Fit Happens: The Executive Search Podcast

Jason Baumgarten
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I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it. In 2021, a British journalist named Oliver Burkeman published a book that sounds like it should be depressing. It was recommended to me by a friend as a great time management book and I quickly realized he hadn't actually read it. The book was called 4000 Weeks and the title's the whole argument. If you live to roughly 80, you get about 4,000 weeks on this planet. That's it. 4,000. When you say it in years, it sounds like plenty. 80 years. When you say it in weeks, it stops sounding that way. And Burkeman's insight wasn't to make you anxious, it was meant to make you honest. Because most of us operate as if time is something we'll eventually catch up with, we'll figure out the right move later. We'll have the harder conversation. Next quarter we'll invest in our own development. When things slow down, we'll tackle that passion project when we get the time, we'll take that trip later. It's our own later list. But here's the catch. Other than perhaps us, the world around us doesn't slow down and the 4,000 weeks creep on. Now here's the application I want to make today. The one that sits at the heart of everything this show is about. Most of those weeks, especially in the middle third of your life, are going to be spent at work. Not thinking about work, not recovering from work, actually working — in meetings, in offices, on planes, on Zoom, on Teams. You're selling, analyzing, convincing, cajoling, whatever it is, the work you do. So the real question for most of us isn't just do I have a good job? But a better question: Am I giving my 4,000 weeks to the right work, in the right place, with the right people? Because that's what fit really comes down to. Whether your finite, non-refundable weeks are being converted into something that is both productive and meaningful. And that's where we're going today. Welcome to Fit Happens. I'm Jason Baumgarten and for over two decades I've been in the business of matching leaders to roles. As a senior partner at Spencer Stuart, I work with boards and CEOs across industries and every search I run is, at its core, a conversation about fit. And today we're talking about the unique relationship between fit and time. Let's get into it. I want to start with something I observed 30 years ago, early in my career that has never really left me. I was sitting in a room on one of my first succession planning conversations. I was watching a board work through a CEO transition plan. And these were serious, rigorous people. They had a lot of frameworks. They talked about competencies and culture and risk profiles. And it was genuinely a good facilitated process. But at a certain point, one of the board members said something almost in passing. He said, we want to make sure that the next CEO will be around for a decade, and we're asking the organization to invest a similar amount of time in them. And the room, well, it just moved on. It was parenthetical, kind of a throwaway comment. And it never really left my consciousness because that's what I'm really doing on every single executive transition I work on — I'm negotiating the use of someone's time, hundreds of them. And we talk about it almost entirely in abstractions — capability, culture, mandate, role — without ever saying plainly, this person is going to spend somewhere between 250 and 650 weeks of their life or more in this role. Those are not trivial stakes. And if you're doing the math, that's six and a quarter to sixteen and a quarter percent of your life in one job. Now, here's what makes time different than every other aspect of your career. Most things in a career are at least partially recoverable or changeable. You can rebuild a reputation if you had a setback. You can recover from a bad decision. You can retrain, re-credential, rebrand. There are very few real career obituaries. But you can't come back from time. The five years you spent in the wrong role, in the wrong culture, on problems that didn't matter to you or with people you just didn't like — those are gone. They don't sit in an account somewhere earning interest while you figure things out. They're just dissolved. We spend so much time negotiating compensation and advancement, but rarely, if honestly, fit. There's a nurse named Bronnie Ware who spent years in palliative care. She was sitting with people in their final weeks and she started writing down what they regretted. And it's sobering. Their top five regrets: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish I had let myself be happier. Most of those people spent their weeks on other people's agendas. And at the end they knew in a way it could never be undone. The leaders I work with are by absolutely every measure incredibly high functioning, super successful people. And some of them are quietly spending their best weeks in ways they wouldn't choose if they stopped and really looked. And the question isn't, how do I get more done? How do I become more successful? The question should be, what are you actually trading your weeks for? Now we live in this cultural fiction called work-life balance. It originated as part of the women's liberation movement in the UK in the 1970s and grew popular in the 1980s. And originally it was specifically around maternity leave and flexible schedules to balance childcare. It was specific and tactical. It was not a life goal. It was not a T-shirt. It was a practical need of literally fitting in leave. The metaphor, though, grew to imply two separate containers — work on one side, life on the other, and to somehow keep them in reasonable proportion. But if you look at where most people's waking hours actually go, certainly most of the people I work with, work isn't a container alongside life. Work is where your life happens. It's where your attention goes. It's where your identity gets reinforced or eroded. It's where most of your relationships live outside of your immediate family. It's where you spend more consecutive hours than anywhere else. And so that means fit isn't just a professional consideration, it's a life consideration. And on this show we talk about the different levels of fitness. Those aren't abstract dimensions. Each one can be applied in terms of how your time gets used. When you think about what you do with your weeks, are you working on problems that draw on your strengths, that energize you? Or are you constantly pushing yourself through work that leaves you depleted in ways you can't quite name? Who are you spending those weeks with? Does the team around you make you sharper, excited? Or do you spend your time managing around people, cleaning up after them, defending yourself from them or to them? How does your organization use your time? Either explicitly, if you have a leader — or if you are the leader, what do your stakeholders demand of you? Is it meeting-heavy theater, or focused execution and impact? Is there a permanent urgency due to controllable mishaps or a rhythm that respects deep thinking and actually tries to move the organization forward? Is it performative or real? What are you expected to prioritize? Are you given the room to work on things that really matter? Or are you always just tackling short-term noise? And it's worth noting that these things change. The role, the company, the people may not have changed, but you could have. You're always moving in three-dimensional chess with the role and the company and everything around you, which means you have to keep turning it around in your head. And when any of these dimensions is misaligned, the first thing you feel is not some abstract sense of misfit. The first thing you feel is a time problem. Your weeks fill up with things that shouldn't be there. You start saying things like, I don't have time for the work that actually matters, or I'm too busy, but I don't know on what. You start to frankly use busy as the adjective of your state as opposed to even productive. And you say things like, I don't know, my time disappears into things that don't feel like I should be doing. And you know, the reality is, for many roles, there's misfit. On paper, things are perfect. The title works, compensation is right, the industry is attractive, the people seem great, but the actual stuff of the job just isn't how you want to spend your weeks. So here's a question I want you to carry out of this segment. It's simple, but it's not actually easy. If I give this role the next 500 weeks of my life, what will I be doing on a random Thursday at 10am? Not some vision, but the random Thursday — the meeting that's on the calendar that you didn't really want to have, the thing that lands in your email that you can't really redirect — some portion of your week. And if you picture that Thursday and something kind of tightens in your chest, no title or compensation package is going to fix it, or certainly not for long. I was recently speaking with a candidate for a CEO role and he admitted to me that he had turned down an incredibly lucrative compensation package for a role about 18 months ago. And when I started asking about it, it was very clear that he'd be working for a founder that he really didn't respect. And that founder was going to dictate a lot of what he was going to spend his time on. And at the end of the day, the more he talked, the more I thought, this is mercenary pay, this is hazard pay — this is, hey, nobody else wants this job and so I'm going to put you in harm's way and pay you more. Well, he turned down the job and I asked him if he had any regrets. And in a moment of great enlightened observation, he said no. Because at the end of the day I'd have to be doing the job with them. And so again, those things don't fix the fit issue. So fit is that mechanism, the engine that converts your time into performance and meaning simultaneously. Organizations care about performance. They want results and reliability and returns on the investment they're making in a leader. And that's totally rational and legitimate. But leaders — people like you and me — we want something that overlaps with that, but it's not identical. Sure, we want to perform, but we also want the weeks to add up to something. We want to feel like we're moving towards a version of our lives that makes sense to us. We're not just busy and proud of how busy we are, but we're busy on purpose. We're having impact on people, on customers, on the world. Or maybe we simply want to provide for our families. That's why it's ultimately your agenda. But fit is what happens when those two agendas find each other. And when fit is strong, a few things happen at once. You're naturally drawn to the work that matters most in the role because it energizes you rather than depletes you. You create more value not through grinding, but through genuine alignment between what the role needs and what you're just fundamentally built for. And you end more weeks feeling like you used them well. There's a concept in organizational psychology called discretionary effort. The difference between what a person does because they're obliged to and what they do because they care. Years ago I was working with a very notable company to recruit a board member and a well-known founder — when describing what he most wanted in a board member, said, I want them to be generous. Well, this took us all by surprise because this founder was not known for being generous. So we asked him to explain that and he said, you know, when somebody's walking the dog or putting shampoo in their hair in the shower, I want them to be thinking about my problems and our company's problems, not something else that they have to think with. I want them to be generous with their thoughts. He was really tapping into this notion of discretionary effort. And it turns out the gap is enormous. It's the difference between how an employee works and how an owner works. It's the difference between somebody who just sort of occupies a role and somebody who's trying to thrive in it. And you can't mandate discretionary effort. Leaders can just create the conditions for it. In 1914, Henry Ford discovered his own version of this. He cut the working days at his factories from nine hours to eight and the six-day week to five days. And surprisingly, productivity went up, not down — up. His insight was that workers who felt their time was being used reasonably, who had enough time to be human, to rest and return with something left, produced more than workers who were burnt out and running on empty and frankly, resentful. Exhausted workers were not his most valuable asset. Workers who felt that their time was respected were. Now, there's a funny story from when I was at McKinsey and I think it's true that in the early days of McKinsey there was a certain uniform everyone had to wear. And at the time, bowler hats were part of the uniform. But apparently the firm believed that that was the job of the individual employee to purchase the bowler hat. Well, there's a famous story of a consultant who, when boarding a plane at Midway, got the gust of the propeller draft and his bowler hat flew away. Not able to run after it, he boarded the plane and promptly acquired a new bowler hat. When he turned in his expenses for that week or month, whatever it was, a note came back from accounting saying, sorry, the hat is your purchase, your requirement. Frustrated, he started saving all his receipts for some longer duration of time and then filed them in a box. He then wrapped the box and sent it to accounting with what sounds like it was hundreds of receipts. And on the very top was a very pleasant handwritten note that just said, good luck finding the bowler hat. And the principle of this is that organizations have so many ways to make it easier on people — to feel like they should deploy their discretionary effort, to use their 4,000 weeks, or whatever portion from 6 to 16% that they're using in this role at this time. But when they do things like not allow you to reimburse the thing they're telling you you need to have, they poke at that, they irritate it, they create friction and frustration. And so as a leader, it's really important to remember that even Henry Ford wanted people to be productive, not just at work longer. Now Ford was running factories, not knowledge organizations. But the principles scale. When leaders feel that the weeks they're giving to a role are being invested in something that feels worthy and important, something that draws on their real strengths and serves ends they believe in and frankly understand — they give more not because they're told to or mandated or required, but because the fit unlocks the energy that obligation never can. And even for very talented people, the opposite happens. You can have an incredibly high-potential leader who is simply miscast or cast in a role with so much friction that on paper they produce enough, they do what's asked, but underneath they don't feel like their weeks are well spent. They're spending time on the wrong things, in the wrong way, with the wrong people, at the wrong stages of their life. At first it shows up as disengagement and cynicism and maybe burnout, but eventually it's total derailment. They leave, they fail, or they just totally check out while occupying the seat. And sometimes it might look like a performance problem — or sometimes not — but at the end of the day, it's a weeks problem. You've only got so many of them. How are they using them? So Burkeman ends 4,000 Weeks with something I find both sobering and freeing. He argues that the real problem isn't that we don't have enough time — which I admit is a bit of a cop-out because we haven't figured out a way to have more — but it's that we haven't accepted that what we have is exactly as much time as we'll have, and that accepting the finitude — really accepting it, not just nodding at the concept and continuing to build a later list — but accepting it is what makes it possible to use your time well. When you stop pretending you'll eventually get to everything, you can start making real choices about what deserves the weeks you have. So here's the experiment I want you to run. And I mean really run it. Not just file it away under a good idea I heard on a podcast — take a blank piece of paper or whatever digital tool you use and draw a line down the middle. And on the left write "more." And on the right, write "less." Now look back at your calendar from the last two weeks — your actual calendar, not your job description or some other thing — and write what actually happened. Now, on the "more" side, write down three things that made you feel larger as a person. You swelled a little from it. And maybe it was a strategy conversation where you felt alive. Maybe it was developing someone on your team. Maybe it was just something that genuinely needed you. And under "less," write down a few things that made you feel smaller. Some moment of political theater, bureaucracy that didn't really serve anyone. Time you spent preparing for a meeting that either no one showed up for or you shouldn't have had to begin with. And don't overthink it. Your gut will lead you to some good conclusions. Now, if your weeks are mostly the shrinking activity, then no productivity system in the world is going to help you. You're just getting more efficient at spending your finite weeks in ways you wouldn't have chosen. But what I'd like you to do is pick one activity that you want to do less of and just work to reduce or eliminate it in the weeks ahead. Delegate it, renegotiate it, just decide you're not going to do it — and then pick one from the "more" activity to give more time, to spend a little bit more time. Maybe it's thinking time, which can sound like a luxury, or maybe it's some problem you've been meaning to think about, but it's on your later list. You're not going to redesign your career. You're not even going to redesign your role. But I'd like you to just try and tilt a couple of your weeks a few degrees. And when those tilts repeat, they compound. Now, in a future episode, we're going to look at all of this through a very specific and urgent lens. Because right now — not in five or ten years, not hypothetically, but right now — something is also happening to the composition of work that is going to change the fit question for almost every leader. And I want you to be ahead of it, not caught by it. I'm Jason Baumgarten, and this is Fit Happens. And thanks for spending a few of your very finite minutes with me today.