Latest / "the good work talk show" with mallory contois / the good work talk show | ep. 03 - marcus buckingham

Transcript

the good work talk show | ep. 03 - marcus buckingham · "the good work talk show" with mallory contois

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: A strength is an activity that strengthens you.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: A weakness is an activity that weakens you, even if you're good at it.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Most HR tools destroy good work.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Guys, managers, lay yourself off the hook.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is not to tell people who they are.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Love is wise.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to decode where your strengths are, your first and most obvious clue is that which you love.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Good job is not the end of a sentence, it's a beginning of an inquiry.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_06: My guest today is Marcus Buckingham.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_06: He is an incredible researcher, author, business owner, speaker, and he's been studying people and work and doing what they love for many, many, many years.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm so excited because there's such a great crossover here between his passion for people doing the thing that they're best about with, my passion, exploring career paths and work and what the book really means.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_06: So I'm very excited to have that conversation with him today and explore his path from co-writing strengths finder all the way to writing his current book and doing the consulting that he does with major cooking.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_06: I'm Mallory Comencum, and this is good work.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_06: Well, no.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: No mad prunage.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_06: No although, or all the mad prunage.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_06: Alrighty.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_06: I'm so excited that you're here.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_06: The reason I'm so excited that you're here is you are one of the first guests that also studies work.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_06: And so, as you know, this this show is really an inspection of kind of like what good work even means and how we get into different fields of work and things like that.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_06: And so I'm so excited to talk to you about all that stuff.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_06: Let's get started.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, so I always like to start with my guests with talking about kind of the the early, early years because I find them fascinating.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_06: So I would love to hear a little bit about what you were like as a kid.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_06: Like what was young Marcus like?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_06: Were there any early signs of like who you would become?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_06: Like what stands out when you think about who you were?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was uh I was uh what they called an abulliant kid, which I thought was like, what does that mean?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when I was 10 or 11, I got that from a report card, and I thought, I'm not a bully.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I was bouncy and I was out and I was sort of open and happy in general.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I had a stutter when I was growing up, so I couldn't speak my name until I was about 12.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I had that sort of hung over me for a long while.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm a middle kid.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So my elder brother was a really, really good pianist and a violinist, and my younger uh sibling, my sister, is a professional ballet dancer.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I was in the middle with I had no talent at all.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: My dad wanted me to be.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_06: You just didn't know it yet.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have any musical talent for sure.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was given a trombone and I it was it was bad, it was just I was given an oboe.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_06: We were set up for failure.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not good.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I was I was a little bit unsure about what I was because you know when you have musical talent or physical talent, everyone's like, that's talent.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: So in the middle, I was like, I don't know, what am I supposed to do?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I was always not to be cliche, but I was always super curious.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like I I remember noticing things that other people missed and wondering about it.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um watching high schoolers do high jump.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I remember just watching all the different people watch somebody else do a high jump and everyone else was jumping or lifting their legs.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I was wondering what like why would we do that?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Why does everyone do that when someone else is doing the high jump?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_05: High jump like a track uh activity?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I it's one of those things where I remember going to the teachers and going, why is everyone lifting their leg or lifting themselves up on their tiptoes to get some and everyone else going, What are you what are you talking about?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know what you're talking about.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so noticing that I noticed things that other people didn't notice and then wondering about it.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_06: Um did you feel like you were weird for that?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_06: Or did you feel like it was just No, I didn't think I was weird.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was normal.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I thought everyone was like, Yeah, why are why is everyone trying to empathetically lift somebody else who they're competing with over the bar?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which apparently we do do.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's called mirror neurons, where we we go through the same experience of the people that were watching.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that at the time.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the only thing that occurred to me was that I was curious about things that other people weren't curious about.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um I didn't know, I wasn't aware that that was a talent so much as it was a recurring part of my experience.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_06: Did you have any guiding sort of people or or any big influences on you as a kid, either family, teachers, people you looked up to?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: I had some good teachers.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I bumped into the, I mean, the my whole life changed at 16 years old.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: I had a dad who was in the people side of business, and he'd brought over this um psychologist called Donald O'Clifton, who I met in a dining room in my house when I was 16.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I was about to go up to university to study social psychology, and most psychology is pathology.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're studying what's wrong with people, psychosis, neurosis, depression, schizophrenia, which is fine.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, positive psychology hadn't begun yet in any way, shape, or form.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Seligman hadn't done his thing.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Don came over and was talking all about human uniqueness and how do we understand human uniqueness?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Individual different psychology hadn't started really, still really hasn't taken root.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I was fascinated at 16 for no good reason.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I was fascinated by this older, bold, shy, quiet gentleman talking about human uniqueness at 16.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I don't know why, but I was hooked in a way that I'd never been hooked before.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: So much so that all the way through university I would go to Lincoln, Nebraska for an internship in Lincoln.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then after university, there was never any really doubt in my mind that I would go over there and I mean I didn't, you know, it was 3,000 miles away from home.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And Lincoln, Nebraska isn't exactly Paris.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_06: A destination.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no knock on Nebraska.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it was no doubt in my mind that it was a subject that for whatever reason hooked me and my heart, my head, and everything.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Why are two people so different from one another?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Everything in sociology is a study of why we're the same, why people raised in this household are different, or why this race is different, or this uh gender is different, which is great.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I was always interested in why are two people raised in the same house?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like Neil Armstrong has a brother.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Neil Armstrong, first person on the moon, his brother, uh Dean Armstrong, was a bank manager.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like what how?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Same parents, um, same upbringing, and yet totally different trajectories in their life.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, for whatever reason, at 16, I was like, that's interesting.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And here's a really rigorous way of studying human uniqueness.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_06: At any point in your time at Cambridge, did you feel like, man, maybe I should like other people are going on these other paths, like they're going into banking, they're going into, you know, whatever it is, and or do I think it's very unique for a 16-year-old, 17-year-old, 18-year-old to be like drawn to something and totally confident in following that pull?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_06: And it's something I think we work on our whole lives, is like listening to that inner thing.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_06: Like, was there were there moments of doubt?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_06: Were there moments of maybe I'll try this other thing, or were you like totally laser focused?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, we we think about careers as the the most of the metaphors we have for careers are climbing metaphors.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So whether it's a lattice, whether it's a ladder, whether at Facebook it was with Laurie and Cheryl, it was a jungle gym.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: But climbing's a weird metaphor.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it was always more about a hunt.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a it's a scavenger hunt for love.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I always felt like there was wisdom to what you love.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about, you don't have to love everything, but if you find yourself in moments of quiet, thinking about it, writing about it, talking about it, thinking about it, writing about it, talking about it, then you even at 16 or 17, even though some of my, you know, some of my peers were going off to far more remunerative jobs in places like Paris or New York or London.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: I actually, now that I think about it, Mal, I never had a, oh shoot, I should go to New York.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think I would have articulated at the time, oh, it's because I love this thing.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: But there's something pure, you know, love is love is wise.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like love is a decoder.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: We don't think about it that way.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: But but if you want to decode where your strengths are, if you want to decode what makes you unique, your first and most obvious clue is that which you love.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: So love becomes like a filter through which you understand what you're drawn to, you know.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's appetite.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I didn't know where it was gonna lead.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a little scavenger hunt going, I'm gonna go to Lincoln, Nebraska, and see what happens.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a purity about, well, I know I love that.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know a lot.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I know I love that.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's quite specific.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I've just done, you know, four years at university, and I actually never studied individual different psychology.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I did a bunch of other psychology, yeah.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Social psychology.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_06: And nothing pulled you the same way.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_06: Not in the same, yeah, yeah.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, rewinding it, I don't know why.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: But no, nothing.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I loved Cambridge.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was, you know, an incredible experience and amazingly smart people, and great.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Teachers were, you know, you have a classroom of four.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like it that you went through all of your time with like four people in it, no big lecture halls, just like you and a professor.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like so it was an amazing learning experience, but I mean, I maybe I'm an anomaly, but I always knew that I love, I don't know why I'm different from my brother and my sister.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And can how much of that can I change?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good one.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: How much of me is me, and how much of me is changeable?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: If I wanted to rewind my brain so that I became less introverted or more extroverted, or more focused on discipline, or less focused on, could I do that?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: How much of that I could bore you to tears even yet today about that.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_06: How much of me can I change?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: When you have kids, it's like you're all the more.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_06: It's like Right, now you're studying it all over again.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_06: Oh my gosh, yeah.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_06: So what what happened when you went to Nebraska?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_06: You left Cambridge.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_06: You went to Nebraska.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Our focus at the time was on um pre-employment selection instruments.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you select people?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_06: Um, can you How do you select people as the employer?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: As the employer.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, how do you just decide?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Disney would come to us and say, we want to select better housekeepers because people are who are really, really good at housekeeping.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: We have guests who will say, I won't be back in your hotel unless I can be back in that particular person's section of rooms.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Merrill Lynch would come to, I was working for the Gallup organization, is what I joined.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And Gallup was known for polling, but I didn't do any, I wasn't on that side of it at all.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was all in the psychometric side.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I got psychometrician training on how do you measure things about human beings that are really, really important but you can't count.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Can you measure empathy?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Can you measure competitiveness?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Strategic thinking, that's a jolly good one.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a skill?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if it's a skill, you can teach it.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to select for it.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a talent?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's a talent.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you better select for it.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how would you select for it?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So companies like Merrill Lynch or Disney or FedEx or whatever would go, we want to find more like our best.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then we would do what's called a concurrent validity study, where you'd go, give me a hundred of your best, a hundred average in the same job, and we'd ask a ton of questions of the hundred, what's called the study group, and a hundred of the same questions of the contrast group.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you'd basically see whether or not people in the study group answered differently than the contrast.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if they did, you'd have what's called a question listened for combination.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you might find that the best FedEx salespeople were competitive.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but that's fine.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then you'd go, well, how the heck do we measure competitiveness?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's 15 questions we could try to measure competitiveness, but you'd find that like one of them would actually work, which means it would sort high performing to low performing.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like how competitive are you is not a good question.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, are you a good loser?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is a really good question.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: So long as the answer is no.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: That works.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: As a question listened for combination, that works.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you have to ditch 10 to get the one to measure the thing.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is competitiveness.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: The listened for question combination is the science.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then you put like 15, 20, 30 of those questions together.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And lo and behold, you've got a pre-employment selection instrument.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_06: For the thing that you're looking to select.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So then you can give that interview to candidates and see whether or not they're more like this or more like this.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was where we that's where I began.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I loved that.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do you if you wanted to find a great nurse and you've had that some nurses give painless injections, they do.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: They measurably give less painful injections.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, well, one of the things that they clearly have is empathy.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, fine, fine.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: How do you measure empathy?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: What are the questions you could ask?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: All the questions you could ask to measure it, and then you've got to find the listen for that goes with the question.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the questions that turned out that worked, as in it predicted if you were a study group nurse or an average nurse, was are you a how do you know if you're doing a good job of listening?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Which if you think about it, it's a really it's a good open-ended question.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: How do you know if you're doing a good job of listening?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: You could imagine all the different possible answers to that question.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: But it turns out all the best nurses say the same thing.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I loved that.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's like they all say the same thing.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: What do they say?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: They all say, you know if you're doing a good job of listening under only one set of conditions when the other person keeps talking.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, oh, that's a listen.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they all say it differently.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Some short.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_06: Well you're looking for those patterns.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's and that's when you go, oh my word.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: All these people must have stimulus response in their day-to-day life.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Their behavior stimulus response creates a feeling for the patient of empathy.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: In an interview, you just mirror it verbally.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Stimulus response, question response.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I loved that.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's like a treasure hunt.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_05: It's like, yeah, wow.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: What makes these people different than these people?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's a bit like once you know how people are the same, you can start to see how they're different.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like individual different psychology is based upon counterintuitively what makes people the same.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So if you discover all the best nurses have empathy, that doesn't mean they're all the same.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: It means you can start to see the differences between them.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's like if you're David Attenborough and you're studying gorillas in the mountains of the moon, he can tell he'll be like, This one is her name's Marjorie, and they're 17, 17 years old.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: This one is Giles.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's only six.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you're looking at going, looks like a gorilla to me.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: How do you tell them apart?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: But because he knows the consistency of gorilla facial structure, the difference is much more clear.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Same's true with humans.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Once you sort of know how they're the same, then you can start to see more precisely how they're different.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_06: And so where did Strength Finder come in in this journey when you were with Clifton and at Gallup?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_06: And what was that kind of experience like for you?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one of the groups we studied was managers, because every single company, you join a, you know, you join a company but you quit your boss.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: We all know we we we now know that.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, you get way more variation in terms of culture and performance inside a company than between companies.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Still, yet today, when you read the business press, it's like, well, the culture of Spotify is like this.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: The culture of Facebook is like that.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: The culture of Disney is like this.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: But in fact, you go inside the company and you start measuring things like, do I know what's expected of me at work, or does someone care about me or whatever?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Those things vary hugely inside the company.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's far more variation inside Spotify doesn't have a culture.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Facebook doesn't have a culture.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: They have many, many, many, many different, depending on who you work for.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd study great managers and contrast it with average managers.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things you find with great managers is that they're different.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: They do all focus on people's strengths and manage around their weaknesses.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: They realize that you don't have strengths and areas for development.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: You have strengths, which are your areas for development, and then you have other things which are things to manage around.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: So once you have so I wrote a book called First Break All the Rules that was just about what do the world's best managers do differently.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it began as a research project and then it just exploded.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so then it was like, well, if managers focus on people's strengths and manage around their weaknesses, what is the most effective way to measure people's strengths?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that became Strength Finder.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have a reliable way of measuring what's right about people.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: This was 1999, 2000.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: So Martin Seligman had sort of started positive psychology in 1988, came out to Lincoln actually, and him and Don.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Don't call the the grandfather of positive psychology because him and you know Marty was his sort of protege.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And but it was kind of weird, even in the year 2000, no rigorous, reliable way to measure what was right with people.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: You had Myers Briggs, which came from a sort of a bastization of young, and you had some MMPI, which is the Minnesota Multivariate Personality Index, which is really looking at what's wrong with people.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Very diagnostic.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Very and pathologically diagnostic.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea of a strengthfinder was let's have a rigorous, psychometrically sound way of measuring your strengths.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not so that you could change them, but so you could maximize them.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which now sounds like duh.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: By the time when you took it, when you took an assessment, it was, oh, well, here's how to manage around, or here's how to fix this, here's how to change that.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Watch out for this.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna do this.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And ours was more like, no, no, no.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's figure out what's what are the what are the trump cards that you can play.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then what we should actually figure out with you is how you can play them.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_06: And you were giving people stories that they were excited to tell versus stories that they were like, oh God, now I have to figure out how to communicate this to my manager or like how to how to be better about these things.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and also you're so inside your own self you don't see yourself anymore.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: When you're inside the when you're inside the frame, you can't see the picture.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: So but the point of strengthfinder in a sense was to give you a bit of distance between your natural recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior and yourself.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're so inside your own patterns, you're like, well, doesn't everybody, well doesn't everybody?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, doesn't everybody?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And of course the answer to that question is no, you do.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's weird in all the best ways.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like the W-Y-R-D way.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Weird meaning spirit, or as James Hillman would say, your soul's code.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's a code in there, and it's got nothing to do with your race or your age or anything.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's nothing even to do with your life experiences.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: You've had a ton of life experiences already in your life that you've gone through, and that's not nothing, that's huge, but it didn't make you a different human.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: There's patterns inside you that are weird and wonderful.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the point of Strength Finder is let's help you put names to them.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not that we want to label you.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: But we want you to be able to have a way to describe yourself to a manager.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not the fact that you like to collaborate with people isn't a delaying tactic to make decisions.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's because you like collaborating with people.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's a thing.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a positive could be a positive pattern.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about how do we make it a positive pattern.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_06: And and you worked on Strength Finder with Don.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_06: Can I call him Don?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_06: I feel like I'm not on nickname turns with Don.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_06: But you and Don, you and Don worked on Strength Finders together, but you also had some projects of your own, like the book that you mentioned.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_06: How are you managing?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_06: I think a lot of people struggled to find that balance when they're working with others or for a company of like how to how to explore their own projects and like stay focused on the work at hand.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_06: How did you think about that?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually the first book that I wrote was a research project for Gallup.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: First Book of the Rules was a research project.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now Discover Your Strengths, which introduced Strengthfinder, was a research project.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I was writing those books as an employee of Gallup's.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: And my mentor was Don Clifton.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then Don died in the Now Discover Your Strengths came out in 2001.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Both of those books, I mean, I thought you just wrote a book and a million people bought it.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's I was so lucky.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was super lucky.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: I loved writing.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: I discovered that at Cambridge.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote, I, you know, give me two hours to do nothing and I'll fill it with writing because I don't know what else to do with my brain.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um but Don died in 2003, and in the spirit of like you join a company, you quit your boss, I got a different boss, and who wasn't, it was Don's son, Jim, who's a good egg, actually, like a good egg.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't the same.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I felt as though I'd been with Gallup 17 years.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, now's the time for me to go out and see whether or not I can build a company on my own.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_06: And why did you stay for 17 years?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_06: Like what kept that is a long time to stay with one organization.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_06: And it's very rare now, I think, probably a little less rare at that time, but I'm curious what kept you there.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I thought I was doing something really important.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um Gallup had an approach, talk about good work.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Part of good work is um is contribution.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta feel your contribution.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so Don Clifton's whole approach to uh work was yeah, um, give people as much decision making as possible, as close to the action as possible.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we had things like you know, there was no there was no vacation policy.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: You could take as much vacation as you wanted.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: Do what you need.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you need.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also like you have the Disney account, you're 24.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's my biggest account, it's yours, go to Orlando however many times you need to go, but you're running this account, you're 24.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's uh intoxicating for some people anyway.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: It certainly was for me.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, why would I go anywhere else?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like I have a chance to be able to make a contribution in something that I I think it is important.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Individual differences matter hugely to, I don't know, individuals.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And work is a place in which you can manifest that.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna stick around while I can continue to do that.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: For a person, you know, humans develop best in response to other humans.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: AI notwithstanding, but we humans lean into other humans.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a person in Don Clifton who was like, you know, he he saw something in me that was um distinctive and challenged, and it was cool.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, how lucky were you?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, totally, totally.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_06: And then as people, a lot of of a lot of my audience is kind of looking down the barrel of entrepreneurship.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_06: Like a lot of times people are thinking, if they feel drawn to working for themselves or finding the right version of work for them, as you thought about leaving Gallup and going out on your own, what was that process like?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_06: And maybe walk me through a little bit of how you made some decisions around, you know, if you you leave and now you're like, okay, what am I, what am I going to do?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_06: Like, how am I going to approach this?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_06: I'd love to hear a little bit about that.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it's scary.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: It is scary, but uh the time I remember thinking after Donda, and I'm like, well, if you're gonna bet on anyone, why wouldn't you bet on yourself?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not to be cliched, but like, why wouldn't you do that?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I had my master's thesis was on the social and psychological issues of entrepreneurship.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I felt like I'd studied entrepreneurs till I was blue in the face.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that, in terms of like study group, contrast group, so we had a whole study group of really great entrepreneurs, and one of the most powerful questions in discriminating excellent entrepreneurs than average, and let's face it, most entrepreneurs we fail before we succeed, right?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot more average than there is.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if you study the really the most successful ones, uh the most powerful question that sorts study group from contrast is what one ingredient is both necessary and sufficient for building a business?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: What one ingredient.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine all the possible answers to that question: money, drive, people, um, timing, luck, I mean, investors, whatever.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: The best entrepreneurs don't say that.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: None of them do.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: They don't say any of those.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: They say what one ingredient is both necessary and sufficient for building a business.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: The answer to that question is that they came up with is a customer.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: That if you don't have a customer, you don't have a business.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: You might have an idea.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: But you've got until you've got somebody going, I'll pay for that, you don't have a business.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, leaving Gallup, it was like, who's my customer?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do they want?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean like in the business school sense of psychographic or demographic or segmentation or any of that rubbish.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: More like, who, what's their name?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it Marjorie?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Is it Humphrey?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what are they, who are they?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_06: And what are they-to the gorillas.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_06: The gorillas were your customers.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_06: That's what I'm trying to say.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: So no, for us, it was like, uh for me rather, it was like, well, who am I serving?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really helpful because it was like, oh, look, my first book is First Break All the Rules.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Managers, so goes a manager, so goes everything.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: You look at the tools inside of companies.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: There are software tools, as you know, there's financial tools, there's marketing tools, there's HR tools.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's tools for HR.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's no tools for managers.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get the best out of your team?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's nothing for you.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Even employee surveys, they're all done essentially by HR.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: The last person to get your data on how engaged your team is, is you, the manager.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: You're the last person.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I was like, oh, that's interesting.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows the data says, so goes the manager, so goes performance, productivity, engagement, loyalty, advocacy.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: We all say that.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we help this person?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: We don't.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, oh, how do I build training or how do I build sub?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, it was always like, I know a lot about that.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_06: So you built very much built around the customer versus coming in and saying, this is something I want to do and I'll find people.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I knew by that point that I knew that I was really interested in how managers do what they why do some managers get people to walk through walls for them and other managers in the same company don't?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Right down the hallway.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because that kept ringing in my mind.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Until you have a customer, you don't have a business.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you can wax lyrical about 17 clicks into that person, who are they, what do they want?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what they want?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know how they buy what you want?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know any of that?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, unless you can sort of land on that, you don't have a business.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like don't start a company until you now you can pivot, but really the way to think about that is in entrepreneurship, you gotta go, I want to get across town, which in this case is I want to serve managers.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then you just have to say for yourself, well, in order to get across town, I've got to go stoplight to stoplight.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna wait until they're all green.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: So for me it was like bonk, left.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Bonk, right.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Stop, go.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I knew I wanted across town for me was like serve busy managers who want to get the best out of their people.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then, oh, how do I how do I get across town?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and being willing to hit those lights and wait for them to turn green, or find, I guess, find a way to turn them green for yourself.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_06: Um yes.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's as a metaphor, it's like just what's good about it is just start.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're gonna bump into a red light.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you're gonna have to recognize it as a red light and then figure out can you turn it green, or do you have to turn left?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can turn left on a red.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_06: Good metaphor.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can turn right on a left.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what you can't do is stay there for 25 years.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's red, man.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_06: Right, right.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_06: It that happens to a lot of folks.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_06: A huge thank you to my friends at Granola for sponsoring the Goodwork Talk Show.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_06: I started using granola as just a note taker, but now I use it for every type of meeting and conversation, from quick check-ins to creative collaborations and everything in between.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_06: Granola is an AI notepad that transcribes meetings, whether online or in person, and it creates amazing summaries that you can chat with and you can ask follow-up questions to well after the meeting.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_06: So as a busy person with a full-time job and a couple of side projects, I truly couldn't keep track of all of it without Granola.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_06: It helps me stay focused and stay present while still capturing all the details and the important to-dos in the background.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_06: I even used it on all of these episodes, so you'll be able to check the notes for each show and chat with them just like you were sitting here with us.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_06: Granola also has features for following up and for drafting to-do lists.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_06: It definitely saves me from dropping calls and it helps me do what I say I'll do.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_06: The best way to check it out is to try it in your next meeting.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_06: To read the summary of today's show and chat with that summary, you can visit granola.ai slash goodwork.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_06: And if you're a new granola user, you'll get three months free.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_06: Again, that's granola.ai slash goodwork.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_06: Um, all right, so we're pausing for our granola question.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_06: Granola has been listening to us and transcribing, and I just asked it what question I should ask you next.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_06: And the question it suggested is you have spent your career helping people name and work with their strengths.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_06: What do you think most managers still get wrong when they try to apply strengths thinking with their teams day to day?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that is a great question.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Granola.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Granola.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_06: That's cool.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, the biggest problem that managers have is they think that strength is what you're good at and a weakness is what you're bad at.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, that's not true because all of us have some things we're really good at that we hate.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, what you're good at is performance.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: What you're bad at is bad performance.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it's all that that's a performance continuum.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about it, a strength is an activity that strengthens you.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: A weakness is an activity that weakens you, even if you're good at it.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, what that means for managers is that first of all, you should be paying attention to what people's appetites are, what strengthens them.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: When are they in flow?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: When do they pick up on things other people miss?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's there's a there's signs of a strength.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: But really, the most important thing for managers to realize is that means if a strength is what strengthens you and a weakness is what weakens you, then who's the judge?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the authority on what your stress your strengths are?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well the person is the authority and what their strengths are.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you, the manager, you don't ever get to come in and go, you're good at your strengths are this, your strengths are that.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get to do that.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can try and do that if you want.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is probably one of the reasons, Mal, why my feedback is so pernicious or can be so damaging, is that most feedback sounds like I'm the manager coming in going, you would be so much better if only you were more like me.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or I've seen what your strengths are, you're really good at this.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right, do more of that.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: You should do more of that.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that's right, but what you really should be saying to a person is listen, figure out in the course of it, spend a week in love with your job.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Spend a week looking at what are the things that you lean into, what are the things you lean out of, and then come back to me in a week and say, what'd you lean into, what'd you lean out of?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the stuff you lean into are strengths.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: How can we turn those strengths into performance?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: What we did with Strength Finder, all we did was take people's natural recurring appetites, put some wording to it, put some psychometrics to it, and turn it into 34 themes of talent.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: And give you your top five.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're really looking at is people's natural reactions, in our case to a set of assessment questions.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: But in life, it would be like, what do you lean into?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: What do you lean out of?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: What activity do you find yourself time flying by?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Others where you feel like you've been doing it for an hour, but you look up, it's just five minutes.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're in you're in molasses.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: So for managers to go, guys, managers, let yourself off the hook.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is not to tell people who they are.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is to let them discover who they are, and then together you guys try to figure out how to turn it into productivity or performance.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's not easy, but at least get lets you off the hook a wee bit from coming in and supposedly you're gonna tell them who they are.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_06: You know and you know everything about them.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_06: What about when they are you have somebody that's in for a role and they're like, I love this part and I'm amazing at this part, and this other part, I would assign this as a weakness.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_06: Like, what do you say to managers in that case where they're like, well, I need them to do like it's their job.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_06: Like they have to do that part.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_06: What do you, how do you kind of coach them there?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so if you think about a job, a job is like a fabric of different activities, interactions, situations.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like you think if I was studying you in your day, there would be a ton of different, I call them threads.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the thread is an activity, it's an email, it's a situation, it's a moment, whatever.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: So every job, it doesn't matter how standardized the job is, it's made up of a whole bunch of different threads.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: So you think about a job as a fabric, and some of the threads are emotionally neutral for you.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're black, they're green, they're gray, they're white, whatever.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: You just gotta do them.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: But some of the threads are red.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: A red thread is an activity that you love, it's a situation that you love, it's something where time flies by, it's something you find yourself naturally volunteering for.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: When you're done with it, you're not drained, you're like a little bit like that.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_06: Wanna go tell somebody?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it felt like you were in your zone, whatever.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: Those are red threads.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, for a manager, what we now know from a lot of data is that you don't need 100% red threads.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: That you know, find a job you love, you'll never have to work at no no no no no.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's no data on that at all.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Don't a good no good work is not finding a job you love.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: But it is finding the love in what you do, which is different.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Find the red threads in what you do.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: How many?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: 20%.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: 20% of the activities in your day should be activities that you love.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that that'll vary a wee bit person by person, but 20% is a very, very good threshold.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of data out of the May Clinic looking at nurses, actually.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that don't burn up are ones that have 20% red threads.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it is a threshold, so it's not like 40%, you're twice as happy.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: 60%.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: You get above 20, you're like you're cruising.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're golden.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: What that means for a manager is hey, look, I want you to help, I want to help you figure out what your particular red threads are in this job.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: The other things, many of them, you just sorry, you just gotta do them.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's job.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's your job.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: But there's others, like I'm really interested in helping you find the love in what you do.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: A, morally, I think it's a jolly good thing.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: But B, you're more we we know your brain chemistry changes.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: You have elevated levels of oxytocin, or pinephrine, and andamide.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: All sorts of all sorts of good things happen in your brain when you're doing a red thread activity.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: So for a manager, we want that.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: We want creativity, we want resilience, we want uh innovation, we want all those things.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when your brain's got that little cocktail, it gets out of that fight or flightness that we sometimes get into at work, and you open up what Bodger Frederickson called broaden and build.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Doing an activity you love, broaden and builds your brain.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, managers, we want that for our people in all sorts of ways.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that doesn't mean a red quilt.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Good work isn't a red quilt.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: Good work is 20% red threads, man.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, dear employee of mine, you're I'm colorblind to your threads.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Just because this is a red thread of mine, well, if I was you, I would say, okay, managers, don't ever say that again.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because their red threads are their red threads.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the answer to your question would be help someone find 20% of their red threads and then figure out can we use any of those threads to get job, to get the job done that we need to get done.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Can we figure out your way, your strengths-based, love-fueled way of getting the job done?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not perfectly, not even half edly, 20% edly, can we find that way?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now all of a sudden that job is an expression of you.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Chef's kiss, that's so that's when people do this.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's when people will walk through walls with you, because you've managed to configure that team so that a lot of your people are like, I s I see your red threads and I can use them.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's like that's the coolest.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_06: And on the employee side, if someone who's watching is like, I'm nowhere near 20% in my role, is how often do you find that someone can find that 20% in a role?
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_06: Or like maybe what is the threshold or the signal that this role or this company or this manager like is never gonna get you to 20%, and you should be trying to reorient towards a different situation?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the first thing you should do is try to do it yourself.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like most of us, even yet today, even post-Strength Finder, even post-positive psychology, um, most of us think that a strength is what we're good at, and therefore that we're not the best judge.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: Even like fierce conversations and tough conversations, all that stuff about you should look to other people for feedback and to grow your career, you should be open to constructive criticism, all of that stuff, which is the data would say is rubbish, right?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have to be able to go.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I'm the best judge of what strengthens me.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Before I start blaming managers for being annoying or managers, before you start blaming other people for not being clear-eyed enough about their blind spots, let's put all that aside.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And for you as an employee or team member, just as I said, like spend a week in love with your job.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Take a blank pad around with you, love it, loathe it.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Any, like just draw a line down the middle, take it around with you for a week.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: What are the activities where you see some of the signs of love?
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Before you do it, you look forward to it.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: While you're doing it, time speeds up.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: When you're done with it, you kind of want to do it again.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Just write it down.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Loathed it.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: The opposite.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: When you but before you do it, you don't, you're trying to procrastinate it.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: While you're doing it, time slows down.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Scribble that down.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: Before you do anything else, spend a week doing that and see what you find.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't do that, please don't blame your manager.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: You you haven't got the data yet.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Get the data first, go to your manager, and then together figure out this is the stuff where I lean in, this is the stuff where I'm on fire.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is now your manager may go, yeah, well, fine, but I need you to do these other 16 things.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're still in a good position to go, well, I can do the 16 things more likely if I actually can, if you can start to characterize me, if you can start to talk more about these red threads.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think I can weave them into performance, man.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: So as a as a way of thinking about it, it really is take responsibility as a team member for figuring out what your red threads are.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: You may have barbed wire.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if there's some things, you know, in terms of the metaphor of threads, some threads are like, some threads are neutral, and some of them are barbed wire.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: Where it's like, I freaking hate that.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that might end up on your loathe list.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that might also be a good thing for before you talk to your manager about it.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: You might want to know what's barbed, what cuts you.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: What's what hurts you, psychologically speaking.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: But all of this basically gives you the response, you're the locus of control for this.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think in terms of good work, people I think don't realize just how much room to maneuver.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, how much agency you have.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: You have a ton of agency.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a world, you know, unfortunately, almost all human capital management systems inside big companies, the workdays, the SAP success factors, those things, those are built on the entire opposite principle of what good managers do.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if you live inside of a human capital management system, it will say, I don't care where your red threads are.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the competence.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_06: There's no process for you to lift those up or communicate those.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's the opposite.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've decided what kind of competence you're supposed to have.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: The manager will rate you on it.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now use AI to have the manager rate you on it.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Twice a year we'll do a performance rating, we'll give you a number.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then we'll pay you based on that.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: So unfortunately, our HR tools are antithetical to the agency that you and I were just talking about.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Most HR tools destroy good work.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: Destroy good work.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because they basically say, you, the individual, you're not interesting.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: We defined your job in advance, independent of you.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is to match the model.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: How closely do you match the model?
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not trivial because we're gonna pay you.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_06: It has real implications.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: Or fire you based upon.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it's tricky, and that's why you know I get out of bed every day is to go, hey, you do actually have agency.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: These HR models, as Marshall McLuhan said, we make our tools and then our tools make us.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: So many of us are living in bad work.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because the HR tools and systems, it's like, sorry, but everyone hates workday.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: No knock on workday.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it's built on principles that the opposite of what the best managers do.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_06: The employees are the managers.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_06: And I, as a as a manager myself, I can say my favorite thing is when somebody comes to me and says, I have somebody right now, you know who you are, who is on my team and she is like, I am awesome at this, and I do I am not good at that.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_06: And it makes my life so much easier because I'm like, okay, amazing.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_06: I know exactly what I can hand you, and you're gonna do an incredible job.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_06: And then like we can find resources to either upskill you here if it's something you're interested in, but if you hate it and you're bad at it, like we're not getting anywhere.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_06: So like let's find a contractor, let's find a resource, whatever it might be.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_06: And I think most managers would say that, even if they are stuck in a system of this top-down kind of evaluation.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_06: I still think those like interaction points between manager and and employee, if the employee takes agency, a manager's always gonna appreciate that.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: It removes, I mean, it as you know, it's burdensome being a manager.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to think about your own work and then you've got to sort of manage other people's work.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, when somebody has an employee, when I mean I've been a, you know, I built my own business with, you know, you have a hundred people that were, and when they come to you and they go, I love this.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: In my language, that's a massive red thread of mine.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: These other things I'm sort of neutral, this cuts me.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like you'd go, oh, now I can work with that.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_06: That's a very clear, that's a path forward versus like there there's a performance issue, and I can't really tell it why it's happening.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and right now the World Cup is going on, right?
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: Sure is.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you listen to all of the pundits talk about how you get a great team to happen.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if you listen to Thierry Henri, who is the god of Arsenal, um, but also a French playing god.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_06: My husband's cheering off camera.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_06: Like, yeah.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, listen to him talk about Erling Haaland.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: Erling Haaland is the lead striker for Norway.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he's six foot seven or whatever he is.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: He looks like a blonde Viking.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's very good at about three things.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: And what to hear Thierry Henri talk about Erling Haaland, he's like, what's great about him is he tries to be the best in the world at those three things, and he has a manager who knows that if we try to get him to play like Harry Kane, by the way, it's the same position, they're number nines.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you try to get him to play like Kylian Mbappe, who's the lead, who's the number nine for France, Erling Haaland would look terrible.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the fact that Erling Haaland goes, I am amazing at these three things.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then the manager goes, All right, let's build a team around you to enable you to do those three things a lot.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's not like a sports metaphor.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's like a management uh fact.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when you fly against that, which is unfortunately most of these big HR tools, fly completely against that.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because you go, well, a number nine's got to have all these qualities.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: They all look the same.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give you feedback on which ones you don't have.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Erling Harland would go, well, screw you.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm never going to be I'll be always a C minus Killian Mbappe.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be a D minus Harry Kane.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be an A plus Erling Haaland.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's chef's kissy for how you build a great team as a manager, or as an as an Erling Haaland, if you're a team member, to come to your manager and go, I'm not trying to make my life easier.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to be more productive.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: Here, let me tell you what some of my strengths are.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you what I love.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, manager, you could come in and say, Yeah, but you're not good enough for that yet.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: In which case, okay.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: If Erlen Haaland goes, I'm really good at getting positions where I can score goals, and the manager goes, Yeah, we haven't scored any for the last five games.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about what you could do to tweak or adjust so you can actually score more goals.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a really productive, that's a good conversation.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's good work.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what is good work if you think about it?
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: Good work is a really tight connection between the person's natural idiosyncrasy and the performance you want.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's linking those things.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the person's contribution.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is tied beautifully to winning.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, winning as a team, winning as an individual, winning as a company, whatever it might be.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: And not divorcing yourself from who you really are.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: But actually capitalizing on who you really are.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_06: Yep.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_06: And I I love this sports metaphor because I think it's a really good reminder that we see these stars, we see these people who are clearly top of their game, top of their field, but they are they are top of their field because they know exactly what they are good at and they don't do any of the things that they're not good at.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_06: And I think in our culture there is such a pressure to be good at everything.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_06: Totally.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_06: And it just keeps this sort of it creates this like averaging effect for people.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and it's it's it's dispiriting as an individual because you think you have to go to work and become smaller.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: Go to work and become smaller.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you look at right now, sorry to be on the on the World Cup, but like Lionel Messi is the greatest of all time.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and his touch ratio of left foot to right foot, you go, he's an amazing dribbler.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it's one to ten.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: You watch him dribble, he touches it with his right foot one time out of ten times with his left foot.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Every single player against him knows he's only got a left foot.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't have a right foot, he's only got a left foot.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because he's like, I'm not gonna, well, I'm trying to get better at my right foot.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_05: No, yeah.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: Stupid.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna get so precise and so fast with his left foot.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now he is uniquely gifted with that left foot.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's like there's a left foot that's like encased in gold.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_06: Many people have that unique gift for very specific things.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_06: And I think a lot of people that have been on this show, including you, have a similar pattern, which is you are really uniquely excellent at one thing and you have crafted a life around that one thing, which has allowed you to become incredible and allowed you to have this big impact.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_06: And I think that's a lot of what I find myself coaching people on is that you don't have to, none, nobody that you see living these amazing lives is good at everything.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_06: Like they have found their one thing and they have crafted a life around themselves and they've crafted their work around it.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't make you narrow.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is the misunderstanding that people talk about depth versus breadth in your career.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: Depth leads to future.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Depth means you can ask the 17 questions and get around the corner.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: Depth leads to asking the questions that no one else has answered.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: Depth becomes, though, the integrating point for everything else you're interested in.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the left foot of Messi, to take that example, becomes the integrating point for the way in which he contributes to the front four of his team.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's not like blind to them.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: He uses that.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_06: Because that would make him a bad team member too.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_06: He would not win that way.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Why is he such a great passer?
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because of his left foot.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why is he such a great dribbler?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because of his left foot.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's used his left foot as a way to integrate with the rest of the team.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: So for most of us, we are one of the biggest challenges at work is to your point, we are told that it's the homogeneity of work.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's supposed to be the same in this job.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: We've defined it, you're supposed to fit it.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: When you don't fit it, if you do fit it, great, let's ignore that.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's even there in the language, Mal.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Everything that you're not bringing to the job, we'll call it an area of opportunity.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's called an area of opportunity.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually an area of least opportunity.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so for us to really dive into, hey, what's your unique contribution?
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't let you off the hook for the black, grey, green threads.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: Flip and do them.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it does mean that we want to find a place for your contribution that's playing directly to your left foot.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: What's your left foot, man?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like that should be the, you know, in any company that you're working for, helping someone to go to step in to go, I'm trying to find your red threads.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to find your left feet.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_06: And showing that you as a manager are invested in that too.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_06: Like I think one of the best things you can do is ask people what they love.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_06: Like it seems like such a simple first step, but many managers don't take that first step, and that is what starts to separate you.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it I mean it's funny because if you ask people, you know, from zero to ten, everyone's kind of interested in the uniqueness of a human.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: 10 to 30, everyone forgets it.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: So if you ask 30-year-olds, what do you love about what you do?
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: By far the most common answer, not even close, by far the most common answer is I love working with people.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Which isn't a bad answer.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's just super vague.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because you want to go, well, which people?
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you think of people?
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: Are you selling to the people, serving, organizing, challenging?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Give me a verb.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_02: Any verb, pick a verb.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we've we've lost fluency, I would say, in our love language.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: We can't describe, that's why Strength Finder was so popular, because it was like It gave people the language.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: Language, yeah.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so for so many managers, we think that we should be careful to point out or pay attention to what people love.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because we think that our reaction to that should be, well, what are we supposed to do?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like pat them on the head?
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, good job.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what of course managers want to do is go, oh, I'm supposed to step it up.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: And like but if you flip it around and go, no, no, no.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: We want that person to figure out what their red threads are.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not so that we can say, good job for being you, but to go, okay, are you love more?
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Better.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: Smarter.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: Faster.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you love it?
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: Fine.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: More.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: Better.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: Smarter.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Faster.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, good job is not the end of a sentence.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beginning of an inquiry.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: What is it about that you love?
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: When?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: Which?
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: How?
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: The best managers are super curious about individual difference, not to do this, but to do this.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now and if you work for a manager like that, it's kind of weird because most managers are like, it's kind of controlling as opposed to curious.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm sure you've had managers like that where they're like, oh mao.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: Hey.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you've had the inverse.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_06: Yep, I've had both.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_06: I think everyone's had some version of both.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, I've got two final questions for you.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_06: The first one is if people want to learn more about what you're working on or interact with you or whatever it is, like, where should they, what should they pay attention to?
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_06: Where are you showing up?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_06: What do you want them to do?
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I've just started another company called Love That, which is about um basically we're all, you know, experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: You want really good outcomes, you got to design experiences, whether for customers or for colleagues, where they go, I love that.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because extreme positive outcomes are driven by experiences where people go, I love that.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that means we're all experience makers.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: And yet most of us aren't skilled at like how do you make experience?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: An email is an experience, a sales call is an experience.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: Checking someone in a hotel, obviously, is an experience.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so um the focus for that company is how do you help people become increasingly skilled as experience makers?
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so if you want to know what that is, uh you can go to love that.com and it's like all about that one competency, which I call experience intelligence.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's the next 10 years of my life, I think that's what I'll be doing because we are experience makers.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: The question isn't, are we on one?
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, are you skilled in that one?
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_06: How do we get better at it?
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_06: Or are you thoughtful about it or thinking about it that way?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you if you want to be influential, if you want to be inspirational, if you want to move other people to action, you gotta design experiences.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the funny thing is about it, Mel, you are whether you're doing it or not, or whether you think about it or not, you are.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you step into that?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: As a as a 16-year-old, how do you design your college life so that you can actually be at your very best?
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: How do you design your own experiences in your own life?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: As a 36-year-old, how are you creating experience?
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do the best managers do?
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: They create experiences for people where they lean in.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, do you want to be that kind of manager?
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: How do you build experiences where people say, I love working for that guy, I love working for that person.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: She's amazing.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's experience making.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the best leaders, best managers, best salespeople, best customer service folks, not just the best UX UI people.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, sure.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like way more analog and way more human in that.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.com.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_06: Love, love.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_06: I love that.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, and you've actually already answered this a couple times, but I like it as a bookend.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_06: What does good work mean to you?
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, from all the data, I would say that we can actually answer that unequivocally.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's where you've got three things: clear expectations, fit to roll, and a person who cares about you.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because the three most powerful questions in terms of driving, performance, creativity, resilience, advocacy.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: Do I know what's expected of me at work?
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: Do I have a job that plays to my talents?
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: And is there someone at work who really cares about me as a person?
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have clarity of expectation, so you know kind of how you what what what is winning, you know that the job actually calls upon certain unique talents of yours in order to win.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all surrounded by a person who deeply cares about you as a human.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a that's a beautiful thing.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's a marriage there between the demands of the job in terms of the expectations and the yearnings, the individualized unique yearnings of you.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: You get that marriage, you have something that will last for you know 50 years.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I love that.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_06: Um, I'm gonna ask one follow-up question.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_06: What about the people that are working for themselves?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_06: Where do they find that that is does that person that cares deeply about themselves become themselves?
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we humans work best in response to other human beings.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: So as an individual entrepreneur, you have to have a community.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: The community doesn't have to be a person that you report to, it doesn't have to be a person that you hire.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it can be, and that's a jolly good thing, but it can be a customer, it can be a fellow community member.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: You we humans do very badly when we're lonely.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think about those three questions, do I know what's expected of me at work?
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because an entrepreneur, you can go, well, I know what my metrics are.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: Does this really, does this job call upon some uniquenesses of me that are really valuable, uniquely valuable?
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you're an entrepreneur and you're doing a bunch of stuff the way you're B or C or D at player, okay, terrible.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: Right, as we all know.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_05: Rethink that.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because you'll just burn up.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're just like you could get through it.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: But now you're getting through the day and keeping things at bay.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's uh that's a recipe for burnout.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: But if you don't have that third one, if you don't have a person around you or people around you who go, uh, I I want you to thrive, I want you to flourish.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah like the human yearning is to feel more fully yourself over time.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: And there's ways to do that, but one of the one of the most important ways is to be surrounded by people who want that for you.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel more fully yourself over time.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: If that's a customer, great.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: If that's a community member, great.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't could be an employee, could be my boss, could be my investor.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's anyone who goes, I want you to get to 95 and feel like you lived a first-rate version of your life and not some second rate version, and I'm here for it.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: So to seek out community members who are like, for you, I am for you, is unfortunately or fortunately a human condition.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I think it's beautiful.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_06: I think it is beautiful and chaotic, and I think it makes us who we are.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_06: So totally.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_06: Um I love that.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, amazing.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you so much for being here.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_06: This was so great.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_06: Hope you enjoyed.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_06: Went by.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_06: And this has been good work.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_06: Yay!