Anthony Onesto, CPO at Suzy, on Gen Z and AI: Leading a Generation with Unlimited Information

Transcript

Anthony, welcome to the show.

 Anthony Onesto 00:02:56

Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:58

Yeah, very excited to do this. So, as you know, one of the questions we like to start with on the podcast is to talk about mistakes. Lately we’ve been changing up the question a little bit. So usually it’s when you first started leading a team, what were some mistakes you used to make? And now we’re kind of changing it and also allowing for recent mistakes, too. So if there’s anything that’s recent that you want to talk about or recent learning, happy to do that, too. But it can be from all parts of your career, any mistake that you used to make that now maybe do less of?

 Anthony Onesto 00:03:28

Yeah, it’s a great, we’re talking about 20 plus years of mistakes, so it’s hard to pick just one. I think it was, especially when, when thinking about leading a team, I think the biggest thing, and it goes back to Ronald Reagan quote, which was trust but verify. I think oftentimes what you want to do is give your teams autonomy to get stuff done. And depending on what level of manager you are or employee they are, that autonomy ranges. And I think the mistake I’ve made was giving people a lot of autonomy no matter where they were in their career. And I’ve learned a lot better. And I’ve actually gone through training, and now I’m certified in brain aware training. And one of the major modules is about autonomy itself.

 Anthony Onesto 00:04:16

So I think my entire career, I think if I were to thread something through, because I’m known as a great delegator, my teams would agree with that. But for the most part, it’s that level of autonomy, and it’s that trust but verify. So give people the autonomy, but go in and support and help and just check. And it also depends on what level they are, too, in their career. If they’re more junior, you’re going to be more involved. If they’re more senior, you’re less involved. So it depends on the level at which you are at, of course, and where they are at. So that’s been a mistake in my career, and I think I’ve been doing a lot better in figuring that out.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:04:51

I love that. And you said you were a master delegator. This is definitely something that I feel like it’s a continuous journey. You think you’re good, but then you realize you’re not that good, and then maybe you get better over time. So what has been the big unlock? Is there something that you feel that you do that maybe other people don’t or something that you learned how to do better in terms of delegation itself?

 Anthony Onesto 00:05:13

I think it’s really knowing yourself, and there’s so many different you know, we can go down a rabbit hole of disk and all these different profiles. I’m also, again, certified in a profile called Ambassador index, which is four quadrants. You answer a bunch of questions and it tells you where you preferred, so it doesn’t give you a personality, it tells you where your preferred work is, whether you are. And there’s four quadrants, there’s optimizer implementation. Each quadrant has either get stuff done or being an idea person or someone that looks at the market and can see future trends. And once you realize what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and being honest about yourself, then you surround yourself with folks that are better at you at those things. So for me, I’m really good at brainstorming, coming up with ideas, seeing the marketplace, seeing trends and things happening, going into execution, and getting stuff done. I’m good because I’ve been a startup HR person, and you had to play both of those parts.

 Anthony Onesto 00:06:14

But I know that’s a weakness to me, to take an idea and then operationalize it, there are better people. So I think it’s first being aware of what you’re good at. Sports analogies. I’m not going to play on the inside in a basketball team, likely. I’m shooting threes, and most of the time it’s off of screens because I’m not that fast. Right. It’s realizing what your capabilities are and then playing that role. So I think that’s a key factor in it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:06:38

No, that’s a very important one. Is it brain awareness training that you said that you’ve done?

 Anthony Onesto 00:06:43

It’s called brain aware. It was started by Brit Andretta, who was the chief learning officer@lynda.com. and then at LinkedIn when they sold, and then she went out and did her own thing, and it was really rooted in neuroscience, which I loved.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:06:56

Sounds like this is one of the key learnings that you’ve had in terms of figuring out what level of autonomy to give someone. Is that something that it just takes a while to figure out what level of autonomy to give them? Or do you start by giving someone, especially, say you have a new team, or you just got hired into a company and it’s a company, you’ve got a team already. How do you figure out where to dial the autonomy back or forward?

 Anthony Onesto 00:07:21

It’s really an interesting. So, within the framework in this module, there are, I think it’s one to nine or one to ten levels of autonomy, and it really depends on an analysis of where that person is in their career and their expertise. So you would assume that earlier on, by the way, one to eight, I think it’s either one to eight or one to nine. One is the least autonomy and nine is the most autonomy. Right. So when you go and you look at and assess somebody’s capabilities now, and I want to be clear, it’s not only tenure, right. It’s also within the certain skill set. So you may have a junior person, and I’m going to make something up here.

 Anthony Onesto 00:07:58

But like, if you’re in the marketing department and you need someone who’s really skilled with SEO or SEM, that person may be highly skilled and junior in that role. So you’re looking at both tenure and role, but also skillset. And so if someone, you’re the head of marketing and maybe you’re not an SEO or an SEM expert and that search engine marketing and search engine optimization, that person is, you’re going to give them more autonomy. Like, hey, this is what I’m setting. I’m going to set the high level goal and then you’re going to go off and do what you need to do. You are the expert of those things. HR, perfect example is my director of people operations is a really well read person on the various different state federal laws, right? So when I start thinking of a plan, I go to her and say, hey, what are the things? And I give her a ton of autonomy to inform me about what’s happening within the state or the federal laws. And so she has, whereas some of the more maybe leadership or communication things, I’m diving in, like a presentation for the company or the presentation for our executive team that she might do.

 Anthony Onesto 00:09:02

I might dive in more than that. I might. On the state laws, I give her an eight or a nine level of autonomy on the presentation. Maybe it’s two or three. Hey, go out and do it. Let me respond to whatever you’re doing. So I think it depends on the individual, and you have to assess each one on your team to understand where they are within both their careers and the skillset that you’re looking at.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:23

Okay. Because if you’re a, say, leader of a large organization, do you get to a point where everybody’s at a level eight or nine or that’s never the case because there’s various skills. No matter what seniority you have, you.

 Anthony Onesto 00:09:38

Would imagine, I mean, you would, if you’re a leader at a large organization, you have folks underneath you that have certain skill sets. And those skill sets, I would imagine, sit in an eight or nine these are high level folks. You’re a CEO of an organization, you hire a head of HR. Pretty high level of autonomy. If you’re a CEO, you’re likely not really educated about the HR laws or the federal laws. Right. So you have to hire an HR person. There’s a really interesting blog article which talks about, especially for startup CEO’s, this idea of learners versus guides.

 Anthony Onesto 00:10:10

And the concept is that you can either surround yourself with people that are learners. I’m going to put you in a position, and I’m comfortable for you to learn that position while you’re here or a guide. And most likely you need guides in HR and finance, people that have been in your position, but also steps above in where you want to go so they can tell you, here’s the roadmap, here are the landmines, things of that nature. So I think once you get into a larger organization and you start building hierarchies, yeah. Your next level of leadership is going to be eight to nine. So you’re really giving a ton of autonomy to the folks that are working in those specific departments and leading those departments.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:50

Yeah. So in your opinion, is it then harder to be a first line manager? Because presumably maybe there’s potentially less autonomy or. It always varies, just depends on who the people are and what the things are that they’re doing.

 Anthony Onesto 00:11:04

I will always vote on it being so freaking hard to be a first line manager. By the way, it is one of the most difficult jobs in the world because you’re leading up, you’re leading down, you’re leading sideways, you’re getting stuff done. And maybe you can appreciate the answer, but it’s yes. And I think it’s hard, but it’s different. And what I mean by that is if I am a CEO of a large company, when I’m working with my leaders and I’m giving them autonomy, the way I’m coaching them is different, right. I’m not giving them the answer. I am not chat GPT or Siri or Alexa. They’re not coming to me and say, hey, anthony, what’s the answer? I’m coaching them.

 Anthony Onesto 00:11:44

Like, hey, I’m putting them down a path of where I’m coaching them to get to the answer because I want them to come up with the answer where I think when you go into the first line managers, that is going to be more directive type of coaching, which is I want you to get to the answer, but I might lead you a little bit more or I might guide you, or in fact, in some cases I know for a fact this is the answer. I’m going to give you that answer. So it’s kind of like a potpourri or a stew, if you will. I can’t think of a better metaphor. Maybe it’s a DJ mixer. In some cases, you’re going to have to fluctuate between autonomy and you’re going to have folks that have small amounts of autonomy depending on their skill sets, some that have more autonomy. But I think you’re very rarely going to get into that eight or nine realm if you’re a frontline manager. And so, yeah, the work is less about coaching and more about guiding and directing.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:12:38

Yeah, it’s definitely one of the things that makes management so much more difficult. But, yeah, it is very nuanced. I did want to also chat with you about your book. It’s called the new employee contract, how to find, keep and elevate Gen Z talent. I think it came out in March 2022 and super relevant for this day and age stuff that certainly everybody’s talking about. So maybe we can start with what is, you know, just to go back to the very, very basic, what age groups are in Gen Z and why are they different and, like, what makes them tick?

 Anthony Onesto 00:13:14

Yeah, great, great question. I mean, I think the easiest way to think about the generation is kind of the iPhone generation. IPhone launched, I think it was 2006, 2007. So this generation has, and I don’t have the exact dates of the specific generation, but it’s the generation that knows only of mobile and Internet. And so if you know a time before the Internet in your life, you’re not in Gen Z. Right. It’s the Internet, the experience that they’ve had, and then ad mobile on top of that, this generation has been literally with a iPhone or an iPad since they were very, very little. And so when you think of that, it’s sort of that world of not knowing a world before the Internet, not knowing a world before the mobile Internet and having access to unlimited information, you just don’t know what it’s like prior to that.

 Anthony Onesto 00:14:07

And so that’s where this generation, I would say in terms of the workforce, we’re probably one or two, maybe two and a half, three years into them coming into the workforce. This is a post college generation that’s starting to come into the workforce. And I would believe, and I remember reading a stat, two to three years could potentially be upwards of 40, 50% of the workforce. So a pretty significant area and growing population in the workforce that, frankly, we are not ready for.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:14:34

And what makes them different. So it sounds like they came in with all this technology, definitely things that improved our lives, you know, for those of us who’ve seen before the Internet. And so what makes them different? Is it they expect different things in the workplace or why are they different?

 Anthony Onesto 00:14:50

Yeah. And I think we’re going to generalize. And there’s always, you know, I always caveat this with, like, there are outliers, older or younger generations, you know, so. But for the most part, in the research that we’ve done. So I work for a company called Suzy. It’s a market research platform. So a lot of the information that we use for the book was based on actually querying the Gen Z population. What we found is a couple of things.

 Anthony Onesto 00:15:13

One is the digital normalcy, right? The fact that you’re on the Internet and it’s mobile. That’s one. And that’s a huge thing. If that is something that you’ve come accustomed to, that, and I could tell you a perfect example. So I have three, and this is more what we call in the market research space, qualitative information. But I’m a dad. I have three Gen Z kids at home. The Internet goes down.

 Anthony Onesto 00:15:36

It is essentially like I have the conch and every dad, where’s the Internet? What’s like, it’s, this entire world comes apart when the Internet goes down. They don’t know what to do because they’ve been on this thing, on this phone, on this device, having access to this information their entire lives as little kids. So the Internet comes up. But I hold on to that a little bit because I like being the center of attention in the house. So I don’t turn the Internet on when it comes back on because I become very popular and I kind of like that. But anyway, when you think of the digital mobile first and all the experience that they have, think about the ability to get anything at any point and anytime within a couple of hours. I remember a time where we used to have catalogs and we used to have to buy stuff, mail it in, not sure if they even got it. And then the next thing you know, a couple of weeks later, something comes to the house, right? It was like kind of wonderful in some ways because it was like a surprise.

 Anthony Onesto 00:16:33

But this generation, again, because of the digital experience and the mobile experience can get access to anything. And when I say anything, it could be material, it could be information. Think about how that would change somebody’s norms and how they expect the world to be. Then you add on the fact that they’re unrelenting in terms of the things that they’re looking for. So they want to know that your company prioritizes diversity and inclusion, because this is the most diverse generation we’re going to see in the world ever in terms of race, but also two or three races. It’s a very diverse generation, climate change. And it’s all because what they’ve seen as they were growing up, they’re seeing all this sort of calamity and this change, whether it was racial inequity, they saw their parents lose their jobs and the economy collapsed in 2008. They see the results for a while.

 Anthony Onesto 00:17:24

For us, it was listening to Al Gore on a TED talk talk about climate change. They’re seeing it firsthand, what’s happening with climate change. So it’s all these things. And so what they’re at the core of what they’re looking for is stability. And that’s the one thing that I’ve seen in the press where they’re like, yeah, they’re going to job, job. No, we left that for millennials. They own that piece, and that’s cool. This generation is looking for stability, but they also want to make sure that you’re checking on all the other things, and if you’re not, they have no problem letting you know that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:58

Trey, super interesting. Do you think that the fact that they’re looking for more stability, do you think that they will be just as entrepreneurial as maybe the previous generations? Do you think it will impact that?

 Anthony Onesto 00:18:10

When you look at the entrepreneurial spirit, I think it’s more indicative of macroeconomic environments than a generational one. Boomers, Xers, millennials, it all depends on the macro environment. When I came into the world, it wasn’t really, you didn’t start your own businesses unless your dad or your mom had a business and they handed it to you, it was like, you go to work and you work for somebody and they pay you. I think it’s all dependent on the macroeconomic environment. You saw millennials become more entrepreneurial because they saw the 2008 collapse, and they’re like, you know what? I’m not getting involved in that. Maybe I should start my own thing. So I think a lot of that has to do with even politics. If you think people talk about all the different policies that are out there, and one is universal basic income or universal healthcare, things like that, I think those things, particularly in the United States, if they come into our world and get approved, it could spawn a whole entrepreneurial effort.

 Anthony Onesto 00:19:05

Right? Because there’s a safety net to a certain degree and you want to go start your own thing. And I think a lot of folks are afraid to go out on their own because of healthcare costs, especially in the US. So I think it’s economical. I think this generation, because they want that stability, but also they have these other things that they’re unrelenting about if it’s an opportunity for them to do it themselves. Yeah, I think they would absolutely be entrepreneurial.

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Aydin Mirzaee 00:20:19

One of the things that you also said is that we’re just not ready for it. So we’re going to go from maybe a few percentage points to 40 50% of the working population will soon become Gen. Zerse. What kind of things should people do or start to think about? When you mention things like diversity, maybe that’s a little bit more tactical and people can do things about. But when you also talk about things like climate change and some things that are maybe more societal or global, what should people do? Especially if you’re not like a 10,000 person company and you’re maybe a few hundred people, but you want to track this new Gen Z population, what kind of changes do you need to make?

 Anthony Onesto 00:21:02

Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I could start off with telling you what you shouldn’t do is what we’re seeing in the media right now, which is every CEO calling names. And what typically happens is when a new idea comes into an existing construct, we attack it like a virus. The antibodies attack it because it’s a new idea. So that’s what we’re seeing in the media, where, first of all, I think the first step is to really understand. I mean, grab the book. Obviously, that’s self serving, but it does go into all the different aspects of understanding this generation. So before you put judgment out, try to understand why they are the way they are.

 Anthony Onesto 00:21:37

Why are these things important to them? Because I think. And that’s of anything, right? Any new idea or anything that you’re challenged with, just research and read up about it. I think that’s an absolute important factor of this. But tactically speaking, if you’re not at 10,000, I think one of the things that’s interesting is this concept of diversity, equity, inclusion, where companies are, you know, they usually take the check the box kind of approach to this and they put on Instagram perpetuating that they’re diverse. But you have to remember, this generation has access to unlimited information. When I joined the workforce, there was no LinkedIn. I didn’t know who your board of directors were. I didn’t know who your senior leaders were.

 Anthony Onesto 00:22:18

This generation, you just put out an Instagram post about how diverse you are. They go to LinkedIn and they look up, or they go to your website, they look up your board of directors, all white males. They look up your leadership, all white males, you’re not diverse. And so they’re not even going to be interested. Now, that’s a marathon, right? You have to start thinking of diversity, equity, inclusion, starting at your board, starting at your executive leadership, and start pushing that down into the organization and make sure not only are you perpetuating that you are diverse, that you actually are. This is the beauty of it. I was in a webinar once and I was talking about all these things that they wanted, and someone put a question is, are they asking for too much? And I’m like, just pick one of the ones that you don’t agree with. They’re asking for great things.

 Anthony Onesto 00:23:02

They want companies to be diverse. Right? So I think when you think of diversity, it’s really driving towards the diversity at the highest levels of your organization, which you can control. No matter what size of organization you are, if you’re a CEO, you’re picking your board, your board, your investors to invest in your company. You’re picking your executive team and leadership. You’re involved in a lot of hiring. Make sure that you’re building the best groups and the most diverse groups around. Culture. I mean, climate change, how is your company impacting now? If you’re not an oil company, you’re a SaaS platform, where, you know, susie’s a SaaS platform.

 Anthony Onesto 00:23:38

It’s really thinking through. Okay, what is our impact on the climate? How are we impacting it? Is it small? Is it medium? Where are our servers? Are we hosting? How is our hosting partner? Think about climate change. It’s thinking through all of and being very thoughtful about these things because it’s easy to be like, hey, we’re just going to spin up AWS server somewhere and we’re going to be going, and I can’t handle climate change. I’m not an oil company or I don’t have a direct impact into the climate. I mean you can look at carbon credit, things of that nature. So there’s definitely, and have a position too. Like what is your position on some of these big issues and make sure that you’re talking about that a lot. So at a high level it’s getting away from what companies have done in the past, which was check the box, don’t check the box anymore.

 Anthony Onesto 00:24:24

Now you actually have to go in and be really thoughtful about, okay, and act on it because again, this generation, unlimited access to information, great researchers, they’re going to find the truth and then it’s going to be very problematic for companies to hire and retain.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:24:39

Yeah, I think that really explains it well, which is you can’t just check the box because they have unlimited information and they will know and they do care. So they will check, they will do the trust but verify thing that you.

 Anthony Onesto 00:24:52

Talked about and you’re never going to know it. Right. Like some folks, I mean some may call you out, there’s a lot of cancel culture out there right now, some will call you out, but otherwise you’re never going to know. Right too, because they’re not going to apply for your jobs and you’re going to wonder, why aren’t we getting a hires in here? And a lot of things that I talk about are hard. They’re not easy. Hey, go open a TikTok and start advertising your jobs kind of thing, which could be a tactical thing to do, but these are really, really hard things to do.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:25:20

Yeah, love it. So your people, officer at Suzy, I was checking out your LinkedIn just before this and you’ve listed chat, GPT as a skill and AI as a skill. So I’d love to know more about how you think about AI in the context of the work you do. Maybe just starting with what do you all use AI for in your day to day?

 Anthony Onesto 00:25:41

Yeah, I think we are. If you weren’t around for the Internet, I was, I was part of the.com boom and bust. But we’re obviously 20 years later. Everything is digital, everything’s on the Internet these days. I think we’re at a greater moment of impact here with AI and it’s easy to overstate it, but I don’t see Internet mobile. I think this is now the big change in so many different things. And so for me, when I think of AI, I can’t help but think of how this is going to impact everything, everything that we do now. AI has been around for quite a while.

 Anthony Onesto 00:26:19

There was actually a really great book that was written called race against a machine. It was two MIT economic professors that about twelve years ago, IBM Watson went against, Ken Jennings in jeopardy, and IBM Watson won and everyone freaked out. The machines are going to take over. And of course Terminator didn’t help with any of that. But these economic professors went out and said, okay, what is it going to be? Is it going to be humans? Is it going to be computers? Who’s going to win? And what they found at the end of the book, the story, go read the book. It’s a really good book, is that it’s a combination of the two, right? It’s machines and people. Machines are going to be good at one thing, people are going to be good at another thing. It’s the combination of those two that’s going to be the most powerful.

 Anthony Onesto 00:27:01

And I think we’re starting to see that with chat TPT coming out, it took AI from behind the curtains to a consumer application. And people are like, wow, this is incredible. You can get information in spite of its flaws. Yes, it hallucinates sometimes, but I have to tell you, in terms of just interacting, the excitement for me is not only the AI, but how we’re interacting with software has now changed. Where years ago we used to have to type commands into a computer, then we had Windows and of course Apple with their Mac OS, everything was point and click. Internet comes on. Everything that we’re doing now is point and click, right? We point, we click, we get to another webpage. What chat GPT has done now is that if you’ve ever created a GPT on the platform, you’re actually talking to software about creating software.

 Anthony Onesto 00:27:50

So I think for me, the most fundamental thing, the most profound thing is how we’re going to rethink about the user experience. So that applies to everything in HR. If I want to apply for a job, I go to a website, hey, I want to apply for this job for customer service. I want to add my resume. Boom, boom, boom. You’re in a chat experience. It does a whole bunch of things. Next thing you know, your resume has been applied and you’re off and running with that company.

 Anthony Onesto 00:28:13

You’re internally within a company and you want to know how many PTO days you would have to go into your HRIs system, find some menu that an engineer hid somewhere because they weren’t really thinking how important PTO was. And so you have to like five click to get there. Now you just ask question, how many PTO days do I have? Right? So it’s the AI. I mean, there are so many things that are going to fundamentally change around AI, the access for a lot of HR departments now to have a people analytics solution, to be able to look at a bunch of data and provide insights, all these sort of things. So there’s so many different. We can go, this conversation could be its own podcast because we can go in so many different directions. But there isn’t a place in HR where AI is not going to impact it. That’s my prediction.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:58

I guess one of the hard things is just also changing behavior. Part of it is a lot of us are just used to doing things a certain way. And inserting the usage of AI into your day to day workflows is also a lift in itself. So I’m wondering at Suzy, if you find effective ways, like how are you encouraging your teams or your company to use more of these tools, more of this way of thinking in their day to day?

 Anthony Onesto 00:29:25

I think it’s a couple of things. One is making sure they have parameters around usage because you have to be careful in terms of company usage, internal data, putting personal information in there. I think, first of all is giving them the guidelines and the tools to use in AI instead of pausing and not doing chat GPT, finding the team solution and being able to get sign ups on the team solution because people are going to utilize these things. So you want to be able to control it in a certain way and then making it acceptable. One of the things that I’ve heard it’s really interesting is I feel like a fraud when I use chat TPT or, you know, I feel like I’m cheating. We’re seeing that obviously proliferate in high schools and other things, and I have a whole opinion on that. But when I finish my work, at the end of the day, I never give credit to my MacBook because it’s a tool that allows me to get something done. That’s what chat GPT is.

 Anthony Onesto 00:30:22

So giving people permission to use it and showing people, hey, your senior leaders are using this solution and I’m very authentic about it. Like if there is, it has been incredibly helpful for me on the communication side. When I have writer’s block, I’m like, how am I going to introduce our all hands tomorrow? How am I going to communicate that internally to get people excited about we have black history month event tomorrow. And it’s a slam poetry event. And I’m like, what do I say? Like, how do I and I go to chat GPT and I say, internal communications on slack make it really exciting in my voice. Here’s the topic, and next thing you know, I have now a first draft of something that would have probably taken me half an hour. I’m being conservative maybe an hour to get to write. I’m now an editor.

 Anthony Onesto 00:31:12

I’m not a writer anymore. I’m now an editor. And that’s the beauty of these things. I think you have to make sure that one, you’re being open and honest. Every time I use it. I even tell our CEO, Jack, I was trying to figure out how to do these things. Jack helped me. I’m not ashamed of it.

 Anthony Onesto 00:31:28

It’s like, again, I wouldn’t hide my MacBook from the CEO. It’s like, almost like, how do you not work with that? So I think it’s normalizing in a more succinct way to say it, normalizing these technologies and the usage of them and then making sure you have guidelines.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:44

Yeah, it’s almost like we need to not only make it feel not only just do away with this idea of it’s cheating, but also just to encourage it to say, like, oh, that’s great that you use chat GBT. You were more efficient, you got work done faster, you are now more capable, you have more leverage. That’s great. Please keep doing that.

 Anthony Onesto 00:32:03

Just make sure that you’re sharing. We have an AI first philosophy now. We branded it. We’re AI first company, and that’s both externally and internally. Now externally for our software and market research. AI is going to impact that greatly. But we’re taking a very cautious approach because we work with enterprise customers now. They’re all sort of getting on board.

 Anthony Onesto 00:32:23

So we weren’t the first to jump into the pool, so to speak. But we’re in there and we’ve been thinking about it since day one, or at least since the excitement around AI has happened with chat GPT, but also internally, we have a slack channel, AI first, and we’re sharing information. I just shared today, HubSpot had a really great chat GPT prompt usage document, 40 page thing. I shared that I let people know that I’m using it. And then we have an expectation now of all the tools that we’re looking at that we’re trying to bring in to our company. What AI are you thinking? How are you thinking about AI? We’re setting that even if you don’t maybe have any AI right now, how are you thinking about it as a qualifier? So it’s really embracing the technology and also talking about the bad pieces too. Like, hey, we have to be careful. Let’s not put personal information in there.

 Anthony Onesto 00:33:15

Let’s not put company information unless it’s our own large language model that we’re running locally. Like, we have to be very careful but educate people because people are scared and then also share information where. And this is my prediction, and a lot of research has shown this, jobs aren’t going to be eliminated, but pieces of jobs are going to be eliminated. There’s going to be an automation of certain pieces of jobs. We have to be prepared for that as organizations. How is that going to change in the future?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:33:43

I agree with you on this idea that everybody is going to have their own internal GPT LLM, something running where all the company’s data is there, and it just becomes this repository to really answer any questions and help with anything, like context aware. One thing that actually can probably contribute to that as well, like that internal knowledge base, is all the things that happen inside meetings. I know that this is one of the things that we talked about before hitting record. I know this is something that you’re passionate about. You’re looking to make some changes or have begun making changes in the company. From just a meeting culture perspective, what have you learned in what you have done? And what can others also learn from the journey that you’ve taken so far?

 Anthony Onesto 00:34:28

Yeah, meetings. Meetings. The HBO series, the Netflix documentary on meetings. I could see it coming out soon. Meetings are interesting, right? Because it’s one of those things where we spend a ton of money on, but we really haven’t thought too much about. So when we buy software, we buy assets. There’s a whole rigorous process that goes into doing that. When we set up a meeting, it’s grabbing time from people’s calendar.

 Anthony Onesto 00:34:56

You’re actually spending salary, hourly time in this meeting, we’ve never really thought about what is the return on investment of meetings. It’s just something that we’ve done, oh, we need to get. And there’s a slack commercial now we’ll have a meeting about the meeting. So our CEO, Matt Brinton said, listen, I just have an instinct that we’re in too many meetings. He’s often in a meeting and he’s like, I’m not sure what anyone else is contributing. There’s like 16 people in this meeting. He’s like, we need to figure this out. So when I started looking into it, it was at the same time, I think it was shopify who said no meetings.

 Anthony Onesto 00:35:30

And I’m like, that can’t be. I never find in anything in life the extremes to be the best answer. It’s always something in the middle like where, yes, we need less meetings, but not every meeting is bad. So going to no meetings, and then if you do that draconian type of style, then people have secret meetings that aren’t in the calendar. So people find a way around it. So when I thought about it was, okay, reduce meetings and actually three polish reduce meetings. Actually, when you’re creating a meeting, thinking about what is that meeting about, what is the objective, what’s on the agenda? Like really thinking through. And it’s so easy.

 Anthony Onesto 00:36:11

Google makes this beautifully easy to go. Anthony Aydin, Zoom. Done. It’s so easy to schedule a meeting. There’s really no friction. But I want people to start thinking about what is the intention of this meeting? What are we trying to accomplish, who’s attending it, why? You know, there’s research that says seven, five to seven people in a meeting is kind of the threshold around productivity. Who’s in the meeting? What is their role? Okay, if they’re not contributing, maybe they’re just an observer. Can we send them notes afterwards, make core meetings and prep in those meetings important.

 Anthony Onesto 00:36:43

And then the follow up, making sure that you’re actually enhancing all the meetings and the follow ups. Right. So we put this out, I did training on it, we looked at technology, your technology specifically, to see if we were able to put some tech involved in it. And the one thing I learned is behavior change is hard. So we’re measuring meetings and we’re having slightly less meetings internally, and some people are putting agendas in, but not everyone. And as much as I push it out there and we’re checking on things and we’re asking folks, and we have a saying, no agenda, no attenda. It’s behavioral change. And so CEO and I had, he’s like, how do you think it’s working? I said, it’s kind of working.

 Anthony Onesto 00:37:26

And he’s like, well, what do you think the answer is? And I do think tech is going to be the answer. I think if you force people into some level of friction in the creation and forcing them into a place where they have to put an agenda, have to put in, observe that kind of stuff, I think that will change behavior, I think it will become normal for them after that. So there’s a lot of learning lessons around this, but I think just putting it in the forefront of people’s mind is the first step. Instead of just setting up a meeting, let’s think about what is the objective? What’s the agenda items? What are we trying to do with this meeting? Are we making a decision or is it brainstorming who’s going to be part of it? And then is there any pre work that needs to be done? So a lot of thoughts around all of that. And like I said, it’s been incrementally getting better. People are getting better, but it’s not in the zeitgeist of our culture yet. And that’s the tipping point for me, is trying to figure out how to do that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:18

One of the problems in general is that it’s one of those things that, because we have been meeting since the beginning of time, whatever company you come from, you’re going to kind of bring your habits from that company. It’s a very hard thing because like you said, it’s behavior change. But you kind of have to get everybody to almost not do things the way that they used to, but do things the way that, say, Suzy likes to do the way that Suzy operates. It’s almost like part of the core operating system of a business because meetings are a tool at the end of the day and they’re there for an objective, and that’s just how you run the company. And yeah, this is what makes management and all these things so hard, because it’s one thing to know intellectually something is right, but then to put it into action is another thing altogether.

 Anthony Onesto 00:39:02

And the other thing, and I think there’s a professor out in North Carolina, Stephen. I think it’s Rogel. Hopefully, I’m not getting his name wrong.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:08

Rogelberg.

 Anthony Onesto 00:39:09

He did research, and when they did surveys of meetings, like, how was this meeting? The participants always scored it low, but the person who created the meeting scored it high. So we love our own meetings. We love our own meetings. We have the best meetings ever. Right? So that’s the other friction point, is not only culturally or custom from what you’re used to, we also, as leaders, are probably the ones creating the most meetings. And we have to be a lot more thoughtful on what we’re trying to accomplish and who’s in the meeting.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:40

Yeah, love it. And Steven’s great. He’s. He’s actually been on the podcast twice. Yeah, he’s very good. Every time we have him on, we all learn a lot. So, Anthony, this has been an awesome conversation. We’ve talked about a bunch of different things.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:53

Everything from Gen Z. We’ve talked about delegation, we’ve talked about brain awareness training, people metrics and AI meetings and everything in between. So lots of great topics. We always like to end on a few rapid fire questions, but I’ll ask you one, which is one of my favorites. For all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft, are there any final tips, tricks, or parting words of wisdom that you would leave them with?

 Anthony Onesto 00:40:20

Yeah, I think leadership is hard, but this framework that I’m about to talk about is simple. And it was a framework written by Kim Scott in her book Radical Candor. And I think if you forget everything else that you learn about autonomy and different levels of autonomy, if you care personally and challenge your people, so care personally, challenge directly are the two axes of the radical candor framework. Everything else will become so simple. You have to balance those two things. You have to care about your people, but you also have to challenge them. And to me, that is the simplest and most easy and powerful leadership advice I’ve ever read in a book, that it’s now become a cultural operating system at Suzy since I started six years ago. So we care and we challenge, and we’re always trying to balance those two things, and we’re calling each other out.

 Anthony Onesto 00:41:15

If we’re caring too much, we’re not challenging too much. So I think to me, those two things as a leader, everything else becomes super easy.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:41:24

That’s great advice and a great place to end it. Anthony, thanks so much for doing this.

 Anthony Onesto 00:41:27

Thank you. This is fun.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:41:30

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.Fellow.app/supermanagers. If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and Fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.