The author of a ground-breaking new book called Nine Lies About Work, Ashley Goodall, joins us today for a fun, smart and unpredictable conversation about work and life. Lochhead and Goodall discuss what’s wrong with work and what to do about it, work-life balance and nurturing the human spirit at work. 

Nine Lies About Work  

Ashley Goodall is SVP of Leadership and Team Intelligence (LTI) at Cisco. He built this new organization to focus entirely on serving teams and team leaders. Through this, they are able to research and study the most challenging questions about work. 

His work at Cisco focuses on defining what is special about the best teams and how does one create the best team for the company. Other than this, he is also the co-author of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World.

“There are very few things in life that you can’t or shouldn’t smile at. At some point, the more serious the topic, the more important it is to find little moments of levity and humor.” - Ashley Goodall

Work-Life Balance 

Ashley points out his opinions about achieving work-life balance and why it is such an unapplicable paradigm in today’s world. Christopher shared how this mindset creates two persons: one that is working and another one, who is living his life. 

“The implication of that is, all that stuff in work is bad and all the stuff in life is good. Your job ⁠—  in order to lead a fulfilled life ⁠— is to have enough sugar to sprinkle into all that bitterness of work.” - Ashley Goodall

In this mindset, we are taught that life is the antidote to work  ⁠— but that is a huge misrepresentation of life. Further, Ashley says that work-life balance is such a disservice to the wonderfulness of work. It mutes employee curiosity of finding out what work will be like if one is high-performing or say, growing and making a huge impact. 

“If the prescription is to take over the toxicity and balance it with life, you'll never get to ask those questions, that is such a shame.” -Ashley Goodall

Language, Love, and Life

Ashley shares a wide array of stories and opinions in this podcast. He poses his standpoint on giving weight to context, as opposed to just taking words as it is. 

He further gives advice on how to grow the human spirit in the workplace. The discussion turns into an interesting discussion about love.

To hear more about the nine lies about work and more relevant information from Ashley, download and listen to the episode.

Bio:

Ashley Goodall is an executive, leadership expert, and author, and has spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside.

He looks for lessons from the real world that help people and teams thrive. Further, he focuses on what makes work a more human place for all of the humans in it. 

His first experience of teams and leadership were as a student musician and conductor. He was fascinated by the unspoken understanding between people playing together and carried this fascination into the corporate world.

He currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence (LTI) at Cisco. It is a new organization built to focus entirely on serving teams and team leaders, and which aims to reveal the answers to some of the most challenging questions about work. What is special about the best teams?

Why do we follow one leader and not another? How can we make more teams like our best teams and more leaders like our best leaders?

The new approaches he has pioneered address everything from performance management to feedback, to team activation technology, to real-time team intelligence, to social network mapping, to strengths-based leadership—and together this challenge much of the conventional wisdom of work today.

Ashley is the co-author, with Marcus Buckingham, of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, April 2019), and of two cover stories in the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback Fallacy,