This is L&D unlocked, a series for L&D and HR professionals looking to unlock the future of learning and development. Presented by BizLibrary, L&D Unlocked is an ongoing series where we speak to industry experts and thought leaders about the future of work, workplace trends, and how your organization can prepare today for the challenges of tomorrow. Learn at bizlibrary.com welcome to another edition of L&D Unlock, the one and only series for L&D and HR professionals looking to unlock the future of learning and development. You can find and subscribe to this series on our YouTube channel at BizLibrary. Very, very excited to introduce this week's guest, Kim Lear, who is a researcher who specializes in looking at generational differences in the workforce. Kim is a well known keynote speaker on this topic, and Kim also shares my extreme passion for behavioral science, really understanding why human beings act the way that they do, what makes them tick, and really what I've learned from getting to know her, all of the background of things that happened in our childhood that are absolutely the reason that we are the way we are today. So, Kim, welcome. And if you could please just spend a little time telling us a little bit more about yourself, and I'd love to hear kind of how you came to find a passion for generational trends. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. So I'll give you just like, the super short snippet of how I got interested in this topic, which is that when I was a sophomore in college, I read Jean Twenge book on millennials. And it's one of those weird, serendipitous things where I can't remember if, like, stumbled upon it at a bookstore and bought it or if it was one of those weird books that my parents had around the house. And during winter break, I got bored or something. But Jean Twenge, she's a great researcher, great social psychologist out of UC San Diego. And this book that she wrote 20 years ago on millennials, it was about my cohort. It was about the backdrop of my formative years, and I found it so interesting. And she's older than me. She's not my age, but the way that she just encapsulated so much of my youth, the way that technology had ended up shaping so much of my views, my interactions, things like that. And then I went back junior year, and it was my junior year of college that was this big tipping point year in technology. And so it was the year, it was 2007. And Thomas Friedman has written about this, other writers have written about the technologies that were released in 2007 that were immediately adopted by young people. And I was on college campus there that year. That was me. And so I was so aware of the ways in which these new technologies were impacting just my little sphere. And that made me interested in the topic overall. I went on to stay with that, to study that. Amazing mentors, David Stillman and Lyn Lancaster, Deborah Arbit. And that's what I've always done. I developed an obsession very young, and then I never stopped doing it. Cool. It's cool to know your thing, too. That's such a neat niche. It's funny, 20 years later now, I feel extremely old to be like, fellow millennial, one of the first people that ever had access to facebook on a college campus. Yeah, totally. And it was. I mean, we just all of those little moments that feel so nostalgic now, but at the time, it was waking up the morning after a big college party and making sure you weren't tagged in something stupid and that kind of thing. And it doesn't feel consequential in the moment. But then 20 years of reflection and you really begin to understand the way that a lot of different things, but those types of technologies just wove themselves into the youth culture of the era and how that continues to shape consumer trends and behavioral patterns and the way we're influenced, the way that we influence each other, that type of thing. I love that. Yeah. And we'll get into that a little bit here shortly around technology specifically and how everyone experiences technology different and kind of that speed of change is just exponentially more than it is each new generation, which is fascinating to me. So want to start first with just talking about kind of engagement and culture. You look at kind of our audience and people watching this episode. It's really a challenge for HR and L&D right now. How do we get an engaged team? How are we connecting people to the culture? And I'm curious, your perspective specifically on work from home and kind of the return to work battle that's occurring. I'm going to over generalize. I think you generally see older generations of leadership, the C-suite, thinking work needs to get done in the office. And then you've got kind of these younger generations of workers that for Gen Z, I manage many of them. Hey, I've never been in an office, so why would I go back? This is normal work for me now. And they say they never want to go back. But am I over generalizing that? How do you kind of view how generations are impacting the state of that work from home return to work battle. It's so complicated because there is no comprehensive data set that can be like, everyone born between this state and this state wants to do this in the return to work that doesn't exist. And so always with this topic, we want to be sensitive over generalities that just can create more misunderstanding. And it is complicated. I mean, with a huge segment of more senior workers, it's these little things that sometimes we don't think about. Even in our focus groups and interview series, we have a ton of seasoned leaders who definitely want to work remote. And sometimes it's things like their spouse is already retired, and so they do still want that ability to be engaged. They like their work. Perhaps they do need that income stream, whatever that is. But they also want to have some flexibility to do a little bit more travel or to spend a little bit more time visiting kids and grandkids and that kind of thing. So we definitely see that component as well. And I don't like doing like, myth busting because I think it's annoying. But just to give another perspective here, we actually see so many young workers wanting an in person work experience. We have in hundreds of interviews with young people who launched into the workplace last May. So it's like their first year in the workplace turning down jobs that were remote. And again, there's these personal things that we consider with this that sometimes are not always top of mind in a workplace setting, but statistically, people are less likely today to marry their high school sweetheart or their college sweetheart. And so a lot of young people are single. And a workplace is an environment where people meet other people. There's that type of know. Harvard University, University of Iowa, and the Federal Reserve, they did come out with, it's a working paper. So again, not conclusive, but the early data is very compelling, showing that for older workers, for more seasoned workers, remote work is better for their productivity. They've already built up reputational capital, social capital. They know what they're doing. They don't always need those connections. And so at home, they can just produce. That can be their sole responsibility. Younger workers, remote work has not been as good for them, like meaningful mentorship and real sponsorship, a lot of growth and development. It just has not translated perfectly to doing it online. And so leaders are in a very tough position where I do talk to some leaders and they have to balance, they may have to sacrifice some seasoned worker productivity for the sake of younger worker growth. Because even in the interviews with young people who are really hungry to have an in person work experience. They specifically want to be there, to be around more seasoned people. They don't want to come in there and have a clubhouse of peers. It's the blind leading the blind, and they know that they want to be with people where they can really learn from. So I think it's more about how we really leverage that in person time. Right? Like the in person work experience, it can't be like 2019, where it was suboptimal and it was all of these meetings that could have been emails and windowless conference rooms and people just sitting in their cubicles filling out Excel spreadsheets by themselves. There's components of work that can be done from home that I think every generation would really benefit from. And then it's how do we properly leverage that in person time so that these connections, this culture building, this growth and development can happen organically? I love that. A couple of funny anecdotes I was presenting a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about this challenge of hybrid and remote work and two funny points of feedback. One person said they've been working remotely for 20 years and they're glad everyone else finally caught up. But she also mentioned when she first went remote, her boss literally said, you know this is career suicide, right? You're just not going to have exposure. Right? And there's that proximity bias of, if you're not around, you're not in person, nobody knows you're there, what you're doing. Which I think is a common challenge. Yeah, for sure. One other piece that I just want to bring up about that, like the idea of older workers really being the ones to prefer the in person work experience. I think something worth mentioning just for that context building is that when we look at retirement trends today, we already find that for older men, it's mostly baby boomer men who have retired or on the precipice of retiring. There are cultural reasons for this, but we do often find that there is this. Who you are as a person and what you do for a living are inextricably tied. And again, for other cultural reasons, not all, but many men of that generation, their close connections and their interpersonal connections were built inside of some type of infrastructure. So the workplace, for older baby boomers, perhaps, that was the military. And so outside of an infrastructure, there are not a lot of close social ties. And so it is one of the reasons why we see in certain sectors, some of the older workers, if it's a predominantly male environment, that there is that preference to work in person. And I think the common thing is, like, they don't trust anyone. They think that if workers are at home, no one's working. I think there is another piece of this that they would not even say, but I think there is another piece of this that has to do with. You spend 45 years in a physical work environment. You dedicate everything to that work environment. That is where your entire social connection is. And so the idea of working from home, some of that loneliness or isolation that can happen with that, feels, like, untenable. So I think that's another just person, human piece that connects to who you are. Yeah, it's what, you know, I was the same way when Covid hit. I'm like, I refuse to believe that in 20 years I'm going to tell my child that there were these things called offices, and you went in and worked next to people. And now it's not that crazy, me, right? But that all is just the time shift. And as time passes, you get used to something. It's insane. But it's funny. You're making me think about generational differences in these misnomers or these assumptions about people. Our CEO started our company 27 years ago, pre Covid, 99% in person in St. Louis. Post Covid, about 70% remote. And none of us go in that are in St. Louis. We're fully remote. And you would think similar to kind of what you're talking about. He'd be someone who was like, no, productivity is in the office. It's what I believe. And he's really evolved on that. And he's like, hey, you know what I realized? I was the original remote employee. He spends half his time, one part that wasn't St. Louis, Michigan, then half his time in Florida. So he's like, how can I expect people to come in if I was the original one? So you're seeing a shift in kind of understanding of that as well as people are kind of getting used to think as. And as the technology gets better, I think that's a piece too. We're already seeing advancements, and I think as remote work can get a little bit more immersive, we get more comfortable with it, all of that. It can change. It'll be an evolving conversation. So along that line. But I'm fascinated. I've managed a lot of Gen Z population, like, right out of college, 23 to 25, the ones that I've managed. And it's funny, now that we're all remote, it's great because the talent pool is a lot bigger. But what I found a couple of times is people saying right out of college, oh, I love remote work, I'm totally good with it, I'm used to it. That's what college was, or whatever it is. And then about six months to a year, and they're like, no, I'm taking a local job, like an agency or something. Kind of to your point, that in person was important to them because they understand how it's going to shape their future. So I'm curious, your perspective, and you presented at our aligned conference a few weeks ago, and I loved your perspective on generation Z's interest in what you called optimization and how does that impact work? And if you could share, I absolutely loved it. Really stuck with me. Your vending machine story from one of your focus groups. Yeah. So in the presentation that I did for biz library, I talked about one of the events and conditions shaping Gen Z was growing up with this backdrop where we as a culture were abandoning our obsession with convenience and replacing it with an obsession on optimization. And the terminology difference is, convenience is about involving little trouble or effort. And to make something optimal is to make it as perfect, as useful, as effective as possible. And so one of the examples that I give around just some of that technological backdrop is I show an image where there's a stationary at home bike and then there's a peloton. And I, of course, ask people to ignore peloton's recent stock price. But looking at how a traditional stationary at home bike sold consumers convenience, it was friction free. You didn't have to drive to the gym and wait for the machine that you wanted. But the reason that peloton could be so disruptive in an already crowded market is because it didn't sell consumers convenience. It sold them optimization. It collected data about your speed and your strength. Your goal sent push notifications to your watch and your phone, not just helping you exercise, but to actually help you advance. And so that's just one of a million different examples of optimized technology. And then I just talk about how that backdrop and how being accustomed to that environment impacts work. And the story that Paul is alluding to is that one of the research projects that my team and I did is we followed a group of young people who went into the in person work experience for the first time. And they had to do one or two years of university online and a virtual internship. And so one of the guys that was part of this study, he like, super smart, tier one school, very ambitious young guy. And during the pandemic, he really had to figure out how to optimize his own time, how to use his time more perfectly, more usefully, more effectively. So throughout the pandemic, when we were tracking him and he was part of the study, he would figure out the best times to do deep, creative work, the best times to answer emails, the best time to work out, the best time to exercise, best time to eat, all of these things. And so because he wanted to still perform at a very high level at school, and because he had a virtual internship, he just, what are the technologies that need to be leveraged in order for me to do this in the most effective, perfect, useful way? How do I organize my time? That type of thing? He went into the in person work experience for the first time in June of 2021, and we called him a few weeks into it to do the follow up interview and ask him how it's going. And the story that he told us is that he went to go put money in the vending machine at work and the wrong chips came out. And he was like, that was it. That was the last straw, the first and last. I remember listening to this being like, that is such a weird hill to die on. But when I put it into just this broader framework of this optimization of using your time, leveraging technology in a way that is more perfect, more useful, more effective, coming into the in person work environment, everything felt suboptimal. So it wasn't just about, like, the vending machine and the chips. It was just, that was one of so many things that felt like a step backwards to him. And so I think that trend, it's permeated other generations. I'm sure some of you are watching right now being like, yes, that would be me. I specifically talk about that trend because it has this upward effect on other generations. But I would say that I do find with the younger workers that there is an exceptionally low tolerance to this suboptimal use of time to suboptimal work experiences, because in a lot of ways, to no fault of their own, they were kind of forced into this situation of spending for themselves in some ways and figuring out how to use their time, use their technology in a way that was more perfect, more useful, more effective. Hey, I'll connect that to kind of a question for you, because there are perceptions from, I think, older generations that younger generations don't appreciate hard work. And it's interesting now, the mental health push makes it so that anyone can kind of take time off, and work isn't supposed to be fun, and work isn't supposed to be easy. You got kind of a shift in generational views on what work is. And I can't help but think what you're talking about around optimization is closely connected to kind of those generational differences, too. Would you say that's fair? Yeah, I mean, we could talk all day about generational perceptions of sacrifice and work ethic and time, even all of those types of things. But I think that something that is helpful when you approach this topic of generations in what I would consider to be, like, the right way, is that you're meant to view these things with a real spirit of curiosity instead of judgment. Like, it's always easy to look at the norms of a new era and be like, they've got it wrong and we've got it right. But there's also a way to view it to say, like, I wonder how this came to be an example of, like, we talk mental health at work, well being at work. We talk about this reevaluation of this question of, what am I willing to sacrifice for work? And if you put yourself into. If you try to view the world through the eyes of another generation, you see young people stepping into the workplace for the first time. And I think there's many things happening. Two of them are that with properly leveraged technology, there really is a different pace to how work can get done. I mean, I do work in the legal field. You think about the legal field. Billable hours, right? So many of those billable hours would go to the research that was required on a lot of these legal issues, and there would be a 25 year old. Right, on a law school person, and they would be spending an exorbitant amount of time figuring out what cases were comparable and how did that end and all that. You can put the question into a large language model, and what would have been two weeks of research is now about 45 seconds. We don't have to go down that whole path. But, no, I love it. Change the way that we think about focusing more on what gets done and obsessing less about how it gets done, which can be a really difficult thing. And then I think the other thing that's impacting it is you've got young people coming up, and they look at the precedent that has been set. If you look at baby boomers, about half are divorced. About two thirds have one or more chronic illnesses. I know today that young women, there's a lot of reevaluation around kind of that girl boss feminism of the millennial era and that type of thing. And so it shouldn't be a huge surprise that you have young people coming in and they're trying to figure out for themselves what role is work supposed to play in my life, and what am I willing to bend on? What am I willing to sacrifice for my job and my career? Yeah, you made me think, I mean, staying on the technology kind of side of things. Recent Price Waterhouse Cooper survey of C-suite executives, one of the biggest things they're concerned about in the next three to five years is essentially, is our business model going to be obsolete? Right. Like, are we in trouble because of the rapid pace of change? And it makes me think your story, example of that's a good thing, that it takes 45 minutes to do the same work that was done in two weeks. It's a scary thing for profitability and how are we going to build? We still got to make the same amount of money, and you've just made it so that we don't have an excuse not to do it quicker or someone else out there is going to have a different business model that gets the same results much quicker. So what's kind of your take on generative AI? You talked about large language models, but AI's impact on generations because it was interesting. You've shared that. I didn't realize. I think baby boomers buy the Apple Watch more than anyone. You know, again, is something that would surprise you and you wouldn't. You know, who do you see being left in the dust by generative AI? Will boomers actually be early adopters? Right. What are you seeing early on, and what's your take on that? I'll make sure if there's notes to this that I can provide. The academic research there is, as of right now, a generational gap in intentional AI usage. I use the word intentional because we're all using AI constantly. It's in Google maps. Whatever you're using, it has some components of AI, but intentional, like I'm seeking it out, is that maybe this does align with the stereotype, but Gen Z is using it substantially more than other generations, definitely a lot more than baby boomers. And so I think that at this point, most of us are in agreement that a human's ability to leverage what these large language models specifically can do is imperative just for future relevancy, future marketability, and I would even say, just not to be Pollyanna about it, but I think there is a lot of promise in that human and AI collaboration when it comes to the creation of truly novel and innovative ideas. And so I think there are good things about it. But people do across the board. I think the more that you experiment with it, the faster you realize what it could be leveraged for. And I think there is going to be the sweet spot in the marketplace for people who are really good translators of that, because the stuff that's coming out right now, if you put something into ChatGBT 4, it's like, some of it's not right. They're prone to hallucinations and some of these other things, and so you need to be able to decipher that. But I think there's a lot of promise. But just like with so many new technologies that come out, the people who end up having an early advantage are the ones who experiment with it earlier and faster so that they can better understand the best ways that it could actually be used. Yeah, it was interesting. Some of the data I've looked at that's fascinating is I think the people who survive and do well are going to have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. And naturally, younger generations have that growth mindset because they came up with it and saw something a recent survey of high school seniors. And it was like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And 30% of them said creators. And our generation was like a lawyer or a banker or whatever it is, that's just how their brains think. And so you could be scared of that or not. But I also saw that by 2030, the percent of work that will be taken is much more of, like, repeatable data type roles, office clerks and customer service and some of those things. But what it means, and I say this to a lot of HR, HR people generally, like, I want to be in strategic HR. I don't want to just put out fires all day. Okay? You're going to have opportunities to actually prove that, and that should be an exciting opportunity for you to actually be a creator, a strategist, much more of like a high level adding the human aspect of strategic thinking and collaboration, the people who are successful will actually embrace that versus not for sure. And I think that we already see so many examples of that across the generations, but it is almost this exercise in being like, I just did a project for a large association of architects, right? And you think about how much architecture has been disrupted by generative AI. And so even for them, though, it's like the role of an architect may no longer be to draw up the blueprints and things like that, but what they do that as of right now, AI cannot really do is think through in the most human empathetic way. What is the human experience of this building still? AI is not great at figuring out the daylight things within a building. Architects work in different communities, and some of them that I work with, they work in some of these lower income communities, communities with a larger population of marginalized people. And they really think through what could this specific community center and the design of it, the placement of it, what can it do for this community? And so it is just a little bit of that retooling of just like you said with HR people, right. If your job is no longer to put out fires and review contracts and things that AI can probably do, then you do get to move into a place that leverages more of that human side, which I think is such a strength of HR people anyways, should be more fulfilling. Yeah, ultimately, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So this is a great time for a short break to hear from our sponsor, BizLibrary, on how we are the one stop shop for L&D and are truly where learning happens for your compliance, upskilling, and leadership needs. At BizLibrary, we know that employee development and retention have never been more critical to your business. We help you build learning programs that create safe and inclusive work environments, elevate employee skills, and develop leaders who drive results. So now you can take award winning BizLibrary content and put it to work to help overcome your biggest challenges. BizLibrary, where learning happens. Okay, and we're back. So, Kim, you alluded to this earlier, but I'm fascinated by it. A lot of things going on in the L&D space right now are heavily focused on skills, upskilling, reskilling. We talked about the pace of change and how the skills needed every year are kind of growing exponentially, and that's a struggle for L&D teams to keep up. I'm curious if you have a perspective on what considerations do we need to have when thinking about upskilling a very diverse workforce. So a lot of challenges I think people are having are like, how do you personalize learning for different generations who all experience learning very differently? And kind of curious your perspective. I know you spoke to kind of being empathetic to different types of people's experience, but any other thoughts there? Yeah, sorry. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great. Some of this is almost reminder of L&D 101. So I'm sure many of you who are watching you know this, but the more immersive and exciting that any type of learning can be, the more impactful it is. And again, almost back to that optimization piece is like, we already find that some of the traditional ways of getting people that information when it does feel almost more like an HR checklist instead of this experience, it's just harder to get people to participate and then really hard to get them to actually engage in the work in a meaningful way. But I love that you brought up the growth mindset piece. I think with so much of this, there's the really specific skills. There's the specific reskilling of, like, these are the skills that your job did need. These are the very specific skills that your job will need. And so we'll train on those tactics. But then I think there is just a lot of room for the development of kind of that can do spirit within an organization, and that can be infused into L&D in so many different ways. There's one organization I worked with where part of what they did before getting into a more practical training is the leader of this group. And I think they brought in an outside consultant for this. They just had the small group talk about a time in the work environment where someone you did kind of fall, you got back up again, you taught yourself how to do it. And almost just those reminders of, like, you can always learn new things, and as better ways to work come out, you can adapt to those. So I think that's kind of an interesting part of the L&D space right now. The other, and one of the things that we talked about briefly during the presentation is those communication skills and really honing in on the development of those, especially as we bridge this Covid gap, because one of the things that we did find is that there's a little bit of a delay in some of these traditional adult style communication can. We don't have to get into it right now. There's a lot of reasons, actually, even besides the pandemic that that could be. But we're already seeing large organizations. I mean, there was a big Wall Street Journal piece on KPMG and Deloitte and a few other companies who are putting quite a bit of money into helping the newest employees to enter the workforce be able to put their ideas in the right wrapping paper, because good ideas and good people, they fall through the cracks constantly if their ideas are not in the right wrapping paper. And so it's these learning opportunities about how to properly vet ideas, like how to bring an idea from ideation to execution, how to get people on your side. So it's those little things that I think can make a big difference, because once people get some of those wins, then that's the competence and confidence building that you really need in a new generation of leaders. I love that. It's interesting you say that. Something we just started doing with our sales development representatives, who are much newer, generally just out of college, majority of them was, we're remote. They don't get exposure to other people and they don't get the casual collisions in the office. They might have an idea where they run into someone or meet someone from another department can go ask them. What I don't think is happening from that communication lens is my generation. Anyone who's been in an office for some time understands now remotely. Okay, I just got to call this person and share that thought or that idea. That's very foreign if you've only ever worked remote. So you almost have to, as leaders, force those conversations. So one thing we're going to start doing is twice a month, call someone from a different department and have a conversation with them. Just crazy. But you would have done that every day in an office, and you just can't now, but you have to actually set aside time for those communication channels to exist for sure. One of the organizations that I worked with, they had something that some of their leaders would do is after remote meeting, they would just say like, hey, Paul, can you stay after for five minutes? I just wanted to chat with you for a minute so everyone will get off. And it would be like a leader with a new employee. And they would just be like, hey, I haven't really gotten a chance to chat with you or meet you. Tell me a little bit about yourself. But part of the reason for that, hey, can you stay five minutes? Is because the whole water cooler conversation and the magic of it, whatever, you can believe in it or not, but it was the spontaneity that was the whole point of it. And so you couldn't have premeditated answers. You couldn't come into it with an agenda. It forced you into those situations where you just had to respond to someone in real time. And with this organization, that was the area that they were seeing, specifically their salespeople having the hardest time with, where in a sales scenario you have to react constantly. You constantly have to be like being able to listen to the information, come up with something to say that works, that resonates. And so that was one of the things that the leaders started doing, was creating moments of serendipitous, spontaneous conversation in a remote environment. I love that. What else? I love that. I thought you might have were going to go here, that, can you stay after five minutes? I think about like, school is they're in trouble. But owning that as, no, this is actually built in time for unstructured conversation and getting to know each other, it flips what could be a negative on its head, especially when you think about, there's so much less access to leaders in organizations, especially cross functionally. So being able to open up those lines of communication and kind of build that psychological safety in that way is really cool. Yes. Love that. Hey, along this line, and only two more questions for you. You talked about. I really like the phrase you've used, like, emotional regulation as a really important leadership trait. It's fascinating to me, and you kind of mentioned this, with organizations starting to truly train on those skills of emotional regulation. As an example, how do you feel millennials and Gen Z are kind of prepared to move into management? And can you kind of connect that to emotional regulation and maybe how prepared different generations are with them? Yeah. The way that I set up that piece on emotional regulation is talking about millennials pouring into the workforce in the early 2000s, which was the whole era of authenticity, like that whole era of bring your whole self to work, and so many good things about that. And there's a lot of reasons for why that happened in the early 2000s, which I won't go into right now, but as millennials moved into leadership roles, when I interview managers 29 to 39 years old, who directly manage five or more people, one of the questions in those interviews is, what have you found surprisingly difficult about managing? And a lot of the responses do have something to do with finding that line between friend and friendly and being part of the team, but still being in charge of the team. And I think that that's kind of connected to authenticity, which for most of your professional life, if the training and the focus, even if it was subconscious, was very much on, like, bring your whole self into work. And it's good to have this authenticity, and it is. But I think we do already find that being strategic about which version of yourself you bring into different. Into different parts of the workplace, that's like a strategic leadership move. And we already see the millennials. The oldest is, like, 42, right? But the ones who have these faster career trajectories, who are leading larger teams, are the ones who are exhibiting more of that emotional regulation, where the daily stresses of the organization or of life don't have such a role in their day to day communication and attitude. And so I feel like I already see a bit of a pendulum swing, not away from authenticity, but into this place of finding that line. And I can give you a personal example here, which is, I was young when I started managing other people, and I think probably just what would be authentic to me is kind of people pleasing, and I want people to think I'm nice and that type of thing. One of the things that when I was a young manager and managing people either my age or just a little bit younger than me was, I was really effusive in my feedback. And so someone would turn something into me, and I would be so quick to be like, I love it. Amazing. I would use some of that hyperbolic language, like that type of thing. And I had a wonderful manager. And she just said to me, when someone hands something into you, just take a beat. Just say, thank you. I'll get back to you tomorrow with feedback. Because she really encouraged me to think about, what is it that they need from you as a leader, not as a friend. And you're kind of serving this role as cheerleader, and you've got it. And that's, like, a good friend role, but as a leader, your job is to make them better. And so if everything that is turned down is met with hyperbolic language and effusive feedback, then their bar is lower because you are easy to please in the workplace. And so she really encouraged me to be like, just wait, even. And that was so unnatural to me. That was so inauthentic to me to be like, okay, thanks. I'll get back to you later. But then I would come back with really meaningful feedback, and the dynamic shifted where my role was not as just, like, cheerleader. You got it. I really tried to shift my role at that time to, like, my core job is actually to make you better and see the things in you that you don't see in yourself to pull out some of that potential. And I think that is just one of a lot of examples about how you kind of shift from in the team to responsible for the team. Love that. Hey, closing. Very serious question for you. I have got to think in the world of Taylor Swift and between the eras, tour and dating Travis, Kelsey, and all the things I don't know if you've followed, like, the mix of NFL and Taylor Swift, just her raising the NFL's prowess. And I got to think, there's so many generational implications to that. And I know Harvard Business Review I just saw yesterday is, like, going to do a massive study on this, which I'm so excited to see. So the generational implications of what, specifically? Of just, like, Taylor Swift being the queen of America. Yeah. And just the ability to raise up all things right because it's a different audience of what swifties are versus NFL fans, but the cross pollination of those generations of those demographics. And you're right, all kind of. I can't comment on all that. And I am excited. I think that Harvard study is coming out October 25. If I'm right, I think we're all kind of waiting to be like, what is this? But this is what I can say and that I've done some writing on. Is Taylor Swift really being, I would kind of argue, like, the first artist who really figured out how to leverage social media in a way that helped create this huge community and really blurring that line between social media Persona and real life Persona. Even like with the eras tour, the fact that she paid such close attention to what her fans were talking about online and the inside jokes that exist within the community of Taylor Swift fans, and then in real life, at the performances, she would talk about those inside jokes. So, like, mother is mothering and Taylor hates evermore, and there were all these inside jokes that fans were having online and then she was bringing to real life and this kind of parasocial relationship that she has with fans. If we just look at why does the Taylor Swift fan base hold so much economic power? I think a lot of it goes back, actually, to this kind of interesting community build that she was able to create that started online and then kind of fused into real life behavior. So I think that's that generational component of it, of the people who fall into that, definitely being people who grew up with that idealistic version of social media that can create those meaningful in person communities. But the whole thing, of course, you have a really great answer. That's funny. My wife's like a hardcore swiftian. If I give her, like, I'm slightly curious about something tied to Taylor Swift. Well, her favorite number is 13, and this is what that means, and this is what we think is going to happen for the next seven years as a result. But you're right, it's so ingrained in that fanship. It's so cool. Yes, it is. So I don't know if that was, like, the answer you were looking for, but following the whole thing is just so fun. And I think that people have been so hungry for just something fun. And, like, the whole TikTok prank about telling your boyfriend or husband that Taylor Swift put Travis Kelsey on the map, that was the best thing that happened to the Internet, all so I didn't fall for that one. My wife tried it the other day, although I live in Missouri, so I think she knows. I know who just learned. I just learned, like, two Sundays. Amazing. Oh, it's so funny. Awesome. Well, hey, I could talk to you all day. Why don't we end with for those viewing, where can they find you? Any kind of plug for any of the work you're doing. Feel free. I write kids these days on Substac, and that's kind of my baby, my little corner of the Internet. I'll put up essays and updates on new research. Anything that are coming out that are about generations or kind of generationally adjacent in the news or in academic journals, I'll always put them there and give some commentary and make sure that you guys have access to it. And so if you're nerdy and into this, that would be a good place just to find the work and engage in conversation. Perfect. Awesome. Well, hey, thanks again. This was super educational, and I appreciate you spending the time with me. Thank you so much. This episode episode has been brought to you by BizLibrary. Head to bizlibrary.com for more information.