Latest / Uphoff on Media Podcast / It's Never Just Business

Transcript

It's Never Just Business · Uphoff on Media Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, it's Tony.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Coming up in business,
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I always thought the line, it's not personal, it's just business was wrong.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Business is highly personal.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: once I took on the responsibility of management and the accountability that came
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: with it,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I knew there would be times I'd have to make a decision and deliver it
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: that was right for the business and wrong for some of the people in it.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's the job.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Making calls that change people's careers has never gotten easier.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: But leading businesses through disruption and transformation,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've learned a lot about how to make those calls and how to deliver them.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode titled,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's Never Just Business,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I go back to 1998 when we ended the famous Bytes print edition
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: and people lost their jobs.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they lay out a better rule.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Make the decision on business terms and deliver it like a human being with respect,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: dignity, and empathy without losing yourself in the process.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's get to work.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Every leader eventually makes a call that hurts someone they care about.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Here's how to make it without going cold or caving.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not personal, it's just business.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: It gets said most often at the exact moment it's least true across a table
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: to someone whose job title or plans just changed.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has ever walked out of that conversation agreeing with it.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've said some version of the opposite for close to 30 years.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: People who say it's not personal, it's just business are kidding themselves.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Business is highly personal.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as a leader,
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: you will need to make decisions that are in the best interest of the business
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: and not in the best interest of someone on your team.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes someone you like, respect, and hired yourself.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Both halves of that are true at the same time.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the damage leaders do to their teams and to themselves comes
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: from pretending one of them isn't.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Management comes with two loyalties and no instructions.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: In the post,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: be careful what you wish for,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote about the question I have been asked every few months for
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: over three decades.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Should I get into management?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: That piece was about whether you're built for the sea.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: This one is about what happens after you say yes,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: when you discover the job comes with two loyalties and no instructions
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: for holding both.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: The first loyalty is to the person in front of you,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: the one who stayed late during the carve out,
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: who covered for you when your kid was sick,
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: who actually you enjoy having a beer with.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: The second loyalty is to the enterprise.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: That word sounds cold until you remember what it actually is.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The other 200 people,
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: their families,
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: the customers who bet their own plans on you delivering,
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: the investors who funded the payroll,
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Deciding for the business is almost never deciding for a spreadsheet.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's deciding for a larger group of people who aren't in the room.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's the weight.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Business isn't impersonal.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's personal in two directions at once.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's just business and we're a family.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Fail the same way.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: The first lie is the one leaders tell themselves it's just business.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's anesthetic.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: It lets you make the call without feeling the cost, which is exactly why it fails.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: The person across the table feels the cost in full
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: and they can tell you've numbed yourself to it.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: What they remember isn't the decision.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's that you seemed not to mind.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: The second lie is the one leaders tell their teams.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, we're a family.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: It feels generous when you say it at the all hands.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's a promise you can't keep.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Families don't restructure.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Families don't run performance reviews.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Families don't sell the division.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Netflix saw this clearly enough to write the opposite into its culture memo.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, it's why we model ourselves on a professional sports team, not a family, end quote.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Families, the memo says, are about unconditional love.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Every leader who has said family and then had to lay someone off has watched
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: a normal business decision land as a personal betrayal.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: The word made it one.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: The two lies run in opposite directions and they fail the same way.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Each one makes the tension go away by pretending one loyalty doesn't exist.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: The job is to carry both.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: What I told the team when we ended Byte's print edition.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: In 1998,
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: I was a group president at CMP Media running a division north of $300 million a year
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: in revenue when CMP bought McGraw-Hill's Information Technology
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: and Communications Group and handed the acquired brands to me.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: The best known of them was Byte,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: which had been the reference point for serious computing since its first issue
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: in September of 1975.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: From diligence onward, two groups of people were watching my every move.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The C&P employees in my division wanted to know what the acquisition meant
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: for their positions and their work.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: The people coming over from McGraw-Hill wanted something harder to give,
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: assurances that their brands and their jobs were safe.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's the moment the family lie is most tempting.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: A few warm promises at an integration meeting would have bought a quiet month.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: They also would have been promises nobody could keep.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Several of the acquired brands were in decline and hadn't led their niches for a while.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Byte's circulation had slid from roughly 523,000 in 1996 to about 443,000 by
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: the time of the deal, the New York Times reported at the time.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: We worked through the details and then we made the calls.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Byte suspended its print edition after the July 1998 issue and moved online.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: A second acquired brand closed outright.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Its circulation and other assets folded into another title.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Both decisions cost people their jobs.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: When we told the team, I said what I had to believe for a long time.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, this is business, not personal, really isn't accurate.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Business is highly personal and particularly so for the people who lost their jobs today.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: At times,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: as leaders,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: we need to make decisions that are in the best interests of our business and
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: that may not be in the best interests of some of the people involved.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of those times."
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't make the news any easier to hear.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing would have.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: What it did was refuse both lies in the same breath.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't pretend the decision was painless and it didn't pretend the decision was still open.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Byte's last print issue still gets written about as the end of an era in technology publishing.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was also the right call for the business.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Both of those were true on the same day, and a leader has to be able to say both.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Managers are carrying more of this and doing it alone.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: The numbers say this matters more than most leaders admit.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Gallup's research has held for a decade that managers account for at least 70% of
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: the variance in employee engagement across business units.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: As far as the team is concerned, the manager is the job and managers are carrying it worse.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Gallup's 2026 State of Global Workplace Report puts manager engagement at 22%
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: in 2025 down from 31% in 2022.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: With five of those nine points lost in a single year,
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: the same report found leaders feel more stress,
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: more anger,
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: more sadness,
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: and more loneliness day to day than individual contributors
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: with loneliness running 10 points higher.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: The person with the most influence
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: on how everyone else experiences work is increasingly the person most alone in it.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happens when leaders try to carry both loyalties without a system for doing it.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Ration, hold.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Three zones, three different rules.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: The advice leaders usually get here is to be friendly but not friends,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: approachable but with boundaries.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's not wrong.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not usable because it treats warmth and authority as one dial
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: where turning up one turns down the other.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're not one dial.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: What a leader offers the team falls into three different zones and each one runs
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: by its own rule.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Here's an Uphoff advisory framework to put this to work.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: I call it give, ration, hold.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Picture three columns.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Give is what a leader offers freely and never rations.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Warmth and respect, candor, early and often, your actual personality and your time in a crisis.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's what keeps you yourself.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Ration is what you manage deliberately.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Access and availability, confidence, after hours, closeness, and who hears what first.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's where boundaries live.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Hold is what you set before you need it.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: The decision criteria,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: the performance standard, the interests of the business and the call itself.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: The standard does the work so the relationship doesn't have to.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Under pressure, leaders go wrong one of two ways.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: The hardened leader rations what they should be given.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Warmth goes cold and the team complies without trusting.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The dissolved leader gives away what should be held.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: The standard bends and no decision feels fair.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Use it to check which way you lean when the pressure is on.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The full chart is in the post or at upoffadvisory.com slash frameworks.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: The decision is business.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: The delivery is personal.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: The simplest operating rule I know,
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: make the decision on business terms and deliver it like a human being.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The business decision answers whether, does this role exist?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Is this person meeting the bar?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Does the plan still work?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: That decision should be clear-eyed,
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: consistent, and written down before any name is attached to it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: The delivery answers how,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: who tells them,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: whether it's you,
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: how much notice,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: what you say and whether you say it yourself instead of reading off an HR script,
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: what support comes with it,
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: severance you fought for,
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: a reference you'll actually give, a call you'll take six months later.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing about the delivery changes the decision.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everything about it changes what the decision means to the person living through it
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: and to the 40 people watching how you handled it.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Two more rules sit underneath that one.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Early truth is the kind version.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: The cruelest thing a leader can do is protect a relationship by withholding bad news
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: about performance.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: The feedback you skip in March to keep things friendly becomes the termination
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: in October that nobody saw coming.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Candor delivered early is warmth.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Candor delivered late is an ambush.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Don't need your team to like you.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Wanting to be liked is fine.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Needing it is where every boundary breaks.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: A leader whose only source of support is the team will ration
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: The
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: support system I call the hardest trait in be careful what you wish for,
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: the peers,
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: the board members you can call,
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: the coach,
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: the family that knows you outside the title is what lets you be warm with your team
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: without needing anything back from them.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: AI will make the analysis sharper, the delivery still has to be yours.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a 2026 version of the first lie and it's already here.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Employers cited AI in 120 announced job cuts, 120,000 job cuts.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the first nine months of this year,
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: according to Challenger,
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Gray, and Christmas, more than double the 54,000 for all of 2025.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: As agentic AI takes on more of the analysis behind staffing,
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: territory,
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: and performance decisions,
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: leaders will be tempted to hand the moral weight to the system along with the math.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: The model ranked the roles.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: The model flagged the underperformers.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's not personal.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the output.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same anesthetic and it will fail the same way.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Machines can sharpen the decision.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: They can make the criteria more consistent and the data harder to argue with.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's useful.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: They can't carry the delivery and a team will not accept a decision delivered
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: by someone hiding behind a dashboard.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: The more of the analysis agents take on,
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: the more of the leader's job is exactly this part,
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: owning the call and delivering it like a human being.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: What your team remembers is how you delivered it.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Leadership doesn't ask you to resolve the tension between the person in front of you
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: and the people counting on the enterprise.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: It asks you to carry it openly without numbing yourself to one side or lying to the other.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Give the warmth away every day.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Ration the closeness.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Hold the standard before you need it.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Then, when the hard call comes,
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: and it will, make the decision on business terms and deliver it like a human being.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was never just business.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was always yours to decide.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the episode.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: To download, give, ration, hold,
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: go to the post on Uphoff on Media on Substack
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: or visit uphoffadvisory.com slash frameworks.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And one favor,
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: if the show is useful,
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: follow it and leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's the easiest way for other operators to find it.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Back at it next week.