Fixing Uber’s Broken Culture

Pushkin. I recently talked with Francis Frye and Anne Morris.

I'm Francis Frye. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School, and I'm married to Anne. I'm Anne Morris.

I'm a company builder and a leadership coach, and the marriage is mutual and consensual. Thank goodness, we're married to each other.

Francis and Ann also work together. They are the co founders of a training and consulting company called the Leadership Consortium. They specialize in helping leaders build trust. They also co host a podcast called Fixable. And there is this particular project that they worked on. In fact, it's the project that inspired them to start their company. And I found this project so surprising and so illuminating that I wanted to have them on the show to talk about it.

He said, will you come and meet my CEO, Travis Kalnik And I said no. My first instinct was no, and I was like, I read the newspapers. It sounds terrible. And then she said, please, as a personal favor, he is not the person that you're reading about. Will you come and meet with him? And so it was entirely as a favor that I flew out to meet Travis.

And what was before you met him? What was your impression, not having met him, of Travis Kalvinick.

It sounded like he didn't care, was out of touch, created a very horrific climate for women and not awesome for others as well. So we help good people do hard things, but we don't help bad people. And so I was like, I'm not going to work with him, but I'll come out and meet him as a favorite to you.

So you go fly out and what happens.

Yes, it was a two hour meeting. It lasted three days, and I found him thoughtful, rigorous, open, just I adored him. By the end, I was down for the count.

So that is truly surprising.

You're not kidding because he came across very the two things I really like are rigor and optimism and he was super rigorous and super optimistic. And then he said, and I need help. The last company I ran had eight people.

And how big is Uber at this point?

Thirteen thousand?

Wow? Okay, and so so you're in.

Well he was like, you know, you need to come and work here full time. And I was like, I'm never leaving Harvard, but I'll consult for you. He's like, no, no, no, we need all of you. So I left there and came home and asked, you know, told Anne about it and was like, what do you think about my taking a leave from HBS and going and working there full time?

And and what did you say?

That's a ridiculous idea?

Go on?

I mean, I think we sat with it for a good week or so. But where we got to is if we can make it work at Uber, and if we can make some of these ideas that we're kind of batting around, if we can really test them at Uber, and if they can work there, then they can work anywhere.

So okay, so you take the job and like, what is the problem you're setting out to fix? Eduber or problems?

Yeah, so two sides. The problems at any organization are always only two things, achievement and or sentiment?

Is the business working and do people feel good about it? Is that what that means? Yes?

And it had both problems, huh. And the sentiment was really rough and the achievement was also they were magnificent in some ways, but this was the era when costs were greater than revenue.

They were losing money.

Yeah, And that's that can seduce you into thinking all kinds of things that are upside down are right side up. And so that's where the strategy.

Going really fast? Right, is that complicated Silicon Valley thing of like incredible growth, but like they're selling every dollar for seventy five cents, and lots of people it turns out, will buy a dollar if it costs seventy five.

Cents, yes, yeah, And I don't know if it's so complicated. I don't think it's that complicated either. I think I think that if you get venture capitalists that are willing to take their money and put it in the pockets of riders, it turns out that can last a long time. So but that's what we went in is sort of we when we talk about study the achievement.

Achievement problem is they're losing money. What specifically was the sentiment problem?

Oh goodness, the It was a culture of I'll give you an example. If one person was going to give someone else feedback at uber, it was an arms race of how cutting the feedback could be. So they were mean, they were they were Yeah, there was a but but not with the intention of cruelty. But yes, it came

So when do you start wearing the Uber shirt every day?

So I got there and I was you know, Anne and I were excited, and I was really proud of the mission. I was proud of the work ethic. I was proud of the intelligence of everyone, and so I was proud to be there. And I got there and everyone was ashamed to work there. There were all the newspaper things like delete Uber, and there was videos on the web of the CEO that weren't good, and so

Oh so you're saying people who worked at Uber would get into an Uber and wouldn't tell the driver they worked at Uber because driver would think they're a bad person for working at Uber.

Yes, they would. They stopped going to parties because the topic of conversation was always Uber and it was embarrassing for them. So they had real shame. And so what I said is, I'm so proud of what we're all intending to do. I'm going to wear an uber t shirt until everyone else regains his pride because there used to be the pride in the organization.

And so you're wearing it Monday to Friday, you're wearing it Saturday and Sunday. And tell me, tell me as the partner of the person.

Yeah, this wasn't an ideal part of the commitment. I'm not sure you had. I did not clear it with this many moves ahead and a chessboard. Now, yeah, there were a couple of awkward family moments. We went to a fancy party where you had to dress up and Francis woarren uber T shirt.

Underneath a jacket. But indeed I did no. I promised to wear any like you could see it like, ah, for sure, for sure the commitment was real.

So okay, we've got the shirt, We've got the problems. After the break, solving the problems and getting to the point where Francis finally feels like she can stop wearing an Uber shirt every single day. Now back to the show. So, okay, you got your shirt, you're fired up. What's the first sort of key thing you do to try and make people like Uber better?

Yes, So the first thing was to teach the entire organization how to build and more importantly in their case, rebuild trust and how to do it quickly. So in the presence of trust, everything goes faster and higher. So if you get trust, nobody's going to relitigate the decision afterwards, you get to stay on one things, and in the absence of trust, people are going to ask you to compromise way more than you should otherwise. So when we're teaching about trust, what we're doing is delivering on the

So that's the abstraction. What is a specific thing you do to that end?

Well, you determine is trust breaking down for one of three reasons. Turns out there's three pillars of trust, and in Uber's case, the reason was empathy at every turn. So you can be awesome, but if you're not empathetic, we're not going to trust you.

And I mean, you say there's three pillars of trust, I got to say, okay, if empathy is on, what are the other two?

Logic and authenticity.

So if you think about it in terms of a person's relationship to their manager, they are thinking, does what my boss says make sense? Is it logical? Is my boss a phony? Are they just giving me a smoke screen that's authenticity? And does my boss care about me?

I mean it's not exactly okay, and care about my success in this job.

And so the people at Uber, in your estimation, in your finding, were logical and authentic. They just didn't care about the people they worked with.

And it was for the employees, it was also for the regulators. It was also for the investors, so they are.

Caring about the regulators. Was sort of Uber's brand, right, like that was I don't quite want to say their secret sauce, but kind of right. Well, it was going into cities where, you know, to be fair to Uber, it seemed like the taxi cab cartels had the regulators kind of in their pockets in a lot of places. So in a way, being not empathetic to the regulators there was a logic to it.

From absolutely, and so the question is is what got you here, what's going to take you there? And they were magnificent at not being empathetic to the regulators. And that's spilled over to many aspects of the organization.

So you've identified now in more detail. Okay, this is what's wrong. How do you fix it?

Yeah, So two things. One, we created a curriculum, So I got friends of mine from Harvard and we created a remote curriculum. Half of it leadership, half of its strategy to teach people how to do things. And it was for the three thousand managers. We thought, you know, maybe five hundred people would show up. People took it.

Six thousand out of three thousand mandagers, so all of the managers basically and a lot of other people. Yes, Okay, that's interesting, Like it seems like the problem is everybody was being mean essentially to each other. How does like online courses actually get people to not be mean?

Like?

It seems weird to me. Maybe I've just had bad online courses in my work life.

Well, let me let me, let me add a little let me add a little context, which I think is material here into a lot of the organizations we work in. It was very clear to the organization that plan A wasn't working, Yeah, and that they had not collectively built a culture where people were thriving. And so the motivation

Huh. Is there a particular time you remember and when you were talking to Francis about what was happening, Like any specific conversations come to mind.

Yeah, Francis had do you remember the robot we had experimented with an It was actually called the Wanatron. It's difficult product name, but the Wanatron was the height of a human sitting in a chair essentially, so it would wheel up to the dinner table. Francis would join us for dinner, and then we would.

And it had a little like a like an iPad for a face or something.

Exactly, so Francis would could could be there friends.

Yeah, it would take maybe three minutes for you and the boys to stop interacting with like a robot, and it was as if I was there.

Yeah. I do remember coming home, you know, a little bit late at night, keeping the babysitter a little late, cats away Jacob, you know, uh, and pulling into the driveway, the wanatron was just waiting in the waiting in the window. And but you were super excited. I mean I can

That's when I knew it was it was fixable.

So at some point Travis Kalanick gets I don't know if he was fired pushed out. He definitely gets pushed out of the company.

Nine days in.

So say that again. Nine days in, nine days after you took the full time job, he sweet talked to you and that he was gone.

It wasn't his idea to leave, No, it was it was really of a sudden and a surprise. And he said to me, he said, you know, in my absence, please do this act in the best because I was like, what can I do to be helpful to you? And he said, you can be helpful to me by doing things in the best interest of Uber. And so that's what I did.

So let's talk about what else you did. There's there's the course. There was one detail that I read about that was really interesting to me, and it was about how people behaved in meetings. Yeah, tell me about that.

Yeah, And I think this was illustrative of the large empathy wobble we would say at the organization. So in the senior team, it was not a safe place. And by that I mean when people were speaking, they were like nervous and looking around and I.

Couldn't been in like c Sweitel people even in C suite.

No, no, no, even in C suite. Then what I found out is that they were texting one another about the person who was speaking.

In the room, in the room, and they all knew that they were doing it.

And they all knew it, which was creating, Like, if you want to create an environment that's not safe, just start doing that. That's that guaranteed to make it not safe.

That it was shocking, super common you came to discover.

Yeah, super common.

Wait, and super tech industry.

Everybody does that and everybody knows everybody's doing that.

I don't think that's an unfair statement. It was at that time, at.

That time, it.

That's so weird, it's so weird.

I have to say I had exactly the reaction that you did. So set a norm because I was facilitating the senior team. The board asked me to do it in between the CEOs, and I said, for our meetings, we're gonna have technology off in a way. Now we do that in the.

Harvard classroom, meaning no phones, no laptops.

It turned out that when you remove the distraction, we actually got an unprecedented amount of work done. Like we did. We I don't think Uber ever got more done than over that summer, so it started an incredible improvement trajectory. So I'll give you another example of something that we did. They were not very good at giving each other feedback, and that I know as an operations professor, if I give you effective feedback, you will improve at a dramatically

Is there an example of helping people give better feedback?

Oh?

Yeah, yeah, like one specific thing.

Sure. So if I want you to improve the ideal ratio of positive reinforcement, that is, do more of this to constructive advice, do it differently. The ideal ratio is five to one, huh.

So you say five good things that the person did and one thing they could improve on, and.

At uber it was zero to ten. And so by doing that it unleashed all of this amazing improvement and we were catching people doing things right in sincere and specific ways. It can't be performed at ever you lose that authenticity thing. So the culture improved and the improvement improved, and this happens overnight.

Was there a moment when you felt like you had done it? Was there a moment when you took off the shirt? Yeah?

I took off the shirt nine months in.

And was there some thing? Was there? What was the last thing? What was the thing that why didn't you take it off eight months? What was the last thing you had to do to take off the shirt?

Yeah?

I mean the thing that was most gratifying to you, if I recall, is seeing uber t shirts on this everywhere of San Francisco.

Everywhere, everywhere you just walk in, and it would have to be like a nighttime horror story to tell people what it used to be like, because you couldn't imagine it being like that anymore.

You didn't need to wear the shirt anymore because everybody else was worthing.

Everybody else did everyone. And that, by the way, is when I stopped working their full time because I also didn't need to be there full time anymore.

And what'd you think when what do you think when Francis first took off the shirt, there was Jacob.

There was great relief.

As her spouse, as her collaborator, which I think it was by the end of this story that you had sold me, and about midway through that you were really putting the pressure on we should go and do this together.

I was intrigued.

Tell me more about that. So you're saying this story when Francis was working at uber was when and you really decided that you and Francis should go work together as consultants.

Yeah, Well, we started a company that was very informed by this experience, that was focused on removing barriers to impact and advancement for people, particularly in tech, and the mission has expanded and so that and particularly.

For women, people of color, LGBTQ, like the people for whom the harms were most likely to be done. What we decided to do is instead of going and helping one company at a time, we started a company where we could bring people in and help many companies at once, and that exists until today, all focusing on the education part, and has been enormously successful in unleashing individuals and the organizations.

We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. That's the end of the ads now we're going back to the show. Let's do a lightning round.

Let's do it.

Okay, what's one tip for teaching your kid how to fish?

If the birds aren't there, go come back another day.

A good one, because the birds eat the fish, and if there's no fish, there won't be birds. Fish where there are fish, A fisherman told male.

Fish where there are fish.

I know you talk on your show about the lesbian can do attitude, which is an attitude that I would love to have. So, like, tell me one thing I need to have the lesbian can do attitude.

Yeah, Well, it's our it's our affectionate way of saying getting in touch with the fixer inside you.

And I think it's.

Fundamentally about mindset. So it's getting in touch with the agency you have to solve problems.

That's it. That's your inner lesbian. We all have one. Yeah, And you know this is interesting. I don't know if I've ever taught anyone how to have can do lesbian spirit. What I do is encourage people to surround themselves with people that have this inner spirit. So it's quite infectious. I think the answer, I think that's the answer, which is be around people who in the presence of a problem walk towards it. They neither freeze nor do they walk away.

What's the best thing about working with your spouse?

I get to know her more every day, and I fall in love with her more every day.

Francis Fry and Anne Morris are the co founders of the Leadership Consortium and the host of the Fixable podcast. If you want a chance to be on their show, call their hotline at two three four Fixable. That's two three four three four nine two two five three, and you can leave a voicemail for Annon Francis with your workplace problem. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo, edited by Karen ch Kergie, and engineered by Amanda k. Wall.