.
Breaking Free from Unfulfilling Work
00:25:18
Speaker
I thought I was making a good benefit. I said, hey, sales are great and I want to, you know, incentivize growth. Well, shoot, if we didn't measure that with collaboration, I'm going to have a bunch of, you know, lone wolves out there killing each other on my team. That's not conducive to what we're trying to build, right? No, because that's why I really truly think that most people don't want this. They're business owners. No. Honestly, you just don't know what you don't know. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. I would say that. I mean, at least I'm hoping for that. No, I think that's probably true. Well, I mean, when we as individuals get sick or we see mortality, what do we do? We go to a doctor, we get an MRI. The doctor looks at that test and then comes and asks you questions. Okay, I see that your cholesterol is high. Tell me about your, this and that. It's the same thing for these organizations. We need to have an organizational health MRI, right? Yes. We understand what's going on and where do I now need to get a surgeon, like a consultant, to come in and start poking around and cutting based on
00:26:09
Speaker
So that makes sense in my head because like yeah we go get blood work done like me and you because we're all of us here we're like health freaks a little bit like yeah like how do you know where to start and if you're not starting at the core of it of like blood work you're looking at all your blood work oh cool you get a full panel then you know like it's good
00:26:24
Speaker
I know we do it in finances, like we regularly know. I like what you do because not only do you ask questions, but you challenge the status quo and you give them kind of a green light or a free pass to do so, right? Sounds like you always did, which I love that. That's why you're in common. But I think that's really good, especially in your situation of just like,
00:26:41
Speaker
It's never bad to let your people, no matter what, challenge the status quo. Why have we done this? And don't get angry when they ask like, well, that's a great question. Let's go through that. Like, if you wouldn't be the tip of the spear on this, please do right? Because I think that still gets ownership and buy it. And even if at the end of the rainbow, you still do the same thing. Well, now you have like, well, now we know why, right? And it's actually doing what we wanted to set out to do. I don't think it's ever bad to just like, let's challenge that a little bit. I love that.
00:27:11
Speaker
I mean, some people say the worst words in business is, and I've heard it all the time from those people are asking not to rock the boat because that's the way we've always done it. I hate that. Oh boy. If I heard that, like this conversation just got shut down, right? Yeah. There's not much we're going to get out of this. Right.
00:27:26
Speaker
So this is what I would say too, for this Golden Handcuffs thing. Sometimes people will come to Uncomma Wealth and they'll say, Philip, I don't have a very, like, we don't have a lot of money and like, we don't make that much money. You know what I say? This could be the best thing for you because it's now not going to take that much.
00:27:42
Speaker
like time and to get you to replace the income that you are already accustomed to. Yes. People are like, I'm making, you know, well over six figures and I'm like, okay, this is going to be a challenge because you have locked those golden handcuffs on you so hard that like, and you have this big audacious idea that you can make this residual income in such an easy way. I'm like, this is going to be a challenge. So sometimes the best thing that you have going for you is to have like,
00:28:11
Speaker
a company that maybe doesn't pay you as good because this uncommon life or this uncommon path that you want to start might be easier to obtain because the income that you need to replace is not as high, right? Almost everybody that we idolize from athletes to celebrities to these visionaries all went through. I mean, unless you're, you know, got a
00:28:34
Speaker
nice loan from your parents or something like that. And it just happened. But for the most part, all those people went through that adversity, right? They all went through the rock bottom. They all took the hits. I certainly took the hits leaving the golden handcuffs. And my first Christmas going, oh my God, I've never even thought about not being on my Christmas presents before. Unbelievable. I cried that month like crazy. But it's only from that. I mean, you talked about your ski trip. You talked about fitness just now. Yeah.
00:29:01
Speaker
Almost every time you go through a new regimen, they say, okay, let's unlearn all that stuff, let's get you down to the bare basics, and let's start building back up again, right? Let's build it on the right way. And that's what we need to do in terms of our work lives. Your work life is half of your waking life, and that's gonna obviously bleed over to the other half.
Cajun Fest and Community Collaboration
00:29:22
Speaker
Man, there's no coming back if you're domesticated and feeling trapped.
00:29:26
Speaker
you can take all the, you know, you can go to the Bahamas once a year like it, like you want to, but that's not going to change your outcome. Oh yeah. So the only way to do that, I think, regardless if you're stuck in a big organization, small organization or independent contract or whatever you might be.
00:29:42
Speaker
It's, for me, taking that 40 hour rule and finding your stuff, right? And that's how we start to get down to the bare basics, the bare necessities. It's good. It's great. It's good. Steven, you are a rock star. Yeah. I love it. I'm a talker.
00:29:57
Speaker
It's valuable information. And I think this is just helpful just to talk through this. Like there is something out there that you can kind of trap yourself into something and understanding that you might be in a place like that, I think is the first step. Now you can either continue down that path, which is okay. That's fine. Or you can start changing. And I like it. Just asking yourself, you know, maybe challenging the status quo and start getting measurable results for you to start getting traction in where you want to go.
00:30:24
Speaker
But I think going back to, the thing that I took away is how you mentor people. Find out what's there at paying you for 40 hours, do it in 20 hours. Then take 10 hours of that and try to create something so you're actually contributing something to where you're at. And then the last one is develop yourself professionally. Have you ever heard of the 20% rule? The 3M used to do it? Pareto principle? Well, no. So back in the day, 3M used to say, hey, on Fridays,
00:30:54
Speaker
I'm not making you do the work that you're assigned to do, essentially. I want you to do something that's loosely company related. Please don't just go learn how to play guitar on us. But take this time and go jump in a different department, go jump on a prom, go do whatever you want. From that,
00:31:10
Speaker
I think of an engineer or whatever it was, the things that you're writing on right now, that's where Sticky Notes came from. Really? Somebody on their 20% off day came up with Sticky Notes, and obviously, Sticky Notes honestly changed the world. That's how I do all of my notes. Right, yeah. I should see my desk. Google did the same thing back in the day, and then I think an engineer came up with Gmail, which we all probably use now. Yeah, I use Gmail. So again, this idea of creating time and autonomy and space and having that trust in the outcomes there,
00:31:37
Speaker
Man, now people start to feel that leash come off a little bit. They're not only afraid of, you know, rocking the boat. Now they're saying, oh my gosh, I'm getting the opportunity to go build something great. And for us as business owners, that's the thing that changes the game for us. I mean, it's the next idea. I don't need incremental productivity. What I need is something that's going to change my game. And that's where it comes from. Yeah, it's good. That's awesome.
00:32:01
Speaker
Steven, thanks for being on the show, man. I appreciate your wisdom. And quick, I want to give you 30 seconds. How's Cajun Fest going? What's the latest? Oh, Cajun Fest is going great. Yes. Oh, man. We're going downtown, which is fun. This year we have some cool partnerships. We're doing, you know, Sazerac and Southern Comfort is hooking us up so that we can have all the hurricanes you can drink.
00:32:22
Speaker
Confluence, which is a brewery here in Des Moines. I was making a Cajun Fest refresh beer, which is awesome. We had it last year. It was really good. Fong's Pizza is getting involved. They're going to make us a crazy Cajun Pizza. Truman's getting involved to make us all these things. Which is really cool. We're starting to see local Iowa businesses come together to create and evolve a cultural thing that isn't necessarily found here.
00:32:46
Speaker
When you get a coalition of good people with the right vision, now you start to make something great. In this case, we're gonna have the Mardi Gras of the Midwest. That's awesome. I love it. Real quick, Stephen, a business owner that's listening wants to look at, see if they wanna work on this. That's good. How do they get ahold of you?
00:33:03
Speaker
Well, my name is Steven Smith and there's a few of us, I'm sure, with a pH. You can find me on LinkedIn. My company is rework.com, R-E-W-O-R-C.com. Okay.
Closing Thoughts and Call to Action
00:33:13
Speaker
And we have some, you know, we do universities, we do hospitals, we do metros.
00:33:19
Speaker
give it a check, see if measuring people in a different way is helpful for you bettering yourself. Awesome. That's good. Sweet. This is a great idea. Thanks for the shout out, man. I rework. That's the company I work for. Thanks again. Appreciate that. Absolutely. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to the Uncommon Wealth Podcast. I've been Philip Ramsey. And I'm Aaron Kramer. Until next time, go be in common and get those golden handcuffs off. Yeah. Talk to you later.
00:33:39
Speaker
That's all for this episode, brought to you by Uncommon Wealth Partners. Be sure to visit uncommonwealth.com to learn more about our services. Don't miss an episode as we introduce you to inspiring people who are actively pursuing an uncommon life.