Max YoderWelcome back to The RecruitingDaily Podcast!  Today we have an incredibly special guest on board to discuss a crucial topic: Max Yoder on Managing Culture, Mental Health and Growth.

This is one of the most enlightening conversations I’ve had yet this year.  It benefits everyone, and you’ll be glad you listened.

Max is CEO and co-founder of Lessonly, the powerfully simple training software that helps millions of people learn, practice and Do Better Work.  Outside of his work at Lessonly, Max is a father, husband, musician, and the author of “Do Better Work.” His bio on LinkedIn states, “Every day, I am grateful that I got cut from the basketball team two years in a row.”  We’re leaving that here for you to read because it is a fantastic line.

Things we discuss today: How has COVID redefined company culture?  What does it mean to promote vulnerability in the workplace, and how does this shape organizational growth?  How can we teach communication skills and other behaviors that naturally promote mental health and help to resolve conflict?

Of course, this episode is packed from start to finish, but you’ll have to listen to learn.

Let us know your thoughts.

Listening Time: 33 minutes

 

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Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The RecruitingDaily Podcast with William Tincup. Of course, comments are always welcome. Be sure to subscribe through your favorite platform.

William:  00:34
This is William Tincup and you are listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Today, we have Max from Lessonly. Where going to be learning about managing culture, mental health, and growth, all simultaneously, of course. Max’s obviously with Lessonly done a lot of these things really, really, really well. So I’m looking forward to the conversation, Max.

Max:  00:55
William. Thanks for having me.

William:  00:56
Appreciate it. Would you introduce both yourself and for those that don’t know, Lessonly, introduce Lessonly as well.

Max:  01:03
So my name is Max Yoder. I’m out of Indianapolis, Indiana. I have a wife, Jess, and a daughter Marnie, and Marnie is 10 months old. That’s pretty big part of my life. And then, for fun, I make music, I just put a couple of new songs on Spotify and that’s probably my favorite thing to do when I’m not spending time with my family or working. When I work, I work at Lessonly, and we make training software and coaching software. So the big idea is if you’re on a sales team or a customer service team, the playbooks always change. Whatever you’re selling is changing, the price at what you sell it at is changing, the promotions you can offer are changing, the processes internally in your company are changing. So Lessonly’s job is to help you stay abreast of those changes, on top of those changes.

Max:  01:48
We give our software to companies and they build lessons with it. Lessons are these step-by-step little chunks of information that teach you what’s happening, why is it happening, how does it impact me, how does it impact my teammates, all that good stuff. So lessons are ways of kind of getting the knowledge you need, and then we create practice scenarios, or people use our software to create practice scenarios, that allow people to practice whatever they’ve just learned. So if you’re on a sales team, maybe there’s a new product coming out. You can read about the new product. You can watch the videos, You can take the quizzes, but then you can actually practice talking about it, either just with yourself, just to kind of personal practice, you can role play with a team member. You can send it to your manager or anybody on the team you want to get feedback from. You can watch other people’s highlighted examples of how they’ve practiced.

Max:  02:31
The idea is like let’s do our work as well as we can. A lot of companies, they function in a sink or swim sort of way. It’s like, figure it out, and if you do, then you’ll swim, and if you don’t figure it out, then you’ll sink, and go ahead and give it a try. We think a lot more people end up swimming if you clarify what it looks like to do the job well, and people tend to do it. We work with like 1100 companies now all across the globe. Lessonly is about 250 people in size. So way bigger than I ever expected. We’re out of Indianapolis, Indiana, by and large. But we have a growing remote population that is really taped up in the COVID world.

William:  03:10
Well, first of all, there’s a couple of things I love. A, Indianapolis has just become a great tech hub. I love that because I love Indianapolis as a city, but the other part is on the Lessonly side, the part that I love is you’re capturing micro experiences, micro learning, and also kind of the way learning happened historically at the office, in between two people, at a water cooler, or in an elevator, or something like that. So it’s taking that learning and then doing something with it.

Max:  03:43
Right, right. Those shoulder taps can be very distracting, and people can pick up habits that are actually not as productive as their teammates might think. So this allows us to just clarify, what’s happening, why is it happening? What matters? Why does it matter? There’s this new role in companies, William, called an enablement person and enablement people on the sales side or customer service side, they’re in charge of making sure, “Hey, are we enabling our team with the information they need with the skills they need?” So we work often with the enablement teams who then take Lessonly and make it a part of their company and kind of embed it in the workflows of their company.

William:  04:16
You can see in enable, enablement, you could see it across the organization. You could see it in HR. You could see it in recruiting. You can see it in marketing, if done well, again, this is kind of what we used to call as operations. Sales operations, et cetera. But now it’s actually okay, yeah, operations is great, but it’s usually relatively reactive. Whereas enablement is more of a proactive way of thinking about things which I love on many levels. Obviously, Lessonly has grown, and so let’s talk a little bit about how you manage those three things and how you’ve managed as an organization. Three things, culture, mental health, and growth. Some of these seemingly enough might be in conflict with one another, but they don’t have to be. So let’s just kind of dig into each and how you’ve kind of be obviously the successes that you’ve had, but also what you’ve learned through managing these to, I believe, a wonderful level.

Max:  05:24
Thank you. Yeah. Well, your point on [inaudible 00:05:27] these are in conflict with one another. I think that is ultimately when we do our best work is when we find a kind of two things that we value that have natural tension. In our case, we value growth, we value culture, we value capital efficiency. So those are three things that can keep one another in check, We’re not going to grow faster than we think we should, if it’s going to be cultural diminishment. If we think it’s going to put too much strain on the culture where people will feel unhealthy, be overly stressed, and we’re not going to grow so fast that we jeopardize our economic efficiency or kind of capital efficiency.

Max:  06:03
We don’t want us to spend $3 to make one, So there’s this natural tension between those three things. If we want to grow as fast as we can. So long as a culture isn’t sacrificed, but as you know, added to, and so long as our capital efficiency gets maintained. I actually think William that the systems that are healthy and functional, don’t have a single goal. Like, our country, let’s use our country for example. I think we have a lot of unhealth in our country because we’ve optimized, for one thing, economic efficiency. How much has our country grown economically, how efficient are we in economic growth. Well, well-being of humans, if we made that as important as economic efficiency, it would cause a step back and say economic efficiency matters, sure. Growth of the economy matters, sure. But so does well-being of humans.

Max:  06:52
If loving of humans is being diminished too much by economic growth, we might want to take a step back. But since we only have one variable to measure ourselves against, we become extremists. So I like having multiple variables that have conflict. And like you said, these do.

William:  07:09
It’s balancing those things out where, again, it’s making sure that one doesn’t overtake the other, it’s an ecosystem, obviously between those three things that you just mentioned, but you can create your own ecosystem. I mean, you just so happen to create the ecosystem of culture, mental health, and growth and balancing those out. For other companies, you could add different things in there if you want to.

Max:  07:37
Amen. Yeah. What do you value and how do you make sure that we bring other things that we value that have natural conflict? Like one more example, and then I’ll get to the topic. If I value being kind to other folks, that can go wrong if I go to an extreme of like, I’m going to have to give myself to anybody who asks for it. Like I’m going to have to get, so I will have to have a counterbalance of something like boundaries. I care about caring for others, but I also have boundaries. Caring for others as a synonym for being… And those two things can kind of keep me in check. Am I overdoing one or the other? So anyhow, it’s been very important to us to have multiple things that we optimize for.

William:  08:17
Let’s go with culture first. The way that you all have defined a culture, maybe pre COVID and post COVID, like how do you have the finger on the pulse that your culture is still where you want it to be, or if it’s changed in a good way?

Max:  08:35
Yeah. What’s changed in pros and cons, Like, I’m a very much a believer in the yin-yang of life. If we get a positive, we also get with it some shadow. If we get a shadow, we also get with it some light. Like that just is, at this point, self evident to me. So I don’t believe in kind of pure upside or your downside. So anytime something changes, we get a little bit of both. When I think about culture, I think about it as behavior. I think about it as our people living out the values that we claim to care about. When I say claim to care about, if we’re living them out, then we really do care about them. If we are not living them out, then it’s debatable. Right. We have values that are very explicitly expressed.

Max:  09:14
Like I share before I’m ready. That’s a value at Lessonly. The idea is not to perfect something in a vacuum for too long, where I might fall in love with my own plan or my own kind of project and I show it to my teammates too late and I find out that it’s not what we needed. Like sharing before you’re ready is about getting to teammates early and saying, “Here’s my rough draft. What do you like, what do you not like, what am I missing?” And they can weigh in early so I’m not working on something that isn’t needed. Which happens all the time in teams. People get a lot done, it’s not what people need.

William:  09:43
That’s beautiful because it promotes vulnerability, and it promotes collaboration, which is wonderful on many levels. I can also see that repelling certain types of talent. Which is a sign of a great employer brand is both the attraction side and the repelling side. Like people that aren’t going to flourish here are perfectionists.

Max:  10:07
You nailed it. You pick up on this real fast. That’s exactly right. We do not want perfectionism.

William:  10:14
Which is so counterintuitive to people that they’re trying to attract talent, that they want perfectionists. It’s just like, “Nah, we want people that are really good in being comfortable showing partial information.”

Max:  10:28
No, no doubt. No doubt. Perfectionists are [inaudible 00:10:30] that’s self-limiting, that’s self-defeating, I don’t want that on the team. I’ve been one myself. It’s not like I look down on them. Right. I’ve experienced it myself and found the personal limits. I see now how that’s just not how I want myself to live, how I want my kids to live. So I better not be living it myself.

William:  10:46
I love that. So mental health. Let’s say again. Obviously the fact that we’re talking about mental health is one of the silver linings of COVID of course, because prior to that, there’s so much taboo. Now there’s not as much taboo. How do you keep track? And again, the finger on the pulse of making sure that everybody in your ecosystem, that’s customers, partners, employees, your executives, everybody, that everyone’s doing okay.

Max:  11:16
Yeah. I can’t help make people do okay. What I can do is give them space, and what I believe is the best guidance I have to either do the work themselves or not. So we have values, outside of sharing before you’re ready, like having difficult conversations. Like I think a big part of unhealth, or a lack of health is not addressing an issue, not addressing a nagging irritation, and kind of either avoiding it or arguing. So I don’t think argument is the kind of addressing I’m talking about. Definitely isn’t. Avoidance is clearly not, is not going to work. But those are the two outs that people go just in general. I think those are the most common routes of avoidance and argument.

Max:  11:58
Having difficult conversations. This is what we believe is the divine middle, where we address something and we do so in a way that is compassionate. We have a literature at Lessonly that we’ve taken from Marshall Rosenberg, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, who coined this idea of nonviolent communication. We talk about what you observed, not your evaluation of it. Instead of being like that was stupid, or that was dumb, to say like, “Hey, that meeting was scheduled for 60 minutes. It ran 90 minutes. I’m frustrated.” As opposed to saying like, “That was a poorly ran meeting and this place doesn’t know how to run meetings,” which is an evaluation. I can say, like, “Here’s what happened. Here’s how I felt about it, and now I’m communicating clearly and it’s not argumentative.” So if we do stuff like that in our personal lives and our work lives, and we have those difficult conversations, mental health is a naturally going to be more likely to follow.

Max:  12:47
If we don’t do those things, natural mental health is going to struggle. Difficult conversations are not the path toward mental health, but they are one part of mental health, Like addressing problems and pain. Then we have highlighting what’s working, which is, I think, is an important part of our health as well.

William:  13:04
It’s the other side of it. The yin yang.

Max:  13:06
Exactly you got it. Exactly. We highlight what’s working, right. This is this whole place, it’s not a shit show. Pardon my language. If having difficult conversations can lead us to point out problems, we also need to counterbalance that with highlighting what’s working and making time to say, “What’s going well and how do we do more of it?” Some people will skew toward one or the other. A lot of times people just skew toward have highlighting what’s working because I think it’s the least contentious, the least nerve wracking. They’ll kind of spend too much time there and they won’t have the difficult conversations, but we have to do both if we want to be the teammates that Lessonly aspires to be.

Max:  13:38
To your original question, how do I measure culture? I measure it through our behaviors. I think our behaviors should align to our values. When we live out those values, that that should be tied to what we believe creates a whole person, a well-rounded individual. Like we have a value called make time for life. We make time for life at Lessonly, which means it’s not just about working this job, and the more time you spend away from this job, you actually might be better at this job.

Max:  14:05
I like to tell the team these days that nature has shown us the way. We have winter. In winter it looks like not a lot’s happening, but plenty of important things are happening. Without winter, we don’t have spring. While it looks like to be a dormant period, there’s a lot happening underground that we can’t see that is very important, just like sleep. It looks like nothing’s happening, but a lot’s happening. If we need to make time for life and have these moments where it doesn’t look like much is happening, but a lot is happening. I think these are paths to self exploration and kind of personal health that if our values are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, all these things should come together pretty beautifully.

William:  14:44
Well, both with difficult discussions and what’s working, there’s lessons, there’s micro lessons, and lessons to be learned in of those. You’re also, I think Silicon valley eat your own garbage, drink your own champagne, whatever the catchphrase is. The idea that you’re also then thinking about Lessonly in this way. Yes, this is a spoke of mental health. Both of these things are. Is on the what’s working, it’s getting people to actually talk positively and think positively about what went well as pre-mortem and post-mortem, what went well, what do we like? How do we replicate that? That seem to go well, how do we do that again? Then getting people to talk about it, but also capturing that lesson. So that, again, we don’t have to keep repeating the same lesson. We can learn something, consume it, and then we can just get better and stronger.

William:  15:45
I think the framework that you’ve created for difficult discussions is beautiful because it’s basically saying, again, your observations, your opinions, they’re wonderful, don’t get rid of them. However, focus more factually on both, what happened, what you perceive to have happened and how you felt, which I think the second part of that, how did it make you feel? And then you can treat that. Once someone knows how you made them feel or how the meeting made them feel, et cetera. Well, once you know that, well, now you can do something with it. It’s not knowing that that’s where some of that festers,

Max:  16:31
Oh, no doubt. There’s underlying needs under all the feelings. I think people say the word I felt, and then after I felt they use a thought, that’s something Marshall Rosenberg points out. They’ll be like, “I felt that wasn’t very well done,” which is really just an opinion. That’s a thought. It’s not a feeling. A feeling is I felt scared. I felt uneasy. I felt nervous. I felt overwhelmed. These are feeling words. I can’t relate necessarily to your opinion, but I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed and scared and nervous, I’ve been there. So I’m speaking to my personal experience with whatever factually just happened. This thing happened to you. You said these five words, that wasn’t very good. They say those four words, that wasn’t very good.

Max:  17:13
I got [inaudible 00:17:14] and say, “Hey, you told me that wasn’t very good. I felt frustrated when I heard that.” Because I value communication. So my request is, if something isn’t working for you, maybe you don’t say it in front of other people, but you come to me, one-on-one, and we talk about it that way because I was embarrassed that you said that in front of other people. This is all [inaudible 00:17:29] communication and it doesn’t mean that other people respond in the way we want them to, which I think is probably one of the most neat things about it is not trying to be a life hack. It’s just saying, if you want to show up to a conversation and you want people to hear you, this is you doing your job, expressing it this way, whether they actually hear you or not is out your hands. But what is in your hands, how you communicate what’s going on, and what will happen will happen. But at least you’re showing up and doing your part

William:  17:57
You’ve touched on vulnerability. So again, you kind of unleashed this and said, when you were talking about feelings, the whole idea is that you get to the crux of how did it make you feel, which is vulnerability on every level. Then there’s resolution, again, like you did with the example of, “Hey, why don’t you to come talk to me if it’s something like that in this particular situation,” so that I don’t feel attacked, or or violated, or et cetera. This way you can create a resolution. In that resolution, now you know, both parties kind of understand how to work better with each other, which again, gets to productivity, it gets to engagement, it gets to retention. It’s just creates a better workplace, but it’s also mental health. I mean, the way that we’ve started talking about it is that everybody’s healthier.

Max:  18:51
Right. Well, if I work in an environment where I’m scared, that is not going to contribute to my health. If I were working in an environment where I feel threatened and psychologically unsafe, that’s going to be trouble. I’m not going to do the work you need me to do. It might look like I’m doing it. I might look compliant. But at the very moment that I look compliant, I’m also simultaneously undermining the team because I don’t like being scared, and people who’s scared, they naturally undermine the system they’re a part of, because they resent it. But if the alternative is a supporting, encouraging, compassionate workplace where we have difficult conversations, because I think that’s compassionate thing to do. It’s not about being Pollyanna about things.

Max:  19:30
We show support and encouragement as a rule, and if we’re frustrated, we say so, and we speak to our needs of where our frustration is coming from. Maybe we feel our senses communication is lacking. Maybe we sense a lack of respect. These are underlying needs. If somebody yells at me, I’m going to say that I was irritated by that and I was scared by that because I value respect and I value communication. So the cool thing about feelings that they speak to underlying needs, when a need is being met, we tend to feel what feelings we consider “positive.” A need’s being met, I was communicated with, I value that, therefore I feel elated, or pleased or calm as a feelings. Under that, if a need’s not being met, then I feel irritated, or sad.

Max:  20:13
These things to your point, are vulnerable gestures. It’s vulnerable to say, I’m scared. It’s vulnerable to talk about our needs, but it’s human. The idea that these things don’t exist in the workplace is insane. We either talk about them or we don’t, but they exist either way. I want to work in a workplace that is loving, supporting, encouraging, compassionate, because I’m not undermining that system. Right. I am bought into that system. I am appreciative of that system. It treats me with dignity. Therefore, I show it dignity. It’s not that complicated, but the problem is, most of our workplaces have inherited behaviors from the past, which those behaviors are command and control, fear-based. It doesn’t have to be that way, but a lot of it is.

William:  20:57
It’s interesting because a lot of this, again, is a filter for, who’s going to thrive at Lessonly, and who’s not going to thrive at Lessonly, and you’re using your values in a way as a filter, to both hire, attract talent, promote internal mobility and things like that. Also to repel. Again, ultimately, if someone doesn’t thrive in this environment that can’t express or don’t want to express their vulnerability or their feelings, they’re just not going to thrive because it’s just not going to work out. I’m sure you’ve had that, through the years. I’m sure you’ve had that happen where you thought everyone thought that it would work out and, for the best of reasons, it just didn’t. I love that you use your values as a way of, again, it’s like REI, I think does a really good job of this on the consumer side. It’s like, there’s certain people that work at REI and their values are pretty well-stated.

William:  21:56
If you’re not a helpful person, and you just don’t care about the outdoors, like you don’t care about climate change or things like that. Like, you’re just not going to thrive there. Like, it’s just not going to work out. Like you should just apply at a job at Home Depot. I mean, there’s other jobs, last thing is growth. Again, we’re doing these all simultaneously, or you’re doing these all simultaneously with your team, of course. How do you look at growth, and especially as the juxtaposition against the other two, and make sure that you’re on the path that you want to be on?

Max:  22:32
Yeah. So, growth should not come at the expense of our culture and to not come at the expense of our capital efficiency. In stages of growth when we’re hiring, capital efficiency naturally dips, but we should see it naturally come back up over time. Like, let’s say we have to hire 10 new salespeople. They’re not going to be selling new deals, AKA productive for three months, six months, whatever it is. So there’s going to be this dip in productivity, but that’s a dip we understand because we know where it’s going. So there’s this short-term moment of capital efficiency suffers, but it’s not going to suffer long if we do our jobs. So, like you said, when you’re looking at growth, how does it affect culture? How does it affect capital efficiency? We have a good grip on both of those things. We can measure our culture through surveys and through just vulnerable communication.

Max:  23:21
We can measure it through our retention rate and, things like that, and just what people tell us. Then we can look at our capital efficiency pretty darn easily and say, for every dollar we spend, how many dollars do we get back? When we put our growth targets together with those two things, it’s not that hard to figure out how do we kind of put a number up that both stretches us, but doesn’t come at the jeopardy, the longterm chronic jeopardy of either of these two counterpoints. That’s been great, man, it keeps working. I think sometimes we’ve grown a lot too fast William.

Max:  23:53
I don’t regret it because [inaudible 00:23:56], like there was beautiful things that came out of that extra stress. But, software companies are, I think, naturally on an unhealthy cycles of growth, because there’s no off season. It’s just off quarter. There’s no off season. There’s no off button. I think it’s really healthy to have an off season and we don’t have one in our world. The customers need us all year round and that’s something that perplexes me and I don’t have an answer for it.

William:  24:24
Well, not yet. So two real quick questions. One is capital efficiency for those that are maybe is familiar with that because it seems like it’s a mixture of ROI and lifetime value or net lifetime value. So, is that basically it?

Max:  24:44
Yeah, that’s it. Like, if we’re going to lose money or make money, we want it to be in a certain threshold. So when we make investments, we want to see if they are in that threshold, and those thresholds are going to be different for each company, there’s no magic number, but for us, if we were going to invest a dollar, we expected that dollar to come back as $1 of recurring revenue, within a year. 12 to 15 months in recurring revenue means somebody has paid us that dollar and they intend to pay us the next year a new dollar, and the next year that a new dollar. So we lose $1 to get over the lifetime of the customer three or four, maybe even five. So those are metrics that we have, in operations team and a CFO, Brian Montminy, who comes to us and says, “If we grow this way, hiring these people, here’s what our metrics are going to look like, model wise.” And then he tends to be pretty right on.

William:  25:40
Well, thankfully, especially in that position.

Max:  25:43
Yeah. I love the guy.

William:  25:46
Let’s keep him happy. Last thing on the way that we go out is for folks that listen to this and obviously the way that y’all run and the way that you operate is vastly different than, I would say, most of the companies that at least I know. How do they get started? I mean, again, where you’re at is really, really at both intellectually, it’s at a great level, but also in practice, it’s at a grade level, but it didn’t start overnight, get there overnight, but what’s your best advice to founders and even CHROs, thinking about the people side of things, how do they get to where you’re at?

Max:  26:31
Yeah. Well, I mean, my first answer is I wrote all this down in a book and I didn’t do that for my own. I did it for my own health because it was very clarifying, but it’s in a book called Do Better Work, and I wrote it, and I wrote every dang page and every dang word, and it basically takes an hour and 30 minutes to read, and it goes through the values we’ve talked about today, clarifies how they work. I don’t think these values are unique to us. I don’t think they’re uniquely valuable to us. Now that our teams have now adopted to do better work as their kind of cultural marker. Like this is how we want to operate. It’s important to understand what your values are, whether it’s the same ones that do better work or your own versions.

Max:  27:05
But, I think humans are humans, and I think the stuff we talk about to do better work is pretty damn consistent across the human race, that it works when we have difficult conversations and it works when we share before we’re ready. Then step two is, if you want your world to look like this. Do you want your world to look like your values? Then, the only job is to live them. I say, the only job not implying that’s an easy job. It’s probably the most difficult task known to man, to have a value, and to have aspirations. 1% of the time, I get more congruent or more symmetrical with those values. So what does that mean? It means just doing the things that you believe.

Max:  27:45
I find that when we start to do the things we believe, one of two things happens. We find that the thing we thought we believed was actually maybe a little bit different than we thought. As soon as we started living it, we started to see it for what it actually was instead of our kind of intellectual understanding of it, which I think is very healthy. So there’ve been things in the past that I valued, like let’s use the loyalty. So if I live loyalty, I find that loyalty is important. But now that it’s counterbalanced it’s to go back to our first thing we talked about, blind loyalty is extremist loyalty. So I’m loyal, but I have to have that other value, like my boundaries, that keeps it in check. But I only find that out if I live it, if I don’t live it, then I just trumpet loyalty as a slogan, but I’ve never lived it to see where it has its weaknesses and everything [crosstalk 00:28:33] to get to the extreme.

Max:  28:35
You got it. Exactly. Exactly. If I turn it all the way down to zero loyalty, not good. Turn it all the way up to 10, not good. If we’re on a 10 point scale. But if I find that balance in the middle and I dial up another dial to kind of counterbalance it, like that’s when great things happen. So people living their values, I think is the only job we have, because we don’t control anybody else’s behavior, so let’s just let people live how they live, and let’s just focus on our own symmetry between what we value and how we live. If everybody did that, I don’t think we’d have the problems that we have.

William:  29:04
Of course you’re using a medical or a musical metaphor with dials. So you’re dialing things up. You’re fading things in, and fading things out.

Max:  29:14
Yes. I’ve got a mixer right in front of me. So that’s why. I’ve got to mix [crosstalk 00:29:17].

William:  29:18
Oh, I love that. You know what’s great is, is in good times, it’s easier, I think, I’ve found that it’s easier for people to live their values, you know, for them to-

Max:  29:30
Yeah, Stress makes it tough.

William:  29:32
Stress and hard times, it’s when difficult decisions have to be made, that’s when it gets really with values.

Max:  29:42
It does. That’s when you find out what you really do value, because it’s pretty easy damn to live a value when that value doesn’t have any pushback. When there’s no headwind, anybody can do it. So it’s really rubber meets the road when I’m stressed. Now I am fortunate enough to have not grown up in an environment that was chronically stressful. So I have some capacities that if you grew up in a chronically stressful environment, they’re harder to develop. I got lucky. My brain develops in a healthy environment and therefore it pays me back in that way. If you grew up in a chronic stress environment, you’re going to have a fundamentally different brain and living toward values can be tougher. I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible. I’m just suggesting we have compassion for folks who maybe didn’t have the same circumstances that I had.

Max:  30:35
I don’t want to spend any time judging somebody who can state their values and then can’t live in them, because I don’t have a clue what that person’s been through, and it’s not really the fuckin’ point. Excuse me, you can put that out if you want, but that’s not the point. It’s just not the point. The point is, what am I doing, is not to judge other people and say, “Well, you’re not doing as well as I am,” but that’s not it at all. That’s missing the point completely. The point is to be a compassionate person who shows protection for people who might’ve been more vulnerable than he or she was.

William:  31:00
What I love about that Max is you’re looking at it as a journey. Everyone’s individual journey for these things. They might not be where they want to be at that particular moment, but at least again, as long as they’re learning lessons, and as long as they’re learning about things about themselves, and learning about the trade-offs, the yin and yang, if you will, of those things, then they’ll get better.

Max:  31:23
At their own pace in their own time. Without judgment of self. Like if they’re judging themselves throughout the process, which is very easy to do, it’s going to get tougher. But if they can look and say, “I’m where I am, irrespective of where anybody else is, I am where I am. It’s not about where anybody else is, and what’s my next step.” That’s hard to do.

William:  31:40
That’s self-love. Again, it’s funny, I bring it back to this a couple of times or brought it back to this a couple of times, this is a great filter. There’s going to be people that can do this, and there’s going to be people where, for whatever reason, they don’t want to. I wouldn’t say can’t, I would just say that they choose not to. Again, this is kind of who flourishes, in an environment like Lessonly. Max, I could talk to you pretty much all day, but I know you got like work to do and things like that. So thank you so much for coming on the RecruitingDaily podcasts. I’ve loved every moment.

Max:  32:20
I enjoyed it a lot too, William, like this is my favorite thing to speak about. So thanks for inviting me on to have a conversation.

William:  32:25
A hundred percent, and thanks for everyone listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Until next time.

The RecruitingDaily Podcast

Authors
William Tincup

William is the President & Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology, he’s a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He's been writing about HR and Recruiting related issues for longer than he cares to disclose. William serves on the Board of Advisors / Board of Directors for 20+ HR technology startups. William is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.


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