Jared Lock began his I-O journey at the University of Tulsa, studying under Bob and Joyce Hogan. These days, he heads up The JDL Group, a consulting firm he founded that employs a network of 40 licensed I-O psychologists. We start our conversation by learning about Jared’s personal I-O journey and what he learned from the Hogans. We then discuss organizational culture, including why I-Os tend to disqualify themselves from conversations with business leaders, how to find the difference between “the words on the wall” and the actual organizational culture, and why it’s important for both individuals and organizations to be upfront about who they really are.
Transcript
This transcript is AI-generated and may not be completely accurate. Please do not quote myself or any of my guests based on this transcript.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to the Department 12 Podcast, where we talk about everything industrial and organizational psychology. I am joined today by Dr. Jared lock. How are you today?
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:00:11] I’m very well, Ben. Thank you. And thanks for having me on the show.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:00:14] I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because there’s a couple of topics we wanted to cover. How did you first learn about industrial and organizational psychology?
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:00:23] That’s a, it’s a funny question. It might be a longer response and you requested, but I grew up in Kansas. My, my parents were farmers and both of my brothers and my dad also worked for John Deere for about 27 years before owning his own dealership.
So a lot of entrepreneurial-ism in the house. My oldest brother went to risk arbitrage on wall street. My other brother went the insurance then banking and finance route, and I kind of wanted a black sheep out and not go down that path. So I thought I wanted to be Sigmund Freud. And at the time I took an intro to psychology class and they said, there’s all these different kinds of psychology.
And, and one of them was this thing called industrial. And you work with businesses instead of you know, people, if you will. And it’s a growing field and it’s there and I didn’t really give it much thought again. I thought I wanted to be Sigmund Freud and you. Move forward to your junior year of college.
And I decided I should probably pay attention. So I started going to class. I started sitting closer to the front of class and asking questions and I thought I should get a job in the field. So I went to a a Psychiatric center for, for employment. And I was a psych tech. And so they at least gave me keys and I could do this and that, but mostly just babysitting and doing that stuff.
And, and I just, I realized that I probably didn’t have the empathy that I needed to be in that industry. So I’m like, Oh, crud on that junior, what am I going to do? And, and so from there, I went back and thought about, well, you know, This kind of business thing is important in my family and everyone seems good at it.
And clinical psychology probably isn’t it. So. Industrial psychology. Here we come. And it was interesting because I didn’t, I didn’t know what industrial psychology was in as an undergrad. And in fact, my two undergrad professors who I worked with one Rick Snyder had to bring in an ex professor in that knew a little bit about consulting to organizations.
And my, I said, well, I’ll give it a shot. And so I kind of lucked in, I guess, Ben.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:02:20] It is amazing to me how often our stories begin with clinical or counseling psych. And then after you find out what that actually entails, it’s sort of like, okay, well, I’m still interested in people and what makes them tick?
I still want to do this thing called psychology or what do I do now? So I understand in graduate school you studied under the Hogan. And so this is a topic I thought you could share a little bit about because.
These are names particularly for newer listeners may be graduate students now that they’re going to hear and they think maybe they should know who that is, but they don’t quite know who that is. So could you just tell us a little bit about your experience with the Hogan in graduate school?
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:03:03] Yeah, I’m following along with that then I got accepted into four or five PhD programs and.
Again, like I said, I didn’t know what a, what a Hogan was and I didn’t know what an IO psychologist was. So as I went to these visits to these universities I, my, the kid that they had walk you around and show you around, I didn’t variably have them take me to the library. And there was a thing back then called cyclic.
And I would say, what are your professor’s names? And I type them in. And and and you’d see how many things they’d publish. Cause I assume, you know, you’re supposed to publish and that’s how you get there. And and most of the places, the, the, the publish rate was low. There wasn’t a lot of stuff.
And I went to the university of Tulsa, which is, you know, just about three and a half hours from Kansas city. And, and they have the stack of stuff. Sitting right there. And part of the stack of stuff was this, the, this thing called the handbook of industrial psychology and, and there were two, two of those books there, the green one and the red one.
And and one of them was the chapter by Bob Hogan. And the other one was a chapter by Joyce Hogan. So I thought, well, If these guys are writing about industrial psychology, they must, they must be pretty good psychologists. So I guess I’ll go here. So again, I kind of lucked into to even finding the university of Tulsa and to this day, I don’t know why they accepted me or how I got there or anything, but Bob and Torres Hogan.
If you want to think about it, Bob Hogan is probably the lead personality psychologist in the world. If you will. And what he did and is in a lot of ways, paved the way for the rest of us, he bit irascible highly intelligent, but believes in what he believes and is willing to discuss it with others.
And, you know, he took it on the chin. Those, those kids out there that are listening to the students there’s a thing called situational behaviorism there’s things called response theory issues and things that you probably take for granted now were big fights way back then. And and he took on every single one of those fights and, and worked on it as, as a professor.
I don’t know, it’s a little bit more meritocratic. You, you had to absolutely raise your hand and you had to absolutely know what you were talking about. And in order to succeed with him, you really had to be able to think psychology. Okay. Not just a book, not repeating theories or anything like that. That truly thinks psychology.
Joyce Hogan man, nuts and bolts, great researcher. Okay. And nuts and bolts teach you the tools of the trade. And so while Bob was a little more theoretical and Hey, let’s talk psychology and let’s, let’s make connections between things that, that, that may not seem to be connected and let’s bring in.
Anthropology and sociology. And let’s talk about all these different connections. Joyce Hogan was job analysis, selection criteria, and related validity studies success rates versus hit rates. Let’s go find a company in town to do something with then. And so she really. Was the, was the, kind of the leading charge of putting tools in the belt.
And, you know, Ben, I know you have a lot of students listening. One of the pieces of advice I give students, I got from her, which is learn in graduate school, learns something. Whether it’s an assessment that you can learn how to interpret, or I know how to use the PHQ job analysis tool, or I know how to do this kind of thing, or I can do a compensation study, learn a tool.
Because when you go to your employer, all you’ve got is your energy. They’re going to have to give you all of the skills. And so, so at least with a tool, you can raise your hand and say, you know, I don’t know if this matters to you, but I know how to do this one thing. And I can do that here while you’re teaching me stuff.
And it just goes a long way. So that’s fascinating. Yeah.
I offer something more than just my energy and enthusiasm. Right. And, and what it does, is it also for the. Or the new, new, new employees. It lets the organization. Now you’re in a relationship and there’s a handshake between us. And part of this handshake is I know you’re going to have to give me a lot of time and energy and I’m going to be slower than you need at least upfront in return.
I don’t have much to offer, but my energy and enthusiasm. And I also have this other little thing here too. And and that little thing might be the difference between getting that job or not.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:07:25] That’s great advice. So speaking of careers you know, many years later you are the founder of the JDL group, LLC.
And one of the areas that, that your consultancy focuses on is organizational culture. So that’s the meat of today’s conversation. How do you define or operationalize organizational culture? You know, when I’m talking to somebody yeah.
About a car or a tree or a house. I know that we mean the same thing. When we use those words, we’re referring to the same reality out there in the universe. But when I use the phrase organizational culture , I sometimes get the feeling that we’re not defining it the same way.
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:08:01] Yeah, that’s funny. One of the things I I’ve been taught a long time ago is that if there’s anything useful to say in the world, probably psychologists will muck get up and make it more difficult than it needs to be. And and I think the concept of culture is, is one of those.
Right. And, and, you know, we, we, as, as, as psychologist, So wrapped up in, well, that’s a value, that’s not culture, that’s a mission. That’s not, or that’s a vision, not a, this or this and not that. And, and there’s all. And, and we just sit there and at ramble at each other over and over again on what’s the right definition.
What is it that we’re supposed to do? Where is it that we’re supposed to go? Right. And in the meantime, CEOs and others are just like, Hey, I’m done with this. I’m going to go look. Look somewhere else for my answers. And so my operationalization of culture takes on different forms in different places for different reasons, quite frankly when I’m low.
And so, as an example, when I am talking to most organizations about culture what I’m trying to get to is here’s how we do stuff here. Right. Here’s the way we talk. Here’s the things we do. Here’s how we approach the market. Here’s the, here’s the things that will, we’ll get you in trouble around here.
And here’s the things that will get you rewarded around here. And so it’s a very practical definition when I’m talking to an executive about culture and their impact on culture. Oftentimes it’s about their personal pillars. If you will, the They the things they stand on, the things they believe in how they manage others, the, the handshake negotiation they make with the people around them and what that looks like.
In general though, for me organizational culture, and this is where the I and the O psychology meetup for me organizational culture is in a lot of ways a buildup of the, the connections between all of the individual personalities in the organization. All right now, obviously the personalities at the top matter a little bit more, I do absolutely believe the culture trickles down from above and that’s where it comes from.
But what, what, what we’re looking at is, is trying to understand the connectivity between all of those people’s individual characteristics and what are the places where they all seem to have to agree. Okay. And if you can find those two or three places where kind of everyone believes the same stuff that’s a, that’s a starting point for both building changing, evolving solidifying a culture.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:10:33] So you recommend starting with looking for those areas of overlap or agreement as indicators of what the culture is. I’ve heard other people talk about organizational culture, just in terms of what they want to change or what they aspire to. So there’s this idea of. The aspirational culture, but then there’s the actual culture, like the culture that is alive and breathing in the organization today. Which of those two do you think is more important?
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:11:02] I don’t think you can change if you don’t know what you’re changing from then. And and so much, like I will say, and this is a line I use often job analysis is the cornerstone of all human resource activities.
I do believe that understanding your current culture. Absolutely necessary to know where you’re going because aspirational culture is basically jumping a chasm, right. We are today to who we want to be tomorrow. And. If you don’t know what the chasm is, how big it’s going to be, what the differences are that are going to happen based on that, then you have, you have a very difficult time getting there.
And one of the things, if you only focus on aspirational culture, one of the things you can’t predict, and my company has done a great job and put together models that will actually predict the speed of change. Okay. And I think the speed of change is a really interesting topic. And if you don’t know who you are today, and you can’t identify the distance of jumping or the chasm that you have to get to, to go to where you want to be tomorrow, you won’t, you can’t, you can’t predict the speed.
Okay. And and so one of the things my company does, I think that’s a little unique, I’m not pushing my company or anything like that, but it just came out as a, as a, as a reflection of, of why do all these change things take longer than people suggest. And, and it’s just because they’re not understanding it.
And so we were able to actually look at a current culture and what’s really there, and that’s not that stuff on the wall. Okay. So one of the first things that we do is we say, okay, you say, this is this stuff on the wall. That’s the most important stuff to you. Employees are our most important asset, usually shows up somewhere around there.
And then you assess the exact team with a measure of standard personality or, or derailment or, or their value system. And you see that all truism is about a zero and commerce is about a 99, right? So they care about money. They don’t care about people. And so. Part of what we do, depending on where we’re going is, is determined.
How much of that writing on the wall is actually true. Okay. And because you’re the one place where you’re not where you, you can’t lie is your employees because they see your actions every day.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:13:22] Sites like Glassdoor or indeed where employees are invited to share their opinion about an employer in a anonymous way to your mind is that. A valid way to learn about the real culture of a company, or do you think that not representative
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:13:40] I’m trying to organize all the data that I do have because I don’t, I’ve never specifically studied that, that question. But here’s some things that I, that, that I do know one the, the personality, characteristics of people who will provide an anonymous review on a site like Glassdoor or predictable.
Okay. So right away, basically 35, 40% of your population will never go do that. That’s just who they are. That’s just who they are, whether they want to, whether they are they’re happy, sad, angry, or mad, it doesn’t matter. They just won’t do it. So, so, so, so you’re losing about 35% of the world by assuming that that’s the representation of everybody.
Now, the second piece is, is the person’s willingness to both praise or not, and that’s a personality character. Risk as well. Some people are looking around every day for snakes under rocks, and some people are looking around every day for the sun to come up. Okay. And, and those are personality characteristics.
And, and so you, you’re, you’re looking at the personality characteristics of the person. And so, and those are predictable as well. But what we don’t know in an anonymous setting is who, who those people are and what they’re doing. And so my, my suggestion into organizations. And my suggestion into those is that you know, like it or not, you have, you’ve created some level of energy in humans out there that have decided to say something about you.
And the general proposition is it is good, bad or ugly, right? I mean, you’re a, five-year a three and a half or year or two. And and, and so where do you want to go to, to, to, to do something about that and, and, and what matters? This kind of brings up the concept and a lot of times of employee engagement and things of that nature.
And I often tell my clients, I go, if you’re unwilling to change a variable. For God’s sakes. Don’t ask people about it. If you ask people, do you like how much you’re paid? And they say, no, and then you say, well, too bad. We’re not going to do anything about that then why did you ask? Oh yeah, yeah.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:15:43] The menu in front of hungry people, unless you got some burgers in the back,
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:15:46] that’s a better way to put it than me, Ben.
Yes, absolutely.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:15:49] You said that in your consulting practice, one of the first things that you do in, in many projects is. Figure out whether the words on the wall reflect the reality in the organization. How do you go about determining what the culture in an organization is like and how close or far off it is from, from the culture?
It says it wants to be.
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:16:06] Yeah, I mean, multiple ways been, I mean, I, you know, obviously I grew up under Bob Hogan and. And so I believe in assessments, I believe in individual differences and, and I believe in using those individual differences to be able to predict things. And so in a lot of ways, culture, it stems from a comm, a collection of The basically the exec teams personality, characteristics, and this could be their positive personality, like normal characteristics, five factor model kind of stuff, to be negative characteristics, the derailment characteristics and things of that nature also could be their value system what’s in their heart.
What do they care about on a day-to-day basis? And, and, and, and a final piece of this is. How are they solving problems and making decisions on a day-to-day basis? Okay. Culture culture can go really, really well. Culture matters a heck of a lot less when you’ve got really, really good ideas going around and they’re successful.
And that, unfortunately that’s true. And And so we, we often, so one, one path would be to take a look at the executive team. And what you’ll find when you look at that is there’s probably two or three things that are consistent around all of them. That’s the things why they came together. We all love money.
Or we actually want to help the world or we believe in creating tight networks inside of our organization, or we just come to work to work, or we are motivated by solving the next grand challenge. Or we come to work every day because we get to do something. No one else in the world does there’s different reasons why people.
Come together. And the first thing is I want to figure out that, all right. And the best place to do that is to find it from the top of the organization. Those of you who don’t have assessments or don’t own assessment practices of this and that focus groups are a great way to get there too. I only have, you know, you just have to make sure that people in your focus group have an opinion and are willing to share it.
Okay. And that’s all I asked for white people in focus groups are a waste of time. Right. And then you can look for more what you were looking for kind of more artifacts, if you will, or more cultural cues or clues out there. I’m looking at turnover rates. I’m looking at I’m looking at engagement data.
If they have them, I’m looking at yearly. Formative evaluations. Does everyone get the exact same rating? I’m grabbing clues from virtually anywhere that I can to try to pull that together. But what you really find and we’re, we’re, we’re we really kind of start, that’s just the starting point. Right?
And then for us, what we try to do is then we say, okay, if these two or three things matter at the top of the organization, but we say there’s six things that matter here. Which of those six things actually get spewed forth by each of these leaders. Right? So you know, and this is one of those things.
If, if, if my company or if my leaders value money over safety, for instance, or, or speed that they value money and speed over, over some other things. Even though my, my vision says we’re a safe company, we believe in safety and this, that, and the other am I as a manager indicating to my employees that safety is important or speed.
And so while, and this is the delusion, this is the disillusionment or the, you know, the, the, the, the dialogue, illusion of culture. Because if your top, if you can find two or three things, your top 10 people care about, then you go out to the next 40 their own personality and their own belief systems will matter.
And you’ll see which things they’ll follow and which ones they won’t. And then you’ll see their employees follow the things that matter to their boss, but not the other things. And then there’s their individual and, and that leakage of culture is it’s amazing to me. The culture is even exists, quite frankly.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:19:47] You mentioned trying to identify the gap between where the culture actually is and where the client wants to see the culture to go. And this is something that I see all the time on social media is basically anytime anyone shares any research on an intervention designed to solve some specific problem or to help mitigate that problem.
There’s just a chorus of people that say, that’s not enough. You need to change the culture, need to change the culture, right? To the point where every problem an organization faces Reliably, someone’s going to say the only way to fix this is to fix the culture. I have a couple of questions based on that.
First I have an idea in my own mind of an ideal organizational culture. Most of us do just like we have an image in our mind of. Our ideal of what the country should be like or what our families should be like. Should I be trying to get my organization closer to that ideal culture? Or should we be trying to be more of who we are now?
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:20:43] That’s a great question. And I’m not going to be the psychologist that says it all depends, but in a little bit of a way, Ben, it, it does. And, and, and where, where I try to go with that concept is, is why do we need to be that. Okay. Why are we choosing to make that change and why are we choosing to get to the place where we want to get to?
And I guess I, and I hope I’m answering your question. If not, please redirect, but I want to find. That I wanna, I wanna make delay. This is where I used the word deliberate, and it’s a little bit different than a lot of people use deliberate. There’s a deliberately developmental organization and things like that.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being very deliberate about what your culture is and, and, and more importantly also what it’s not okay if we’re. Changing our culture because someone says, we think they should, then I don’t know why, why are we, does it make business sense? Is it an important thing there does, is, is it, does it, does it rally around a concept that the people in our organization care about?
And if, if it doesn’t then, then, then why are we changing? And so the, the jump across the chasm. Isn’t just a job it’s to get to somewhere. And if I can’t see the get to somewhere piece of of a focus on a culture change, then it should just go away. Because it’s not, it’s not really beneficial.
The other thing. I, the other thing I try to help organizations understand, and I learned this, I just saw it early on. And w in, in, in virtually any organization that I went into, when we tried to do a change Roughly 30% of the population loved what we were doing and were like, woo let’s go. And let’s do that.
And about 30% were like, ah, you know, this is kind of cool, but I’m kind of scared and I’ll let you guys go. First. And 30% were like, this will never work. Just sucks. This is terrible. This is bad. You might ask it and you’re, you’re, you’re beautiful. Audience will wonder where the other 10% is. That’s just, people are weird.
Okay. Unpredictable. It’s, you know, in statistics we call it error, but I call it the human function. And I I love that humans are unpredictable about to, you know, for about 10% of it. But so, so regardless of your culture change, 30% of the people are gonna love it. 30% are gonna be okay with some aspects of it, not others and 30% of them are gonna hate it.
Okay. And and so. Th there’s gotta be a reason more so than just because we’re supposed to, or bill Gates said we should, or, or Elan does this and he’s cool. So we’ll do it too. What’s the real reason you want to make this change. And does it make rational sense for your business?
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:23:27] You mentioned that 30% roughly in a given group are going to hate the change. How do you work with those folks?
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:23:36] That’s that’s a leadership issue. Okay. So now we’ve gone from organization back to a individual, if you will, or industrial in a lot of ways. And so in all of our culture change initiatives we identify the 30% that are gonna, that are gonna love it. And in a way, I mean, absent of being real kind of blahzay about it, we kind of make them the good kids, right.
This is where we’re trying to go and these people are holding it up or helping us with it, propping it up, I guess, is the right word. We then identify that middle 30% and and have the first 30% help them make the jump. Okay, because part of the, the biggest difficulty with culture change is people think it’s a huge job and it doesn’t have to be Ben and, and, and what the, what the people who love it are able to do it.
They’re able to say, man, I know it looks really big. If you do this, this, this, and this you’re three quarters of the way there. And they make the jump look smaller. Okay. And now all of a sudden you have majority, right. You know, you’re at least 60% and and you have a 60% flowing your way and going your direction.
And then the last 30% it’s it’s a very important discussion. And this is where most culture change initiatives fail is because Our performance management systems or our training around getting managers, good feed, having managers give on and have honest conversations with their employees and, and not helping people see that they’re impacting it in a negative way versus a positive way or not helping them understand what’s happening.
If you don’t have good managers or good leaders to carry it out, it’s going to fail because then they’ll say, wow, yes, this won’t matter that much. And then you have that leakage coming in, right? You have people going in a different direction. One of the best organizations I ever worked with. And I’ve worked with them for a couple of decades now.
They, they grow through acquisition. I didn’t say merger. I said acquisition, and that’s the way they say it. And, and, you know, they, they walk in and they say that the people in the organism, the new, the newly bought people, they say, look. Here’s our culture and here’s what we do. And we bought you probably because you’re underperforming in the marketplace and here’s five or six things.
These are our non-negotiables, here’s our five or six non-negotiables. Now we know 30% of you are gonna love it. So come on board. Welcome. And you’re gonna fit in. Great. We know 30% of you are going to be somewhere in the middle. I encourage you to lean on those guys and 30% of you probably aren’t going to like it and we’ll tolerate that for 60 days.
But by 90 days, either you will need to make a decision or we will. And at the end of the day, fortunately, or unfortunately it’s, it’s, it’s a 30%, 30%, 30% go away. Not, and, and half of that is because we’ve asked them to, and half of it is because they want to. But we’re not keeping the special person around who does that one thing, or we’re not worrying about some of those things because organizations can succeed and exist without a single individual.
So those are hard decisions. It’s a little easier in a merger and act, but what we found is their honesty and what I’d call their deliberateness actually leads people with fewer hard feelings. Yeah. Cause they’re like, you know what? They told me, they told me this is what it was going to happen. And it is.
And now either I got to decide, I want to come on board and be part of this or I don’t. And, and, and if I don’t want to come on board, they’ll figure it out and let me know. And so the hard feelings go away. Yeah. And working with this client, it sounds like the client organization that does all the acquisitions.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:27:06] Isn’t a matter of, Hey, let’s try to take the edge off of this culture. Let’s make it softer and fuzzier it’s this is the culture of the acquiring organization. They know exactly what they want. They communicate it clearly. So it’s helping that organization be more of what it already is and have a clearer easier to communicate version of itself to present to these internal stakeholders versus, here’s some ideal rainbow and puppy dogs, version of culture that we want to try to push everybody toward.
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:27:37] Yeah. That’s and I think Ben that’s exactly right. And I think that’s why the, the, the base rate of what we call mergers and act is what I think the base rate of failure is 70% or something like that.
And, and You know, if you think about it, most of the people at the top of the organization are focusing on money. Okay. We can cut these group, this, we can merge these two together and shave head count, and we can save money this way. And we can do this, but they’re not thinking about the culture in there.
And they’re there. They’re not thinking how important it is. And, and I don’t, and I’ve said this a million times. I don’t care what the culture is. But by God, you should be honest to it. And you should be willing to, to, to talk about it now, clearly some of the fortune fives or whatever, they’re going to say, we have to say these words, there’s, we’re in a political nightmare.
We’ve got this, that and the other, and these things have to come out of us. And, and, and I’m okay with, with some version of that, but the writing on the wall. If you’re going to put something on the wall, then you could have multiple messages if necessary. Here’s how the community will perceive the writing on the wall.
Here’s how we enact the writing on the wall inside of this organization. Okay. I have an organization for instance, that has As one of their pillars is we aggressively compete to win and define the standard in our industry and the word aggressive and compete and win can, can scare a lot of people, but that’s how they see themselves.
And they’re okay that way. And so you think, and, and so then you, you, you know, the, the top five people and I came up with this and, and it’s one of. Five or six statements that they make. And and then the next 30 people had to decide, how did they live that and how don’t they? And, and, you know, one person said my aggressiveness is, you know, he, he’s the loud macho, ah, I’m going to take over this place and show you where we’re going.
We’re going to. That Hill let’s go. And, and that’s an okay version of it, but this other guy said, you know, I’m not that I’m, I’m Bill Belichick, I’m going to die. I’m going to figure out I’m going to be so aggressive in planning and so aggressive on competing on how to take care of deficiencies and eat fish, any efficiencies that I can dink and dunk and, and, and go up and down the field on you.
It will. Taken five and 10 yard chumps instead of hail Mary’s all day long and I’ll still get there. But my aggression is quiet. My aggression is behind the scenes, but it looks like this and that combination of letting both of those two people be themselves while living the culture and being deliberate about it makes it successful for them.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:30:18] If, if you could wave a magic wand and everyone in the world would understand something about organizational culture, what would that thing be? What would be the thing that would put you out of work?
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:30:29] I put myself out of work all the time. Okay. So and that’s a good, and you know, ed Schein taught us that a long time ago, if you’re a good consultant, you go away.
And and we do, and we do, but th th I, I, I’ll kind of repeat myself here in a little bit then, which is You know what you can try to be someone else and 30% and the 30, 30, 30 will happen. You can be yourself. And the 30, 30, 30 can happen. Two things. Why not be yourself? And two, why not tell everybody that?
And the second point and I’ll expound upon it a little bit is we’re so afraid as managers to, and this doesn’t sound like me. Right. But we’re so afraid to be vulnerable. We’re so afraid of, Oh, I don’t want anyone to know how I really am or who I am or what I feel or any of this. Stuff. And so they’re going to have to figure it out over years and years of watching me.
And, and, and why can’t we just be loud about it up front and say, Hey man, I get grumpy on Fridays or, you know what? You bring a new idea in to me. And it’s not my idea. I’m going to say no first, but I promise you, if you ask me you, you have the right to ask me three times. Okay, because I just I’m in no first person or every time we started yeah.
Project, I’m seeing snakes under rocks and I’m I’m everything’s, this is bad. This is bad. This is bad. If you can deal with me for a month and a week and a half on a project, it’ll get better. I promise. And if it doesn’t call me out on it, and so why aren’t we creating these leadership? What I call service level agreements between ourselves and our employees and our peers and our bosses that just say, Hey man, here’s who I am.
And here’s how I’m going to run my business. And so many of us think we have to run it in such a different way. It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Ben Butina, Ph.D.: [00:32:12] Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today. This was a fascinating conversation, and I’m going to share a link to to your business, and hopefully if there are any listeners that are interested in finding out more about what you do, Or just have questions about anything that you’ve shared. You’ll be okay with them reaching out to you.
Absolutely. I love that. And if, if you’re the students, I love giving time to, to, to people who are motivated.
Jared Lock, Ph.D.: [00:32:36] If you’re motivated to do something for your career, then, you know, Feel free to give us a call and I’d be glad to give you some thoughts or advice. Obviously, Ben, I have opinions I’m willing to share them. I really appreciate you letting me be on this, on the show today. And there’s anything we can do hopefully in the future, we can maybe tackle another topic and, and do it all over.
Sounds good. Thanks again, Jared. Have a great one.
All right. You take care. Appreciate it.
