Your Team Is Dying and You're Measuring the Wrong Shaet
Your Team Is Dying and You're Measuring the Wrong Shaet
Someone has to say it: While you're obsessing over OKRs, KPIs, and whatever three-letter acronym your VC daddy told you to track this quarter, your best people are quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles.
You know it's true. You can feel it in your bones every time you walk past someone's desk and they quickly minimize a tab. (Spoiler: It's not Reddit. It's Indeed.)
Meet Bobby Dutton, The Guy Who Accidentally Solved Burnout
So I sat down with Bobby Dutton—professional speaker, entrepreneur, and licensed commercial pilot who flies planes for fun because apparently running a legendary event company for 20+ years isn't enough dopamine—and he casually dropped the most elegantly simple solution to employee burnout I've ever heard.
And honestly? I'm pissed it's not more common.
Here's the thing: Bobby runs GBM Six, an events company built on the statement "music is no longer a spectator sport." They make people happy for a living. And unlike most companies that slap "culture" buzzwords on their About page and call it a day, Bobby actually measures happiness.
Like, mathematically. With dashboards. Like a psychopath. (The good kind.)
The Three Questions That Will Save Your Company
Every. Single. Week. Everyone on Bobby's team who gets paid submits three numbers, 1-5:
How happy are you?
How stressed are you?
How utilized are you? (Translation: How full is your plate?)
That's it. Three questions. Five minutes.
And Bobby gets a dashboard that looks like an airplane cockpit—his words, not mine, pilot boy loves his metaphors—that tells him exactly where his team stands. Green needles? You're good. Yellow or red? Time to intervene before someone writes a Glassdoor review that ends your recruiting pipeline.
The Rule That Makes It Real
Here's where it gets spicy: If anyone's stress exceeds their happiness, that's a code red.
Not "concerning." Not "let's circle back on that." A PROBLEM. An engine failure. A five-alarm fire that requires immediate action.
Because Bobby understands something most founders miss while they're crushing 18-hour days and mainlining cold brew: stress happens. Deadlines exist. Shaet goes sideways. That's business.
But if your people are consistently more stressed than happy? You're not building a company. You're running a burnout factory, and your product is resignations.
Why This Isn't Soft. It's Strategic.
"But Karl," you're thinking, "happiness is subjective! We need HARD METRICS! REVENUE! GROWTH! SYNERGY!"
Cool. Cool cool cool.
How's your retention? How much are you spending replacing the three engineers who quit this quarter? What's the productivity hit when Sarah from Product is spending 40% of her mental bandwidth fantasizing about telling you to shove your quarterly goals where the sun doesn't shine?
Bobby put it perfectly: "If we don't figure out how to focus on happiness proactively and objectively, then people are going to focus on the things they can measure, like cost. And then everyone will have the cheapest concert or the cheapest event, but not the best one."
Replace "concert" with "product" and you've just described half of SaaS.
The Part That Made Me Jealous
Here's what really got me: This isn't micromanagement. It's anti-micromanagement.
Bobby's not hovering. He's not breathing down necks. He's not scheduling daily stand-ups to "check in" (read: justify his existence). He's empowered his managers with their own dashboards, and they handle their teams the same way.
When someone's metrics start trending wrong, they already know about it. No surprise meltdowns. No abrupt "I quit" Slack messages on Friday afternoon. No exit interview where you find out Jessica has been miserable for six months and you had NO IDEA.
It's like having a check engine light for your humans. Before the engine explodes.
The Scale Thing
And because I know you're thinking it: "That's cute for an events company, but we're SERIOUS TECH PEOPLE building SERIOUS SOLUTIONS."
Bobby's team works in higher education, one of the most stressed-out industries on the planet. They regularly pull 18-hour days for massive shows with diva rock stars. They survive it. They thrive in it. For 20+ years. Through a pandemic that destroyed the events industry.
You know why?
Because they prioritize sleep. They watch the metrics. When utilization gets too high for too long, they adjust. They don't just work hard—they work sustainably.
Meanwhile, your company is bragging about hustle culture on Twitter while your customer success team fantasizes about faking their own death to get out of another all-hands.
What This Really Solves
Look, here's the truth bomb: Most leaders don't listen to their teams because they think it takes too much time.
"I can't have one-on-ones with everyone!" "I'm already drowning!" "My calendar looks like a game of Tetris played by a drunk person!"
This system tells you who needs the attention right now. You're not doing blanket check-ins. You're not pretending everyone's fine. You're seeing the smoke before the fire and dealing with it immediately.
It's targeted. It's efficient. It's scalable.
And most importantly? It shows your team that when you say you care about culture, you actually mean it. Because nothing says "we value you" quite like "we built a system to make sure we notice when you're struggling."
The Bottom Line
Your competitors are fighting for the same talent. They're offering the same benefits, the same equity packages, the same ping pong tables and kombucha on tap.
You know what they're not offering? A leadership team that proactively gives a shaet about whether their people want to show up on Monday.
Bobby's been doing this for 20+ years. His company survived the pandemic. His team is happy, productive, AND sustainable.
Meanwhile, you're reading this between meetings, wondering why your best PM just gave two weeks notice.
Maybe—just maybe—it's time to start measuring what actually matters.
Go Watch the Full Episode
Bobby drops way more gold in our conversation than I could fit here without this turning into a novel. We talk about the specific conditions that trigger interventions, how he scales this across managers, and why his pilot brain makes him weirdly good at running a happiness company.
Trust me, 20 minutes with Bobby will do more for your retention strategy than your last three leadership books combined.
P.S. If you're reading this and thinking "but we DO care about our people!" then prove it. Ask yourself: When was the last time you knew—actually knew, with data—how your team was really doing? Not the sanitized version they give you in meetings. The truth. If your answer is "I... don't?" then you already know what you need to fix. And if your answer is "we don't need this because we have an open door policy"... buddy, your door isn't as open as you think it is, and your people aren't as honest as you hope they are. The numbers don't lie. Your team does. Build the dashboard.
Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H, human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.
