Burnout with Aneika and Anjuan Simmons

What is burnout? What does it look like in an individual, versus a team? What can you do to counter burnout?

What do you do if your new team is already suffering from burnout, before you’ve had a chance to build relationships with anyone?

In Episode 24, Professor Aneika Simmons (@aneika on Twitter) and engineering manager Anjuan Simmons (@anjuan on Twitter) talk about burnout from two different perspectives: academic research and hands-on management.

Show references:

Transcript

JENNIFER: Welcome to Storytime with Managers, a podcast by Cohere.

Hi, I’m Jennifer Tu and I’m here with Professor Aneika Simmons and Anjuan Simmons to talk about burnout. Can you tell us a little about yourselves?

ANEIKA: Yes. My name is Aneika Simmons. I’m a full professor in the College of Business in Sam Houston State University. I’ve been married to Anjuan Simmons for about 18 years now. We have three beautiful children.

ANJUAN: Yes. And I’m Anjuan. I’m an Engineering Manager at Help Scout. And as someone who’s managed many software development teams and never had one that did not suffer from burnout, I’m really excited about this topic and talking about it with you today, Jennifer.

JENNIFER: Awesome. Let’s jump right in then. What does burnout mean? I heard you say teams suffer from burnout. What is burnout? Can teams and individuals suffer from it? And what does that look like?

ANEIKA: Burnout can be experienced in any industry. I’m in academia. My husband’s in software engineering, technology, and so forth. Basically, burnout is a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. Stressors are the things that cause stress. Stress is what I feel. And there’s three dimensions to it.

Number one, it’s when a person is feeling completely exhausted. They’re totally consumed by their work. It’s kind of like when you come home from work, now we’re all working from home. But when you’re done working, you feel like there’s nothing left. Depersonalization, that’s the second dimension of this. And this is where you’re feeling cynical. You’re feeling impersonal. If you talk to a person, you start to think of them as just an object and maybe a barrier to what you need to get done. And then there’s a reduced sense of personal accomplishment.

ANJUAN: Yes, Jennifer. We like to summarize burnout with a working definition, just because we talk about this with a lot of people and just to make sure that we all can get what this is. And our working definition is the ongoing feeling that today’s resources aren’t enough to meet tomorrow’s demands.

ANEIKA: And when you ask, can individuals and teams feel it? Yes. It can be at an individual level. It can be at a team level. It can even be at a departmental level where burnout is showing its face.

JENNIFER: That was really helpful. Let’s start with what happens at the individual level. If you’re managing a team, how can you tell when a single individual is burning out on a team and no one else is burning out?

ANJUAN: This is where I use the old saying “dig your well before you’re thirsty”. It’s really important to build real, meaningful relationships with the people who you work with. And by doing that, you get a sense of what is their baseline profile, what is normal for this person? And by being in tune with your team, you’ll be well positioned to detect any discorded notes in their behavior.

I once talked to a friend and they were telling me about the way that government agents are trained to detect: is this money counterfeit? And you might think that, “Well, they’re just going to study all the different fake money out there.” That’s actually not true because there are almost infinite ways to fake currency. And so, what they do is that they study real money. They become very intimately familiar with real money, and then that makes it really easy to spot fake money. And it’s the same way with teams. By becoming deeply aware of my teams and who they are, I can easily detect when they’re acting differently and see if they’re exhibiting the symptoms of burnout. So, that is the best way at the individual level to understand, is this person going through burnout, and to begin to address that issue?

JENNIFER: Are there any signs that I should be looking for, like, maybe I feel like someone is acting a little bit differently, but I can’t quite put my finger on it?

ANEIKA: One of the things about burnout, remember, there’s cynicism and then there’s this feeling that they’re not getting value or meaning out of their work. So, I think one of the things that we can kind of take a look at is if the things that used to bring value and meaning in a person and you’ve known them, and that’s why when anyone talks about digging the well before cultivating those relationships, then you would be able to notice that. But if it comes to a point where now the things that used to bring value no longer bring value and meaning to them, that might be a sign.

JENNIFER: What do you do when that happens? You noticed that someone isn’t as happy or as satisfied as they used to be. What, as a manager, should be your first step?

ANJUAN: Let me give you an example of how this happened in my experience. A couple of years ago, I was at a different company than Help Scout. And I had a team member who just suddenly began changing her behavior. She went from someone who was always early to every meeting to always being late. And her energy level went from being very high to being extremely low. And all this happened in a short period of time. Now, I never tried to diagnose people on my team, so I didn’t say, “Hey, you seem burned out,” because I’m not a medical doctor. But over the course of several one-on-ones, I just shared my observations with this person. So that’s the first thing. Just say, “I’ve observed these things. What do you think is going on?” And by having these conversations with her, I realized she had been struggling with the pressure of upcoming release that we were all working to get out. But she also had a few things happening in her personal life that were causing her stress. Now, unlike Helps Scout where I work now, this company was not a remote company. We all worked in this same office. So, I was able to take my observations, take what she shared with me in our one-on-ones, and then go to my management structure and say, “Hey, I really need my team to be able to work from home every Friday.” Now, I did not say I need her to work from home each Friday because I didn’t want to compromise her privacy. But I think the entire team needs this. And also in our last Sprint Retrospective, that came up as an action that the team had won it. So I was able to take what I thought would help her and the feedback from my team and make it happen. And so, my team was able to get the option to work from home, which allowed her to get more time to tend to her personal life. And I saw her go back to her normal self over those succeeding weeks. And that was one way of seeing an individual in my team exhibit the signs of burnout, gather information, share that information with her and then work with her to come up with a solution.

JENNIFER: I really like that. So, when you experience a single individual experiencing burnout, look for ways to change the environment for everyone in a way that’s good for everyone and particularly good for the person who is suffering the most.

ANJUAN: Absolutely. And not only the way that she was behaving change, but my entire team, we got more done. Our velocity went up. And by helping one member of my team with something that was hindering her, I was able to bring improvements to the entire team.

JENNIFER: One thing I’m thinking about is sometimes you’ll see someone’s behavior change. And is there a difference between when someone is experiencing burnout and when someone might be looking for a new job?

ANEIKA: Yeah, that’s really a good question. First, we just want to say that burnout and wanted to change jobs are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There are a number of factors that can masquerade as burnout. Right now, we all know that we’re dealing with a virus, this Covid-19. And one thing that makes viruses so deadly is their ability to wrap themselves in the membrane of our cells to mask their presence from our body’s defenses. So similarly, people can subconsciously and unknowingly be dealing with burnout. And so, what is the difference between being burned out and someone wanting to leave their job? We need to think about the construct of engagement, because sometimes a lot of people think that engagement is the opposite of being burned out. So, if someone is engaged or super engaged, actually the research by the University of Cambridge says that, that person may really be susceptible to burnout. So what we need to look at is if the person is saying, “This job that I’m doing, I used to get purpose out of it. I feel like I was being self-actualized here. I’m not getting that anymore,” then perhaps that someone is just looking to change careers. And I did that. I used to be an IT consultant and it just wasn’t – I wasn’t burned out. It’s just who I was, my best self, my gifts, my skills, I just didn’t feel like that they were being used to the fullest, so I wanted to change jobs, whereas our careers. But when someone is burned out, there’s this high level of cynicism, depersonalization, lack of meaning. There’s all of these things that are going on that are kind of underlying. So that’s again, where a manager or a supervisor really has to have that cultivated relationship with their teams and with their individuals so they can really be able to discern what is happening here.

But of course, none of that can [inaudible] someone’s self competency. So we have to be competent of ourselves and know where we are and then hopefully work in an environment where there’s psychological safety, where I feel comfortable sharing with my manager or with my partner. I remember when I decided to go get my PhD, I went and I spoke to the partner of the firm. But this was someone that I had built a relationship with and he was very, very supportive as I made that transition. So, I think intention. How do you know it’s the intention of the matter of why they’re doing what they’re doing? That would be the difference.

JENNIFER: Got it. That’s really helpful. So, look for the intention and look for those three signs. It was depersonification, and I forget the other two already.

ANEIKA: Cynicism and lack of meaning.

JENNIFER: Got it. And so look for those three signs as well.

ANJUAN: Yup. And it’s depersonalization, is the first one.

JENNIFER: Got it. Thank you.

ANJUAN: You’re welcome.

JENNIFER: All right. So that’s what we do when it’s a single person. What about when it’s your entire team suffering? What are the things that we’re looking for to realize it’s the whole team, and what do we do from there?

ANEIKA: I think one thing that really comes to mind that Anjuan and I have been talking about, Maslow’s Hierarchy came out in the 1940’s. But we really believe that that is playing a huge role now. And remember, Maslow’s Hierarchy had those five levels. Most of us studied it in school where you had physiological at the bottom, then security, then affiliation, esteem, and self-actualization. And we’ve really taken a hard slide down where people were before, all this started thinking about, “How can I be self-actualized?” Or, “Where can I go where I can be respected for my skills?” But now, we’re at that physiological level where worst worried about the air we’re breathing when we go outside is – Tyson put out an article today that our food supply chain is in trouble. So we’re down at those lower levels. So really, it is most probable that it is at a team level that we’re dealing with burnout at this point.

And so, again, we need to have that environment that’s been cultivated with empathy, where people feel like they can share their weaknesses and they can be vulnerable here, and they can admit their struggles during this challenging time. And maybe management can come in and say, “Hey, we need to all make sure that we are practicing self-care.” Sometimes that’s something that is said, but it’s not something that’s implemented. So I know some companies are saying, “Hey, we used to all log in or come in Monday through Friday. Now let’s just come in Monday through Thursday.” Or, “We need to really make sure we have a hard stop from 6 to 9. We want to make sure that you all are spending time with your family.” So I think at a team level, it’s something that is more pervasive right now with what we’re dealing with with Covid.

JENNIFER: What do you do in this kind of situation, not just with Covid, but in general, if whatever is stressing your team is completely out of your control? What can you do to decrease the intensity of burnout for your team?

ANJUAN: One thing that we talk about and believe is that relationships lubricate stress. We’re all grinding in the gears of stress, especially right now with this global pandemic. But there’s also stress just in the everyday work of building software. It’s just a very stressful thing. There’s so many unknowns. There are deadlines that always seem to loom. And so, on top of the global stress, there’s stress inside our companies. And so, we really advise people to lean in to relationships, heavily invest in relationships. And even when things aren’t in your control, when there are all these external factors that are putting stress on your team which increases the chance that they may suffer burnout, it’s really important that we take time for each other.

I would say that there are a couple of simple practices. At Help Scout, we believe in a principle called Fika. Fika is a Swedish word that basically means to take a break, grab a nice warm beverage, maybe something tasty, and then meet with each other. It’s basically a way to spend time with each other doing something that you both enjoy. And so, when my teams are going through burnout, I help them and say, “Hey, maybe we should do in their group fika or maybe each person that’s on our team could fika together.” And then that’s a way for us to really draw strength from each other when there are things that aren’t in our control. And as an engineering manager, if I am helping my team to invest in their relationships, then I’m also buying time for myself to work with management to find some way. And often those external factors that aren’t in the control of my team or myself, those usually can be solved by having conversations with the people outside the team. And so, once I empower my team to lean in to each other and to stay together while we’re going through stress, then I’m able to buy time to do what I can do to try to mitigate some of those external factors. If not remove them, at least soften their impact.

JENNIFER: I like this idea of fika and introducing it as a habit for the entire team. What do you do when your team isn’t yet in that habit and you’re realizing everyone is burned out or experiencing burnout and you just learned that the best thing to do is to establish relationships. I know a lot of teams can be kind of resistant to taking time away from what they perceive as the work that will reduce their stress. So, how do you encourage that relationship building?

ANEIKA: Basically, emotional intelligence. Dr. Daniel Goleman, he is the person who presented this conceptual work. Emotional intelligence really means that I’m able to read my emotions and how they impact other people. The team is able to read their emotions and how they impact the greater group. And then as an individual that is trying to make sure that a team feels like, “You know what, we’re really burned out here, and I don’t want to step away from this work, because I think that the source of my burnout is this work.” I think that a great manager or a supervisor will be able to say, “Okay, I know that we have all this work to do, but I’m going to give you permission to engage in self-care.” I think a manager or a leader that we can all look to that does this really well is somebody like Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett does not overschedule his people. Warren Buffett gives them the opportunity to take risks and not feel that they’re going to be totally punished if they make a mistake or punished if they take a break or punished if they take an opportunity for self-care.

So, I really believe that emotional intelligence and taking the time to really refine those skills, I think, is important. In fact, the research says that emotional intelligence actually is 50% more important than just IQ alone. Basically, people refer to emotional intelligence as EQ and then cognitive intelligence as IQ. So, a manager or a supervisor that is taking the time to focus on that, I think, would be able to know when and how to deal with the nuances of a team that’s managing burnout.

ANJUAN: Yes. And I love giving a talk – by the way, Aneika and I do a talk on burnout that we’ve really enjoyed giving. And I just love being on stage with her and on podcasts because she has all this great lofty academic theory and rigor. And I have like Wikipedia and like my hard knock life. So, I would say that in addition to all the great things that she just said, that when you have a team that is burned out or at least stressed out and you don’t have the time to build those relationships, to dig your well before you’re thirsty, that’s where as an agile engineering manager, I’m able to use the agile principle of simplicity.

And that’s the idea that the best work is often the work that you don’t do. The code you don’t write has no bugs and runs really fast. And so you really have to understand, “Okay, my team is really stressed out. Some of them are burned out. I need to make sure that I simplify our workload.” And so as the engineering manager, taking the opportunity to say, “Look, I’m going to really superfly our sprint backlog and we’re just going to focus on a few things. I know our velocity says that we can do these 10 things. We’re just going to do three things.” And then I’m able to ideally use my own personal capital with my management to say, “Look, my team’s running really hot. Here are my observations. Here are the risks if we don’t do something to slow things down.” And then I can use that to say, “We’re going to just simplify things for everyone. Here are the one or two or three things that we’re going to do for the next couple of sprints.” And then help the team to understand that we’re getting some leeway. We’re getting some slack in our schedule in order to make sure that we can have time to recover, because I found that often teams that are stressed out and burned out, if you can remove the pressure of the work. And that’s often challenging because we’re obviously all paid to create outcomes. But by making the case to my management that we’ll get more longer term benefits, if we slow down now, then we’ll be able to go faster later while I help tend to the health of my team.

JENNIFER: I like this idea of using agile and changing your sprint to adapt to what your team needs. How do you know if you need to do it for one sprint or for more sprints? And what do you do if you realize you’ve gone for a sprint? People are feeling a little bit better, but they’re still not feeling too great.

ANJUAN: One great thing about working agile is the retrospective, and that’s a practice that at the end of every sprint, we examine ourselves. So, the sprint demo is when we take the work that we’ve done and we share it. We kind of examine our work. The retrospective is when we examine ourselves. And that is just such a critical time to dig into the team and see what they’re talking about, what head space are the individual members of my team in. And that’s when, as the engineering manager, you have the benefit of doing those tests. To just getting those data points and trying to understand where people are. Having the practice of the retro, then you’re able to get the data to see, “Okay. Things seem better. We’ve gone a sprint. The things that I’m hearing now indicate that things are better.” And then, “Okay, let’s go to another sprint.” And the, “Okay. Things seem even better.” So the retro feedback I’m getting from my team supports that this is working.

Now, if you continue to not have any results, or if people are still burned out, that’s when you got to lean into the one-on-ones. So as a team, we’re doing these sprints. We’re having a reduce sprint backlog. I see some improvements. That’s when you really have to go into the one-on-ones and figure out what can I do for the people that are still having a hard time to really meet those needs. And I love – Nicole Sanchez did a great job about talking about one-on-ones, [inaudible] call back and say, “You go to the archives of this show and look that up.” But one-on-ones are such a rich way to get to those really deep issues.

JENNIFER: I like this approach. It sounds like what you’re saying is you want to try to change the environment for the team and then use the team retros to get a sense for how the team is feeling. And then in the situations in which it’s not a big enough change, try to amp up your relationships. So that way, you’re able to use that relationship lubrication to get the team through with that combined, changing the environment a little bit so that way, everyone can get through together.

ANEIKA: Absolutely. You have to have those relationships strong before you address those challenges, for sure.

JENNIFER: All right. So we’ve got all of those together. What about what you need to be doing on the agile side with managing up to your own management level?

ANJUAN: Yes. One great thing about agile software development, and I’ve been doing it for many years and I’m absolutely a fan of the practices and the principles of the agile software manifesto. One great thing about having a team that you are truly engaged with and going through agile software development is that you have an empirical track record. Every sprint, we say what we’re going to do. We can see what we got done. And then we can report back to management, “This is what we got done.” We had the sprint demos, which I found that in my career that the best way to show progress is working software. So we do two-week sprints like most people do. And by having those demos every two weeks, you’re showing to management, “Look, we’re getting things done.” And if you have a track record of getting things done, then you are able to get capital as the engineering manager that you can spend on the health of the team, so that when you do have a challenge that you have to make the case upward that the team needs to slow down. Then if you develop that track record of having several sprint demos where you’re showing them, “This is what we were asked to do. This is what we delivered,” then I found in my experience, that is the best way to get leeway. That’s the best way to get space, to say we need to do things to address what’s happening with the teams with regards to either stress or with burnout.

And so, it’s important that you lead into those agile practices and build up that track record and then realize that by delivering software, you’re able to deliver value not just to customers, but back to your team and really investing in what’s best for them.

JENNIFER: I like the idea of using demos to reinforce how well your team is doing. What do you do when your team maybe has some kind of external deadline on top of everything? So, the company has made a commitment to ship the product or maybe you have to remove some external dependency because that API is going away. How do you balance that with changing your sprints?

ANJUAN: The great thing about agile development is that it’s really built for change, it’s built for flexibility. And one, the ideal to that last example is that if you have an API team that you’re dependent upon, then you need to have an API developer on your team to make it truly cross-functional. So I would say that one thing that is important to do is that all of the skills that you need, need to be present in your team. And that’s the best way to make sure you have a healthy, agile software development team, that you don’t have to do some work and then throw it to the other team in order to get it done. So that’s one thing.

When you have a looming deadline and let’s say that they need to either add something to the product backlog or take it off, then that’s a conversation with your product owner or product lead based on what your company calls that role. And that’s a discussion that you have. And the ideal is that you do have a good relationship with that person and that you’re able to again, use that track record to say, “Okay, we’ve delivered eight sprints of value. You’re saying that you want to change this. Well, we know our velocity over those few sprints, or at least the average velocity over the last three. Then this is the impact that will happen to that outcome. This is the impact it will have to what we think will be the ultimate deadline for getting this done.

Now, if your team is going through, let’s say, stress or burnout, then part of velocity is not a promise to perform, but it’s something that you can say that we’ve measured, that we can adjust. And there are times that I’ve reduced the expected velocity of my team based on what’s going on with my team and say, “Look, we’ve done –” just to throw out some number, “We’ve done 33 points roughly every sprint for the past three sprints. But I’m talking to my team. We’re getting feedback from the sprint retrospective. And my one-on-ones, this is what I’m hearing.” And then adjusting the reality of future sprints to align with the reality of your team.

JENNIFER: I like that.

ANJUAN: Thank you.

JENNIFER: One last question for me. What do you do when you are new to a team, new an organization and you drop yourself in and realize that your new team, who you have new existing relationships with, is experiencing burnout?

ANEIKA: This actually goes to some of the research on teams. There are stages of teams that basically are global. And they are you join a team, as you said, and you don’t know anyone that’s forming, and then you go to storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. At the storming level, I think it’s when you would be able to work through these issues of burnout. What was your question again, specifically about the team?

JENNIFER: What do you do if you’re brand new and you realize the team is experiencing burnout? What are the options ahead of you since you don’t have existing relationships?

ANEIKA: Right, exactly. So then the forming stage, that’s where everyone is still being polite. So we’re saying that someone kind of jumps in at that storming stage and you realize, “Wow, maybe I’m in over my head.” So once again, I think in that situation, culture and climate may play a big world. What is the culture of the organization? Is the culture of the department or the team such that I can actually share what I’m actually feeling or discerning and maybe be able to have honest dialogue to work through those things? And then, of course, I would need to make sure that I’m equipping myself to make sure that I am managing these challenges above and beyond the tasks that I’m being asked to do, but also the fact that the climate is one that is filled or infiltrated with stress. So culture is something that is lengthier where climate is something that maybe pertinent to something. So maybe we’re dealing with a production issue. Maybe we’re dealing with some kind of external financial situation that’s causing people to be more burned out. So what can I do? I can make sure that my arsenal is on firm ground, that I’m being honest with the people that are around me and that I can make sure that I’m in tune so that when it’s time for me to maybe take some of that load from my team members, I’m able to do so.

ANJUAN: One thing I will add and I love how Aneika really use Tuckman’s Ladder, that’s what that’s called, that teams go through those stages. And correct, you go to forming, then you go to storming. And that just shows that once the team gets together, they immediately usually have issues with performance, because we just came here, we’re getting to know each other. As an engineering manager, I’ve always known that when a new person joins a team, you change the team and you go back to the storming stage. Even if you go on to performing, you go back to some degree to storming. In your example, when you are a new person that’s joined a team that’s burned out, you’ve just joined a team that’s going through storming. Some of the best things that you can do, in addition to what my wife just said, is to begin to model healthy behaviors. You have to make sure that you’re tending to your physical health. You have to make sure that you’re able to get your workload focused. You have to make sure that you start building those [sordid] relationships with members of your team because relationships lubricate stress. And by beginning to model that, you hope that other people will see how you work and begin to echo back that behavior to you.

And also, if you can, try to find someone, if everyone that’s on your team is burned out, hopefully someone in maybe another department, maybe marketing or sales that you can also partner with, then have someone that you can talk to about what you’re going through. And by doing that, you can (1) model better burn out resistance practices, but also find someone who’s a like-minded person that you know that you’re not in it alone.

JENNIFER: Got it. So if you don’t have relationships, get yourself relationships as fast as you can.

ANJUAN: Exactly.

ANEIKA: Absolutely.

ANJUAN: And try to become a model for what we call a burnout resistant person is. Start a relationship, focus work, healthy body.

ANEIKA: Basically, one of the principles that Anjuan and I believe is that healthy teams make healthy code. And you want to make sure that you’re staying as healthy as you possibly can by having that balance, that balance with the relationship, balance with your work life situation. Just making sure that you are staying focused on your priorities and what’s important and not a way that is overwhelming or exhausting.

JENNIFER: I think that this might be a great place to end our episode. What do you think? Any other words of advice you want to give to our listeners?

ANEIKA: I was just going to share that Anjuan and I first gave this talk in April 2019, and there was no medical diagnosis for burnout then. But back in May of that year, last year, the World Health Organization reclassified burnout as a legitimate diagnosis. And it could be because about 8% of our national health care spending is on stress, and that is about $190 billion. So this is a real issue. It’s something that we really need to be mindful of and we need to use the resources that are available to us to make sure that we are not a part of that population, which they say, the statistics show, a [Gallup poll], that about 2/3 of people deal with burnout at some point in their career. And we just want to make sure that people are taking those walks, connecting with family and friends, protecting their mental health, engaging in mindfulness, so that this is not something that overwhelms us at an individual level, a team level, or even at an organizational level.

ANJUAN: Absolutely. And Jennifer, I want to close by saying thank you so much for having us. I know we’re the first couple you’ve had on your podcast. And so, thank you for taking that risk to get the audio together and to manage two people talking.

ANEIKA: Yes, thank you.

JENNIFER: This was amazing. I can’t imagine having had this talk without having those two perspectives at the same time now.

ANJUAN: Well, thank you so much. I just want to re-emphasize what we’ve been saying. Healthy teams build healthy code. And as engineering managers, we are really well positioned to lean into the health of our teams. When you think about it, the individual people on our team often are not able and not empowered to have the leverage to tend to the health of the team. And then you have people who are upper management. My role typically reports up to VPEs and CTOs and CEOs. And those people are usually well intentioned, but they’re trying to tackle the bigger propositions. So, it’s really important that as engineering managers to know that we are the people that are really there to solve burnout problems. And I really hope that as engineering managers that we take that responsibility seriously and knowing that we’re one of the few people that can truly change how people on our teams are responding to burnout. So, I just really hope that we all lean into the health of our teams, especially during these times when we’re all feeling vulnerable.

JENNIFER: That’s a beautiful way of putting it. If anyone wants to continue this conversation, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

ANEIKA: They can reach me at @aneika on Twitter or on LinkedIn, Aneika Simmons.

ANJUAN: And I’m @anjuan on Twitter and everywhere else. I’m very lucky to be able to get the first Anjuan on most platforms. So if you Google me, then you’ll find me.

JENNIFER: All right. Thanks so much, you too.

ANJUAN: Thank you, Jennifer.

ANEIKA: Thank you.

JENNIFER: Thanks for listening to Storytime of Managers by Cohere. I’m Jennifer Tu. Our theme music is by Kevin MacLeod, and we are edited by Mandy Moore and the Dev Rep’s crew.

If you like this episode, please think about leaving us a review on your favorite podcast listening platform. This can make a really big difference in helping other people find and start listening to Storytime with Managers. Thanks so much.