We are in the middle of a crisis of commitment in the workplace – 53% of managers are burnt out, 1 in 3 employees leave their jobs in the first 90 days, and an estimated $7.8 trillion in lost productivity is due to poor organizational fit.
On this week’s Dev Interrupted, we uncover the keys to a thriving workplace as co-host Conor Bronsdon is joined by Dr. Andre Martin, a seasoned organizational psychologist and author of the book 'Wrong Fit, Right Fit'.
Together, they share strategies to discern whether a job will be a right fit or a wrong fit and delve into how companies can align their structures with individual preferences to enhance employee engagement and productivity. This insightful conversation offers practical strategies for leaders and individuals alike to identify and cultivate the right fit for long-term success and fulfillment in their careers.
Episode Highlights:
- 02:00 Inspiration behind Wrong Fit, Right Fit
- 05:30 Identifying wrong fits in the workplace
- 11:30 Burnout among managers and employees
- 14:30 Advice for executive leaders
- 18:30 The role of energy renewal in performance
- 20:00 Strategies for finding the right career fit
- 25:00 What a 'right fit' job looks like
- 29:30 Crafting a successful long-term career
Episode Transcript:
(Disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)
Conor Bronsdon: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your co host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Andre Martin, author of Wrong Fit, Right Fit. Andre, welcome to the show.
Andre Martin: Thanks a lot. Good to be here.
Conor Bronsdon: Yeah, it was really wonderful being at your book signing last night and seeing just the incredible energy here around your new book, Wrong Fit, Right Fit.
I had a chance to read a couple chapters last night, and so I'm looking forward to hearing from the source himself. You're an organizational psychologist. You've got over 20 years of experience in talent management and team management. And I know you've worked on employee engagement and culture with global giants like Target, Nike, Google, Mars, and Disney, just to name a few.
As a champion of this kind of idea of purpose driven culture, purpose driven organizations. You've really helped companies spearhead value focused digital transformations. I know it's a lot of words, but I promise we're going to unpack them, folks. And what was the inspiration behind this book? How did it come out of your work?
Andre Martin: Yeah, the inspiration around the book, I think like most books, there's probably two pieces to it. The first one is just my personal journey, right? Looking back over 20 years of working at really great, really interesting and very distinct companies. And knowing that, hey, some of them really worked for me because they allowed me to do work easily.
Others were great learning experiences, but the experiences were hard. And so I think that personal experience is always where a writer starts, right? And then from there, it's been this one number that's been on my mind, in my grill, keeping me up at night, which is 7. 8 trillion of lost productivity in the workplace today, estimated by Gallup.
I just, I look at that number and I'm like, it's just too much. It just means that there's far too many people. Who are sitting at their desk in their company and really not feeling like they're able to do their best work. And that's my cause. I think everyone deserves that opportunity because we spend so much time at work in our adult lives.
Conor Bronsdon: I love that you're trying to make this really important piece of our lives better, because even if I work just an eight classic eight hour a day. That is still what? Probably half of my waking hours per day, maybe a little less, maybe a little more depending on the person. And that is such a deep resonant impact in how people feel day to day and how people go through the world.
So I love that you're thinking about that. And I know that when you set out to start writing this book, You didn't quite have that as your mission. You had a related mission. I did. How did you decide that this was the
direction that this needed to go?
Andre Martin: I'm a geek at heart. So I'm a researcher, I have a PhD, I love digging into a problem, so the first thing I did is I After agreeing with the publisher to write a book on culture, I thought it was going to be about culture in this new era of work.
So how do you build a really great culture given that we're hybrid and we're remote and all these different factors? And so I started talking to people that I know, that I respect. People that are either running companies, in companies, thought leaders in the world. And what became really clear in those initial conversations?
was that there's just not one way, right? This idea that there's good or bad culture, that there's toxic or engaging cultures, it just didn't hold true on the margins. There was something else happening. And so in the late conversations, it became really clear that, no company in the world sets out to create a poor experience for their employees, right?
If you think about it, it'd be counterintuitive to business. Right? Why would I ever want to put my employees in a place where they are stressed or burn out or not able to be productive? There's just no way you can succeed. So something else is afoot. And as I dug in, it became really clear that maybe it's about a mismatch.
Maybe the way that a company likes to work doesn't actually fit the preferences of the individuals that are there. And right there, we start to feel like we're slogging through mud. And that was the genesis of all these interviews to ask. Successful leaders. Tell me about your RightFit experience, the time in your life when you had a deep, sort of authentic dedication to the way a company worked day to day.
And then tell me about a time that wasn't true. And in those conversations was just the body of the book. It just started writing itself.
Conor Bronsdon: I'd love to dig into those wrong fits to start with. How do you identify as an individual that you have a wrong fit? And then also, how does a company identify they have an issue with a lot of wrong fits?
Andre Martin: Yeah.I think the easiest way to know is a little exercise I have in the book, which I ask people to write a single sentence. with their dominant hand and then their non dominant hand. And when you write with your non dominant hand, you probably tried it. There's a few things that are true.
I did. First page of the book. Right. How did that feel?
Conor Bronsdon: It it was weird. It was hard. I, strangely, I will say I had shoulder surgery this year on my dominant hand, so I've gotten a little better this year about it, but even just the experience was very challenging.
Andre Martin: It's challenging. People describe it as stressful.
It's frustrating. I don't feel competent. The quality's not as high. I end and I do not want to do it again. And that's the great visceral feeling that people have in these wrong fit experiences, right? How do you know you're in a wrong fit? It feels like everyone else has a secret decoder ring for success, except for you.
You reach Sunday night and instead of being excited to walk in the door on Monday morning, you have the Sunday scaries. You're dreading it. While you're at work, you feel like work is harder than it should be. You walk out stressed, you try to work harder, you end up pulling from your life because you only have so many hours in the day and in the end it leaves you burnt out and exhausted.
Those are the things that interviewees told us. What was true in these wrongfit experiences. I think if you're a company, you're a leader in a company, you have a lot of great mechanisms you can use to hear your employee's voice, right? We have engagement surveys, we have town halls, we have all of these assets.
But I got to tell you, it's pretty simple. Walk around your office, ask people how they're doing, right? Engagement is something that you feel. Commitment is something that you feel. And if you walk through your offices and it's pretty silent and people are heads down and everyone looks a little stressed out or haggard or exhausted, you probably, on the margins, have some work to do to create an environment where people can do their best work.
Conor Bronsdon: This is advice that I've heard from other organizational psychologists as well. Simply on a one on one scale of like, when you're having those one on one conversations with your employees. It shouldn't be all about tasks, you need to understand how they're feeling, is this working for them? And also, like, I've had team members where I know it hasn't been quite the right fit, or maybe it was the right fit, but now the needs of the organization are changing and it's no longer the right fit.
And it's a very challenging thing as a leader to, to try to help that employee find the right fit. And it's, it is disheartening when that doesn't go well.
Andre Martin: Here's what I'd say to you it's actually not the responsibility of leaders to do that for people. Yeah. Right? The responsibility the leader has is to be crystal clear about your answers to four basic questions.
You need to be able to tell your employees, this is why the world is better with us in it. You need to be able to be explicit about how we make money. You have to be able to tell them how work gets done. How do we collaborate, solve problems, manage conflict, socialize, develop, give feedback. All those things that make up work.
And then you have to tell them your unwavering promise to them for working here. And the thing is that I'm watching in this conversation right now is it used to be in the days of decadent growth. We could just hire someone, give them a computer, set them in a seat, and they're fine. Now those cycles of re recruitment.
They're shorter. And my advice to leaders is to say, Hey, in any given year, if you were leading me in any given year, you probably have a thousand touchpoints with me. How many of those are you using to re-Recruit me back to those, to the company through those four questions. And how many of them are using, are you using to just simply get more output outta me?
And I think if we looked at the world that way, it becomes pretty simple. Your job is simply to remind me why I matter. And why it's good for me to be here. And then, the choice is up to me. Right? If you tell me and you're super crystal clear, and it doesn't work for me, that's okay. It's better for me, it's better for you.
But, sometimes what happens is, I actually love working for you, I love being here, and I'm just getting distracted by the noise. I have my head up, I have my social media feed on, I'm seeing all this greener grass. All these people I know that are getting better titles and bigger pay, and I might jump, not because it's bad, just because I've forgotten how important this place was for me.
Conor Bronsdon: As a leader, how do you know if you're striking the right balance on that focus on re recruitment, as you put it, versus striving to drive more productivity from a team member?
Andre Martin: I would just say you can't do it enough. The truth is, the only road to productivity is deep commitment. Because when someone's committed to your job, the thing that you get Productivity is their discretionary effort.
You get them walking in, looking for a hole to fill, asking the question, what do you need and how can I help? Productivity is you don't have to worry about it anymore. Right, they're bought in and it'll flow from there. They're bought in and you're getting crystal clear. You're telling them why the world's better with us in it You're telling them how we make money, which is essentially telling them what their priorities are. You're reminding them of how we work so they can do their craft and not have to worry about all the crazy coordination of stuff. And you're saying, and remember, by doing this hard work, this is what you're going to get in return.
And so it's like, I just think we sometimes make leadership really complicated. I've been guilty of that. Yeah. And so what I would tell you is how often should you do it? You should do it every day. Yeah. Every time you bump into somebody, right? The more you do it, the deeper commitment you're going to have, the less likelihood I'm going to have my head up and the more productivity you're just going to get from me in the future.
Conor Bronsdon: And yet we have this massive problem, 7. 8 trillion of lost productivity and this is a yearly figure. Yeah. And that's due to this disengagement, these wrong fits. We're seeing why is the state of work so disheartening?
Andre Martin: It's like, there's a lot of reasons why, but I think you first got to just unpack that number, right?
There's, it's a really dire time for many corporations, right? You've got one in three new employees who are leaving their jobs in the first 90 days. Even the employees that stay there for six months.
Conor Bronsdon: I'm sorry, let me just clarify. One in three employees?
Andre Martin: Estimated by JobVite, one in three. Wow. 30 percent of new joiners leave their job in the first 90 days, citing three issues, right?
The first one is, they don't see clear learning opportunities. They don't see clear opportunities to advance their career. And last but not least, is a mismatch of expectations. Whatever was promised to them on the way in the door, by the time they got there, it looked like they thought they were landing on the moon, they ended up landing on Mars.
And so that's one. Secondly is our managers. Like our managers and our leaders in tech and all these other functions. 53 percent of managers are burnout, and we know that Gallup tells us 70 percent of our engagement is due to our manager. If your managers are burnout, there's no chance the rest of your team is going to be in good shape.
As an organization, as a leader, my first call to action is, I've got to make sure my managers are fully engaged. Fully Committed, Fully Energized, so they can do the hard job of doing that for everybody else. It's the old analogy, right? Put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then put it on everybody else.
Conor Bronsdon: Do you see this issue with management as far as burnout that then feeds down into other team members? Driven by those same four factors, or is there another problem that's driving that?
Andre Martin: I think there's a couple things that happened, right? So we're coming out of COVID. Now, COVID wasn't the cause of these issues.
Conor Bronsdon: It was an accelerant.
Andre Martin: It was a great accelerant, right? So in that time, what we saw is a lot of extra cognitive weight. And stress put on the backs of our managers. Think about it. Our whole systems of how we operate were turned upside down in almost a day. And so I think managers are literally just still trying to climb out of a time that put undue stress and took a great deal of energy from all of us.
So that's one trend. I think the second trend, and this one's probably a little bit harder to hear, but we're coming out as some of the most prominent growth, consistent growth, at least in the United States we've ever seen. Right? Right. And so when you have a decade of consistent growth like that, it hides a lot of sins.
And so this generation of managers actually aren't that prepared. We didn't invest probably in the way that we needed to get them ready for this time. The time after a pandemic, in a recession, when everyone's struggling to make money. That's a different leadership skill. We don't have wartime leaders.
And so I think part of the other reason you're seeing this burnout is our managers won't say it, but they're just not prepared. And so we owe it to them to help them first get out of the energy debt, and then secondly, get them prepared for a different era of leadership.
Conor Bronsdon: So if you were an executive leader or talking to an executive leader, what would be your advice to them as far as trying to recover that energy of their managers to help their whole organization?
Andre Martin: I think there's a few things I'd say, like the first one's really simple and it may sound trite, but if you are a manager of managers or an executive, I would tell anyone the first thing I'd want you to do is to realize that your calendar is the company. Your relationship to time, the meetings you choose to have, the cadence at which you choose to have those meetings, that is going to create the calendars for everybody else.
And I think often we don't stop and have enough intention to look at our day and say, Hey, am I having million dollar conversations? Am I adding legitimacy to the right things? Am I keeping people focused? Am I protecting my time? Am I modeling, like, a way of working that's sustainable? And I just don't think our leaders see how much their frame of reference, how much their calendar, how much their relationship with time just literally impacts everyone else downstream.
And so I'll give you for instance, right, if I'm a leader who's running a company, I'm willing to take back to back meetings eight hours, ten hours a day, every single day. That's basically the expectation for everybody. Yeah. Right? So I think we have to stop and go, Hey, we are out of the crisis, right?
Now it's time to rebuild how we're going to do work in a way that's sustainable. And the first thing leaders have to do, they have to do it for themselves.
Conor Bronsdon: I have to say, I'll give credit to my co host, Dan Lines, who's not here right now. He's the CPO and co founder of LinearB. And he has done a really good job over the last year or two of intentionally resetting here because I think like a lot of other leaders who especially startup leaders who are so driven and passionate about their, the problem they're trying to solve, for VPs and engineering, just like himself, he said, Hey, I am driving myself too hard.
I need to commit to this value that we've stated as a company, which is. I'm going to maintain a healthy life alongside my work around my work. And again, I'll give him credit. Like he, he sat down, this whole year, he's been going to yoga twice a week and he's like, this is a clear calendar block.
And it's not a calendar block that lives after work. It's, Hey, I'm going over lunch on Fridays. I'm going to go and spend and take an hour yoga class and I'm going to intention set every week. And it's been impactful for me, I'll say, because I love my job. I'm passionate about it. I'm driven by it, but I'm, I don't always have the healthiest relationship with it sometimes.
And. Because I want to dive into it, I want to solve these problems, and I have to remind myself that it's okay to pause, and in fact that'll be positive for me to be healthier, to be more present to be less stressed and helter skelter about it, and I'll give credit to Dan on leading on that and helping our organization see that's okay and being public about that.
Andre Martin: I want to give credit to Dan, too, because one of the things that is super clear in the research we're seeing today is that very few leaders, Understand that their espoused values just aren't matching the felt experiences of their employees. In essence, we're not representing the value system that we say we have or that we put on paper.
MIT did this great piece of research with Culture 500 where they actually looked at this. It's the first piece of research that's gotten to the bottom of this issue, which is they took all the espoused values. Of all these great culture companies, and they basically look at the annual reports and videos of the leader and career sites and all these pieces of information, and they looked at how many times was a value stated by a leader, and they ranked those and weighted them from most important to least important, and then they took that set of values, they went over to the employee review sites, and they looked at how often do employees Describe the company through those values. They found zero correlation.
Conor Bronsdon: Wow.
Andre Martin: Right? And so right there, you're creating dissonance that's just driving down engagement. I hear you say we're this. My felt experience is this. Therefore, there's no way I'm going to stay committed and engaged.
So Dan is an example of what every leader's going to have to start doing is if you want to state a value, you better be super ready to stand for it.
Every single day, all the time, in every public moment. Because the minute you don't, You're a hypocrite. And I love this idea, and I also love the other thing that Dan's doing intuitively, and maybe realizes, maybe he's not, by putting times when you're regaining energy. Human energy is finite.
Opportunity isn't. And so if our companies don't start seeing that a part of performance is actually the renew, the renewing of energy, we're never going to get it right. I remember when I used to lead these large teams, Google and Target and Nike. One of the performance goals every team member had was what are you going to do to make sure that you have the same level of energy at the end of the year that you had coming in?
And I didn't care what it was, I didn't care what they put there, but I held them to account. For some people it's, I'm going to schedule all my vacation at the beginning of the year. For other people it was, I'm going to take a yoga class on Wednesday and Fridays. For other people, I'm going to take a full break for lunch and actually go eat and spend time with people.
And I'm like, I didn't care what it was. All I cared is that everyone understood that renewing energy is just as important to me as utilizing it.
Conor Bronsdon: I think that's a really smart thing to do and making folks think about it and holding them accountable to this positive approach. And we've spent a lot of time so far in this conversation talking about what leaders can do.
And I think that's really important. A lot of our audience is leaders. But I think we also should talk about individual careers because that is such an important element of your book. Yep. And how people can understand if they have the right fit, how to find the right fit. And whether you're a leader or someone who wants to be a leader or you're very happy with being in IC and just want to continue to grow your career and be at the right companies.
This advice is very important to you. So I'd love to ask you, what's the approach that you think people should be taking to finding the right fits?
Andre Martin: Even important, even more important this conversation maybe is what my interviewees told me. was their strategy to finding right fit, right? So I talked to over a hundred people over the course of a year, and there's a couple things that stood out, right?
When I asked people about these wrong fit situations, one of the most interesting things to me was, I said, hey, when did you know? When did you know it wasn't a right fit? And they would pause, they'd take a little bit of time, and then they'd put their head down and shake it and say, you know what?
I knew at the interview. I knew at the interview, and I just didn't pay attention to my spidey sense. Because it was a better title, it might have been better pay, I just really wanted to get out of my job, I felt like I was stagnant. And so they ended up making a decision that they knew wasn't right for them, and all of them knew it early on.
And what happens there is that we actually have some trip wires in our brain that can cause us to make that mistake, right? So when you think about confirmation bias, let's say there's all the truth about a company you might want to join, right? And you're motivated to make that decision? You're only going to pay attention to the information that confirms it.
Right? Yeah. Really dangerous when you're trying to make a decision like, Do I stay or do I go? Especially when you see a shiny number like, Oh, this new salary.
That's exactly right. Or, the other thing that's true about job interviews, and we know this as well as anybody because we've both done them, is they're first dates.
Yeah. You're the interviewee. You're on your best behavior. You're best clothes. Your best prepared answers. The error free version of your resume. And I'm a company? You think I'm going to tell you anything but that this is the best place to work in the world? That seems unlikely. Right, and so we're in this process where we're not actually getting to the information that matters most.
So two things I would tell any talent. First one is, before you jump on a job site and you start looking for a new job, You have a lot of work to do. My interviewees told me if there was one thing they wish they would have done, it would have been a ton more self reflection before they ever opened a job at advertisement And in the book we have these excursions, right? So they're actually built to help you get as clear as possible about some fundamental questions. First one is what do you value in big decisions, right? What are you solving for right now? How do you like to do work? What kind of leader do you like to work for?
Where do you want to be in 10 years? Right? All of these questions start to do one thing that's really important in a job search. Is they help you discern the signal from the noise. And they help you have intention. And I think that's probably the best thing in the world that talent can do is have that intention.
And then, you gotta ask better questions. At the end of your interview, you have five minutes. We waste those questions. Tell me why you love working here, right? They're just, they're throwaway questions. We give layups because we think that's what interviewers want. That's your chance to get really clear about some fundamentals.
And so in the book, we have, 10 or 12 sort of questions that are a little bit different, a little bit more pointed, might help talent get a little bit clearer about where they need to go.
Conor Bronsdon: Can you share one as an example?
Andre Martin: Yeah, one of the first ones, and also share a strategy I have, one of the first ones is like, tell me about a person who's joined recently.
That has been a tremendous success. Tell me about who they are. Tell me where they came from. Tell me what they value. Tell me how they get work done. Tell me what they did in their first 90 days. Like, these questions that get at a level of depth around a person that's successful. Because then, without giving away anything, you can find out, hey, are you that person?
Are you willing to work 12 hours a day? Including weekends. Like, that might be what it takes. And usually you'll get a little bit more information because you'll ask them to talk about a real person, not a fake one. Tell me about a real person. What's their name? And then they start to open up a little bit more and they'll start giving you some better information.
The other thing I tell interviewers every time is the interview is probably the place where you're always going to get the least valid information. So my strategy again is to say, Hey, let's say I want to join your company. The people I would talk to that I'd actually interview is someone who had been at your company for at least three to five years. And they recently left.
Conor Bronsdon: Why did they make that decision now after being there for such a long time?
Andre Martin: The first thing is being there a long time means they actually know the company. Yeah. Right. Someone who's been in a company for six months doesn't probably really know how the thing works. And they're going to be a bit jaded because they probably came in and went back out.
Someone who's been there while made a commitment. They saw something. And so And they just left, which means they're going to be brutally honest about it.
Conor Bronsdon: That's a really interesting strategy. And I think a great one that folks can apply if they want to do a little extra research. Yeah. And given how important it is, when you make these decisions, that feels like a logical one to approach.
Do you have an example from your interviews of someone who you felt did a really good job of finding the right fit for them?
Andre Martin: I had a really fascinating interview, so I don't know if it's a story about finding the right fit, but it was a story of a creative marketing director, who, looking back across her career, she's been a high success.
Look back at one of her early experiences and said, what stands out now after all these years is in this first experience, I went to a company that literally for the first couple of weeks taught me how work gets done. And they had standard operating procedures. They had a template for every deck.
They had a way that you had to organize your information. They basically told you all these ways of working. They were super clear. And every year. You would go back and take that sort of course again to remind yourself about how the company works. And she's like, when I was originally there, I thought that was really constraining.
I'm a creative marketing person, right? I want to have freedom and I want to do all these things and I want to do it my way. And she said, but that was the place where I most purely got to practice my craft. Because she said, I didn't have to worry about my creative energy flowing to how I'm going to get work done.
It just flowed to me putting my best effort into the deck, into the template, into the advertisement, into all the things. And I think the lesson there for anybody is that your creative energy is always flowing. It's always flowing. When you're in a wrong fit experience, or a company that's not clear about how they work, it's either flowing to coordination costs, that is, you want to see a piece of information different than the next person, different than the next person, so I've got to recreate it every time.
Or your creative energy is flowing to manage your own emotions. Creating stories about why this is okay, about why this is someone else's fault, about why, instead of it flowing to the thing that you're great at. And for tech leaders, this is especially important. Your jobs are craft jobs. You are experts in your field.
You're doing these really complex things. And if half of your creative energy is going to context, or to managing your emotions, you're just not doing your best work.
Conor Bronsdon: That's a wonderful example because I think it speaks to something we talk a lot about on this show, which is designing your organizations, not just your technical systems, but your organizations to reduce the friction that happens in your employee workflows.
And this is a great example of saying, Hey, we're going to make it really easy for you to understand how to work here and how to be successful here in your work. And then we're going to free you up to focus on the things you do really well. I do wonder, what's an example of something where that goes really wrong?
Andre Martin: Hey, here's where it goes really wrong, is every organization has to continue to evolve, right? And so there's disruptions in your market, there's changes in your product set, there's reorganizations. And often, I think, in those moments, we have to realize that, hey, we need to bring everyone and teach them how to do work the right way right now.
And then if we shift or move or change or something disrupts us again, you know what you got to go do? Do it again. You got to teach them again. And we don't do that, we just push through it. And over time we start to lose the very sort of secret decoder ring that made us great in the first place.
And so when you're a growing company, I mean you are a growing company and you're still relatively, what's your size, how many employees?
Conor Bronsdon: A little over a hundred right now.
Andre Martin: Yes, you're at a hundred employees. Now here's the deal, if you keep growing, you're going to hire another hundred employees. And if you're not careful, you know what happens?
It happens to every startup I work with. Is... That next hundred comes in, they bring their technical skill. They bring their brilliance of working at scale. You know the other thing that's in their backpack? How they work. How they work. Their work principles. Their favorite platforms. Their favorite practices.
You'll see it almost immediately in that everyone will bring their favorite project management tool. Like, and then everyone's like, and then you're on Monday, and you're on this, and you're on that, and you're on all these different platforms, and you're like, what happened? And then the founder wakes up and goes, I don't even recognize this place anymore.
And the thing is, it was our own fault. Every time you bring in a new person, the most important thing you need to do is to teach them and show them and mentor them into how this company works. Otherwise you're going to lose yourself.
Conor Bronsdon: Given these concepts, what's your advice to individuals who are looking to craft a powerful, successful career over the long term?
Andre Martin: There's a couple things. First one is you gotta know what kind of career you're building. And there's three types I talk about in the book, right? There's a career that's of company. That means I've found the product. I've found the place. I'm a diehard consumer and believer in whatever we do, and 20 years there.
Then there's careers that are of craft, right? And those careers are, I want to be so deep in this narrowed field that I want to be the best in the world at it. And then there's careers that are of cause. There's an injustice or an opportunity that I want to either upend the injustice or figure out the problem or opportunity.
And so I gotta follow the energy of whoever's working on that thing. And often we don't know what kind of career we're actually creating. And I'll tell you, and it changes over time. Like, I was a craft person my whole life. Right. I was going to be one of the best in the world or try to be in culture and leadership.
I couldn't stay at one company to do that. Right. If I only saw one way to do that work, I'm useless. I'm probably good for the company, but not good for the profession. And so I purposely had, in my mind to say, Hey, I'm going to move companies quite a few times in my career because I got to see it all.
Right. I got to see how many different ways you can do this. Now, since I've left my last big job and I'm written this book. I'm finding a more about cause, right? I want to solve this 7. 9 trillion of lost productivity. And so I'm going to the places that are interested in that conversation. I'm heading to companies that are willing to think about, Hey, maybe I want my brand to be come to work here and you'll walk out healthier.
I'm coming to conferences where they're having conversations about culture. And I think you just got to first know what kind of career you want. And then you gotta know what you're solving for right now, and where you want to be in 10 years. And I just don't, when I talk to people about their careers, not very many people are very eloquent in either of those three questions.
Conor Bronsdon: I think so many of us spend our time dealing with day to day tasks, or maybe quarter to quarter challenges. Yeah. Strong trade of all successful leaders I know, is they start thinking a year ahead, 18 months ahead, 5 years ahead, and even if they don't have the full outline of 10 years, they have an idea.
They're like, oh, this is what we could be. This is what I could be too. And so I love that you bring this up, because I think that kind of planning on a regular schedule, taking the time to sit back and say, not just what do I want to do this year, but where do I want that to get me to? What's that stepping stone towards?
Because. As humans, it's so easy for us to think about the instant gratification. That's right. And to get caught in these loops, whether it's a TikTok video or the next thing I need to do at work.
Andre Martin: Or the next big job with the next big title or the bigger paycheck, which we know that has no long term impact on job satisfaction.
Conor Bronsdon: Yes.
Andre Martin: And so the advice is, and you're getting at it, is anytime you're in a transition, go back and do those reflection exercises again. If your company is going through a big disruption, on the heels of that, look at the company again. Is it still the right place to be? Any time you are getting ready to look for a new job, do those self reflections.
Any time you end up moving cities, take a look at it. So any time you're on the cusp of a transition, make sure to do that diligence. Take a moment, take a deep breath, take three steps back, open your eyes really wide and ask yourself what you want.
Conor Bronsdon: I think that's a wonderful note to end this on. I'm really excited to read the rest of the book.
Andre, thank you so much for taking the time here. Where can folks find the book if they don't already have a copy?
Andre Martin: They can find it on all the major book Resellers, so Amazon, Barnes Noble. You can go to my website, it's www. wrongfitrightfit. com and you can link out from there. And also I'd say, hey, if you want to get practical tips every week, I got a Substack newsletter, it's mondaymatters.
substack. com and it's out every Sunday. You can read it with your cup of coffee and walk into your week a little bit more prepared.
Conor Bronsdon: We're going to have to ask you to write a guest article. We've got about 15, 000 readers of our own, Substack. We'd love to feature you.
Andre Martin: Let's do it. I'm in.
Conor Bronsdon: Great.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's been a pleasure getting to know you at the conference and chatting with you. Really appreciate the insights and again, can't wait to read the book.
Andre Martin: All right. And keep doing what you're doing. This is a great asset to tech leaders.