Businessweek Extra - Frances Frei

It's with Francis Fry. She's got a new book, Unleashed, The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering everyone around You. This was one of these interviews that the moment she came on the line, we were excited because she's a real person. She's had real experiences. She told some great stories, and she's been in the trenches, well trenches meaning uber and we were check it out. I think that there are great leaders and then there are people that are not

very good leaders. I think leadership can be taught. So for those that for those leaders that aren't doing a good job, if they have the desire to get better, we can teach them. If they don't have the desire to get better. I wish for them to step aside. How do you teach them? Because these are these are tough people who are often in positions where they are and you have run into some of them very directly, who are very confident and they know where they're going.

I just finished listening to a six part podcast on we Work, and you know more about that story, uh than I do. But but I do wonder how do you break through to two people or there's some who just can't be broken through. Well, I find that if you can break through, it's usually either through emotion or logic. And the lesson to be learned is that if someone is if someone is like at an emotional level, no

amount of logic is going to penetrate. And if someone is at a logical level, no amount of motion is going to penetrate. So you have to see where they are and then bring either the moral or the rational argument to them. Um, I will tell you, in my lifetime, I have met very few people that uh didn't want

to improve. Well, so, so okay, so take us back to you are hired, You're tapped to be Uber's first senior VP of a leadership and strategy, curious about the conversations to get you there, and then you walk in the and then you walk in the door, and then what so just take us back there. Yeah. So I was asked to go by a former student to go and meet with the then CEO, Travis kalmick Um. And my first reaction was no, because I, like everyone else, had read the newspaper and said, I only like to

help good people win. This does not seem like a good person. So no. And the student was said, Um, I think he's a very good person. I think he's out of his depth on parts of the job. Will you do me a favor and come meet with him? And so I flew out to California. I was planning to meet with him for an hour and I stayed for three days um talking with him and realized that this was a person who was last job, he had led eight people, this company had gone through hyper growth.

It now had between ten and fifteen thousand people, so he totally needed help and leadership. But you know how I knew that. He said, I totally need help on leadership, and then on the strategy part. You know, he's like a mad genius in his mind. But it wasn't getting out into the minds of everyone in the organization, and so he asked me to help strategy, at least in so far as we could communicate it so that everyone was going off the same script. And then he said,

you have full license to do whatsever necessary. That was my conversation with him, and then I went and met with a lot of employees, bought a lot of them. I think I interacted with about employees before I said yes, because I only like to help good people win. And if I didn't have the sense that this was overwhelmingly good people, I could never have gone to the organization. And I have to say it was overwhelmingly good people. And you walked out of there feeling the same way.

Oh yeah, So you know, nine months later, the culture was completely turned around. Everything that you read about in the culture back in two thousand and seventeen, none of that could happen today, like just literally none of it. And we had it, We had it. None of it could have happened within nine months. UM, And we've taught, We've brought in the largest executive education program I think

ever into a company. UM, And I've never met such willing learners I love this notion that you talked about in the book, which is in in some ways turning leadership on its head, or at least broadening there, widening the aperture a bit, because I think we we think so much about you know, I'm the leader, I'm the decider, and you know it needs to be about me and I need to sort of have this command and control. And you make a different argument. I think, help us

understand your sort of rubric I guess for thinking about leadership. Yeah, and I do make I think the exact opposite argument, which is that so you're exactly right, no, as what you were saying, Oh good, okay. I was like, wow, I really misunderstood what you're saying. No, no no, no, no, I was giving sorry they you couldn't see me. I was nodding vigorously. So leadership is about making other people better,

Like leadership fundamentally is about other people. And so the mistake that some people make is that they think their job is to be lead really and it's like they have a mirror in their office and they keep looking in their mirror to see how they're doing. And you should really put a window in your office, because you should be spending all of your time seeing how other people are doing. And a job of a leader is to make others better in there as a result of

their presence and into their absence. And so I do think that it does really turn around what leadership is because it's not about the leaders. In fact, our first chapter is all it's not about you. So how do you do that? Like? What does that look like in practice? When I walk into a meeting if the most interesting person in the room to me is me, and I'm

happiest when everyone else is looking at me. But if when I walk into a room, the most important people to me are everyone else in the room and my helping to set them up for success, and I will be looking super curiously and with all of my attention of how can I make you better? Like what are the obstacles in the way? How can I get you to reach higher? How can I get you to develop more skills to do a better job. So it's really

it's it's not self distracted, it's other distracted. We're just like sitting with this, Jason and I are looking at each other because this is pretty powerful. Um, you know, apply it? And I wonder how are you looking at what what you're saying right now and what you've just written in this book with what's going on in the world and what's been going on in the world for the last three months. The virus first of all, and what's been kind of put front and center once again

those things that ail our society. We knew they were, they were there, but you know, we're being confronted with it. And then certainly what happened with George Floyd in Minneapolis. Yeah, so I'll start with George Floyd. Uh that which is you know, our country has been grappling with issues of race for I don't know, close to four hundred years, and we've never dealt with them. And UM, I think that everyone probably because we're all in COVID together and

we're all breathing the same breath. Everyone witnessed, it seems at the same time, the death of a man because of the color of his skin, and this time it has sparked collective reckoning UM and feels like at least the first moment in my life where we might be willing to change. UM. But what we know about change is you have to do three things. If you're going to change, you have to honor the past. We've never done that regarding race. You have to have a clear

and compelling change mandate. We have that right now, and you have to have a rigorous and optimistic way forward. And so I think great leaders will honor the past and we'll have an optimistic, a rigorous and optimistic way forward. And the same thing. And if that's like poignant lead

for George Floyd, it's also what's happened with COVID, you know. Um, Like I think you could line up great leaders, great world leaders, from top to bottom and look at how well their countries are responding, and it's like a one to one, Like great leadership is playing out on the world stage. We're all given the same conditions. It's just whether or not it's about setting others up for success or whether or not the leaders thinks that leadership is

all about them. It's like pretty straightforward. Yeah, when I feel like we're seeing that at companies too, right, I mean we're seeing you know, both in terms of COVID and in terms of the reaction to the to the murder of George Floyd. You know, the that exact am thing that it's all the same circumstances and and granted their little variables here and there about what type of

company you run. But but it seems like so much of it is ultimately about and we have these conversations all the time, leaders being willing to to say something in many ways, and it seems so simple. But I feel like that gets lost. It's like Twitter versus Facebook right now. Oh, you know those are two platforms. I just got on my first social media platform and that's LinkedIn.

I'm on neither Twitter nor I don't do well with distractions. Yeah, but tell us about that notion of communicating and and the importance of leaders for saying something. Yeah, So here's what I would say. I mean, if if you are a person of color in the United States today, you're hurting. You're hurting not just for what happened to Georgie Floyd, but that's like horrific, but that you're hurting for what's

happened in your life, that you're cheating. You know, you're you have to teach your children not to run and to keep their hands in plain side. I don't have to teach my children to do that because I'm white. Like it's like there, it's just this aching about race. And so if we look at c e o s, you can watch them doing one of two things. If they're a white CEO, are are they primarily worried about? Oh my goodness, Now is the time like what led up to what happened with George Floyd and we are

now going to address it. And we all stand together. And here's the thing. If I'm comfortable with my race, it's my job to go and fix racial inequality. It's not the job of people that are destabilized by race to have to fix it. It's like when people used to ask women to fix gender problems. No, no, no. If we're like we're the bird and we're dishouldering the burden of it, don't ask us to fix it. You'll fix it. I think that's exactly what we're seeing. And

so we're seeing amazing CEO is stepping up. Now I'm saying, Okay, we got this. You're right. We have been waiting for others to fix it. Now we're going to fix it. And that feels like a pretty magnificent moment in our history. And that was Francis Fry. She's Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, and a couple of years ago she was tapped to be Uber's first senior

vice president of Leadership and Strategy. I loved hearing about the story about how a student got her to talk with Travis Kalinek of Uber. I mean, that's how she got involved in the company and what she did Jason, before she agreed to do the job talking to hundreds of Uber's workers, she had to feel good about the people who were there before willing to work with them,

and she made a difference. That's clear. It's a different company because of what she did and a lot of those lessons there in her new book, it's called Unleashed. You've been listening to Bloomberg Business Week Extra, be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week Radio Live Monday through Friday at two bm Wall Street Time on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jays and Kelly. This is Whooper