Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety so Employees Can Thrive: A Conversation with Adam Grant

Adam Grant: If you tell people that they could only bring solutions, you'll never hear about the biggest problems that might be too complex or maybe feel too risky for any one person to speak up about let alone to solve.

Michael Rivo: That was organizational psychologist, Adam Grant talking about how important it is for business leaders to create a culture of psychological safety, rather than one of fear for their employees to thrive. Welcome to another episode of Blazing Trails. I'm your host, Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. Ever wonder how you can best motivate your employees? What the long- term outlook for remote work looks like? Or how to retain top talent in an ethical way? Those are questions bestselling author and Wharton professor Adam Grant spends a lot of time thinking about. On today's episode, he shares his ideas on those topics with Salesforce's Sarah Franklin. But before we jump into Professor Grant, a quick word about work. com. Work. com is an all new suite of apps and resources that leaders around the world can use to reopen, re- skill employees and respond efficiently to the COVID- 19 pandemic. Reopening will be a journey, but work. com is your guide. To learn more, go to work.com. And now Salesforce's Sarah Franklin and professor Adam Grant.

Sarah Franklin: He's Wharton's top rated professor, organizational psychologist who in his own words wants to you make work not suck. I love that. And he's been recognized as one of the world's 10 most influential management thinkers and Fortune's 40 under 40, Oprah's SuperSoul 100, many, many accolades that's so impressive. New York Times bestselling author, multiple books, please without further ado, everybody, please give a warm virtual welcome to Adam Grant.

Adam Grant: Thanks.

Sarah Franklin: Adam, you've done just so much significant research on jobs satisfaction. Why do you think it's so important for organizations to focus on change management and the people in this time?

Adam Grant: Well, I think if we've learned anything during the pandemic it's that we all need to improve the acuity of our peripheral vision. It's so easy to get tunnel vision and focus on our mission and our strategy and assume that the world is just going to adapt to us. The reality is that we've all had to adapt to the world in dramatic ways of the past six months. And so I think organizations that don't really pay much attention to people often end up seeing their people stick to the status quo as opposed to embracing change or even initiating change. And I think that for me, a lot of change management efforts are really efforts to find out about the changes that employees already know are important and give them a chance to really get their ideas on the table.

Sarah Franklin: You're not just an author of books, but you also recently wrote an incredible article in The Economist that was on how jobs and bosses and firms can improve. Whether it's, you mentioned earlier, job satisfaction, leadership and trust. What can you share with everybody today and your thoughts on those areas and how important it is and what leaders should be doing to retain the top talent, to make people happy, to do this in an ethical way? I'm a mother of two and I'm very sensitive to what this means to my kids are not in school, they're at home, what this means to people that have different home responsibilities, the time, all this stuff. What do you think about all of this? And what can you share with our leaders that are joining us today that are wondering the same things?

Adam Grant: Well I think that depends on how many days we have to cover all that ground. But I feel like in the past week, I've gotten to retake part of first grade and fourth grade and seventh grade with our kids, which has been an interesting experience. I think we're all dealing with a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability. And when The Economist came to me at the beginning of the summer and they said," Look, can you tell us what the future of the human side of the workplace is going to look like?" The first time I had was, this is a dangerous exercise to try to predict the future. And there's an old saying that historians can't even predict the past with much accuracy. I think we should all have a lot of humility when it comes to trying to figure out what the world is going to look like in a year and two years let alone five or 10. But what I then thought would make sense was to say," Look, although none of us have ever lived through a pandemic before, we have lived through other kinds of crises and economic recessions and so maybe there's something we can learn from the data there about what we can expect in the future." And I think there's both good news and bad news. A lot of this research comes from Emily Bianchi, who's the world's leading expert in studying how the conditions of the economy affect your own individual motivation and experience of leadership at work. And what Emily's shown is, first of all, if you graduate from college during a recession, even 20 and 30 years later, you are significantly happier with your job. And that's regardless of what industry you enter, what kind of work you're doing, even controlling for how well paid you are. There's something about starting your career when it's difficult to find a job that cultivates a lasting sense of gratitude that I have a job and people feel fortunate about that. And I think that's encouraging. It means that maybe people are not going to be looking over their left shoulder every four minutes to try to figure out if there's a better opportunity out there. But I also worry that that maybe opens the door for leaders and managers to exploit employees a little bit more. The more grateful people are to have work, the more oppressive conditions they're willing to put up with. And that I think if you stop there, I'm nervous about that. But then there's another good piece of news from Emily's work, which is people who graduated during a recession once they become CEOs a couple of decades later, they actually pay their employees more generously because in part they're less entitled and they remember what it was like to be struggling earlier in their careers. And so I think that for a lot of people, this COVID pandemic, it's going to be an imprinting moment. It's going to, I hope create a sense of noblesse oblige, where leaders are going to say," Okay, I have a responsibility to take care of people who are at the very bottom of my hierarchy." And I think that on the talent side, there's going to be an expectation that that's going to happen. I think that employers can seen how many organizations were immediately willing to do layoffs as opposed to exploring alternatives, like furloughs or pay cuts, or even going to a four day work week temporarily. And in the long run, the companies that treat their people the best are going to have the easiest time attracting and retaining and motivating their talent. What do you think?

Sarah Franklin: I agree. I think that at Salesforce, I was very inspired by Mark Benioff, our CEO and co- founder where he did the 90 day, no layoff pledge and challenged two CEOs. He's like," Don't have any jerk reaction here. What can we do as a company to help our community handle these crises?" It's very hard to see millions of people out of work, furloughed or not and it's heartbreaking. It's uncertain. Here is also thinking, what can I do to invest in people? Remember what it was like when I was just starting out. It's good to remember your roots, of where you come from.

Adam Grant: One thing that I would just, I guess, add to that at some level is there's evidence for Mark's philosophy here. There's an actual paper published in one of the most rigorous journals in the management field called Dumb and Dumber, which analyzes the effects of companies choosing to do layoffs.

Sarah Franklin: Not the movie?

Adam Grant: Versus delaying. Yeah, Dumb and Dumber. And it turns out that if companies are able to either delay layoffs or avoid layoffs, on average, they actually perform better than the ones that don't. And you can see that tracking their profitability and their stock price. And we've known this for decades, that if you can find an alternative, you should not only because of the social justice and responsibility component of this, but also because when companies do layoffs, oftentimes they have to replace a sizable proportion of the number of people they let go, not quite realizing how indispensable they were. And also the people who are left, experienced tremendous amounts of survivor guilt, which lead them to say," Well, maybe it should have been me." Or anxiety," Maybe I'm going to be next." And so they ended up getting focused very narrowly on keeping their jobs, as opposed to thinking broadly about innovating and adapting and changing. And then also your most talented people, the moment you do a downsizing, are the ones who are quickest to jump ship, because they're basically saying," Look, this isn't a place where I can build a secure future so let me go work somewhere else."

Sarah Franklin: These are all characteristics that you're describing of leaders that care. That care about their employees, that want to develop culture, that have purpose and motivation and not just taking care of their shareholders, but also every stakeholder. And stakeholder capitalism has been something that Mark has advocated for that it's not just shareholders, but it's every stakeholder, including your employees, including your customers, including the planet, including all of these things. And so how do you think leaders maintain that and infuse that sense of resiliency into the culture? What advice do you have for everybody with that?

Adam Grant: I think the first step for any leader to take, if you want to build a resilient organization is to build psychological safety. My favorite definition of psychological safety is Amy Edmondson's where she says," Look, psychological safety is the feeling that you can take a risk without being punished." And that risk might be speaking up about a concern. It might be raising a suggestion. It could be being a little vulnerable and asking for help. And I think a lot of leaders understand the importance of psychological safety in principle, but they failed to create it in practice. And Sarah, one of the ways I see this over and over again is I'll walk into a new company and as an organizational psychologist, I'm often the person who gets hired after three or four consultants had been fired. And so I'm just curious, okay, what's actually going on here? And I'll hear leaders say," Don't bring me blank. Bring me blank." And Sarah, if I could ask you to think about a boss that you've had at some point in your career who like to say," Don't bring me blank, bring me blank." How would you fill in the blanks? Don't bring me.

Sarah Franklin: Problems.

Adam Grant: Bring me.

Sarah Franklin: Solutions.

Adam Grant: Yeah. I don't know why every leader on the planet feels like they need to say the same robot sentence, but I get why leaders say it. You want people to be constructive. You don't want them to whine and complain.

Sarah Franklin: Was that a test that you gave me? Because I didn't know.

Adam Grant: You passed. You totally passed. No, I really think I do appreciate the sentiment behind it, but the effect can be really chilling from a psychological safety perspective because if you tell people that they can only bring solutions, you will never hear about the biggest problems. That might be too complex or maybe feel too risky for any one person to speak up about let alone solve. And so the first thing I would recommend to every leader that I work with is create a culture where people can voice problems, even if they have no clue how to fix them. And that is the beginning of how we change, how we innovate, how we create new strategies. And one of my favorite examples of this is at Warby Parker, the eyeglass retailer, where their five biggest innovations in the past decade or so, four of them have come out of what looks like a suggestion box, but it's actually a problem box. It's an online document in the cloud where anytime you see a problem, let's say it's a technical problem, you can submit it. And then they have leaders vote on which problems matter. Then if I'm a junior employee, I can look around, see which problems are strategic and then if I see one I want to solve, I can make it part of my job to do that. I get resources and a team around me to work on it. And what I love about that most is the people who are the canaries in the coal mine, who are best at detecting threats are not always ones with the skills or the resources to solve them. And so if we can decouple those two things and create the psychological safety to raise problems, it's a lot more likely than that people will jump in and try to fix them.

Sarah Franklin: Those are some interesting questions on leadership and focus on culture. Want to shift a little bit to how we adapt to this long term reality of a remote workplace. We're talking about next summer. This is here for the long haul and it gets scary a little bit thinking, are we all going to have plexiglass and masks all the time? But I guess that's the reality. What's this new normal workplace going to look like?

Adam Grant: I wish I knew. The first thing we can say is if COVID doesn't kill the open office, it should. Even before the pandemic, I was struck by the evidence that open plan offices aside from leading people to have to take more sick days, also just killed the ability to concentrate and focus and find flow and really get absorbed in deep work. And ironically, some of the open office experiments that have been done when people's walls and doors are taken away, they actually talk face to face less. And they end up emailing more in part because they're just constantly getting overloaded. I think that the first thing we can expect is much more in the way of clear physical boundaries that not only keep people healthy, but also allow them to do their work and collaborate when they want to. I think probably the second thing we're going to see is we're going to see a lot of organizations over correct, I'll tell you, Sarah, in 2018, I went to a bunch of the top CEOs in Silicon Valley and I asked if they might want to try a remote work Friday experiment. And none of them were willing to take the risk. They said," It's opening Pandora's box. If I let people go, they'll never come back. We won't have spontaneous water cooler conversations. This is a terrible idea." And now at least three of those CEOs have announced that they might be a permanent remote workforce company wide. And before I was disappointed they weren't willing to try partially remote and now I'm disappointed that they think they should be fully remote. I think the evidence is still really early, but we see very mixed effects of people not coming into the office. I think it's easier to pull off if your job is a little bit like a baseball game, where every batter can go to the plate independently. It's a little harder if you're playing football or soccer or basketball and you actually have to pass materials and ideas and products and services back and forth to people. And my read of the evidence to date is that people are most likely to be not only productive, but also enjoy their work if they're able to be in the office about half the week, because they miss the structure, they missed the community, they miss the spontaneous interaction. And I don't think we know yet how to substitute for those things. And so my hope is that leaders are going to say," Look, just as we were too rigid before in insisting everyone was in the workplace all the time, we shouldn't be so rigid about saying no one ever comes into the office either. And we need to be running a lot more experiments to figure out what's going to work for us."

Sarah Franklin: I love that idea of the experiments and seeing that adaptation and learnings. I'm curious, Adam, what you think, I don't know if you feel you're working more, a lot of people have said I'm working more. I'm always at the screen. How do you avoid that burnout feeling when you feel like you're just kind of always here in front of the computer doing something?

Adam Grant: I think this depends in part on whether you tend to be more a segmentor or an integrator. This is my colleague, Nancy Rothbard's research. She shows on this spectrum on one extreme, we have integrators who love the idea of blurring the boundaries between different domains of life. You might have had pictures of your kids at your office. You're thrilled to invite your coworkers over for dinner, maybe even on vacation and everything I just said, if you're a segmentor freaks you out. You like a very strict border between work and the rest of your life, you don't want to bring your family to work, you don't want to bring your work home. And there's some research that just came out in the past couple weeks, showing that segmentors are struggling from a wellbeing perspective, much more than integrators are. The segmentors, a lot of them feel like, well, I'm basically having to work at home or worse yet, I'm living at work now and I can never escape. And empirically, there's a new study that Ethan Bernstein and Hayley Blunden just released showing that on average, many of us are working two to three hour longer days. Sarah, exactly what you were describing really seems to hold up across a lot of different industries. We're not commuting. We know we can start earlier. We can sort of creep back into our home offices a little bit later. And so I think, especially for segmentors, we need to set boundaries. If you can, it seems to help to have a separate space for work. And then when you leave your home office, you don't go back in there until the next morning and you might even change your clothes. Going in and going out so you feel like you have a work self and a home self. I think it also seems to make a difference to set clear time boundaries. And ideally you coordinate those in a team. This is Leslie Perlow's research. What Leslie shows is if you say," Look, I'm going to unplug on nights and weekends. It's too easy for your team to drag you back in. What you actually need as a team commitment to say,'Look, nobody is expected to respond to emails let's say after 5: 00 PM on nights or at all on Saturdays and Sundays.' And if the team will commit to that together, they're much more likely to hold each other accountable." Now, of course we all recognize emergencies can arise and so what you're supposed to do then is pick up the phone if you desperately need to reach someone. But I think trying to coordinate with the people that you work most interdependently with and agreeing when you're not going to work, that can actually free up a lot of time and energy to focus and concentrate and also to not work.

Sarah Franklin: That's a great advice, Adam. And I will say last time we spoke, I took that advice from you.

Adam Grant: Uh-oh.

Sarah Franklin: And I went to my team and well, no, it was great. I can be some data for you in your studies where we coordinated time off on a Friday and we called it reflection days where you just weren't meeting and we coordinated it so that you weren't stressed and people that stress like, oh, I'm missing something. I know there's something very important I'm needed for. And the reactions were very positive to that coordinated time. I'm super guilty of doing the, I have a flexible work hours, I've talked about it on Twitter. I wake up at 4: 00 and I'll email in the early morning, but you're not expected to respond. But the weekend, this was the other thing I tried was to not email on the weekends and provide that psychological safety to the team that they could not email on weekends, which seems obvious. But this was advice that you gave to myself and a group of leaders and I implemented that advice and I'm so grateful for it. And I think my team is also grateful for it. I hope everybody here can think, what experiment can you run? It was very easy. Next day did that experiment and got some good results from it. Thank you for that.

Adam Grant: I'm so glad to hear that it didn't ruin your life entirely. I was wondering Sarah, why I haven't been hearing from you on Sundays as much, but now I know.

Sarah Franklin: Now you know. I'm doing things and I'm better too. I do wonder, this was a new idea. You have to be open to listening to new ideas and you have to be willing to have the courage to champion new ideas. And you have a book, one of the many, Originals: How Non- Conformists Move the World. And this is all about how to champion new ideas and fight the group think, which is it's hard when you feel like 10 people in the room are all saying the same thing and you're like," But I have an idea." What is some research that can help leaders drive this innovation across teams in this new work environment where I imagine group think is even harder because it's even more intimidating on the virtual world?

Adam Grant: Yeah. I think the first thing to do differently is to change the way you structure your brainstorming. Sarah, I know you're familiar with the evidence already, but I am always surprised by how few organizations are actually adopting it. We have over four decades of research on brainstorming. And the punchline of it is that if you're going to put five people in a room and let's say in a Zoom together to brainstorm, if instead you would put them in separate rooms to work independently alone, you will get more ideas and you also get better ideas. And we know there are a few reasons for that. One is in groups, there's a production blocking problem. We can't all talk at once and so some people don't get heard and that's more of a problem the bigger the group is. Secondly, is ego threat. I don't want to look stupid so I bite my tongue on my most original ideas. And then the group misses out on some real creativity. And then there's just the simple conformity challenge that in a room, an idea starts to get popular and especially if there's a HIPPO, a highest paid person's opinion, then everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon and then we get way too much convergent thinking, not enough divergent thinking. My favorite solution to that is called brain writing. All you do is you let people generate ideas individually and then you bring all the ideas together. You might submit them in the chat window, if you're virtual and then you let the group do what the group does best, which is to evaluate and refine. And there's some recent evidence on this that suggests that individuals have more brilliant ideas than groups do. They also have more dumb ideas than groups do. What you want is basically to maximize variation by letting individuals come up with the ideas, but then bring in the wisdom of crowds to figure out which ones are worth pursuing.

Sarah Franklin: But neither of us would ever have bad ideas. We as individuals always have great ideas.

Adam Grant: Oh, I will say, actually I have a former student, Justin Berg who studied this. He went to Cirque du Soliel and he got all these circus artists to submit videos of brand new performances that had never been seen yet. And he wanted to know, could you predict which act was going to be a hit with audiences? And so he released them on YouTube. He let people watch them, vote on them and even donate their own money to support the performer if they liked them. And then he had different groups try to predict which of the videos were going to be the favorites. And the first finding was, people could not judge their own ideas at all. On average, if you're a circus performer, you ranked your own video two slots higher in a set of 10 then the YouTube audience did.

Sarah Franklin: You have a quarter.

Adam Grant: Of course. It was my idea, how could it not be genius? But there's some new evidence actually showing that the more senior you are in your career, the more likely you are to overestimate the value of your ideas. Whereas more junior people may underestimate them slightly, which could be a confidence effect. But then Justin thought, okay, well, let's go to leaders and managers then because they're the gatekeepers. They're the people who decide which ideas live in and which ones die. And it turned out they were almost as bad as the artists themselves, but for the opposite reason. The creators were too positive on their ideas, the leaders and managers were too negative. And they were too negative I think in part, because they would use prototypes. When they were judging ideas, they've looked at what had worked in the past and then they'd try to match them. Which is a great way to make decisions but when you're trying to bet on creativity, what's worked in the past is irrelevant to what's going to work in the future. It might actually be negatively correlated with it. And so the thought is, okay, you can't trust yourself. You can't trust your boss either. Who do you go to? And Justin found that the best judges of original ideas were actually your peers, your fellow creators. That just like the leaders and managers, they had some distance and so they could say things like," Sarah in that act you dressed up like a clown, don't do that because no one likes clowns." Which was actually a finding in the data, clowns were universally hated. But unlike the leaders and managers, the peers were invested in seeing new ideas take off. And instead of looking for reasons to say no, they looked for reasons to say yes. I think we should actually take senior leaders out of the gatekeeper role a little bit and do much more peer voting on which ideas are worth investing in and betting on.

Sarah Franklin: I love that. I love the brain writing idea. Also, it's funny, you talked about people changing clothes and everything. I think it's important to just invest in yourself and how you feel. My daughter today broke open her piggy bank, she was like," Mama, do you need some money to buy some new pants? Because you wear the same pants all the time."" No, thank you. I'm okay but I will get different pants." Now I want to get some incredible Q and A from the audience. And so I do see, apologize I'm looking down here at the data, but I see from Emilio Rays LeBlanc that employees tend to use on average eight to 11 different tools in their every workday and Adam, what do you think about this about having multiple tools, if that's confusing or hard for people's job satisfaction?

Adam Grant: I so think it's a challenge. Sometimes you spend half your day just trying to figure out how to get all your technology platforms to work together. And so one of the things I've been curious about is, is there an optimal number of tools? And I can't think of a good study that directly addresses that, but I think there's an analog. Michael Houseman actually gathered some data. If I remember correctly, this was about 50, 000 people across roughly a dozen industries. And he found that on average, people who had between two and four social media profiles were more productive than people who had fewer or more. You can start thinking about what's going on. Well, if you have seven media profiles, chances are you're too busy either posting or scrolling to actually do your job. And if you have fewer, you're just not engaged in the world in the 21st century. And so I wonder if there's an analog that can be applied to some of the productivity and communication tools that we use.

Sarah Franklin: That's very interesting. Adam, another question, so this is from David Raiden. He loves your book, Give and Take and where you outlined the difference of givers, matchers and takers. And he was curious, how does a leader create the giver culture throughout his or her organization?

Adam Grant: Well David, thank you first of all. I'd say it's important to create a giver culture. It's even more important to screen out or eliminate a taking culture. And so I would think about a few ways of doing that. The first is you try not to hire takers and there's a whole series of tools that I'm happy to share offline if anybody's curious on how do you tell if somebody is extremely selfish before you let them in the door? I think the second thing you do then is you take a close look at your performance evaluation system. And the sad reality we see in so many organizations is they say," Look, we want people to be collaborative and generous," but then they only measure and reward individual achievements. And so it's a real disincentive to the givers. It undervalues the people who are making other people more successful. And so what I'd like to see is performance evaluation and reward and promotion systems that place equal weight on whether you're out hitting the people around you or making your team successful as they do on whether you're achieving your own goals. And then the third thing that I think we need if we want to build a culture that's more oriented toward giving than taking is we need a culture of help seeking. And this was counterintuitive to me for a while. I thought, we want people to be offering help, not demanding it, but the data suggests that somewhere between 75 and 90% of all helping in organizations starts with a request. You don't have that many people who are sitting there thinking, I'm kind of bored this month. How can I enrich your life? Most acts of helping start with me saying," Hey Sarah, I'm stuck on this and I would really love your support." And so we need to normalize help seeking. We need leaders to model it. I've been working for a couple years on an online tool to try to facilitate help seeking and help giving it's called Give a Toss. And it's a really simple knowledge sharing platform where anyone can make a request and then anyone else can jump in and try to fulfill the request. And I think we need to do more of that because we do see even in help seeking cultures, people tend to go to their strong ties, the people they trust and know well and feel comfortable with. And those are rarely the best experts or the most connected people. And so the more that we can open up the whole organization for people to get help from those who are most willing and able to support them, the better off we are in terms of building a giver culture.

Sarah Franklin: I love that in building that group of culture. Great advice, Adam. And a question from Renata Goldmide. I apologize if I mispronounced your name Renata, but she's curious on advice for introverts and I'm an introvert. I think Adam, you've described yourself as an introvert if I recall correctly. In how to propose new ideas in this virtual setup. And especially when leads are very vocal or I love the HIPPO, the highly important person is part of the status quo. What advice do you have for introverts?

Adam Grant: Sure. It's funny. I didn't actually know I was an introvert for a while and then I got into the psychology field and started doing research on it and found that everyone who knew me was convinced I was an introvert with one or two exceptions. And as I read more of the studies, what I realized is number one, being an introvert does not mean that you don't get energy from interacting with other people. That said, I think one of the most common myths about introversion extroversion, we are all energized by social interaction. The difference is how much of it we can tolerate. And as an introvert, I'm much more easily overstimulated by too much attention or too much interaction than an extrovert might be. And so I think the first thing to do is to make sure you set the kind of boundaries we were talking about earlier. The second thing is, don't assume you always have to pitch ideas the same way extroverts do. I've seen that very often what introverts like to do is create a structured memo or a deep reflection on a topic. And there's no reason why going into a meeting you can't send that out in advance and ask everybody to read it and engage with it. I think the other thing that I've enjoyed seeing teams do is to say," Look, as Susan Cain pointed out in her book, Quiet, if you look at the data, there is zero correlation between who's the best talker and who has the best ideas." And so what if we decouple those two things? What if, as an introvert, you are not always pitching your own ideas, but you get to hand them over to somebody else in your team to explain them. And that I think will increase the likelihood that different kinds of pitches are tried for different types of ideas. There's no reason we can't pair people up to do that as well. And just say," Look, if you're an introvert or you're an extrovert, you know you benefit from somebody else's thinking. And so if we let people generate ideas and dyads, maybe we get the best of both worlds there."

Sarah Franklin: I want to take this time to thank all of you for joining us today. Adam, thank you so much for everything that you have shared with us today, but also in your books and your articles, please continue to help us navigate through this new normal.

Adam Grant: I need nine sentences here and they're probably not going to fit together. I think from all the research that's been done on adapting to change and dealing with the increasingly digital dominated world, we're all living in, I think I would just not underestimate the importance of real human connection. And I think we all are in touch with our strong ties regularly. We're under communicating with our weak ties, our acquaintances who tend to have more novel information to give us because they're doing different things. They're interacting with different people. And I think we're especially underestimating the value of our dormant ties. The dormant ties you have with the people that you used to know and have lost touch with. And there's just a wealth of evidence showing that when you reconnect with those people, not only do they tend to give you fresh ideas and it's a little bit easier to reach out to them than people you hardly know, it's also a supremely enjoyable experience. And so I think it's just worth noting that not all ties are dormant for a reason and there are probably people you've lost contact with that would enrich your professional life, but also your personal life too.

Sarah Franklin: Well that is great advice. And I am so inspired, we're on this journey together. Adam, you're helping guiding us and I've learned so much today. Everybody, we encourage you to do some experiments, focusing on that job satisfaction and reducing burnout and focus on your employees and your customers together. And really just be on this journey together with us. I so much appreciate your time and now is the time to say goodbye. Thank you so much.

Michael Rivo: That was bestselling author and organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, who sat down with Salesforce's Sarah Franklin to talk about how we can all work better, stay motivated and lead more fulfilling lives. I Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios, thanks for joining us today.