Most people want the vision spelled out. Every step, every deliverable, no ambiguity. Ryan's take: that's exactly the job description you can hand to a machine. The uncomfortable version of job security isn't clarity — it's being the person who helps figure out what nobody has figured out yet.

Then there's the other half. Gallup asked people across 52 countries what they need most from a leader, and hope beat trust, compassion, and stability combined. Which raises the question this episode keeps circling: who's supposed to supply hope when nobody knows what the next two years look like?

In this episode:

• Why demanding a step-by-step process is a sign your workplace runs on fear, not standards
• Mistake versus sin — Ryan's line on why there's no such thing as a repeat mistake
• The soccer pitch model: make your boundaries rigid and your plays loose
• Whether AI shrinks the job pool or just reshuffles it, argued in real time over drive-thrus, paralegals, and roof sales
• What Ryan actually wants from AI, and why it isn't Clippy
• The job of the CEO reframed: Customer, Employee, Owner — and why chasing one at the expense of the others eventually costs you all three

00:00 — If Your Job Is Crystal Clear, You're Already Replaceable

02:00 — Mistake vs. Sin, and Why Fear Makes People Demand a Script

07:00 — 56% Want Hope. 85 Million Jobs Are Going Away.

14:00 — Does AI Shrink the Job Pool or Just Reshuffle It?

24:00 — The Call Center Getting Cut 80%, and the Email Daniel Can't Take Back

31:00 — Own Something That Matters

36:00 — Leaders Are Dealers in Hope

RYAN: Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast. If the journey is so crystal clear that you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing, exactly how to get there, and you've got visibility into the next five or ten steps, you will not have a job much longer. There will be a robot that will come do your job very soon. Your boss is paying you to help them figure out that journey, and the moment there's no more thinking required, that's the moment we're going to hire the robots.

So you can look at that one of two ways. You can say, "Well, the vision's not clear. I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing." That's the job. You have to help them figure that out. And if you don't want to do that job, AI will.

You're never going to have perfect clarity. And if you do, you should be very nervous, because that's the moment I can outsource your job to some other place that'll do it for a fraction of the cost. Being comfortable with that uncertainty is a big part of what our jobs require.

It is funny, I think especially technical people, detail-oriented people — it's not clear to them if they don't have every letter spelled out for them. But that's not actually a good thing for you, because if I'm having to come up with every one of those steps, we're not really going to a good place. I need you to help me in that journey and define it with me.

Look, I get there are some things where we need things spelled out like that. If you're manufacturing a medication and measurements matter, there are situations where it does need to be spelled out. But that's the exception. That's not really the rule.

And I think again it goes back into, if you build the environment where people can be successful — actually, let me rephrase that. If you've built an environment where people are afraid, there's that lack of trust, lack of compassion, stability, then people are afraid of making mistakes. When people cannot make a mistake, then they want everything spelled out for them so that they don't get punished for making a mistake. Because if they have every little i dotted and t crossed and they follow it, then you can't yell at them.

But what happens is, we think we want that. We want every i dotted, every t crossed. Then what we get is an SOP that's so overwhelming that we can't possibly do it, and it doesn't incorporate everything, and then we fail it, and then we get yelled at. And it's like, well, you're both wrong.

The other thing I want to call out is there's a difference between a mistake and a repeating mistake — or what I often call mistake versus sin. In the sense of, you cognitively chose to make that decision knowing the consequence was negative. A mistake is when you unknowingly make it and you learn from it, you improve it, and you don't repeat it. There's no such thing as a repeat mistake, because the second time you cognitively chose to do it wrong.

So I think there's a difference between — we need to make sure our systems don't allow repeat mistakes, but it needs to be flexible enough to allow mistakes in order to be successful. You can't have success without failure. We have to have an environment where people can fail in a successful manner that still drives the business forward. That's where you start loosening up the reins. That's where your SOPs and your job descriptions and your boundaries can be a little looser.

You want your boundaries to be rigid so everybody knows what's in bounds and out of bounds. Think a soccer pitch. Everybody knows the goal lines, the markings on the field.

DANIEL: Yep.

RYAN: But nobody's telling the striker exactly every step to take. He knows his position. He knows what he's got to do. Nobody's telling the goalie exactly when to dive for the ball and when not to.

DANIEL: Mhm.

RYAN: He knows his position. Defend the goal. Don't let the ball go in. Oversimplified, but everybody else — don't use your hand, only your feet. You don't have to overcomplicate the journey side of it if the vision side of it is clear, and the direction, the definitions, and so on.

It's similar to what we've said in the methodology — vision, journey, culture, results. If vision isn't clear, it's really hard to get the rest of those pieces to line up. And I would say the same thing about what this Gallup poll has found: that if hope isn't there, trust, compassion, and stability are really hard to get to as well. It kind of has to start with that hope.

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DANIEL: AI is projected to create about 39 million jobs, but destroy about 85 million jobs. So you're net down about 156 million jobs over the next couple of years.

I think it's interesting how many businesses are investing in automation. I think a McKinsey study said something like 85% of organizations investing in automation. But automation isn't necessarily just robots. That's not just hardware, it can also be software. There's a lot of software things that are now being automated that are replacing jobs.

RYAN: Oh, I'll give you a perfect example. There's a company I'm invested in — it's more of an e-com business, and right now there's a large call volume. It's high volume, low margin. There's people that have to take these phone calls to answer very simple questions. We're investing heavily in AI right now so we don't have to have this call center force. We should be able to reduce the call center force by 80% and only have enough call center to take the really hard stuff that can't be answered with AI.

So I think a lot of companies now are taking it to the next level and embedding that piece into it. And I think those are the jobs that are most at risk. The data processors, the data analysts — people whose job is literally to look at a system, make a decision, and put an action into it. That entirely can be replaced with AI today. And I think that's what people are doing today.

DANIEL: Yeah, which is interesting, because you could use that description to describe lawyers, financial advisors. There's a lot of jobs where it's like, read all this information, take it in, make a decision. To some extent doctors are that, lawyers are that. Those are not just minimum wage jobs. Those are really high-skill, high-dollar jobs. Do those go away? What do you think?

RYAN: No. Let's talk attorneys for a second.

DANIEL: Okay.

RYAN: Somebody's still going to have to duke it out in court. Somebody's still going to have to understand — and let's be honest, every courtroom, it's the British showman, right? It's who can be the better showman on the information.

But where it's going to streamline it, and hopefully drop my legal bill — well, not that I have a lot of legal stuff going on, but just in general — is paralegals. The people that do the data collection and pulling all the facts for the case. If you could drop a bunch of documents into a repository and the AI can categorize it and collect it and put it together and summarize it for the attorney, in theory they should be more efficient. They shouldn't have to sift through phone records and record logs and emails. Somebody's got to read all that stuff right now and come to conclusions and hand it to the attorney for a case, versus if it can be fed into an AI system.

So you're really removing the support infrastructure for the attorney. But somebody's still got to interpret the law and defend the law and present the case and this, that, and the other. I think it can be another added tool. You're probably going to see predictive models of, okay, here's the case, here's what we have, here's the suit — what's my probability of winning?

DANIEL: Yeah, I think that's probably going to be a layer.

RYAN: You've seen Nvidia shares skyrocketing because they're the processor to have for AI right now. Somebody's still got to make those chips. Somebody's still got to service the servers. There's still infrastructure that has to be maintained to support that. And so I think there's a level of — does it really shrink the job pool, or does it just reshuffle the job pool?

Well, let's talk about AI in a more practical sense, at a restaurant.

DANIEL: Okay.

RYAN: Right now there are call center systems where you can actually talk to an AI agent that can do a level of tasking without the human. Check my schedule, check my bank balance, check this, check that, give me this input. You could theoretically roll that out — and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody's either already done this, doing it, or about to do it — you could roll that out in the drive-thru for order taking.

DANIEL: Sure.

RYAN: You don't have to have the — I mean, there's so many factors on it, between the attitude that you might get from an employee, to there's one person working the register and the front counter and this, that, and the other, and you're creating a line. Versus that AI agent at the speaker box having that more natural conversation, taking your order. That just streamlines it.

But somebody's got to maintain that. When that breaks, somebody's got to fix it. Somebody's got to maintain that when you change the menu. There's things around it. So you may have taken the order taker from the fast food restaurant out of the mix, but you still have a problem to be solved.

Now, what you might have to do is — let's say you take a hundred cashier window workers for a restaurant. You may take a hundred of them out, but did you create maybe 20 tech jobs from that?

DANIEL: I think it's 100 to one.

RYAN: Okay. Well, there is a scale. I don't know what the scale is. But if I was having to solve that, I would say, look, I don't want to build the AI. Apple's already built it with Siri — so funny, my phone starts lighting up when I say it. I would just use the AI that's already built there and tie it to my menu, and that way people can just walk up and order.

Somebody still has to — that's the downfall of AI at the moment.

DANIEL: Sure.

RYAN: AI still has to be very micromanaged. AI is very good at programming a particular task, and the second it's outside of that, it either flounders or it gives you bad results. And so the problem is you still need someone to orchestrate all of this.

DANIEL: Yeah. I need one guy to upload that menu and keep it working, and I can replace every cashier in 2,000 restaurants.

RYAN: Well, let's take it a step further. You could build an AI worker that takes the menu and does the formation and does it over. My point is, you still need somebody to maintain the infrastructure to make sure that AI system is working.

DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.

RYAN: Make sure the servers are online. And you need a system recovery, you need a disaster recovery solution in case something goes wrong, so it doesn't kill your entire business.

DANIEL: So yes. But I think a vast majority of these non-complex, order-taking, simple, follow-instructions jobs — I think they're gone in the next 10 years.

And then, "Excuse me, sir. We had a really bad storm that came through your neighborhood. Most of your neighbors got their roofs messed up. I'd love to go up on top of your roof, take a look, and give you a quote." AI is not there. AI is not ready to do that part yet.

RYAN: Well, here's why I would say it is, but it's not worth it yet. It's a game of numbers. You could probably go in there and say, find all the areas that were impacted by the storm, source this database to give me all the contacts. You could make that human more effective. You could tell that human, you need to go knock on these hundred houses because statistically they were the hardest hit, versus guessing where you think it went.

But you could also use it to send text messages and emails to those people. And there's the folly of it, because everybody gets so much spam junk in emails that it's a game of numbers to an email trying to sell me a new roof, or a text message. So the most effective sale is actually the person knocking on the door.

So then how do you balance the two? You use the systems to find the houses that are the most impacted. You can tell your sales rep, here's exactly where you need to go, to make them more efficient. And then they upload pictures of the damage, and maybe use a drone to get the top view.

DANIEL: Mhm.

RYAN: And then they can feed that back into a system that can then better communicate with the homeowner more effectively than the human can.

So at the end of the day, it goes back to the pneumatic nailer, the nail gun. Every step of that process got more efficient, but I didn't remove the human. I made the human more efficient.

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DANIEL: So you said something earlier when I asked about what you're seeing in AI. You said there's a difference between what I'm seeing and what I want to see. So I'd love to go back to that and say, what's the vision that you would love to see for AI?

RYAN: Oh, I would — as it pertains to corporate and making work not suck — and this is a scary thought. I want AI to prompt me back. I want AI to prompt me.

So I'll give you an example. I write code, and I was working on a project the other day, and I'm going through it and I'm prompting the AI to write this function, do this function. And it really did help me out. But my problem is, one, it's weird, it forgets. I was going through the code and I'm like, wait a minute, three steps ago we added this function and you just removed that from the equation. Why? Oh, yep, I'm sorry, I forgot not to add that. Let me add it back in.

Like, now I feel like I'm dealing with — this is probably horrible — I feel like I'm dealing with an outsource resource from the Philippines, where you kind of have to train them on every little single step-by-step process. And if you go out — no disrespect intended to our Filipino listeners.

DANIEL: Nope. Nope. Not none whatsoever.

RYAN: Just — there's some classification of employees that you have to spell everything out for. If the process isn't perfect, anything out of bounds, it falls apart.

DANIEL: Mhm.

RYAN: That's what I was experiencing with the AI. And what I would love is for it to say, are you trying to do this? Or maybe it would be, hey, I see you've got this. Would you like to try this instead?

DANIEL: But hold on. That was Clippy back in the '90s, and we hated it.

RYAN: Man, I said more dirty words about Clippy than I care to admit.

DANIEL: So let's be honest. Why do you say you want that? Clippy was just like, "Do you want to add that?"

RYAN: Clippy was like — I mean, yeah, no, we're not even going there. All right. Contextualization. Taking it in context and improving upon what I'm trying to do. Because the one thing that drives me insane when I'm using AI today is it's almost like it's constantly trying to teach me. Like, no, I don't need you to teach me. I don't need you to explain it. And I can go in there and change it. I can change the problem. Stop trying to explain it to me. I just need you to produce the code.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: And it's because it doesn't have context. It's just literally swinging all over the place.

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DANIEL: Yeah. I've heard this sometimes referred to as a premortem. Before you make a decision, you kind of work out what's the worst case scenario. What could happen here if things don't go well. And if you work that out and you understand what you're walking into and it doesn't happen, great. But if it does happen, you're still prepared for that potential reality. You can learn from it and reframe it not so much as a regret, but as a failed experiment.

RYAN: Yeah, definitely.

DANIEL: So let's take this a step further. That million-dollar investment loss has actually made work suck for a dozen people because of the negative fallout that's caused.

RYAN: But then again, it always goes back to it — it's the opportunity to — I always go back to Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack Sparrow, when he's talking to Orlando Bloom's character, and he makes the statement of, there's only things what a man can accept and can't accept. You can accept the fact that your father was a pirate or you can't, but he was a pirate nonetheless. So can you accept it or not?

That's just the reality of it. Do you accept? You can put your head in the sand, or you can accept it and move on. But the only option is to purge or forge forward.

You know what, here's an interesting one. I actually used this this morning with someone. I'm going to bring in some of my anime favorites. The screenshot here, it was between two characters. It says, "Whether your behavior is sacrilegious or not means no difference. Forge ahead." He says, "Because you don't get the option of standing still."

So what I take away from that is, in your career path, it doesn't matter where you're wishy-washy or whatnot — the only path is forward, because you don't get the option to stand still. If you stand still, something else is going to happen. It will create regret. And if you don't want to regret your career choices and you want to make work not suck, then the only way is forward, because standing still is not an option.

DANIEL: Right. I've even talked to doctors that are like, I'm done practicing, because it's too much of a hassle. And you've got good doctors coming out of the system.

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DANIEL: You know, when you and I worked together at a company a couple years ago, I love the way that you talked about the job of the CEO. It stands for three things. Why don't you walk through that, because I think that's a helpful reframing of the job of the CEO.

RYAN: All right. So the job of the CEO — it's not chief executive officer. It's customer, employee, and owners and shareholders. So we'll say owners, because if you're a shareholder, you're an owner of some sort.

But it's not only that. It's the customer's customer. It's the employee and the employee's family. And it's the owners and the owner's legacy. And if you put the CEO in the middle of that and you draw those three dots in a triangle, those outer ones, it makes a target.

And the problem is, too often the CEO will go strictly after the customer to bring the revenue in and pay the shareholders at the expense of the people. Now, there are companies that go the other way. They take the money from the customers and give it to the employees at the expense of the customer.

But at the end of the day, if a CEO can truly bring balance into delivering value to the customer, providing for the employee and their families, and the shareholders, that's a triple win. I hate the whole win-win concept — I think it's dumb when people use that as a greed excuse — but you really can get to a win-win-win situation when you look at it holistically like that. And I think that's what CEOs need to do. I think boards need to be part of that equation as well.

DANIEL: Yeah. I think boards need to set that as the expectation and structure the comp of their executives to deliver that triple win. Because most of the CEOs of publicly traded companies, they're really just compensated on earnings per share and driving up the stock price and making the owners happy. And to do that, they've got to make the customers and employees happy enough, but they can't piss them off. Very few of them are incentivized to engage their customers and employees and owners and delight all three of them, because it's hard. That's really hard.

RYAN: Especially in publicly traded companies. The average tenure is what, three or four years? And what do they do? The first thing they do is they go in and they wipe out a bunch of people, and that drives the share value up because profits skyrocket. But then there's too much work and stuff starts slipping through the cracks. So after you get the boost in stock price, you get all the people back. And at the end of the day, the next guy comes in and he's got a mess to clean up.

We just have compounding messes, where the CEO and the board needs to put a sustainable plan together that doesn't include hiring people — or firing people to drive the stock price, rehiring a chunk of that back.

I'm all for good hiring and firing techniques, for keeping good people in the company and rewarding them, and underperformers out the door. I'm all for systems like that. But when it's just mass layoffs to drive a stock price so you can hit a dollar per share and get a bonus, I think boards should penalize against that.

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DANIEL: Communication is one of those things that's really popular. Lots of people talk about it. Many people think they are communicating when they are in fact not communicating. And I think that disconnect is part of what makes work suck for so many people.

So in today's conversation, I'd love to just dig in on this idea of workplace communication. The dos, the don'ts, the best, the worst, maybe even some of the generational differences, harking back to our last conversation about how different generations communicate differently. Just see if we can give some practical tips for how to communicate better so that work doesn't suck.

RYAN: I just have to ask — did my wife text you? Did she put you up to this?

DANIEL: She did not. I have not talked to your wife in a while.

RYAN: Okay. Because it's very oddly timed that you want to talk about communication after the past few days with my wife. So you're very timely.

DANIEL: That is pure coincidence. But I'm sure my wife would appreciate you sharing some of your wisdom with me, because I don't think I'm doing a great job of it either.

RYAN: According to this side of the fence, your wife doesn't want me and you talking, because I'll just give you the bad advice.

DANIEL: Yeah, maybe. All right. Well, we can do a lot about communication in our personal life — that's probably a different episode. Let's talk corporately. What's one of the worst communication mistakes that you've made in your career?

RYAN: A lot of communication is not about talking. It's about listening.

DANIEL: I know for me, when I'm like, oh, okay, we're going to talk about communication today, my brain goes straight to how do I talk better? And I probably need to start with how do I listen better?

I'll share a couple of my horror stories. The first one that comes to my mind — I was emailing with my boss about some people in another part of the company that we were trying to bring on to our team. They had agreed to loan us one of these people, but I was trying to build a full team. And so I emailed my boss and I was like, yeah, we'll start with this one guy, he'll be helpful, and then we'll just gradually take the rest of her people, because she doesn't really have enough good work for them to do and we've got way too much to do. So we'll just gradually steal all her people.

And I copied the manager that I was stealing people from in the email. So she saw me telling my boss, we're going to steal all of her people. Which was bad.

RYAN: Whoops. Whoops.

DANIEL: The best part was, I left that company a year or two later, started working for a startup. She left the company after I did, and then she came and started working for the same startup. So we ended up being peers again. She was much higher than me before, and then we both had the same boss, and we had to go back and smooth some of that over, because I had put my foot in my mouth and now I had to work with her. So thankfully she was gracious and forgave me. But not the only time I've put my foot in my mouth.

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RYAN: I think one thing I would say for a younger generation going into their first job is — I mean, you should map out your career path. You should map out your escalation and what you're trying to do, your glide path. I would say don't expect the company to operate on your timeline. Just because you want a raise in six months doesn't mean the company wants to give you one in six months.

Now, I think you should find out those times and opportunities, and you should constantly work on your path, and you should check in with your boss and make sure those things are there. But I've seen too many people that go, well, I've been here for six months and I've done these accomplishments, therefore I should get a raise. Well, no. I mean, good on you.

DANIEL: Yeah.

RYAN: And if I'm inside the business, I'm your boss, I'm like, yeah, you're showing great career path and progression. But it goes back down to, is there a seat available for you? Is it the time of year for raises? There's cycles for this stuff. There has to be a role available to promote you into.

DANIEL: Mhm.

RYAN: Just because you did a bunch of achievement doesn't — and I'm going to use the video game analogy. The kids, especially some of the boys, they're so used to playing video games and leveling up, and every time they level up they get a reward and they get more and they get more, and they just keep climbing that ladder. But that's not how career paths work. I mean, it is, but it's on a mutual time frame with the business time frame, not your own.

And I would say just because you've been there for a year doesn't — you know, Fortune 500. Go back to the Navy versus the pirate ship, right?

DANIEL: Sure.

RYAN: The Navy is going to have automatic triggers. As you hit certain ranks and you check certain boxes, you're going to rank up and you're going to go from an E-whatever to an E-whatever. And that's got pays to it. But that's not going to happen quickly.

DANIEL: No. And that's okay. But just understand that in large corporations, you don't get promoted every 12 months. That's just not how large corporations work. Small companies can do that, but there's not a safety net there. There's not a path. And that's higher risk, higher reward.

RYAN: Well, I think that goes back to the pirate ship. The small business may throw too much money at somebody. The pirate ship may elevate someone to first mate that's too junior. It's the chaos dynamic.

DANIEL: Right. They might give you your own ship and then you sink it.

RYAN: Right. So I think it's not about lowering your expectations or dismissing your expectations. It's about making sure you've got that plan or that direction, and that you're constantly communicating and checking in and making sure it's on point. And at the end of the day, if you've put all the time and energy into it and you've got the skill sets and the business is going to hold you back, find the other job.

That's the whole job-hopping component people go through. And I think we're seeing that a lot right now, as people gain skills and they make a lateral hop, either in the same company or into another company, to keep progressing. We're seeing that job hopping more frequently. Which I think is okay, if you're trying to progress your career. I think where it happens erroneously is when you don't have that plan mapped out, or when your expectations don't align with the reality of your current job.

DANIEL: I would also say that it can sometimes be a function of people who want to advance without accomplishing anything. That's just hallucination.

I would say to my boys, when you start your career, especially any sort of professional career, I would say move as quickly as possible into a role where you own something that matters. Something that can be measured. Whether it's sales, whether it's a P&L, whether it's some sort of a client go-live — something where there is a clear metric of success, and you can say, because I was in this seat, this number moved from this to this.

Those are surprisingly hard to find earlier in your career. But at the end of the day, ten years later, no one's going to care how long you were in that seat, whether it was six months, 12 months, or 24 months. You're going to say, look, when I showed up, the gross margin on this product was X. When I left, it was Y. And people will be like, dang. That is far more important than how long you sat in the seat.

RYAN: You know what, that's a really good call out. Attach yourself to a KPI or metric that matters, that shows that progression. Not an arbitrary one, like I clocked in on time every single day, I was in the seat for two years.

DANIEL: Yeah, I was in the seat for two years.

RYAN: I mean, those are good things. You should always clock in on time, and if you have been in a role for two years, that gives you a level of experience. But I think those metrics are not the ones that matter when it comes to career progression and achieving goals.

DANIEL: Yeah. If you want to advance your career, you have to own something that matters. That's revenue, that's profit, that's a P&L, a profit and loss statement. That could be a client relationship, it could be a technology platform. There's a lot of ways to slice that. But you need to get as quickly as possible to own something that matters, that has a clear metric of success. Because over the long haul of your career, that's what's going to matter more than how long you sat in anyone's seat.

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DANIEL: Gallup asked people across 52 countries what they needed most from their leaders. Fascinating article, Ryan. I'm not sure if you got the chance to read the whole thing. Gallup's a very famous organization for doing these kinds of studies, and 52 countries is a really broad data set. It's not just a US thing.

And I think that's perhaps one of the risks — the overwhelming majority of the work that I do is in the US, and so I think I can have a biased view slanted towards the US workforce. But I love the fact that this is across all these different countries.

And what they found was that there's four things that people want from their leaders, and this is in order: hope, trust, compassion, and stability. Hope was actually the biggest one, at 56% of people said they need hope from their manager. Next was trust. Trust was only 33%. Still a big number. But only a third of people said they needed to trust their manager. Compassion was at 7% and stability at 4%.

RYAN: So here's — I'm going to call a couple things there, because we said there's four of them, and I'm going to reference back to one of our previous episodes.

Hope at 56%. I get that. That is huge. Trust, 33%. That's still a big chunk. But compassion and stability at 7% and 4% respectively does seem pretty low.

And I'm going to guess, based on some of our previous episodes, we talked about pay. There were several comments that were like, just pay people more. Pay people more. People just want more money. So I think what we have to talk about here is, let's assume the money is not the issue.

DANIEL: I'm assuming in the study, it was talking about the difference between what makes you thrive at your job versus you just punch in, punch out. If I understood the study correctly, this was like what keeps you engaged, what makes you drive, what keeps you motivated beyond just the paycheck.

RYAN: Yeah. Right.

DANIEL: And I think it's interesting, as I look at the numbers, I don't think this is only 4% of people said they need stability. The numbers here add up to 100. So I think it's the percentage of the whole that this comprises. So over half of what employees need from their manager is hope.

RYAN: Mhm.

DANIEL: That surprises me. Hope's an interesting word there. What was your first reaction when you saw that?

RYAN: Not shocking at all, to be honest.

DANIEL: Okay.

RYAN: So I've often said over the years — and this was the difference between failure and success in the past for me, in the companies that I've run and in the companies I've worked with — I've always said, any company I work with, the most dangerous thing we can do is provide hope of a positive future and not deliver on it. I said, it will destroy your company if you do not follow through on that. Because the most powerful thing and the most dangerous thing is hope.

And how many organizations have you walked into and they're like, yeah, we want to do this grand thing, and we want to have the mission, and we want to do this. And they get everybody rallied behind it, and then the CEO pulls you off to the side and goes, I just need to squeeze more profit out of it. I don't care about this mission crap and all this BS. How do we squeeze more profits out of it? That's what makes them happy.

That is a false hope, and that is very deadly and dangerous. So the reason why it's 56% is because it is the most powerful thing in an organization that can make it be a raving success, building raving fans, building a raving culture, versus a company that squeezes its people.

DANIEL: Do you think that this is more true now than it used to be? There's a part of me that thinks that this is growing in its importance, and that if you'd asked 20 years ago, hope would have been on the list, but it might not have been as big of a contribution.

But my sense is that there's so many people that are so hopeless in so many parts of their life, that if there's at least hope at work — that I'm doing well at my job, I could get a promotion, the company's going to do well, there's a bonus for me at the end of the year, there's something that I can look forward to and be hopeful for. I just think people are struggling to find that in any part of their life. And if work can bring that, and your boss can bring that, that is a huge motivator for your employees.

RYAN: A thousand percent. Hope is what kept a lot of companies afloat, especially small businesses, during COVID. The companies that had no hope of survival — nobody knew what was going to happen when all that went down. Nobody could predict it. Nobody could have known how it was going to go, what the government would have done, what other countries would have done. But the companies that banded together and had that hope to persevere together are the ones that are stronger today. The ones that did not have that are the companies that fell apart and went under during COVID.

If that's not a message right there. And now you take it forward. That was in a time of crisis and uncertainty as a global economy. Now let's just talk about the normal business that's just running day in, day out.

DANIEL: Yeah. You know, it's funny. I was on a sales call earlier today with a guy, and I was talking to him about leadership development, and I used this term VUCA. And he was like, I don't know that word, can you tell me? I was like, oh, VUCA is an acronym from the military. It stands for volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous.

And the point I was trying to make with him was, there's a whole field of study around how do you lead in contexts that are volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous. He goes, oh, that's just like every day at my company. And I'm like, yeah, I think we all feel that. I think the world feels like that.

And if your boss can inspire hope and give some meaning to your work in a world that feels more and more volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous — I think it not only attracts employees, but it engages them and brings the best out of them, because so many other places are just chaotic. It maybe makes the difference between your boss being some sort of a slave driver, or a manager of despair, versus somebody who can actually give you hope that the world can be a better place and that you can play a role in it.

RYAN: When you have a hope mindset — and again, this isn't flowers and unicorns and rainbows and fluffy. This is actually clarity on the vision at the end of the day.

DANIEL: Mhm.

RYAN: What gives people hope is when there's clarity of what we're working towards. The secondary component of it is, when there's a lack of hope or withholding of hope, that actually is a form of oppression and suppression of your people.

I think the other thing in the article that talks along this is the mindset shift between a boss and a leader. A boss that is more command and control and focuses on management is not going to provide hope, because they're in a command and control situation. They don't want you to have that hope. I'm not saying they're bad people, but if you're providing hope, then you're allowing people to have more freedom. You're allowing people more creativity. You're allowing those things, because you're providing that framework for it.

Versus what the article talks about — those that want hope and those that are getting it is where we're shifting from boss to leader. Leader being centered on motivating, guiding, and empowering people. If you're motivating, guiding, and empowering people, you're providing them hope and giving them control of the future a little bit, within the context of the organization. Whereas if you remove hope, that's where you're going to get command and control, fear.

I think the other thing too is, hope — what's the opposite of hope? Fear. So if you're running in fear, you're probably glass half empty. If you're running in hope, you're running glass half full.

So in a time of uncertainty — whether it's the company just lost a large contract, or a partnership fell through, a big sale didn't happen, it's a startup and cash is tight, are you going to get the next round of funding? Those are the things that motivate people — not those things, but the hope and the vision behind the hope is what motivates everybody. It gives them the belief that they can overcome that adversity.

DANIEL: Yes. And that comes from the leader. I think it was Napoleon said leaders are dealers in hope. But I agree with you that leaders who adopt a more command and control, try to be all IQ no EQ, I don't care how you feel about this, suck it up and do it — they don't tend to produce hope. They don't tend to engage their employees. And in times of volatility, I think they're the ones who are going to suffer the most, because they haven't really engaged their people on an emotional, relational level.

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ANNOUNCER: Make Work Not Suck — our podcast that talks about exactly that. Our process: vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck. Hosted by Ryan Hodges, co-host Daniel Steere. Join us each episode, and make work not suck.