Hey everyone. I'm Varun Rajan. Welcome to the Push Pull podcast, where we explore career transitions and specifically the push and pull factors that inform those transitions. Now, I've talked about this before, but Gallup found, uh, that disengaged employees counting, actively disengaged and those not actively engaged cost the world$8.8 trillion in lost productivity. That's nearly 10% of global GDP annually. I picked up another book this time. It's Wrong Fit, right Fit by Andre Martin. I'm about a quarter into the book and I've already picked up some really interesting gems and it's helped me reflect a lot on the things I'm really looking for in a workplace. Here's the really interesting thing that Martin proposes in the book. He admits that it's important that companies do what they can to improve their organizations and their cultures, and he does have insights for both job seekers and companies, which I'm excited to get more into as I get further in the book. Again, I'm about a quarter of the way through. I like sharing while I'm learning. I'm a think out loud kind of guy, so deal with it. But, I think when a lot of us think about work environments where people thrive, we focus on what companies do to help talent feel fulfilled once they're already there. What can they change? How can they organize, how can they provide incentives? And all of that is valid, but. What if the real problem isn't culture or perks or org structure, but fundamental misalignment beginning at the point of hire between employer and employee? I would argue that the core conceit of this book is not about how to change companies to build the right environment for everyone. rather this book is thinking about how talent can find longevity at the job. In finding the right fit by focusing on what the working style of the company already is, and that companies can find committed talent by being way more upfront about what their day-to-day actually looks like. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what I've learned from the book so far, and even give a little bit of shape to some of the things that I care about as I've reflected on the idea of"fit" over the course of my career. Martin emphasizes reciprocity, a mutual give and take between employer and employee. This word really stands out to me as I consider reciprocity a lot in my personal and professional relationships. Mutual give and take that continues to iterate and flourish over time is how I would define it. I often think of. reciprocity in contrast to being transactional. Now, I haven't seen him use the word transactional yet in this book, but I think it's a very crucial distinction. So what does it mean to feel a mutual sense of investment, a reciprocal relationship, and not just a contract with your employer? We often frame jobs through a transactional lens. Salary, benefits, output, time. in contrast, what does it mean to be in a place where you're enabled to work on your craft and empowered to have your generative creative energy funneled into more parts of the business or organization in a way that you feel adequately compensated for and valued as an employee? There's obviously going to be a lot of give and take between the two. Martin emphasizes and. This is something that we've talked about here before, that it is a fool's errand to search for the perfect fit. There's always gonna be trade offs with your working environment, and you have to identify the sacrifices that you're willing to make, as long as the net balance of your activity serves your psychological wellbeing and gives you energy. Ultimately a focus on reciprocity is what's going to lend itself to a happier state of work for employees and more stability for employers looking to keep their talent engaged and productive. I wanna talk a little bit about workplace branding. Martin talks. About a lot of the trends over the last decade, decade and a half, two decades, that have led us to the place that we've been in today with employees really feeling like they're languishing and not engaged in the work that they're doing. In particular, he talks about the rise of culture decks, starting with Netflix's culture deck that started to go viral, in 2009, and that's when over the last. You know, 10 to 15 years, the idea of employer brand really became a thing. Um, he talks a lot about how heads of HR at all of these companies ended up getting a bunch of speaking gigs and grew the brands of their employers in ways that kind of made them HR influencers. And that wasn't necessarily reflective of what the working style and situation. were like at those companies during that time. So you have a place where there's kind of like this HR influencer culture where people start talking about employer brand and why it's important where employer brand is constantly convincing you about what it's like to work at that company without really. Showing or conveying how the work actually gets done or what the day-to-day is like. And employer brand actually ended up being a big part of how companies would bolster their consumer brands and more importantly, vice versa. Martin talks about BIRG, uh, BIRG, basking in reflected Glory. It's the idea that a lot of times an employer brand reflects. It's success as a company or even gets a big shine from their consumer brand, but doesn't actually reflect the company's, teams', or organization's day to day. Some proxies for that are the transactional things that we've mentioned, like pay or title or the brand on your resume. People want to be affiliated with brands that look successful. Working at brands like Apple, Google, or Nike feels prestigious regardless of the actual role. It's the social version of resume cloud. If your company looks good on the outside, it's has to feel good on the inside, right? Uh, and even if it doesn't, you're gonna make it work. But ultimately you see the shine of working somewhere. So you say yes, you take the job, and you start trying to fit in before you know it well. Why is trying to fit in a problem something else that the author elucidates about the word"fit" particularly"right fit" is its contrast with the idea of fitting in, or more specifically the attempt to fit in. sometimes people join jobs for reasons that don't align with how they actually work and end up in a situation where they're unhappy and are not exactly sure why. In service of productivity, performance, and career advancement, they end up trying to figure out how to work the way the company does in order to achieve these transactional goals, more pay bigger title, et cetera. These are branding elements for the employee at the end of the day. He explains that often when you're trying to fit in, you encounter cognitive dissonance. cognitive dissonance he explains, is triggered by survival responses in our brain and can have a long-term impact on psychological wellbeing when we are seeing ourselves experience cognitive dissonance day in and day out at our jobs, we might encounter cognitive dissonance when being asked to do something that doesn't align with our core competencies, or more importantly, our core values. And that's what really got me thinking and reflecting and going through a lot of my notes. What are my core values when it comes to working at a place? Um, you know, in my last job, a person that I was dotted line reporting into actually led her team, me and a few other product managers to go through a values exercise. And I actually found this to be incredibly valuable at the time, and it was something that I referenced, when I eventually decided to leave that job. so I wanted to talk a little bit about the values that I came up with at the time, uh, and see if they still resonated with me live while I'm recording this right now. Uh, and share with you kind of how I see my workplace values and see if it actually was in accordance with the kind of work that I was doing at the time. So there's about five here. that I wanna share with you. the first value is fun, uh, and. That might sound a little counterintuitive, especially if you're thinking about careers as a serious topic. Obviously your job is serious, that's fine. Um, but for me, the value of fun, means that. You have an understanding that taking a project or our job seriously does not have to come at the expense of having a good time while doing it. Take the job seriously. Don't take yourself that seriously. I am kind of a class clown type. I like to make jokes. I, I love to engage with people as people, and it's really important to me that I'm able to do that as much as possible on the job, uh, because we are all humans at the end of the day. This isn't something to say that we should be bringing our whole selves to work or anything like that. I, I don't know that I fully buy into that idea, but I do think that there is a time and place for levity and that time and place probably shows up way more frequently than a lot of us Are willing to recognize or are confident enough to recognize. Value number two: evangelism. I get a lot of fulfillment for being a hype man for the people and the projects that I believe in. If I am not excited about something, I try my best to get excited about it, to get people. Amped for the work that we're gonna do. and I think the work gets done better that way if people are actually believing in it. I think having a sense of purpose in what you're doing is incredibly important. And so being an evangelist for that is absolutely something that I will carry with me into every job that I take. The third value, this is really interesting because I think I've defined this value a little bit differently for myself. Um, discretion. Being intentional about how you communicate and weighing how you can best deliver your message. On the spectrum of candor and diplomacy, I think it's really important to understand who you're talking to, who your audience is, especially as a product manager, somebody who is leading through influence rather than authority. You need to know who you actually need to move and why in order to get done what you believe needs to get done. One of the things that I've said a lot, uh, in the context of this podcast and interviews that I've had is that diplomacy is actually a core value of mine. I think that candor and diplomacy doesn't necessarily have to be intention. Um, and I think that's something that, and that aspect of candor and diplomacy not being intention is something that I've come to lean into a little bit more over time. I think you can do both. Um, and I've said it before on this podcast many times, I think you can be both honest and diplomatic, in a way that forwards your career, and can make everybody understand where you're coming from. but what I had written down, for my values, when I had done this probably like, I don't know, nine months ago or so, was discretion. Being intentional about how you communicate. Because sometimes maybe there are people that need to hear the brutal honest truth and a blunt take. Uh, fourth value, uh, is value, uh, or impact following an instinct to focus on what matters, even if it means pivoting. Uh, delivering difficult feedback, again comes back to candor and diplomacy, uh, a little bit, uh, or, you know, cutting something like a project, uh, or something that we once believed in. I have definitely been in the room with people, other product teams where I have successfully convinced the group as well as the decision makers in the room that we needed to cut another team's project or our own. Um, and it sometimes rubs people the wrong way, but to focus on impact in the business means getting across the right message and working on the right things. And so, um, following the instinct, like I said, on what matters. And the last one, uh, fifth here is relationships. Um, it's interesting, uh, that I did say this before, but we are all people that work with people and that should guide how we interact with one another, um, with empathy. And, um, yeah, I think a lot of it ends up tying back to diplomacy. Even though diplomacy was just a sub-bullet, uh, as a, you know, spectrum, uh, that I had said when it came to my value of discretion. But I fundamentally do think that looking back on it and reflecting diplomacy is kind of like a, you know, underlying value that ends up kind of like hitting a lot of these. It hits discretion, it hits value and impact because you need to be diplomatic a lot of times, especially when you are delivering difficult feedback or trying to say no to something. Um, and then relationships obviously is making sure that you're building them by having empathy for the people that you work with. when I left my last job, I think that. If I'm looking back on these values, I think it was really challenging because. One of the things that I realized was that there was a lot of politics involved in making sure that I did what I tried to do. So as I leaned into the diplomacy and the discretion, um, one of the things that I probably had to sacrifice as a result of where things were set in terms of management structures and decision makers was that I had to sacrifice on value and impact by not necessarily saying no to things that I thought I should have said no to. Um, and not being bold enough with the vision that I actually had. So before I ended up leaving my job, what I ended up doing was charting a path forward to build a really robust, product strategy that I felt like I kind of, through conversations with a bunch of different leaders at the company, ended up nicking and diving until I got it to a point where it no longer fit my vision, and it no longer was something that. I felt I was having fun with or wanted to evangelize or that I could in good faith evangelize. Uh, and that was really draining my energy. And that was kind of when I realized this is the wrong fit for me. I. And so yeah, that's, that, that's my story. I'm super excited to read a little bit more about what, Dr. Martin has to say, about what companies can be doing to actually ensuring that they're hiring for the right fit, or even understanding what the talent that they have, what makes them a good fit or not. and whether they can actually build an organization where people can find fit once they're actually there. Uh, but I think it's really interesting that the core conceit, the thing that he's arguing from the outset of the book is fit is something that we need to be working on determining at the outset by companies being a little bit more upfront about their working style so that we get the right people in the door, uh, so that people aren't constantly looking for, figuring out how to shift themselves in order to achieve the things that they want to achieve in their careers. Super excited to keep going through this. Um. But, uh, yeah, thanks again for, for listening. continuing to have some really amazing guests coming up, and a lot more rants about work, work life and, how to find work that really resonates with you. And, you know, fundamentally this is an exercise in me trying to figure this out for myself. So, uh. Thank you so much for following me on the journey. Again, this is the Push-Pull podcast. Please give me a review on any of the podcast apps that you're listening to this on, like, uh, or comment on the YouTube video if you're watching this. Um, and, uh, share it with your friends. Um, I love doing this and, uh, thanks again for being here with me. Uh, and yeah, if you have any other questions, obviously you can email me at Varun. That's V-A-R-U-N, at push pull podcast.com.