Give Yourself Permission to Be Present w/Curt Steinhorst
Episode Overview
Join us this episode for an insightful dialogue with focus expert Curt Steinhorst. As a strategist in workplace attention and productivity, Curt dissects the pitfalls of a distraction-ridden office environment and the counterproductive nature of constant interruptions. We delve into improving HR functions, redesigning company culture to value deep work over immediate response, and Curt's personal journey towards harnessing focus. Among the key strategies discussed are the restructuring of meetings, crafting interruption-free timeframes, and the leadership role in modeling focused communication. If you're aiming to navigate and thrive in a distraction-heavy world, this conversation offers a vital roadmap.
About Curt Steinhorst
Curt Steinhorst is the author of the bestselling book Can I have Your Attention? And a regular Forbes contributor on leadership strategy. He is the Head of People & Culture at Venus Aerospace and the founder of Focuswise, a consultancy that helps leaders develop focused teams. Curt's unique perspective and entertaining style keep him in high demand as a speaker with organizations such as AT&T, Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase, Nike, SAP, Southwest Airlines, and the US Naval Academy, to name a few.
You can connect with Curt through:
Focuswise: https://www.focuswise.com/
Full Transcript
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Curt Steinhorst [00:00:00]:
We associate how quickly people respond and with how loyal and how hard and committed they are to work. So basically, we create a culture that rewards interruption and assumes that, like, if you're not immediately available, you're not working. And so we end up incentivizing interruption and just time based time for the, like, putting in time for the sake of work, looking like we're working, and we erode anyone's ability to do uninterrupted, hard, heavy lifting type of work.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:34]:
Hello, and welcome to the Making Better podcast. My name is Matt Jertson, founder of Better Everyday Studios, and I am so excited you are with us today. In the world, there are generally two kinds of people. There are those who take the world as it is, and there are those who choose to make it better. On this show, we talk to individuals from the world of business and leadership who have chosen to make the second choice. Whether they are looking to change themselves, change their organizations, or change the world, you will learn actionable insights of how to improve your own performance and the performance of those around you, hopefully with a little bit of inspiration thrown in as well. Our guest today is Kurt Steinhorst. Kurt and I were originally connected because we're both in the aerospace industry.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:23]:
He's the head of people and culture at Venus Aerospace, a hypersonic flight startup. But as I got to know Kurt, I realized that this is just the tip of the iceberg for him. He is a best selling author, a regular Forbes contributor, and the founder of Focuswise, a consultancy that helps leaders develop focused teams. In this episode, expect to learn a different way to look at the role of HR, how culture plays into a company's ability to focus, and the top tips that every individual manager and business leader can use to improve the focus of their organization. Before we get into the episode, I do want to remind you to please like and subscribe this show to make sure you never miss a future episode. And if you were already subscribed, then please share this show with at least one, one other person, because that is how we grow. I cannot tell you how much it means to me. And with that, let's get into the discussion with Kurt Steinhorst.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:27]:
Kurt, so your specialty is focus. It's what you've been talking about for a really long time. And right now you're working in the tech and manufacturing space, which in, in my experience, is kind of a crazy kind of space. It can be a little bit chaotic in, in startups. What has, from the point of view of somebody who specializes in focus, what's your experience been like.
Curt Steinhorst [00:02:52]:
What you're asking is, am I glutton for punishment here?
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:56]:
Yes, exactly.
Curt Steinhorst [00:02:59]:
It's actually really interesting in terms of my experience jumping in, because the truth is, when I have spent a decade studying all of the challenges that companies are having, the idea of, like, going and working inside one was not exactly on my radar. And so really, this opportunity at Venus was the only one that I would take. And it was in part because of the fact that they were young enough and small enough, growing fast enough, that they were open to being a test kitchen. And so it has been really, it has been really fun. And some of the places that I would say, I just didn't realize how much I was inheriting from the industry were just assumptions around throwing time at a problem, assuming everyone should be in every meeting. Really, a lot of the foundations of what I think about, when I think about attention, I realized, are things I take for granted that the industry hasn't thought about. So, yeah, it's been interesting.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:04]:
That's. That's really interesting. That that first point really resonated with me of just kind of throwing time at it, because, you know, coming from the military world, that is the biggest thing for me in the military is just this idea that the belief that the one infinite resource is time and that when. When, in fact, it is the reverse. Right. Is the. It is the most limited resource we have. But, yeah, throwing time out of problems.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:31]:
You mentioned they were willing to be kind of a test kitchen. What, what kind of things? Is there anything in particular that you got to try to. As you said, there's a lot of culture that you kind of inherited. What are some of the experiments that you got to be able to do?
Curt Steinhorst [00:04:46]:
Yeah, so we did a lot of work around meetings. For instance, when I got there, there was. They had heard half of the equation, that meetings are often overwhelming. And so every meeting was defaulted to 30 minutes. And I realized pretty quickly that the problem with that is that most meetings really need to be five or 15 or they need to be 90 or more. And so we would end up having, like, 630 minutes meetings that could have been two, like, 1 hour long meeting. And so we rolled out really a top to bottom meetings principles and had meetings champions that really allowed us to say, if we're going to have this much money that goes into the way that we collaborate live, then it's worth us having a few people that are experts to make sure that time is really effective. So it was a pretty fun experience of going from.
Curt Steinhorst [00:05:42]:
It gets thrown on the calendar. And we meet on these rhythms, no matter what, every day at this length of time. That was probably one of the first experiments that I thought, okay, well, hey, we could maybe do something here. So it's been fun, though.
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:57]:
That's really interesting. So did you get to have. Was it in an individual meeting, there was just somebody charged with it, or did you actually have people who, their specialty was, like, running meetings?
Curt Steinhorst [00:06:08]:
We each kind of division would have someone who had chosen as kind of a secondary skill set to be meeting facilitators. And so the idea there is to say, yes, we need everyone to be an expert on everything. Let's throw them all in another training. The truth is, people don't have the capacity. And so. But we can get. But we can leverage someone to be intentional, and then over time, everyone else will learn how to model it without it being something that we throw another class on the schedule for.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:40]:
Yeah, that's really. I'm getting a lot of Cal Newport vibes from what you're saying, you know, I mean, he. The thing that. The thing that came to mind for me that I've read from his. From his books, is this idea that you hire these software engineers. That was his example. You hire a bunch of software engineers, you're paying them 200 grand a year. Their job is to write code.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:00]:
Why do they all have an email, which is just an invitation for every person in the company to come tap them on the shoulder instead, have your software teams in pods where there's, like, four of them or five of them.
Curt Steinhorst [00:07:11]:
That's right.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:12]:
One of them has email and can go get into the others, whereas everybody else is just like, no, the rest of the company doesn't exist. I'm writing the.
Curt Steinhorst [00:07:20]:
Yeah, and, you know, it's interesting you say that, because early on, right when I got there, I started by doing an interview from. To most members of the company that we then went about actually codifying our core values. So. But one of the most interesting observations I had was a certain member of the team had previously been at SpaceX and had been at a couple of other space companies. And, you know, SpaceX has a reputation of pretty people work long hours there. Right. What was interesting is that she said her favorite place she ever worked before Venus was SpaceX. And she said it's because, yes, they made me work hard, but they also allowed me to work hard.
Curt Steinhorst [00:08:07]:
Like, it's all of the interruptions from the work that make a company so frustrating. And often what happens is you come in as the people in culture group and what that means is how many parties and happy hours and cupcakes, like, the people in culture's job is to do all the distracting stuff that keep people from getting work done and waste their time in the name of culture. And so we really started from the very beginning by saying the work is worth it, and we don't want to get in the way. We want to make it easier. And so that really was the lens we've used to apply across the board, even from policies people can't remember. 150 pages from trainings people can't remember because they went to a one time training. How do we, at every step of the way, make work easier for people and get out of the way rather than adding another thing to their plate?
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:08]:
I love all that. It's really reminded me. So are you familiar with the all in podcast?
Curt Steinhorst [00:09:14]:
I love it. It's one of my favorites.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:15]:
Yeah. So as we're recording this, the last episode, they went on this big tangent about HR, and I actually posted a clip of it where one of them. So for anybody who hasn't seen the all in podcast, this is a group of essentially four billionaires. They have all done successful startups. Many of them have started multiple companies, exited from multiple companies, kind of the who's who of, you know, Internet, early Internet 2.0 kind of folks. And one of them said just point blank, HR should only be an administrative function. If they do anything other than just like putting people in spots, getting things signed, then it's bad, you know, then it means they have too much power. And there's part of me that wanted to just like, have this almost visceral reaction to that, like, as a people person.
Matt Gjertsen [00:10:08]:
But I think it's, it highlights exactly what you just said of the negative interactions that so many people have had with HR. Not from, I mean, certainly from like a legalistic point of view or something like that. But more importantly, not putting the work first in that it should be our job to be the specialists in knowing human psychology, knowing the way people work, knowing all that stuff. And how can we strip away everything to strip away anything that gets in the way of maximizing that resource? Because, yeah, it totally makes sense. It totally resonates with me, that idea of, yes, I worked hard, but they let me work hard. Um, which is huge.
Curt Steinhorst [00:10:56]:
Yeah, I I also listened to that. And, um, the truth is what that, what, uh, I think it was chamath that was actually saying that, that he's really indicating is, is the current perception of what HR's function is. And in that sense. I completely agree with him.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:15]:
Yes. Yeah. Like, yes.
Curt Steinhorst [00:11:17]:
The HR's function, on the other hand, in a world that is creating more and more rapid change, that people are being asked to have skill sets and developing those skill sets at a faster pace. Right. There's less in common than people share. Like, we have more diversity, which is a really great thing, but also it makes it ripe for conflict. It's more for frustration. All of these reasons say that if HR would understand the foundation of their function, they've never been more important. And the question becomes, is it going to be basically a benefits administrative function or a kingdom building, like source of distraction, or is it going to be the fuel that really drives the organization forward? Because it's the people that will ultimately make or break a company.
Matt Gjertsen [00:12:07]:
Right.
Curt Steinhorst [00:12:07]:
So I'm hopeful that some HR groups see it, but I'm also very aware of how many years of institutional, you know, I would say, like downhill that we've fallen, but there's a lot of momentum the other direction.
Matt Gjertsen [00:12:26]:
Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. It is a challenge, but I always use the analogy of the foundation of a building when describing HR in that, you know, it is extremely essential. In fact, you know, if you've ever seen a skyscraper get built the first two years, it's just a big hole in the ground as they build the foundation. Right. And then as soon as it gets above ground level, it goes up really quickly because you have to put in the effort into doing it. But the reason I think I like that analogy is because it's this really essential, really important thing that takes lots of skill, lots of hard work to do correctly, but it's just not the spotlight, it's not the sexy thing, and it's never gonna be. And there's almost this, like, embracing of our support role and not trying to be the stars because, and again, like you were saying, I would agree with that point. If HR is the stars in the company, something's probably gone wrong, because that's not the point.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:27]:
That's right. So you had this amazing opportunity to go to this startup, this aerospace startup, and as you said, kind of get to tinker and play around and experiment, but you also said it was the last thing you ever thought was going to happen. You started, the main thing that you've been doing for the past several years is this focus on focus. How did that start for you?
Curt Steinhorst [00:13:56]:
Yeah, I inherited the challenge of focus very honestly. I was actually not diagnosed until later, but was consistently told that I had ADHD. And frankly, it was in my mid twenties, I was actually about to go to business school in Chicago, but decided the last minute to start my own business and my study. And what I'd been working on was rhetoric, or how does someone who has a big platform actually speak and compellingly tell their story on stage? So it was doing that, just the sheer volume of things coming at me, the emails, the time Google chat messages of the girl I was trying to date at the time, and now I'm married to, and then, you know, checks all the emails, I was so overwhelmed. And it became a personal passion to just understand distraction and focus. At the time, though, I was also speaking and working on behalf of the largest generational research firm in North America. And so I was all of a sudden being asked to speak on generational issues. I started incorporating more of the attention stuff that I was personally learning about my own challenges into that.
Curt Steinhorst [00:15:13]:
And that's what people kept asking more and more about. And so I, at first it was just, frankly, me trying to make sure I didn't have to, you know, move back home with my parents. And then I realized, like, oh, this is a challenge that is much deeper than what most people are aware of. Like, I inherited it. I was ADHD before. It was cool, but it was actually so foundational to our thriving, and I just dove all in and I was the beneficiary of having a platform for speaking and writing already. And so it meant that I didn't have to do the promotional work. I got to just focus on the content and thinking and so that's nice.
Curt Steinhorst [00:15:52]:
Yeah, that's my story.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:54]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think a lot of people probably resonate with that. I think so many, especially at larger companies, I know this is true in the government, it's true at large companies where very often your whole day is spent doing other stuff. It's emails, it's meetings. And then the reason why people feel so busy and burnt out is because they're doing their work at night, because that's the only time we have when. So you kind of started with this idea of needing to understand it. What do most people get wrong? I think the last time we talked, you mentioned how people have kind of a misconception about what focus is.
Curt Steinhorst [00:16:31]:
Yeah, yeah. I would say there's an individual level and then more of a systems or teams, like cultural level. On an individual level. I think what people get wrong is the most basics of focus is not for it isn't the ability to do boring stuff quickly. Like, that's when I used to think about why I couldn't focus. What I was doing is saying I don't like to do boring things and so I'd avoid them. My inability, and the truth is, focus is for doing challenging work. That is fascinating, that by focusing on it leads to differentiated outcomes and expertise.
Curt Steinhorst [00:17:12]:
So I guess really the point I'm making here is we're never going to get good at focusing on, like, stuff that a monkey can do. Like, a lot of people feel bad because they're bored. Well, if what I would say is, works that work that's boring, the problem isn't the person, the problem is the work. So that's like, on the what I would say individuals get wrong on a team and group level. I very, very, very simply that we acknowledge, we associate how quickly people respond and with how loyal and how hard and committed they are to work. So basically, we create a culture that rewards interruption and assumes that if you're not immediately available, you're not working. And so we end up incentivizing interruption and just time based time for the, like, putting in time for the sake of work, looking like we're working, and we erode anyone's ability to do uninterrupted hardware, heavy lifting type of work.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:17]:
So, yeah, that, that second part really hit me. It reminded me of when I. So during COVID I was still working at a company when it started, still working internal in a company. And then while COVID was kind of still happening, where everybody was still working, mainly working from home, I went out on my own. And so as I was getting ready to leave, I went into the office kind of a last time because some people were going in periodically and I remember very clearly the difference. So when I was at home, because I was at home, I was trying to be super focused because I felt like every moment of the day I had to be producing to show my value, to create my value. And that the only way I could show my value, since I was at home, was in the work I was producing. That's the only way I could show my value.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:04]:
And then I go into the office, and the moment I stepped off the.
Curt Steinhorst [00:19:08]:
Elevator, I felt like I was being.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:11]:
Productive, or at least I was doing what I was supposed to be doing because I was there. It had nothing to do with what am I producing right now. It was just much more a feeling of, oh, a big part of working is stopping for a second to talk to my neighbor and being available to go sitting on a call. And all of a sudden the need to produce felt completely removed. It was a really interesting experience. Yeah.
Curt Steinhorst [00:19:43]:
And my question back to you is, which do you think is correct? Like, do you think that both are or. Yeah. What's your assessment of it?
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:55]:
I would agree that both are. I think there is a time and a place for both of them. I mean, hey, I work for myself now, so I'm completely on my own and I'm trying to build a company that's going to be a remote company. So I do tend to lean towards that. We need to produce. Let's get things done. But I do also understand that there is a time and a place for availability, connection, that kind of thing. And I think depending on the role, depending on the company, depending on the culture, kind of.
Matt Gjertsen [00:20:28]:
It's not an either or. It's a. It's a. It's a spectrum. I would.
Curt Steinhorst [00:20:31]:
I would say, yeah, that makes sense to me. And I, when I joined Venus, actually, it was one of the early places I knew, you know, when you go into a new environment, new industry, you know, I work with really big companies. I've been a solopreneur. This is kind of mid range. I know I'd learn a lot, but one area that I learned is that I came in having, you know, led a team that prioritizes focus and teaches companies how to focus and. Yeah, so I never want to. I would come into headquarters and I would never talk to people as I walked by them.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:11]:
Yeah.
Curt Steinhorst [00:21:11]:
Like, and the reason is because at the time we've moved this, one of the changes I've made is. But it was a fully open office, and in my mind, I'm like, I don't want to be rude and interrupt them because focus matters. I was always trying to find closed rooms, and then I actually had somebody come up to me, a leader, and just say, hey, did I, did I. Did I do something to frustrate you? You haven'T. Yeah. I feel like you've BEen, or like you've been frustrated by me, and it all was because I was not jumping in and saying hi every time I walked by. So these are really unique variables because I'm trying to show I do care and someone else is saying, that doesn't look like that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:53]:
So.
Curt Steinhorst [00:21:54]:
Yeah, it's really interesting.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:55]:
Yeah, it is interestinG. And I think, yeah, it is very culture and that's interesting, you know, in the aerospace kind of world, because this is one thing that, you know, Elon. Elon Musk was very controversial, has been very controversial and very kind of draconian about the return to the office kind of mentality but I will agree there is a part of his sentiment that I do understand. First, I think every company has the right to set their own policies as long as they're communicating with their employees about what those policies are going to be. But I do take his point that, like, look, for TEsla, for example, we're an automotive company, that a giant portion of our workforce has to be in the office to do their work. So we're going to be a in the office company. We're not going to have two different cultures where some people get to work from home because they're not the technicians. And then I think that totally makes sense.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:48]:
Again, it's like, it's that cultural sense of. And then I think because in manufacturing spaces, because there tends to be decent amounts of time where you're kind of waiting for parts or you are doing something boring, there is more of that kind of, like, camaraderie feeling that develops as just a natural part of what the culture is going to be. Yeah.
Curt Steinhorst [00:23:11]:
And I think Elon brings up a really interesting point when it comes to work from home. The challenge with the return to the office for everyone all the time is that it's actually offensive to people who can work anywhere, have proven that they're productive, and then have said, in the name of culture, I'm going to demand that you lose 2 hours of your family in traffic. That doesn't make any sense at all. On the other hand, there's nothing that we are not at a point where our technology has been able to replace the embodied experience of humans in the same place. Over time, we know this, relationships start feeling commoditized. People get like, the less time I spend with someone I love, the more that I find them not. I don't like them as much. I question their thinking.
Curt Steinhorst [00:24:11]:
And then you spend just a little time together and you're like, oh, wow, okay, this person's a human. I don't think we're anywhere close to a world where fully remote can keep a team together long term. I also don't think we're at a point where people are willing to tolerate wasting their time to be in an office all the time. That doesn't actually provide a better place for them to get their work done.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:35]:
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. So as part of focus wise, you've gotten to work with a ton of individuals, a ton of companies, I'm sure all size organizations, as you mentioned, you kind of broke down this things the individual gets wrong, things that organizations get wrong. I'd love to kind of work through that, of at the individual level, at the manager level, and for their teams and at the organizational level. Starting at the individual level, what are some of the most common things that you think people can improve? I'm sure this is highly individualistic, but what are some of the most common things you see that people can do to improve their focus and productivity?
Curt Steinhorst [00:25:20]:
Yeah, some of them. These are just like classic time management hacks. Easy ones would be to organize work into chunks and make sure that the chunk of that work are all in the same sphere of work. So meaning I'll take a 45 minutes sprint to work on content for Venus, for marketing, and then I'll take a break, and then I'll jump into a different category. But, like, try to chunk the work together. Doing harder work when we have more energy is always going to help as the day goes along, having what? We get more tired and we really need more stimulation. But I would say, like, number one for individuals is a recognition that viting your attention, trying to do multitask, trying to, you know, jump from thing unrelated thing to unrelated thing and manage like you're juggling, that's the best way to not get your work done as fast. It's the best way to do poor quality work.
Curt Steinhorst [00:26:25]:
It's the best way to emotionally be disconnected from it. And so think, how do I divide my time but not my attention? I give my full attention to this period. For this period. That's the number one thing I would say for individuals.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:38]:
Yeah. Do you struggle convincing people of that? I know all kinds of people who say, oh, I'm a multitasker, or is it enough kind of in the zeitgeist that most people get it now?
Curt Steinhorst [00:26:50]:
Yeah. You know, I have always been shocked by what I think has become so commonly known that isn't around multitasking. So I still would say that when I go to an audience and ask them, do you believe multitasking is a myth, or do you believe you can multitask? It still is about 50 50. And the truth is, it's actually not true that you can't multitask at all. The key is, what tasks can you do together and what can't you? If it involves language, if it involves, like, precise timing, you can't do two unrelated things at the same time. That's the simple.
Matt Gjertsen [00:27:30]:
Yep. That. That makes a lot of sense. And as I've gotten into this and looked at this myself, I've just noticed how this is advice that can apply to every part of your life. You know, if you are a parent, you've probably realized that, you know, it's not that your kids want all of your time, they just want your attention when you're with them, you know? And so it's like when I'm. I try very hard to be, like, with family or not with family when I'm doing, you know, when, when I'm doing recreation or trying to, you know, I think something that I used to always do, speaking of emails and always being overwhelmed with emails, is it's a Friday night, I'm going to kind of veg out, but I want to catch up, so I'm going to put on a movie and just open up my laptop and start to catch up on emails. And then after a few times doing that, I'm just like, why am I doing this? I'm not getting the relaxing of the movie and I'm taking twice as long to answer all my emails. Why am I doing both of these things? So it definitely is an important lesson that it took me a while.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:34]:
So I feel good that not everybody has caught on yet because, so it doesn't mean I'm like, totally, totally lost or totally behind.
Curt Steinhorst [00:28:41]:
Yeah. And the truth is, like, we, the reason we do it is we lack the ability to resist. Like, we need more stimulation. We've basically trained our brain to need multiple inputs, even at the cost of quality and being fully present. And so, like, what you've actually suggested on that silly movie example is actually one of the most important, easy ways that we start unlearning habits that are actually creating kind of this chaotic, anxious, never off, but never on mindset. And so it's literally just saying, I have permission to be fully immersed in a movie. I have permission to be fully immersed in a conversation at dinner. I don't have to answer every person as soon as they reply, like, that is the clearest way that I'm not going to have a good relationship with anybody.
Curt Steinhorst [00:29:34]:
Permission to be present is really, really, really important. And that doesn't mean that I'm going to be a monk who is just doing meditation all the time, but it does mean that I am helping my brain get used to giving full attention.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:51]:
I love that phrase, permission to be present. That is fantastic. So as we move up from an individual to a team, so you're a manager of a team, so you're not setting company policy, but you kind of have your team. What are some of the most common things? Or what's the number one thing that a manager could do to try to help with the focus. You of their team, you think, yeah.
Curt Steinhorst [00:30:13]:
I'd say number one is permission to be unavailable and a way of indicating when you're not available because you're doing deep work. Because otherwise it is always an assumption that if someone's not available, it's because they're not working. And that's the reason that we set a culture of interruption, permission to be unavailable. And if a manager can also even do like, hey, everyone, we're going to do it at this time where no one's going to be no focus sprints. So they can either say, we're going to do it all at the same time, or they can go the other way and say, we are going to be fully available. I'm having open office hours these hours of the day. So the idea is, can we all be available? If you have any questions, call during these hours, the other hours people are not expected to be openly available to. So really comes down to saying, as a team, do we all understand and have ground rules for giving people permission to have focus in their workday? I'll give one more on the team level, it's related to this and that's that.
Curt Steinhorst [00:31:21]:
Like really simply meetings. How do you switch it from, you're not important enough to be in the meeting, meaning social capital is based on if you're invited to the meeting. So now we invite everyone just to not offend anyone to, you're too important to be in the meeting. How do we go about making meetings? Not the social like capital, but instead a place where we collaborate when necessary, but we help people avoid being in them because their work is too important.
Matt Gjertsen [00:31:53]:
I love that. And I think it's interesting. Are you familiar with Basecamp, the company Basc camp? Yeah. So they, I believe they just recently they launched. So they came out with, hey, which is their like, email application. A couple years ago recently they came out with a calendar application. And I know I haven't used it, but just listening to the founders talk about it, I know their intent is to, rather than it being as if you have your calendar that is open and you put stuff on on it, your calendar is full and you're taking away, like, it's just that interesting. So when you want to put a meeting on somebody's calendar, you're taking away their time, their work time.
Matt Gjertsen [00:32:39]:
I have no idea how they're doing it, but I know that's the reframe that they're trying to make.
Curt Steinhorst [00:32:45]:
I'm intrigued. I'm a big fan of the Jason Fried's overall thinking and work on when it comes to focus and attention and productivity. So, big fan.
Matt Gjertsen [00:32:57]:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so then when we get to the top level, at the company level, I know some of that manager stuff I'm sure applies at the company level. Anything else that, that is specific to it only. It kind of only works if we all do it. Or like, what are some of the big picture things that can really help?
Curt Steinhorst [00:33:16]:
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting here is at the senior level, there's no end because everything that they, that they're able to do is going to cascade through the organization. And so I could give all the individual ones. Cause it becomes much easier. Like, if the CEO is not available and then only has some open office hours, then that is gonna be easy for the rest of the company to do it. Now with that said, specifically at the senior level, modeling how to communicate with people's attention, in mind, me, is mission critical. And so what I mean is there's a tendency to live in the more is more approach. Like another policy, 160 page handbook. Write long emails, long messages.
Curt Steinhorst [00:34:08]:
Like, and, you know, how do we protect a company? By ensuring that there's no one who could possibly read that entire policy book. Right. I would say, like, how is the leader very, very, very clearly and simply making it like, hey, we communicate succinctly. We have really clear mission, vision, values. We reinforce those. So it's actually, how do you compellingly communicate what matters consistently and in different forms to drive focus down into the organization?
Matt Gjertsen [00:34:43]:
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And that just bringing this kind of conversation full circle back to HR were probably the often the worst ones of this, of keeping it simple, keeping it clean, and. Yeah, the, yeah, I love that. Communicating with focus in mind, with attention in mind, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. Awesome. Well, these have been great. I think that was a really quick, kind of great run through of a lot of individual tactics that we can have and can be applied at all kinds of different levels.
Matt Gjertsen [00:35:22]:
We started kind of a new final question with this show, because since the show is called making better, and so what I've started to ask guests, and I've gotten some really interesting, interesting responses so far. If you could snap your fingers and change one thing to make the world better, what would it be?
Curt Steinhorst [00:35:41]:
Wow, that's a beautiful question. That every human being knew that they were loved and that they belonged. So they were known, loved, and belonged. I think that it's amazing how many things go wrong in our world because people are, people don't know that they're actually loved for who they are. And so, and when you aren't, when you don't feel loved, you don't feel known and isolated. People hurt people.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:16]:
Yeah. I mean, I think to me, at least when you say that, what, it connects with me back what you said before of the permission to be present, and so many of us don't feel like we have that permission because we're worried about all the other stuff. We're worried about this other person that, and what are they going to think of me? And, oh, I forgot to answer this person and, oh, are they, you know, and so we, we lose that because we, we don't have. We're not grounded in that sense of, it's okay, I'm accepted here. Yes, that's right. Amazing. Well, Kurt, thank you so much. This is, this is a fantastic conversation.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:51]:
I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed learning about the experiments that you're getting to do at Venus. I'm sure many, many HR professionals are drooling because, oh, if only we could have that kind of stuff. But it's neat that the reason you were able to do that, the reason you were able to have that kind of license to experiment, because you brought to the table so much experience of working on focus, working with focus wise to work with all these different organizations. It was, I'm sure, very research backed and very, very vigorously tested, which is amazing. So thank you for coming on so much. I'm sure people got a lot out of this, and I look forward to staying in touch with you in the future.
Curt Steinhorst [00:37:33]:
Me, too. This was a true joy. Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Gjertsen [00:37:37]:
Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did. If you want to see more discussions like this, then make sure to check out some of the videos right over there. And while you're at it, make sure to subscribe to the channel. It really helps improve, improve our reach and gives us the fuel we need to bring you more of these great conversations. I hope you have a great rest of the week, and we will see you next time on the making better podcast.
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