Your Employees Don’t Need Another Pizza Party | EP 16

0:00 Your employees don't need another pizza party. They don't need another mandatory team-building exercise. They don't need another employee appreciation email written by somebody who barely knows their name, and they definitely don't need a slice of pepperoni pizza because they've been working short-staffed for six months. You know what they need? Clear expectations, good managers, the tools to do their jobs, recognition when they actually earn it, accountability when somebody isn't pulling their weight, and sometimes they just need you to leave them the hell alone and let them work.

0:39 Somewhere along the way, corporate America started confusing employee engagement with employee entertainment, and I think we've got it backwards. Every result has a price. Every goal requires a choice. Comfort keeps you where you are. Discipline takes you where you want to go. Welcome to Discipline Over Comfort with Bob Terrio, real-world conversations on leadership, business, marketing, and execution.

1:05 Welcome to the Discipline Over Comfort podcast. I'm Bob Terrio, and today I wanna talk to you about pizza. Well, not really. I wanna talk about leadership, because the pizza party has become almost a punchline in corporate America today. Employee morale is down, order pizza. Employee, the em- everybody worked late, so order pizza. The team hit a huge goal. You guessed it, pizza. The team missed a huge goal, but everybody worked really hard. Apparently, pizza. Now, before somebody gets angry with me, I like pizza, specifically cauliflower pizza.

1:42 I'm not anti-pizza. I'm not anti-company party. I'm not against celebrating people. Actually, I think companies should celebrate their people more. But here's the distinction: A pizza party is great when you're celebrating a healthy culture. A pizza party is insulting when you're using it to compensate for a broken one, and that's what I wanna talk about today. Because I think we spent years trying to figure out how to make employees happier, when maybe we should have been asking a completely different question.

2:15 How do we create an environment where good people can do great work? Those are not necessarily the same thing. So here's the engagement problem. There's a reason this subject caught my attention. I started looking at some of the conversations employees are having online, and one comment really stood out to me. Somebody, somebody basically said, "I don't want more engagement with my coworkers. I wanna do my job, and I want them to do theirs." That's interesting, because companies spend an enormous amount of time talking about engagement, employee engagement, culture initiatives, team building, employee appreciation, more communication, more meetings, more check-ins, more collaboration.

2:58 And sometimes I wonder, what if some employees don't need more from us? What if they actually need less? Recent workplace research backs up at least part of that frustration. Korn Ferry reported that 62% of employees in its 2026 workforce survey said their workloads had increased significantly over the previous two years. But here's a number that really caught my attention. 45% said they were too busy to deliver meaningful results that actually contribute to growth. Think about that. Too busy to produce meaningful results?

3:33 That should bother every leader listening to this right now, because we've somehow created workplaces where people can spend an entire day working and still not accomplish the work that actually matters. And then what we do, we schedule another meeting to figure out why productivity is down. You can't make this stuff up. Maybe we're solving the wrong problem. Here's my hot take. I don't think your job as a leader is to make your employees happy. I know. That sentence probably just made somebody in HR uncomfortable, but stay with me.

4:07 I'm not saying employee happiness doesn't matter. Of course it matters. People spend a huge percentage of their lives at work. Nobody wants to spend that time miserable. And if your employees hate coming to work every day, you absolutely have a problem. What I'm saying is that happiness cannot be the objective of leadership, because happiness is personal. It changes, and sometimes doing meaningful work isn't particularly comfortable. Sometimes there are deadlines. Sometimes somebody has to tell you that your work isn't good enough.

4:39 Sometimes you have to change. Sometimes you have to learn something you don't wanna learn. Sometimes you have to work with someone you don't particularly like, and sometimes work is work. Your responsibility as a leader isn't to guarantee that every employee feels happy every hour of every day. Your responsibility is to create an environment where people are treated fairly, where expectations are clear, where performance matters, where good work is recognized, where problems are addressed, and where talented people have an opportunity to succeed.

5:14 That's leadership. I've learned this the hard way. I've been working for a long time. I've been an employee. I've owned a business. I've managed people. I've worked with business owners and CEOs, and today I'm an executive inside a company. So I've seen leadership from just about every angle, and I've made mistakes managing people too. There was a time when I probably thought being a good manager meant being more involved, checking more, following up more, making sure people knew I was paying attention.

5:41 But experience teaches you something. The best people I've ever worked with rarely needed me to motivate them. They were already motivated. They wanted to do good work. They wanted to succeed. They wanted responsibility. They wanted to know what winning actually looked like, and then they wanted the opportunity to go do it, which led me to a leadership lesson I wish I understood earlier. Great employees don't always need you to motivate them. Sometimes they just need you to stop demotivating them.

6:13 That because leaders demotivate good employees all the time without realizing it. Micromanaging them, changing priorities every three days, making them sit through meetings that have nothing to do with their work, not giving them the resources they need, failing to make decisions, taking credit when things go well, blaming the team when things go badly, and maybe the worst one, allowing poor performers to get away with things your best people would never be able to get away with. Your best employee is watching your worst employee.

6:46 I want to spend a minute on this because I think it's one of the most overlooked parts of company culture. Your best employee notices when your worst employee gets away with everything, especially if they're family or related to you. They notice. They know who isn't carrying their weight. They know who misses deadlines. They know who creates all the drama. They know who constantly has an excuse. They know who everybody else has to cover for, and they definitely know when management knows and refuses to do anything about it.

7:20 Now, think about the message that sends. You have one employee working hard, taking ownership, solving problems, maybe staying late occasionally, maybe doing the things that aren't even technically part of their job because they care about the result, and sitting five desks away is someone doing the bare minimum, or worse, working remotely from another city, and both of them get treated exactly the same. Then Employee Appreciation Day rolls around and everybody gets pizza. How do you think your best employee feels?

7:52 That isn't appreciation. That can actually feel like the exact opposite. Because one of the fastest ways to lose a great employee is to continually ask them to compensate for a poor one. Accountability is part of culture. Standards are part of culture. Fairness is part of culture. And sometimes protecting your best people means having an uncomfortable conversation with somebody who isn't meeting the standard. That conversation isn't fun, which is exactly why weak leaders avoid it. Here's another thing I think companies get wrong.

8:28 Your perks are not your culture. Free lunch isn't culture. Casual Friday isn't culture. A Christmas party isn't culture. A company picnic isn't culture. A ping pong table isn't culture. A happy hour isn't culture, especially if you're forced to participate. And no, pizza isn't culture. All of those things can be expressions of a healthy culture. There's nothing wrong with them, but they cannot create one because culture is what happens when nobody is performing for leadership. Want to know what your culture really is?

9:03 Watch what happens when the boss leaves the room. Do people still do the right thing? Do they solve problems? Do they help each other? Do they take ownership? Do they communicate? Do they tell the truth when something goes wrong? Do they hold themselves to the standard even when nobody is watching? Or does everything stop until somebody with a title comes back into the room? That's culture. Culture isn't what you write on the wall. It's what people tolerate in the hallway, and that includes leadership.

9:34 If the company says accountability is a value, but executives aren't accountable, that's your culture. If the company says communication matters, but leadership doesn't communicate, that's your culture. If the company says people come first, but employees only hear from leadership when something goes wrong, that's your culture. Everybody pays much more attention to what leaders do than what leaders say. Always have, always will. Managers think they're doing more. There was another piece of research that really caught my attention.

10:05 The American Management Association recently found a pretty significant disconnect between managers and employees. Sixty-two percent of managers said their engagement with employees had increased during the previous year, but only twenty-nine percent of their employees said their manager's engagement had increased. That's a pretty big gap. Managers are saying, "I'm doing more." Employees are saying, "Really?" And I think there's an important lesson here. More management activity doesn't automatically equal better management.

10:37 More check-ins, more emails, more meetings, more team messages, more Slack messages, more dashboards, more status reports. None of those things automatically create better leadership. Sometimes they just create noise. One of the hardest things for a manager to learn is when not to manage. If somebody is performing, if they understand the objective, if they communicate, if they consistently deliver, why are you constantly standing over their shoulder? Some managers need to feel needed. Great employees usually need the exact opposite.

11:11 They need trust. Clarity is better than motivation. If I can replace a lot of corporate motivation programs with one thing, I choose clarity. What exactly do you expect from me? What does success look like? What matters most? What can I decide by myself? When do you want me to involve you? How will my performance be measured? Where is the company going, and how does what I'm doing contribute to that? Answer those questions clearly, and you'd probably solve a lot of what companies call an engagement problem.

11:44 Because uncertainty is very exhausting. Trying to read your manager's mind is exhausting. Having priorities constantly changing is exhausting. Not knowing whether you're doing a good job is exhausting. People shouldn't need a decoder ring to figure out whether they're succeeding at work. Tell them what winning looks like. Give them the tools. Coach them when they need coaching. Hold them accountable. Recognize them when they earn it, and then get out of the way. But employees have responsibilities too.

12:17 Now, I know exactly what happens with conversations like this online. Somebody takes the first half of the argument and turns it into, "Management is always wrong. Employees are always victims." No. What I'm saying is leadership has responsibilities, and employees have responsibilities, too. You have to show up, you have to communicate, you have to perform, you have to be accountable, you have to learn. You have to adapt, and you have to understand that your employee hired you to produce something of value.

12:51 Your company does not owe you a daily dopamine hit. Your manager is not your cruise director. Work does not have to entertain you every minute of the day. Sometimes work is difficult. Sometimes it's repetitive. Sometimes you're gonna get feedback you don't like. Sometimes someone else gets the promotion. Sometimes the answer is simply no. And sometimes the problem isn't the culture. Sometimes you need to get better. That matters, too, because healthy culture requires standards in both directions.

13:25 Leadership has to earn trust. Employees have to earn trust. Leadership needs accountability. Employees need accountability. It's not management versus employees. It's adults working together toward a common objective. So what do good employees actually need? After decades of working with people, I keep coming back to a pretty simple list: clarity, trust, fairness, resources, opportunity, recognition, and accountability, respect. Notice what isn't on that list? Pizza. Again, buy the pizza, have the party, celebrate the win, take your team out, laugh together, build relationships.

14:07 Those things absolutely do matter, but they work because there's already something underneath them: trust. If people trust leadership, a pizza party feels like a celebration. If they don't trust leadership, it can feel like a bribe. That's the difference, and you cannot buy trust for $14.99 plus delivery. Here's the question I'd ask leaders. If morale is bad inside your company, before you create another employee engagement initiative, ask why. Are people overloaded? Are ex- are expectations unclear?

14:42 Are managers inconsistent? Are your best employees carrying poor performers? Do people have the tools they need? Are meetings consuming the time people need to actually work? Do employees understand how their work matters? Are good people being recognized? Are bad behaviors being tolerated? Because if you don't understand the actual problem, your solution becomes theater, and that's what bothers me about some corporate culture programs. They're visible. They're easy. They're, uh, photographable.

15:14 You can put the pizza party on LinkedIn. You can take pictures at the company picnic. You can post about Employee Appreciation Day. But nobody posts a picture of the difficult conversation a manager finally had with an underperforming employee, especially family. Nobody takes a selfie when a leader admits, "I screwed this up." Nobody posts balloons when a manager removes pointless meetings from everyone's calendar. But those decisions may do more for culture than the party ever will. Discipline over comfort, and this is where the whole conversation comes back to the name of this show.

15:52 Comfortable leadership is ordering the pizza. Disciplined leadership is having the conversation you've been avoiding. Comfort is scheduling another team-building exercise. Discipline is dealing with the manager everybody knows who is toxic. Comfort is sending an employee appreciation email. Discipline is actually knowing who deserves appreciation and telling them specifically why. Comfort is talking about accountability. Discipline is holding your high performers accountable, too. Comfort is talking about culture.

16:26 Discipline is building one, and building culture isn't glamorous. It's hundreds of small decisions. Who gets promoted, what behavior gets rewarded, what behavior gets corrected, who gets listened to, who gets tolerated, whether leaders keep their promises, whether employees keep theirs. That's culture, not the poster, not the slogan, not the company picnic, and definitely not the pizza. One last thought. I wanna leave you with this. If you're leading people, your job isn't to make every day comfortable.

16:59 Your job is to build an environment where people know what's expected, where they have what they need, where great work matters, where poor performance is addressed, where people are treated like adults, and where trust goes both ways. Then celebrate the hell out of them. Order the pizza, buy the cake, have the party, take the team out. Seriously, everybody likes pizza. But don't confuse feeding your employees with leading them. If this episode made you think or maybe made you a little uncomfortable, send it to a manager, business owner, employee, or coworker who needs to hear it.

17:36 And I wanna hear from you in the comments. What matters more to you at work: perks or leadership? And what's one thing a company has done that actually made you feel valued? Not entertained, valued. Those are two very different things. Subscribe to the Discipline Over Comfort podcast here on YouTube. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're not already subscribed to the Discipline Over Comfort newsletter, I'll put the link in the description, too.

18:07 Until next time, lead with clarity, hold the standard, recognize the people who earn it, and if you wanna order some pizza along the way, I'm certainly not gonna stop you. Just remember, discipline over comfort every time.