EP031 - The next generation of creative leadership with Kara Redman of Backroom
About the episode
This episode focuses on creative leadership and its future. How can we apply 4-day-workweek practices, remote-first operations, and future-of-work principles to an industry created around in-person collaboration, brainstorming, and an always-on client service mentality? To discuss, I have Kara Redman with me, founder and CEO of Backroom agency.
About the guest
Kara is the CEO and founder of Backroom, a brand strategy and activation agency. Over the last 15 years, Kara has helped founders and marketing professionals launch startups, raise up to $9M in funding, build brand equity, merge, acquire, go public, and exit.
She’s worked on budding brands to household names like Hellmann’s, StubHub, Pepsi, and the U.S. Department of State. In 2014, she founded Backroom to build and activate brands of all sizes with people who are tired of the status quo. Flexibility, process, and collaboration are the heart of her work and are infused into Backroom’s culture.
Find Kara on LinkedIn and learn more about Backroom at backroom.io.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
Having a 4-day workweek is just a question of planning your time. I have not seen a 7:00 PM request come in because someone managed their time well or because they thought ahead.
People don't like talking about the 30, 30, 30, where two of those thirties are your payroll and operating expenses. If you don't have office space and overhead, guess what happens? You have more margin in there.
The deal is you have to have a goal. It has to be shared, and everyone has to believe in it. Then, you have to be able to break that goal out into things that apply to each person's individual role.
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Welcome everyone. Yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we'll discuss how building a people first culture within a company is not just beneficial for the people who work for the company, but also affect the performance of the company as well. We also revisit the practices on how to manage creative teams remotely To discuss, I have Kara Redman with me, who is the CEO of the advertising agency, Backroom. She built the entire concept and branding of her business around promoting people first culture and managing a remote creative team. She also has very challenging concepts on leadership, which I hope she will share up with us today. Hey, Kara, thanks for joining.
Yeah, thanks for having me. And of course, as soon as I'm doing my intro, the beautiful sound effects of Baltimore coming through. So forgive the sirens in the background . That's right. Being a full immersive experience today.
That's all right. We can hear you perfectly and loudly, so all good.
Great.
So this is a highly conversational podcast and show, but still the first question is kind of like the same for everyone. Give an intro about what you do, but more importantly, how did you end up working remotely and how did you end up managing a team remotely?
Yeah, that's a lot of questions to start with. I'll dig right in. So what we do at Backroom is brand strategy and activation. So what that means is the agencies that I worked for before were really focused on immediate metrics, short-term goals, which are great to have, but they weren't also considering the long-term effect of the brand in terms of equity in the brand name perception, sentiment. If they wanted to reach a certain valuation to exit or to raise price point. So we like to look at short-term milestones to help of course, keep the lights on and get business growth in a good spot. But we're always thinking about that stickiness of the brand and how do we actually build something sustainable the long run. So I'd say that the capabilities we have and how we work go hand in hand in terms of the origin story. I just tend to not like convention and I say the word like as though it's just a preference, but I can't function in conventional environments. And I am a high functioning individual. So I found that by being put into a box, whether it was working in a physical space or within a certain timeframe or on projects that didn't make sense to me I wasn't functioning right and I actually posted about this this morning that it becomes physically painful when you're, when you're asked to continue to do something that's sucking your soul. And quite frankly, in advertising, Peter, takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of brain space. It's deep thinking. We get the Sunday scaries in this industry so badly, not because of a very finite list of tasks, but because of the deep thinking and the parts of your brain you have to turn on and it hurts. So I wanted to keep the parts that I love, which is, you know, helping clients and their businesses grow and getting to the heart of really what is your brand and why does it matter to people? I think the psychology behind that is beautiful. I think the human behavioral component is fascinating, but I wanted to remove all of just this bullshit that was a construct that was created by somebody else once upon a time that we just are born into this earth and we just accept blindly, right? It's like, this isn't just how we do things. And it didn't, it didn't work for me. And so, you know, remote was always built into our culture cuz I don't think that I have to be a certain place at a certain time to do great work. Neither does my team. And then we incorporated the four day work week a couple years ago because it just, it was something we experimented and everybody thought that such a game changer for how we work. Why not just continue doing it? So it's worked for us.
This is an amazing intro. Thank you. I worked in an advertising, advertising industry for almost 10 years, so I can relate the Sunday scaries. In terms of the way you work, because you frame that you're more into the branding side of the business and less, and correct me if I'm wrong, because this is in important from the operational perspective and how you operate as a business remotely. You're more into the branding and the high level stuff and the strategy, right. And less involved in the day-to-day. Let's say, I dunno, posting on social media, you know, the, the classic we do management stuff.
We manage manage ad campaigns, we do influencer management, we create content, we do social publishing, social listening, we do all that.
Then the question rises. How do you ensure. Because again, most clients in the advertising agency world they need, one of the reasons why they have agencies, and I don't want to oversimplify the need, but because they need some so sort of creative support, but also handholding. Right? So like, I wouldn't say that half of your job is is being a therapist for the clients, but but part of it, it is, and because of the handholding, it's usually an ongoing work or an always, we say it always on, right? How do you manage that always own mindset. With two things, working with a remote creative team that are maybe, and that's a question, maybe they're spread across different time zones. B they're not in the office of course, so obviously you cannot just walk next to each other and, you know, have you seen the email that the client just sent and whatever? B You don't operate all the days only four days a week and pre-call you just had a great answer that what happens if the shit hits the fan for the client on Friday for example.
Yeah, I mean, I, people ask me this all the time I'll address the first part of your question first is how do we manage this Always on mentality. We reject the always on mentality. We're not er doctors and from our perspective and the type of work that we do and the need to be always on as a result of poor planning. I am open to having my mind changed on that. I have not seen a 7:00 PM request come in because someone managed their time well or because they thought ahead. Now, that doesn't mean that things don't come up. We make mistakes all the time. There are things that we didn't think about. In fact, yesterday my creative director and I were going through and going, oh no, we used the wrong font on this portfolio piece. I have to go remake them really quick. Right? We laugh about it, we get it done, and if it bumps the day, it bumps the day. Right? It's a social media post. It's gonna be okay. You know, but we, we don't have, we don't have those. If an email comes in from a client after hours, we don't say, what do you think about this email? Because we're not looking at it. And those are expectations that we set early on. Now all our clients know they can text or call if they have something. It has happened in the past where they just had a moment and they needed something and they needed reassurance, whatever. Absolutely. I'm gonna reply and let 'em know. It's okay. I buffer my team from that. And it's very rare and I think that that type of interaction is much more born of a trust and reliability that we build with our clients rather than a fear-based something's wrong and Kara needs to fix it. And I think that that's the piece that a lot of agencies don't wanna do. They don't wanna build the relationship. They don't wanna say, What do you need at Project Kickoff? At Scope? Very early. What do you need to feel Good? What does success look like to you? I don't care about numbers. What's gonna put you to bed at night? And you're gonna feel like everything's taken care of. And I'll give you a very tactical example of this. One of them was knowing what's effective, like really understanding, because we're spending a lot of money. We're taking some big bets, we're guessing on some, we're using data to make informed assumptions, right? Which is what marketing is. It's an science experiment. And we have to then wait right until our weekly status or actual performance. So we invested in tools that give our clients 24 7 access to numbers that are important to them. We wanna remove that anxiety for them. Right. And wouldn't I, wouldn't my team rather somebody at 2:00 AM who's having an anxiety spiral open their laptop rather than open their phone and call me. Absolutely. So we, it hasn't come up for us. I don't wanna be naive and say that, you know, it never will. But after nine years, it's just not been a problem.
This is amazing. What do you think? Gotta pick your brain. Is it because you position. Yourself, your company, and also how you work in front of the clients that yes, you are highly effective, super pre-planned. So in most cases you don't need that always on handholding, whatever because things are taken care of in the background. So pretty much if you work with Kara, you are okay. You are in good hands. No need to worry. So is it because of the positioning that you do or, and that attracts, you know, the right type of client towards you, or you do the pitches and you know, the sales and whatever. And when you start working with the client, you spend time in education cuz that's, and it becomes a leadership question, I guess.
All of you. People come cause I think because they want to believe if they see the positioning, they see me running my mouth. They see the things that are important to us. They see the ethos on the website like they wanna believe, right? Because a lot of clients come to us and they've been burned and then they'll say, Hey, I know we're checking, could we check in next week? Because like I just, they, you can see they have so much anxiety and reserve because it's a gamble. You're putting a big deposit down and giving your baby essentially to a group of people who are making promises that you don't know. You have no idea. Such a gamble to hire an agency, in my opinion, just because they did great work for one client doesn't do great work for another. Right. And we're very sensitive to that. And we understand that a lot of clients have been burned, but the the magic is actually following through with stuff, which sounds simple when you think about it, but a lot of folks don't. Or they like the idea of it and they don't even realize they're not following through. So for us, it's not just toxic positivity and soothing egos. It's what are you anxious about? What are you afraid it's gonna happen. What visibility can we give you? Right? What things can we do? So make sure that you're getting that box checked for yourself and, and for us, and forgive my tone, it just seems so obvious to us, and I think that our industry, much like I think the legal industry, I think the finance industry have this level of opacity that was intentionally designed back in the day with our good old marketing forefathers to make clients feel dumb so that they don't really understand what goes on behind the scenes so that you can make big promises, but when you make big promises that you don't know you can follow through with, it creates a lot of work, stress, fear, anxiety, and all of these negative emotions, I frankly like to avoid. So we just don't do that. You know, we just would rather show them like, no, this is what we're, what we're doing. Right? If I'm cooking you a grilled cheese and you're like, Kara I really, really want provolone and cheddar. And I'm like, I got you. If you wanna come back midway and just check the cheese, I'm gonna go, Peter. Yeah, it's right here. Right? And a lot, a lot of won't. They'll say, no, no, no. Just trust me on the cheese. Right? Most of us have been so burned by so many different people and things that have been sold. We just want reassurance. And I think that you talked earlier about the people first culture and it's like that's what putting people first looks like is looking at the emotion rational or not, not having this ego of like, oh, we've done this for nine years and we know we're talking about, we see you. It's a valid fear. We get your emotions. How can make you feel better? And then you don't get those seven o'clock at night calls because they feel better.
Do you operate, with such a transparency internally as well? Let's talk a little bit about the, how do you manage the people within the agency? They are, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're spread across, I guess, in the US right? So kinda like the same time zone, but how do you operate?
Yeah, we're in different time zones. Actually we're from all the way from Portland, Oregon to here on the East coast. There's a couple of us, and then we've got some in the Midwest. It's the same way. I mean, we don't, there are, there's not ego on our team. Right. Their feelings were humans and we're people. I mean, we had a call yesterday and I could see someone on my team really struggling. Their kid's been sick, they haven't slept, and they were driving this presentation and like everybody jumps in and they're like, Hey, why don't you fade to the background? We've got this we can take. Like that's just the culture that we have because we're working towards the same goal of get the most incredible award-winning work that gets outcomes for our clients done with as little effort as possible really is, if you think about it, that's business, right? You wanna deliver exceptional products in a way that retains your talent for as little cost and time as possible. And we're all working toward that goal because it's a lifestyle for us, and we're working toward that goal because we shed tears when we get a portfolio piece together that we're proud of. And I think managing that requires a vulnerability for me to be the first to say, I'm not feeling great today. Can somebody take these questions for me? Or, Hey, I over committed to something and I need help. And a lot of times there's this like, leadership won't do it and we're kind of sitting up here and expecting everybody else to congregate and collaborate and do all of these things that we're not modeling. And there's a lot of times where I come like really feeling defeated and my team hikes me up because they pull me back into the goal. But the deal is you have to have a goal. It has to be shared, everyone has to believe in it. You have to be able to break that goal out into things that apply to each person's individual role. And then we work together to make our clients happy. And like earlier you asked me, You know about the four day work work week? We tried it because I was like, what if we did once a month, we take a Friday off and it's like our personal development day. Maybe you learn a new tool or you catch up on something you really wanted to do. We did it twice and the whole team was like, oh, it's changed everything. Like my whole life is better. I feel like I actually can see my family and I actually feel recharged and ready to come back for work versus anxious. You had asked earlier, and I get asked a lot like, well, what happens if a client needs you? I'm always like, what happens if a client needs you on a Sunday? Do that. Like have an escalation plan. Let communicate. Let them know this is what we're trying. If you need us, we're gonna have someone on call. Right. It's, it's not rocket science. It's not hard. You just have to think about it and communicate with people and say, we're trying something. It's okay.
Everything you say is, and sorry everything that you say is highly controversial. I'm just saying. And wait. Wait for it. Wait for it. It's highly controversial, but it is common like it's, sorry, but it's common fucking sense. So why other companies cannot really operate like this? Why what you are saying, not just here by the way, but also I see the content that you publish everywhere, it perceived as a controversial mindset, it perceived as a controversial idea. Why do you think we have this whole burning A to B side? Why do we perceive this as a controversial idea?
I don't know. And I get asked that a lot and I think to me, I don't understand why it's controversial because I live in my own bubble, right? And the things that I do are things that are just frankly normal for what I see colleagues doing. And I see businesses that I admire doing, like Fortune 500 companies have been doing this successfully, right? And I get the, well, you're so small, you'll never scale. I'm like, but companies have been global for a long time. Like there's no such thing as a true nine to five five day work week because we have this thing called time zones. Like there's never really been, right? Except for before the internet and really before telecoms was big. Like we all work globally. We're global citizens. We we're global corporations. We think about it and no matter what size you are, you do what works for your team. There are plenty of really large organizations that do hybrid, where some offices are in person, some are fully remote. And I've seen some that are doing staggered days, so everyone gets four days, but their office is open five because they like there's so many flavors and choices here. It and, and I don't know why it's controversial. I have seen some folks come in and really just kind of shut it down I think. I think also when it comes to social media, I think once it reaches critical mass commenters, start forgetting that like the original poster is like connected. Like I can see you and we don't have to talk. Third person, I'm right here. But I, I get things like, oh, your competitors are gonna, my favorite was gonna clean your clocks. That we're never gonna scale, that we're gonna fail, that this is never, never land. We probably have cotton candy and unicorns, and I'm going like I don't understand why it's such a hot button topic, because it's not, it's not either new or novel. I feel like I'm jumping on a bandwagon that's been going on for a while and I'm taking the leap, and for many, it's like, who is this chick? And what is this nonsense she's talking about? So to answer your question about why I don't know, and part of my personal journey in therapy right now is to stop trying to dissect and analyze why shitty people do and say the things that they do, so I'm just gonna keep doing things to serve my people. And if it's not for you, it's not for you.
Might comfort you. That it is . Maybe because, I mean, well, it's my show, so I can say maybe most workplaces suck. And how they operate culture, how they work with their people. It's just plain and simple, not considering what their people really need. Because they cannot really focus. And that's leading to the next question because they cannot really focus on, on the benefits of creating or operating like this. I think we need to change the perception of investing into your people from considering it as an expense and making sure that it's more like an investment because it has an ROI at the end, not just on your people, but also in terms of your business. And correct me if I'm wrong, and that's the next question. You personally, as a agency owner, which by the way, it's a hundred percent people driven business. So you are a creative agency if your people are creative enough that they are able to do a creative work, you know within a brief or something. So it's a hundred percent people driven. If they're not happy, your agency will plummet and you won't deliver great work. Right. So I guess the question is that, do you see the benefits of operating like this? And if yes, how?
Yes, for sure. And you know, I talk a lot about culture and people and you know, finding joy in your work, enrolling with the negative emotions. The reality is I have a business to make money. The reality is it has to operate. We have numbers, we have balance sheets and PNLs like everybody else. Something that people don't like to talk about is, you know, the idea of like the 30, 30 30, which should be, you know, two of those thirties is your payroll and your operating expenses, right? Like, if you don't have office space and overhead, guess what happens to that payroll? 30%. You have more margin in there. So we have so little overhead. We are so lean to a point where when I was getting insurance for the business, I had to kind of make stuff up to meet the minimum asset requirement. I was like, this chair I sit in and work sometimes, like, how much do I spend on printer paper? You know, because we just, we don't have it. And if you think about it, it's already scary enough for me, right? Trying to, you know, make all the bills that we have and hit payroll and all that stuff. Like it's the worst part of business ownership, right? Because you're feeding mals. But I'm like, gosh, if I had to pay a $10,000, $30,000 rent on an office space on top of that, I would never sleep. And so I think what tends to happen is you get into a fear-based mentality because you now you have this beast. That demands and demands of you because you're the leader. And so if your team starts to struggle because they're whole humans and they've got things going on in their lives, or kids get sick, or your husband leaves them, or whatever happens right as being humans on this planet, that's gonna impact their work. And if you're looking at them going, well, you still need to produce despite this, you're destroying an actual human. When you destroy the human, you destroy their brain space, their motivation, their ability to think creatively. You turn off their prefrontal cortex, and now they're all lizard brain, right? And they're no longer operating from a place really where they can produce anything of meaning for you. And so what happens is a result over time, usually I'm getting some sort of VC funding, right? Because you've got, you need a bailout, can't do it anymore. And then you have this huge beast that's starving constantly and it's churning out mediocrity. And you've got a revolving door of people. You've got horrible Glassdoor reviews. You're on your deathbed at the end of it all going like, I've hurt people's lives, essentially. Right? Like, if you have any mode to come of self-awareness at the end, and to me it's no way to live and it's just it's this whole like, get there at nine, leave at five, you get a little bit of time for lunch and like you have to like clock all these hours. And I'm like, gosh, like what if I'm just sad today, and of course we powered through our emotions and we worked with them, but there was, for me, there wasn't really any margin for any of that. And I was a single mom, was a young mom and it was really tough. And looking back, I wish that there had been more flexibility and opportunities for me to work in my own space, on my own time, and man, what I could have accomplished for that business, right? It's like what I would've wanted to accomplish for them. So it's either you can feed people and take care of them to a point where they are excited to create for your business and for your clients. Or you can give 'em the Sunday scaries and make them dread their job every day and cry in the bathroom and consumer brands have gotten this for years. Think about Nordstrom. They'll come around counter and hand you your bag and you buy whatever because you know they're gonna take care of you. Something goes wrong. So they keep coming back and they keep doing things for your business. It's absolutely helpful for operations. I get so many leads from LinkedIn because they buy into our ethos or they see something, someone on my team has written about us, they see on our website how we talk about celebrating humanity and embracing curiosity and like finding your weird, that's like people are tired. I mean, they just, they don't want that model.
This is so inspiring, but again, also very controversial for most people because you just, you just described the VC driven startup culture as it is. Without any fluff. And you are steadily 99% of the time, you are right on that. This is how most businesses really operate not just remotely, but anywhere. I think we should discuss a little bit about, because you opened the whole conversation with this and maybe people can learn from it. You said that you I'm not sure how you phrase it. Maybe you haven't used the, you hated the fit into the normal spaces. But what do you think? Why was that? Why couldn't you operate in a. traditional environment. Why did you need to start your own business? Because I personally, was able to relate to that by the way.
Oh, that's great to hear. And I think a lot of people have, and I think you know, extroverts have gotten, you know, this great rap too. And you know, there's just, it's like the louder and more charismatic you are, the more successful you are on your career, which is sad. I think it's a lot of reasons. I think, one, I am a high anxiety, number one, like I've struggled my whole life with the debilitating anxiety. There were days I called out sick because, Just the feeling of having actual clothing in my body, like was painful for me, right? And so there's just a mental health component to it where I could have gotten up and probably done two hours worth of work just sitting in my bed on my laptop with a coffee and knocked it out. But now I have to go look presentable. I'm worried about makeup, I'm worried about hair. I'm worried about what I'm wearing. I gotta pack of lunch. Am I gonna be extra hungry today or not? I gotta like, make sure my kids got a lunche and get them out. And there's so many things that have to happen. To me unnecessary things just to get to the actual work, right? I just wanna get up and work, but now I have this laundry list of things. I'm leaving my house for the day. Did I walk the dog? Like there's just so much that goes into it. And some people, many, many people prefer that, and I think that that's great. I think that a lot of times people look and wanna pick apart you know what we're doing as some sort of universal playbook. It's just what works for us. I'm just trying to challenge that you don't have to pick up this framework and apply it to your business. You can start where you are and evaluate what actually makes sense for you and do that, and you can change your mind too, right? This is not, there's no, there's never what? Parenting in business, there's not a magic framework. We've been trying to sell 'em yes, for decades. There's not a magic one because you have to actually look at the human in front of you and respond accordingly. And so for me it was just, it was all of those things and just the physical having to be there. And I am deeply introverted and I know that a lot of people like the whole, we can just pop over to someone's desk. I find that highly disruptive when I'm in a creative cycle. I don't like it. I think that virtual tools do the best that they can to replicate in-person, brainstorms and creative sessions. They're not perfect and they don't work for everyone, but they are enough for us to get our job done exceptionally well. So, I mean, even just now, I very rarely get in my car. I live in a city. When I actually go somewhere, Peter, I'm like, I've had to deal with this every day your cortisol goes up. It's like life or death scenario with a bunch of people who haven't slept, who hate their lives, who don't wanna go like every day I did. And then, oh, you get in your car and it doesn't have gas in it. It's just, it's compounding to me. And then you remove all that stuff and you just get to work. I remember really early on, my arts director, Josh Harding, said to me, he's like, I can get a lot of work done in four hours it turns out, right? Like you can get a whole eight hour days work and four or less easy with all this stuff removed, right?
I had to mute myself because I laughed so hard.
Yeah, I'm still work. I don't wanna hang out at work. Do you know what I mean?
Yes, totally, totally. Maybe, and maybe because you're saw bad leadership practices as well, maybe that was also the case. Who made you feel even more anxious? Because you probably, I mean, that's like most agency owners, I guess. You spent your pre backroom career in agencies as well, right?
Correct. And I will say I'm very fortunate to have had a very small handful of phenomenal leaders, like the original CEO of my last agency is a phenomenal human. I met my mentor George there, just a PhD in branding, and she changed my career. I will say that I can't name many more than that. I've had some I could write a book about some horrible, just horrible things that have happened to me and the people around me from people who were somehow knighted as leaders, but to this day should be working in a warehouse somewhere. But it's important I think to take what applies to you and your personal growth and your professional growth because if you're working in one of these environments, because unfortunately there's just so many unqualified people in leadership positions that don't understand anything about human psychology that don't understand anything about compassion and empathy's this like hot topic and I'm like, you only need to be empathetic. Like it's codependent. Like just have compassion and like trust other humans when they say they need something and help to provide that. And you know, I think servant leadership, this you know, very trendy right now. I think it can go into the opposite direction. Like you still have to guide the ship. You still have to have hard conversations and steer people in the right direction, right? So I'm hoping that we're finding this sort of middle swing where it's like, yes, I have a vision for the company. Yes, I'm going to push you and challenge you. Yes, I see your individual weak spots and I'm going to help you grow through those versus applying this like, here's the mark and everyone has to hit it, which was my experience.
I don't want to stop you or even enforce maybe to a little bit brag about your leadership practices, but I do want to ask this question because you really stepped on the real sweet spot. I do agree with you. Most leaders view this whole people first mentality again, sorry for oversimplifying this but like a soft thing to do, Right, which hurts the well hardcore stuff, which is, you know, operations, numbers, revenue, yada. And it's really interesting to see how to find the balance between the two and. I personally think that the answer is mentorship providing some sort of coaching and mentorship for your team. But I would love to hear how you approach this.
Coaching great, but what you're describing and from just anecdotally are leaders who don't understand the roles that are in their organization and how they contribute to specific, tangible, measurable performance goals for the business. So I can come in and say, I need to grow qualified leads by 50% in the first quarter and hire people to do that, but that's where it ends, right? Then leaders don't know. Okay. Within that specific role, these are the expectations for what you're accomplishing, just from like a to-do perspective, what metrics you're being measured against. It's performance reviews are, from my experience, geared around attitudes. The ability to produce at a high level attendance level, things. The look and feel of a presentation. They're not around goals and the reality, and this maybe ties back to your question earlier that I refused to answer, but I'll give you a theory about why leaders resist this and it feels controversial. I think they don't wanna do the hard work. I think they just have a number and they're like, I want people to hit it. And if you don't, you're out and I'll just find the next person and keep churning through people to hit these numbers that I have for the business, but they're not stopping and thinking about how do all of these different departments and individuals function within my organization. What really are those individual metrics and then you can get into understanding why aren't we hitting them? Is it training? Is something going on at home and you need support? Is there something else going on? It's that level of measurement that I don't think a lot of leaders are actually doing, and I don't think they know how and they don't want to learn how, because that's work. There's some statistic I read recently that only like 10 to 15% of people walking around this planet and have any level of self-awareness. I think a lot of people weren't taught. I think a lot of people in leadership roles, We're brought up with this mentality that their mediocrity is enough, that they don't have to do more, that they haven't been pushed and challenged. And I think that it's, I think it's very difficult when the kind of thing too, they don't have anybody modeling that behavior either, right. So I think that we've done a disservice to leaders by giving pats on the back and gold stars for business level numbers, when that did not translate to how people were actually hitting numbers too, and how they were growing and progressing and those types of things. So I think there are systemic problems. I don't like to point to people to say that they're lazy. I think for the most part, we're all kind of doing the best we can with what we have. I'm certainly guilty of over complicating things too, and I think that there is an over complication within these systems of like, this is just how we've always done it. And they're not gonna.
Yeah. That's more like a, I mean, over complicating things, it's, I think it's still okay. It's usually it's a smart people problem. Usually smart people do that over complication of everything. For you, probably one of the biggest challenge that you personally have is to oversimplifying things or at least just simplifying things. So I can understand. I think, I think you're right with the systematic Challenges, it's so much easier to move up the ladder through being assertive only and not supportive or actually, you know, curious to learn anything new.
And a lot of them were just playing game they've been dealt right, like a lot of, especially larger organizations.
Yeah, of course.
Like you just, you show up and you play the game.
Yes, yes. But still, and that's the main point. I think that's point, the point of this whole show as well. And the reason why you are here as well, I think, is that the game is changing. And well, I'm not sure what will be the tipping point, but I think everyone should be a little bit more supposed to be a little bit more self-aware to be a little bit more better leader or supportive. I really like the thing that you said that that empathy is not really needed. It's more like compassion that you need to understand how people are behaving and why they are performing or not performing and being compassionate. Anyway I really loved our conversation. Thank you for your time. Where can people find.
LinkedIn is the best because I have all of my links to different ways to work with us. We have a course where I've packaged up our entire process for how we build brands into a self-paced course. There's links to that. I do free resources, brand tips, articles. I have several newsletters, including a job roundup and free resources for brand. And then of course working with us as an agency, there's information on that too. And then our website is backroom.io for agency work and a little bit more about what we do.
Awesome. Thank you again for coming. This was really inspiring conversation.
Thanks for having me.
