Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Welcome to the Deep Dive. I want to start today with something you've probably seen, especially if you manage or, you know, work with younger people.

• Speaker #1

  So I want you to picture a scenario for a second.

• Speaker #0

  Okay.

• Speaker #1

  It's a Tuesday afternoon.

• Speaker #0

  Right.

• Speaker #1

  And you are a marketing director.

• Speaker #0

  Right.

• Speaker #1

  You're sitting in this conference room. The AC is humming. And up at the front of the room is Chloe.

• Speaker #0

  Ah, the famous Chloe.

• Speaker #1

  Exactly. So Chloe is 23. She's your junior project manager. She is bright. She is super creative and she has enough energy to power a small city.

• Speaker #0

  I think we all know a Chloe.

• Speaker #1

  We do. But right now in this room, you are watching a train wreck in slow motion.

• Speaker #0

  It's that classic promising junior but terrible presentation scenario.

• Speaker #1

  Yes, exactly. She is pitching to a client or maybe she's just rehearsing for you and it is just a complete disaster.

• Speaker #0

  Oh, no.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. She's speaking at like 100 miles an hour. Completely losing her train of thought.

• Speaker #0

  And let me guess, the slides.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, the slides are just walls of text.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  No visuals, no hierarchy, just a novel pasted onto a PowerPoint. And you can actively feel the client tuning out.

• Speaker #0

  You can feel the credibility of your whole department just sort of evaporating. It's a really visceral kind of stress, isn't it? Because you're not just watching bad work, you're watching your own reputation take a hit right in front of you.

• Speaker #1

  Right. So the question for you, the listener. is what do you do? Because I think I know what I would do in that situation.

• Speaker #0

  That's your move.

• Speaker #1

  I'd wait for the meeting to end. I'd pull her aside, tell her, you know, good effort, great energy.

• Speaker #0

  Right.

• Speaker #1

  And then tonight after dinner, I'd open my laptop, crack a bottle of wine and just fix the slides myself.

• Speaker #0

  You'd feel pretty good about that, wouldn't you?

• Speaker #1

  I mean,

• Speaker #0

  you'd feel like you really saved the day.

• Speaker #1

  Well, I'm protecting the client relationship. And honestly, I feel like I'm protecting Chloe. I don't want to crush her spirit. She's new. Why humiliate her?

• Speaker #0

  See, that is the exact narrative we all tell ourselves. I am benevolent. I'm helpful. I am a team player.

• Speaker #1

  Because I am. I'm doing the work.

• Speaker #0

  But if we look at the insights from our source material today.

• Speaker #1

  Right, which is chapter seven of Benoit van Kouwenberge's book, The Gen Z Shift.

• Speaker #0

  Yes. If we look at that chapter, that instinct you just described, that isn't leadership. It's a trap.

• Speaker #1

  A trap. Okay. Well, welcome to today's deep dive, everyone. That's our mission today. We are unpacking this idea from the Gen Z shift, specifically looking at why modern management styles might actually be destroying talent.

• Speaker #0

  And why what feels like kindness is often just, well, something else entirely.

• Speaker #1

  So you call it a trap. What kind of trap?

• Speaker #0

  Van Kouwenberg calls it the nanny trap. And what you just described, staying up late, fixing the slides, softening the blow, he argues that that isn't kindness at all. It is polite cowardice.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, hold on. Cowardice feels a little aggressive.

• Speaker #0

  I know, it stings.

• Speaker #1

  It does. I am the one staying up until midnight to fix a slide deck.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  That feels like sacrifice, not cowardice. Like I'm taking one for the team.

• Speaker #0

  It definitely feels like sacrifice in the moment. But let's really peel that back. Why are you actually doing it?

• Speaker #1

  To fix the problem.

• Speaker #0

  Are you doing it for Chloe? Or are you doing it because you want to avoid the awkwardness of a difficult conversation?

• Speaker #1

  Well, I mean, nobody likes telling a puppy they made a mess on the carpet.

• Speaker #0

  Precisely.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  You are prioritizing your... own emotional comfort over her professional growth.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, well.

• Speaker #0

  You're protecting your own tranquility. By doing the work for her, you completely avoid the tension. But the hidden cost is that you're manufacturing what the book calls a competence debt.

• Speaker #1

  Competence debt. That sounds expensive.

• Speaker #0

  It's incredibly expensive because you're creating a junior employee who literally cannot learn. She never faces the reality of her own output.

• Speaker #1

  Right, because I'm always buffering it.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. And at the same time, you are creating a manager yourself who is destined to burn out from nocturnal maintenance.

• Speaker #1

  Nocturnal maintenance. That is a hauntingly accurate term.

• Speaker #0

  Isn't it?

• Speaker #1

  It's that secret shift you work from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. to fix everything your team didn't get quite right.

• Speaker #0

  And that is the absolute definition of the nanny trap. You think you're keeping the peace, but you're actually deforming the team.

• Speaker #1

  So you end up with an exhausted leader and totally stagged in talent.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. It is a failure of management disguised as heroism.

• Speaker #1

  Okay. I get the burnout aspect, but I do want to push back on this a little bit.

• Speaker #0

  Go for it.

• Speaker #1

  In the real world, we have deadlines. If Chloe's presentation is tomorrow morning and it sucks, I have to fix it. I can't just let her fail in front of a major client to teach her a lesson. We have revenue on the line.

• Speaker #0

  That is a completely fair point. And honestly, it leads us directly to the core problem. The reason we fall into the nanny trap isn't just because we're being nice. It's because we have a fundamentally broken risk architecture.

• Speaker #1

  Risk architecture. Break that down for me.

• Speaker #0

  We tend to treat every single task in a corporate environment with the exact same level of existential dread.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, that's true.

• Speaker #0

  We act as if a typo in an internal memo carries the same weight as a safety failure in a nuclear power plant.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. The urgency has always turned up to 11.

• Speaker #0

  Right. We've lost the ability to distinguish between different... types of risk.

• Speaker #1

  So we're just over indexing on fear across the board.

• Speaker #0

  Massively. And Van Kallenberg proposes a classification system in the book that I think is just brilliant. He breaks risk down into three distinct levels, A, B, and C.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, let's walk through these. I'm assuming level A is the scary stuff.

• Speaker #0

  Yes. Level A is the cliff.

• Speaker #1

  The cliff.

• Speaker #0

  These are critical, irreversible actions. If you fail here, the company is in mortal danger.

• Speaker #1

  So we're talking about like a massive merger or a global product recall, a major compliance breach.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. If you jump off a cliff, you don't get a do-over.

• Speaker #1

  Right. So if Chloe is negotiating a billion-dollar merger, maybe don't let her just wing it.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely not. That requires heavy, heavy oversight.

• Speaker #1

  Makes sense.

• Speaker #0

  Then you have level B, which is the slope.

• Speaker #1

  The slope.

• Speaker #0

  These are costly risks. If they fail, it hurts. You might lose some money. You might look really bad for a quarter. but you will ultimately recover.

• Speaker #1

  So think of like a failed marketing campaign or a bad hire.

• Speaker #0

  Right. It's a stumble. It's not a death sentence.

• Speaker #1

  Okay. I'm with you. And level C.

• Speaker #0

  Level C is the sandbox.

• Speaker #1

  The sandbox.

• Speaker #0

  These are low impact. They are entirely safe to fail. If this goes wrong, the only real cost is time.

• Speaker #1

  Okay. So a draft presentation.

• Speaker #0

  Yes. A brainstorming session, a social media post, a routine internal meeting.

• Speaker #1

  The sandbox. I like that. It's where you're supposed to play.

• Speaker #0

  It's where you're supposed to learn. But here is the statistic from the source that just blows my mind. In most organizations, about 80% of the daily work is level C.

• Speaker #1

  80%?

• Speaker #0

  Yes. 80% is sandbox work.

• Speaker #1

  Wow.

• Speaker #0

  Most of what we do is just drafting, testing, iterating, and emailing. But, and here is the massive dysfunction.

• Speaker #1

  Let me guess. Managers treat it like level A.

• Speaker #0

  They govern that 80% with level A anxiety. They treat the sandbox like the cliff.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, I see that constantly. I have literally seen managers demand three levels of executive approval for a single tweet.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. And that absolutely kills speed. But more importantly, it kills growth.

• Speaker #1

  Because you can't experiment if you're terrified.

• Speaker #0

  Right. The book phrases it perfectly. It says the machine cannot tell the difference between a risk and a rehearsal. If you treat a rehearsal like a crisis, you completely paralyze your people.

• Speaker #1

  OK, so bringing this back to Chloe, her presentation might have been a level B risk. Maybe even level C if it was just a draft reversal for me. But I, the panic manager, treated it like a level A cliff event that I just had to save her from.

• Speaker #0

  You treated it like a bomb you had to defuse rather than a puzzle she needed to solve.

• Speaker #1

  Ouch.

• Speaker #0

  And because you couldn't distinguish the risk level, you instinctively reached for the absolute worst tool in the management toolbox to handle the feedback.

• Speaker #1

  Oh boy. Let me guess. The feedback sandwich.

• Speaker #0

  The feedback sandwich. The tool that refuses to die.

• Speaker #1

  Everyone knows this one. It's like standard corporate training at this point.

• Speaker #0

  Unfortunately.

• Speaker #1

  You start with a compliment, you slip in the criticism, and then you end with another compliment. So I'd say, great energy, Chloe. Just maybe work on the structure a bit next time. But overall, really great attitude.

• Speaker #0

  It is the ultimate expression of polite cowardice. We call it tact in the corporate world. Van Kouwenberg calls it manipulation.

• Speaker #1

  Manipulation.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Is it really manipulation, though? It just feels like I'm trying not to be a jerk.

• Speaker #0

  It feels that way to you, the person giving it. But look at it from the receiver's end. When you sandwich the criticism, you are diluting the message to the point of complete irrelevance.

• Speaker #1

  I guess that's true.

• Speaker #0

  Saying a bit more structure isn't feedback. It's a vague wish. It gives her absolutely nothing concrete to act on.

• Speaker #1

  It's just noise.

• Speaker #0

  It leaves the employee with nothing to actually transform. And worse, it institutionalizes the implicit.

• Speaker #1

  What do you mean by that?

• Speaker #0

  It relies on the employee having the social radar to read between the lines and realize, oh, when he said structure, he actually meant rewrite the whole thing.

• Speaker #1

  And this is where the generational friction really comes in, isn't it?

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely.

• Speaker #1

  Because I feel like earlier generations, Gen X, millennials, we were essentially trained to decode that stuff.

• Speaker #0

  We were.

• Speaker #1

  We knew that if a boss said, let's take this offline, that actually meant. You're in trouble.

• Speaker #0

  We were trained in subtext. But Gen Z, they do not speak that language. And this isn't because they're fragile or entitled, which are the really lazy labels people like to slap on them.

• Speaker #1

  I hear that all the time. Managers saying you have to walk on eggshells around the new grads.

• Speaker #0

  It's a total myth. Gen Z isn't fragile. Think about how they grew up. They grew up in a world of algorithmic feedback.

• Speaker #1

  Right. Instagram likes, Reddit upvotes, comment sections.

• Speaker #0

  Yes. It's binary. You either got the like or you didn't.

• Speaker #1

  That makes sense.

• Speaker #0

  They want what the author calls usable truth. They don't want an opinion wrapped in cotton wool. They want a data point. To them, the feedback sandwich doesn't feel polite. It feels like lying. It feels inefficient.

• Speaker #1

  So when I say great energy just fix the structure, they hear great energy and they just ignore the middle part because I didn't emphasize it.

• Speaker #0

  Either they ignore it or worse, they detect the staging.

• Speaker #1

  The staging.

• Speaker #0

  They sense that you are actively managing their emotions rather than managing their performance. And when Gen Z detects that kind of manipulation, they don't necessarily throw a tantrum or squirm out.

• Speaker #1

  What do they do?

• Speaker #0

  They do something far more dangerous to your bottom line. They withdraw economically.

• Speaker #1

  Economically? You mean they just stop working?

• Speaker #0

  They stop investing. This is the root of the whole quiet quitting phenomenon. It's not laziness. It's a highly rational calculation. They look at the situation and think, this manager isn't being real with me. The feedback is fake. So why should I hustle? And they switch to execution mode.

• Speaker #1

  They just do the bare minimum to not get fired.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly.

• Speaker #1

  That is a terrifying thought.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  That my attempt to be nice is actually signaling to them that I don't respect them enough to tell the truth.

• Speaker #0

  Yes. Neglect is very often disguised as kindness. If you don't give the feedback, you deprive the person of reality.

• Speaker #1

  You replace clarity with interpretation.

• Speaker #0

  And that makes the employee incredibly paranoid. Think about it from their perspective. If you know your boss never actually says what they mean, you spend all your mental energy trying to decode their smile.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, yeah.

• Speaker #0

  You're constantly wondering, he said good job, but does he really mean it? Am I safe here?

• Speaker #1

  And that anxiety burns up all the energy that should be going into the actual work. Decoding the smile.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  That's exhausting just thinking about it. Okay, so we've established that the nanny trap burns out the manager and the feedback sandwich alienates the talent. We clearly need a new model.

• Speaker #0

  We do.

• Speaker #1

  And the book suggests moving from being a nanny to being a sparring partner.

• Speaker #0

  Right. And I really love this metaphor because it completely changes the physical dynamic of the relationship.

• Speaker #1

  See, when I hear sparring partner, I immediately think of a boxing ring. I think of getting punched in the face.

• Speaker #0

  Right.

• Speaker #1

  Is that really the vibe we want to cultivate in the office?

• Speaker #0

  Not quite. Think about the actual purpose of a sparring partner. You don't step into the ring with a sparring partner to get knocked out. You step in to get better. Their job is to test your defenses. They throw a punch so that you learn how to dodge.

• Speaker #1

  So it's resistance training.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. The nanny manager constantly clears the obstacles. They say, don't worry about that difficult client. I'll handle him. Or don't worry about the slides. I'll just fix them.

• Speaker #1

  And the sparring partner.

• Speaker #0

  The sparring partner says, here comes a difficult client. Keep your hands up. Here's how you handle it.

• Speaker #1

  There's a great parenting quote that the book brings up that fits this perfectly. It goes, Do not prepare the road for the child. Prepare the child for the road.

• Speaker #0

  That is the absolute essence of it. The nanny prepares the road, smoothing out all the bumps. The sparring partner prepares the employee for the road. It's all about creating a controlled ring.

• Speaker #1

  A controlled ring.

• Speaker #0

  It's a space where the risk is managed. Remember, we're operating in the sandbox, or the slope, not the cliff.

• Speaker #1

  Right.

• Speaker #0

  But the feedback in that ring is real. The sparring partner hits to train, not to humiliate.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, so how do we actually do this practically? Because I can't just walk up to Chloe's desk and say, put your hands up.

• Speaker #0

  Probably not a good HR move.

• Speaker #1

  Right. We need a script. And the source material outlines three rules for what it calls managerial translation. How do we translate you suck into here is how you grow?

• Speaker #0

  It's not about being mean. It's about being surgical. There are three components to effective sparring style feedback. Specific consequence and immediate action.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, let's break those down. Rule number one. Specific.

• Speaker #0

  Right. No more saying make it pop. No more, it needs more structure. Those are completely useless phrases. You say, slide four is unreadable. There are 200 words on this slide, and the font hierarchy is non-existent.

• Speaker #1

  That's undeniable fact. It's not an opinion on her character or her work ethic. It's just a fact about the slide.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, rule number two. Consequence.

• Speaker #0

  This is the part that managers almost always skip. You have to explain the why. You say, because there is so much text, the client will tune out in 10 seconds. If we lose their attention, we lose the buy-in for the budget.

• Speaker #1

  Ah, now she understands the actual stakes. It's not just that I'm being a picky boss. It's that her slide literally costs us money.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. You are connecting her work directly to the outcome.

• Speaker #1

  And then rule number three, immediate action.

• Speaker #0

  You give them a clear path forward, cut the text by 50%. Group the remaining points into three bullet points and send me a version two tomorrow at 9 a.m.

• Speaker #1

  Specific consequence.

• Speaker #0

  Action.

• Speaker #1

  It's very dry. It completely lacks the fluff of the sandwich.

• Speaker #0

  It does. And that is exactly why it works.

• Speaker #1

  But doesn't that feel a little harsh? If I deliver that to a 23-year-old, aren't they going to feel attacked?

• Speaker #0

  They might feel a spang, sure. But we need to reframe our idea of harshness. Van Kouwenberg argues that vague feedback is actually a form of contempt.

• Speaker #1

  Contempt. That's a really strong word.

• Speaker #0

  It is. But think about it. When you give vague feedback, you are essentially saying to that person, I don't think you are capable of handling the truth, or I simply don't. care enough about your development to do the hard work of explaining it to you.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, wow.

• Speaker #0

  Specificity is respect.

• Speaker #1

  Specificity is respect. I really like that. It says, I believe you can fix this, so I'm going to tell you exactly what is wrong.

• Speaker #0

  Precisely. Navigation is respect. If you're lost in a new city, you don't want someone to just say, oh, just drive with good energy. Right. You want them to say, turn left at the light, then go two miles.

• Speaker #1

  Okay, so let's replay the entire Chloe scenario with this new mindset. I'm the marketing director. I've realized I'm a nanny. I've realized I'm suffering from polite cowardice. Step one.

• Speaker #0

  Right.

• Speaker #1

  Chloe hands me that terrible deck. What do I do?

• Speaker #0

  First, you close your laptop. You do not fix the slides tonight. That is the hardest part. You have to actively stop the nocturnal maintenance.

• Speaker #1

  So the slides remain bad.

• Speaker #0

  You call Chloe in. You look at the deck together. And you use the framework. You say, Chloe, this document doesn't pass. The narrative is completely lost in the text density. The client will not buy this. I need you to restructure it completely. One idea per slide. I want a version two tomorrow morning. And then you drop the safety net. You say, you can come see me if you get stuck, but I will not correct it for you.

• Speaker #1

  I will not correct it for you. That is the scary part. That's the exact moment the training wheels come off.

• Speaker #0

  And that is the exact moment growth begins.

• Speaker #1

  But what is happening to Chloe in that moment? She's panicking, right?

• Speaker #0

  Oh, absolutely. Her cortisol is spiking. She is stressed out. She might even be mad at you, but... We really have to stop demonizing stress in the workplace. Cortisol is a learning mechanism. It signals to the brain that this matters.

• Speaker #1

  So I have to just sit with the discomfort of her being stressed?

• Speaker #0

  Yes. You hold the frame. You remain calm. You remain supportive. But you hold firm on the standard. She goes home. She struggles. She curses your name.

• Speaker #1

  Probably.

• Speaker #0

  She deletes slides. She rewrites. She figures it out.

• Speaker #1

  And when she comes back the next morning?

• Speaker #0

  If she nailed it, or honestly, even if she just... improved it by 50%, she feels something the nanny manager can never give her. She feels the pride of acquired competence.

• Speaker #1

  The pride of acquired competence.

• Speaker #0

  She knows that she did it. You didn't save her. She saved herself. And that creates genuine confidence. It creates loyalty. If you had just fixed it for her, she would only feel relief. And relief is cheap.

• Speaker #1

  Competence is earned.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly.

• Speaker #1

  That is such a crucial distinction. Relief versus competence. The nanny provides relief. The sparring partner builds confidence.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. And that brings us to this really fascinating concept from the book called slow violence.

• Speaker #1

  Flow violence. It sounds like the title of a horror movie.

• Speaker #0

  It really does. It's a concept used to describe that overly nice management style, kindness that deliberately avoids the truth, is a form of slow violence.

• Speaker #1

  Because it hurts them in the long run.

• Speaker #0

  Right. It doesn't kill the team immediately. It doesn't cause a big dramatic scene. But over six months, over a year, it rots the entire foundation. It makes the team durably mediocre.

• Speaker #1

  Durably mediocre. That is the nightmare scenario for any leader. You wake up two years later and realize no one on your team can actually execute anything because you've been doing it all for them the whole time.

• Speaker #0

  You end up firing them because they didn't develop. Even though you never actually gave them the chance to struggle and learn, that is the real tragedy of it.

• Speaker #1

  So if we want to escape this trap, we have to fundamentally change our relationship with risk. And we have to change our definition of what kindness actually looks like at work.

• Speaker #0

  We have to start preparing the road. We have to start preparing the person. And we have to recognize that the 80% of work that is sandbox work, the drafts, the emails, the internal pitches, those are the sparring rings. Let them get hit there. Let them fail there.

• Speaker #1

  Because if they don't learn to dodge in the sandbox, they're going to get knocked out on the cliff. This has been a serious wake-up call. I think a lot of us, myself included. Hide behind being nice because it's just easier for us. But true management sounds like it's about doing the hard thing for the right reason.

• Speaker #0

  Being a good manager isn't about being liked in the short term. It's about being trusted in the long term. And you simply cannot build trust on a foundation of polite lies.

• Speaker #1

  Wow. So we always like to leave you, our listener, with a challenge. Something you can actually do this week.

• Speaker #0

  I want you to look at your calendar. Look at your to-do list for the next 48 hours.

• Speaker #1

  identify the problems on that list that actually belong to your team.

• Speaker #0

  Which of those problems are you quietly planning to fix yourself tonight after everyone else is logged off? Which fire are you planning to put out silently so no one gets burned?

• Speaker #1

  That item right there. That is your nanny trap.

• Speaker #0

  Don't fix it. Send it back. Give specific consequential feedback and just see what happens.

• Speaker #1

  Step out of the nanny role and step into the ring. And here's one final thought for you to mull over. We've been talking entirely from the perspective of the manager. But look at your own career. Look at your relationship with your own boss.

• Speaker #0

  Oh, that's interesting.

• Speaker #1

  Are you getting vague, polite feedback? Is your boss secretly rewriting your reports before they go to the VP?

• Speaker #0

  Are you the victim of a nanny manager?

• Speaker #1

  Exactly. Because if you are, your own competence might be an illusion. And you might need to be the one to demand the sparring partner treatment. Thanks for diving deep with us today.

• Speaker #0

  Until next time.