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- [00:00]
A
Most everyone who listens to this podcast wants to go way beyond just hitting numbers and achieving goals. In addition to that, we want so deeply to see the people we work with flourish in their careers. In this episode, the sequence of five feelings that makes this work and why A Lot of It Comes down to Love. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 778, produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. When I say that word thrive, it is one of those words that we all are aiming for. We're aiming for, certainly ourselves. More importantly, we are aiming for it for the people we work with, the people we serve, our organizations, and the good work that our organizations do in the world today. A conversation that will help us to do a better job at helping people thrive. I am so pleased to welcome Marcus Buckingham to the show. Marcus is the author of two of the best selling business books of all time and has three of Harvard Business Review's most circulated industry changing cover articles. After spending two decades studying excellence at the Gallup Organization and co creating the StrengthsFinder tool, he built his own coaching and education firm and has been a prominent researcher on strengths, love and leadership at work. He is the author of Design Love how to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. Marcus, a pleasure to have you on.
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B
Thank you for having me.
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A
Dave, you write in this new book, Love Dies, the poet Pablo Neruda reminds us not from being killed, it dies from forgetting, from neglect. I was thinking about that beautiful quote and thinking about how we see that happen so often in organizations. And you've seen this up close too, both in your research over the years, but you've also seen it personally. And almost a decade ago you sold your business. What happened when you started to look at this up close and personal?
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B
Yes, it's funny when you look at extreme productive outcomes, which of course as leaders, we all want. We all want our people to be productive. We want them to be loyal and resilient. We want our customers to come back and buy more and tell lots of people about our firm, our company. And if you look at those outcomes, obviously you can try to get those as a leader, directively, you can try to set goals and give coaching and feedback and get people to achieve productivity that way or with customers, you can set prices and you can, you can design loyalty programs. And that does drive outcomes temporarily. But if you look at, well, what really sustainably drives all those really great outcomes, and you go upstream, you discover that, of course, experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes. So if you want to create really productive outcomes for your company, whether it's from employees or for customers, you've got to go upstream and go, well, how do we make experiences that drive the behaviors that drive the outcomes? Which means, really for all leaders, you're an experience maker. As a leader, you're an experience maker. And the issue isn't, are you one or not? The issue is, are you one deliberately? Are you unintentionally, Are you a skilled one? And so if you look at, then what do the best leaders do to create experiences that drive behaviors to drive outcomes? The word that people use to describe extreme positive experiences, whether they're customers or whether they're employees, the word we naturally reach for is love. We'll say, I love that company. I love that team. I love that leader. I love working here. I love that movie. I love this pair of socks. Whenever we have an extreme positive experience, the word that we humans reach for is love. And in my firm, when you start a company, you just do this instinctively. You want people that work there to say, I love working here. Because it's really you against the world. And you want your customers, particularly your first three or four customers, to go, I love that company. And you just talk about love all the time because you have to have almost a sense of delusion, positive delusion, that this company's going to work. And for it to work, both the customers and the employees have kind of got to fall in love with it. And I'd built a company like that. And then for various reasons, I'd sold it to a much bigger firm because I wanted their 3,000 salespeople. I wanted that reach. I wanted that. That ability to touch so many more people and companies. But for whatever reason, which we could get into if you wanted, but once that business was sold, the machine of the very large company took over. And so what we ended up talking about wasn't love anymore. Whether it's customers or whether it's employees falling in love with your company, we didn't talk about that. We talked about next quarterly earnings. We talked about process. We talked about compliance. Not bad things, not. Not evil things. Just the relentless running of the machine became what we talked about. Love doesn't die from being killed. Love dies from neglect. When we stop talking about it anymore, when we forget it, love dies from forgetting. And that's certainly what I saw in my own company. Once you allow the machine, with its need for efficiency and functionality to become the source of all of your conversations, then all of the vivid emot richness of how the heck do we get customers to love us and how the heck do we get people to love working here? Which is really tricky anyway. But when you stop talking about it, you absolutely lose the fluency in what does it mean? And what do we have to do differently on Monday to get people to love us? And for me, it was the death of love. That in a sense, prompted me to go. Let me go back into the data and see how we can design love in to companies, because as employees or as customers, that's what we really want. And I'd allowed it to the opposite of design is drift. And in selling my company, I'd allowed it to drift into functional compliance. And yeah, very hard to get it back once that happens.
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A
Indeed. Speaking of data, you've probably been in data processing data, thinking about data, more so than anyone I've talked to on the podcast in many years. And I was really struck by two lessons that you surface from your work and looking at the data. And I think it frames from a lot of the research and surveys that we tend to administer in organizations. And we think about that common one to five scale, right? Five is like what you just love the best possible thing. The word love comes up a lot. And then one is this horrible experience. And we ask people to rate things on all kinds of things. Their, their experiences as customers, their experiences as employees. And what was really interesting to me was two things coming out of that as you looked at that data. One of them is that as organizations, as people, as leaders, we tend to zero in on the ratings that show up that are between 1 and 3. What is it that you noticed about that that's so significant?
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B
Well, we live in a one, three world. If you imagine experience is rated on a scale of 1 to 5 and out comes up the Y axis, we imagine that and this is getting a bit into the data, Dave, but instinctively we imagine that the relationship between experiences and outcomes is linear. So we imagine that if you move a one experience to a two or a two to a three or a three to a four, you get the same amount of performance increase, of outcomes increase. And so if you happen to have a lot of customers that are getting a 2 experience as business leaders, we tend to focus on the two and go, oh my gosh, we got to move the twos to the threes. And if we have a lot of customers saying threes, well, let's try to move the threes to the fours. And in fact, we'll put the fours and the fives together, and we'll call that top two box or percent favorable. And then our focus as leaders becomes let's move the ones to the twos and the threes to the force fives. And the same is true with employees, where we'll have employees that leave our company. And many companies do exit interviews.
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A
Yeah, with the.
- [08:38]
B
With the people that leave. And we're trying to understand how to get people to stay and be passionate about our company by interviewing the ones that are leaving. Everywhere you look, we seem to think that if we move the ones to the twos and the twos to the threes, we'll. We'll get a really sustainable performance increase. But in fact, that is a complete misunderstanding of the way that experiences drive outcomes. The relationship between experiences and outcomes, it turns out, is not linear. It's curvilinear, which means it's like a hockey stick, which, if you imagine a graph where you got experiences on the x axis and outcomes up the y axis, moving a 2 experience for customers or employees to a 3 doesn't drive their behavior at all. Doesn't get you anything. Moving a 3 experience to a 4 for customers or employees. So going from an average experience to above average doesn't drive their behavior at all. You get no more productivity, no more loyalty, no more creativity, no more collaboration. If you think about the job of a leader, it's to change behavior. Well, if you move a 2 to a 3 or a 3 to a 4, you don't change anyone's behavior. It's only when you do something for customers or employees that's so remarkable, that's so meaningful, that hits them so hard in their heart, that they go five, that we start seeing behavior change, which means that we don't productively live in a 1, 3 world. We should live in a 1 3, 5 world. And that doesn't mean we ignore the ones. If you've got really grumpy customers, you should probably figure out what you can do to make them not be grumpy. But if you want to change the behavior of your customers, if you want to get them to come back more, if you want to. If you want to get them to spend more, if you want to get them to give you positive word of mouth and the same in the equivalent way for employees, you gotta focus on the fives. Because when it comes to measurement, of experiences. You got fives and then everything else. Fours, threes, twos, and ones is just not a five. The world is way more binary than we think it is. You got fives, everything else, not a five. So for leaders who want to create more positive behavior change, all of us ought to be fascinated by and curious about the fives, because the fives are different. You fives aren't just the opposite of ones. You don't learn anything about the fives from studying the ones. You don't learn anything about how to get employees to be really passionate and in love with your company from doing exit interviews with the ones that leave. You don't learn anything about how to get customers to fall in love with your company by doing interviews or being curious about what the grumpy customers are feeling. Excellence, fives and, and. And failure ones are just different. It's a huge kind of mind flip for leaders to realize. Failure doesn't teach you anything about success. Anything. It's just fives and ones. Fives and threes, they're just different. So for leaders to build the kind of teams where people say, I love working there or where customers say, I love shopping there or doing business there, Leaders have got to be really, really curious about the fives, because only the
- [11:47]
A
fives drive behavior you already hit on. The second big thing that I noticed in looking at the data was the distinction between a 4 and a 5. Like ones, twos, threes, fours, the incremental changes. But the 4 and a 5, it's a huge difference. And you write on this, your fives are the very things that make your life's journey worthwhile. Fives are those experiences you'll always say yes to, the ones you can't stop yourself from thinking about and looking forward to, even if you wanted to. Your fives are your sources of energy that not only move you forward, but also color. How you're moving actually feels to you. Your fives define your life and your living. And I was reflecting on that and thinking about the word that you've already mentioned a couple times in this conversation and keeps coming up when you look at the transcripts and the data and the research and all the surveys and the word that keeps coming up is love. How have you changed how you think about that word going through that process and looking at it through all the research?
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B
Well, if you study the fives and you do focus groups or interviews, whether it's with customers or with employees, and you just get them to talk about, why did you say five? What was it about the experience, what happened. The word that people instinctively reach for is love. And for the longest time, I rejected it. I kept trying to change it into words that were more palatable to the business community. So I would change it to joy or passion or satisfaction or engagement or even strengths. And those are good words, but that's not actually what people say. People say, I love that team. I love working for that leader. I love that store. I love that we reach for the word love. And so for me initially it was like, okay, take the word seriously. People are using it spontaneously, top of mind. So what do they mean by it? Rather than me dismissing it and try to find a synonym for it, what do they mean by it? And it turns out that what they mean. And of course there's 8 billion definitions of the word love. But because love is a consistent predictor of productive behavior around the world, we must all mean something common by it. And Dave, when you unpack it, what people seem to be referring to when they reach for the word love is flourishing. And by flourishing, it really seems to mean I feel more fully myself over time. Imagine that we all go through life wrapped up, armor plated like an armadillo, because the world is scary, but inside of us, there's something that wants to come out. All of us. Every human has something that we feel inside of us. And a healthy life for us, a flourishing life for us. It's is one where we get a chance to express ourselves a wee bit. And so any experience, no matter how small or how big, that allows us to express some small part of us. It could be a pair of socks that when we put them on, we're like, I just love these socks. It could be a movie where we're like, I don't know that I love that movie because the character or the scene or the story or something, it touched me and I came out of the theater bigger. Or it could be my mom, or it could be a mentor. So a really meaningful thing where somebody saw past my performance review and allowed me to step into something where I got to express myself. Any experience that allows us to take off one little plate of armor and lets us to express something inside of us, we call that love. And so that experience in our lives is something that we naturally reach for. It's like our whole lives are a scavenger hunt for those sort of loving experiences. And any leader who can design those experiences into the way that they recruit, the way that they onboard, the way they do performance management, the way that they promote is Going to be the kind of leader which can get people to go, I love working for them. Any brand or any business that figures out, oh, how do we create that feeling for customers of allowing them to take off one plate of armor after another so they lean in and lean in and lean in. Those are the kind of companies which will get people to build love in their heart where the customers are like, I love that company. That's what I would call experience intelligence. It's the in. It's the ability, the capability to design into really practical touch points. That feeling of. Of taking the armor plating off. That's what love is. When people say five, it's a feeling that I got to take some of the armor plating off and I got to feel more fully myself over time as a function of that experience.
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A
Well, and the good news for all of us is because of all your experience and all the research you've done over the years, you have identified some wonderful paths for us to be able to do that. And there's a ton in the book on so many things on how to do this with employees and customers. And you've surfaced five feelings when it comes to love and also made the point that they do follow a sequence. And I'm thinking we look at those five and maybe look at what are some of the ways that leaders might, might be able to embrace these just a bit more and a bit more intentionally. Like you said, we're creating experiences whether we think about it or not. And the first one is control. And you write on control to treat you lovingly. I must start by helping you feel control. What do you mean by that?
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B
Well, so the way that these five feelings came about, if you start with the outcome, the outcome is you've got a team member or you've got a customer going, I love that company or I love working on that team. So that's the outcome. And then you imagine to yourself, well, how'd they get there? How did we get it? So that that particular team member was like, I love working for that leader. Was that magic? Was it just an accident? If you reverse engineer it, Dave, you get these five feelings, which are sequential, which means basically love builds. And these five feelings for a leader can serve as a blueprint for. If you want people to say love that. You got to know what those five feelings are, and then you got to try to design activations for each one. Every lead is going to be a little different in terms of what they do, but every really great leader is trying to create these Five feelings and the people that they lead or the people that they serve, as you said, the first feeling is control. And if that's counterintuitive, but we humans, because we do go through life sort of balled up like an armadillo, the first question we ask in any experience is, what is this world you're dragging me into, and how does it work? When you can answer those questions really clearly as a leader, then I take one of those armor plates off, because I now understand what this world is and how to function within it. And so for you, as a leader, one of the first things, by the way, is to say, what does your team stand for? What does your company stand for? If you're very clear about the mission of your company, you give me a feeling of control. Even if you take, like, Chick Fil a saying, we're closed on Sunday, okay, that gives me, the customer, a feeling of control, of, I know what the world is that you're asking me to walk into. It's a world where it's closed on Sunday. Now, you, as a customer, may choose not to. I don't know, not to frequent that particular restaurant for whatever reason, but it's super vivid and super clear, and it gives me a feeling of control. A bit like the when Southwest Airlines said, hey, look, you be a passenger on our airline, we're not going to give you a seat assignment. We're just going to give you a letter, and then you got to figure out what your seat is. Now, there's a lot of customers maybe who were like, I don't. Okay, I don't want that. But there's a lot of other customers and employees who are like, I know exactly what you are as a company, and I know what you stand for, and I know how it works. So the first feeling that we humans reach for if we're going to move toward a feeling of love is, tell me how this world works and make sure that the tools you give me in the world do actually do what they say they're going to do. If you don't do that, you get what Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological association, called learned helplessness. And many leaders, because they're vague about the world you're asking people to come into because they aren't clear about the rules, because they aren't clear about the tools, you almost create in people a feeling of learned. I would call it learned powerlessness. That's unloving. Don't do that.
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A
The second one is harmony. And you cite an example from nursing, actually, for this one. And you write, the best nurses position themselves as being in emotional harmony with their patients. What does that look like?
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B
Yeah, the second feeling on this sequence is harmony. Every experience is an emotional experience for humans. And so one of the things that everybody's asking themselves, either overtly or subconsciously, is, does this experience know what I'm feeling and does it care? So for you as a leader, like, do your people think that you know what they're feeling and that you care when you don't feel that? When you feel that the experience, whatever it is, doesn't know what you're feeling or knows what you're feeling and doesn't care, you lean out because it's jarring. And you keep that armor plating firmly attached because it feels super exposed to be in an. In an experience which doesn't know what you're feeling. With nurses, we found that some nurses gave consistently lower pain ratings when they gave injections. And it was funny. It was like, how are they? How are they doing that? Why are some nurses rated much lower in terms of their pain rating than others? And we studied how they put the needle in, and we studied what they said, and were they warmer or were they more professional? Like, what was their thing? And it turns out it had nothing to do with that. It had everything to do with what they said right before they plunged the needle in. And the nurses who gave consistently less painful injections always said the same thing. Right before they plunged the needle in. They always said, some version of this is going to hurt a little bit. I'll try and make it hurt as little as I can. And somehow in saying that, and some of them said it warmly and some of them said it in a very professional way, their tone didn't matter. Just in saying, I know what you're feeling, you're thinking, this is going to hurt. It is going to hurt a little bit. I will try to make it hurt as little as I can. Somehow, in saying that the patient felt the nurse was sharing the pain and they rated the pain lower, the nurse met the patient harmoniously right where they're at. And what does that do for the patient? It means the patient leans in wherever you might want to move the patient to or move the customer to, or move the employee to wherever you want to move them. You have to meet them before you can move them. So if you've got an employee that's unhappy, you have to meet them at unhappy before you move them to happy. Same with customers. Harmony is the second step in the sequence of love. Because if you get it wrong, one of the examples I quote in the book is I got to the end of my lease from. I had an audi, an Audi A4, and I loved it. And I got to the end of my lease and my feeling at the end of a lease is what most people feel at the end of a lease, which is great. I'm going to look at new cars and maybe I'll get a different car. And it's exciting. Your feeling is excitement. And three weeks before the end of my lease, I got a robocall from Audi where they simply said, in a very robo like way, you have failed to schedule your termination inspection. And I didn't know what a termination inspection was, but it sounded pretty bad that I'd already failed it. And the next week I got another one saying the same thing. You failed to schedule your termination inspection. And I'm busy. I'm charging around like a mad prune, like most people are. And I just kept leaning out because on some deep level I realized Audi doesn't know what I'm feeling, or they know what I'm feeling and they don't care because this is a totally jarring communication from Audi. I'm leaning out, I'm leaning out, I'm leaning out. And then Audi had lost me for three to five years simply because they didn't take seriously the fact that they needed to meet me where I was at. Harmony is like this hugely sophisticated part of it. Experience, intelligence. Does the person know what you know, what they're feeling and that you care? However you want to show that, you better show that, otherwise you've lost me.
- [23:47]
A
The third of the feelings is significance. You write on this. If I show you that I'm attentive to your unique story, if I design systems that enable me to capture and recall the story, and if I tell you what exceptions I make based on this story, you will keep leaning into your journey toward me. For people who do that, well, what does that look like?
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B
So this third feeling is significance. And at some point in my journey toward love, in my heart, whether I'm a customer or an employee, at some point in my journey, I want you, if you're the designer of the experience, I want you to show me that you know what my story is and that you care. Front and backstory. Backstory, meaning, do you know anything about how I got here? And then front story. Do you know what's happening to me right now? Which is really the it depends feeling? I don't Want you to start that way. I want you to start with control. I want Chick Fil A to start off by saying, we're closed on Sunday. I want Southwest Airlines to start off by saying, you don't get any seat assignment. I want rules. I like rules. I want the doctor to tell me how do I set an appointment, and I want the doctor to tell me how I engage with that doctor's office. But at some point in my journey, I want the doctor in this case to say that I don't have the flu. I have my flu, and my flu is a little different. And so the prescription might be a little different. So what it looks like is at some point in the journey, the leader communicates. It depends. How do I praise you? It depends on you. How do I motivate you? It depends on you. What's the best way for you to learn? Oh, it depends on you. At some point, the best leaders in development individualize. They don't start off that way because that's chaos. And weirdly, we don't want that. But at some point, I want you to. To show me that you're interested in the uniqueness of me and that something might change because of that. Like, if I'm the sort of person who, like, what's the best way to praise me? Many of us don't actually know what kind of praise we lean into. But the best leaders are always trying to think about individualization. And so they may figure out, oh, you don't want praise in public. You hate that. You want a quiet little private word with me in my office. That's the only thing that matters to you versus someone else on the team, where it's like the only praise that matters for that particular person is a letter from a customer. They're all about service. So unless it comes from a customer, it doesn't matter. The best leaders are always attuned to those kinds of uniquenesses and the different decisions that you might make because of that, that's significance. And it's not the first feeling, but, boy, if you get that wrong. Dave, if you are applying all of your rules, which live in control, if you're applying them uniformly, then at some point, I, the team member, or I, the customer, I'm going to go, I'm insignificant, I'm unseen. And whenever we bump into that, we put the armor plating back on and we lean out. And we're doing that because it's pretty clear that this experience, whatever it is, doesn't see me as me. And that's really scary for us, and it's deeply unloving.
- [26:57]
A
The fourth one is the warmth of others. And on this point you say that one of the things to look for is a single point of contact guide. That seems really significant from some of the examples you mention in the book. What is it and what's important about it?
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B
So the fourth feeling is the warmth of others. We humans don't like going through an experience where we're isolated. If you, again, if you keep that metaphor in mind that you're an armadillo, each one of these feelings, you're removing one armor plate. Well, at some point after significance, you're going to start looking around and going, is anyone going through this with me? Who's with me? And how can they help? If you look around and you see no one's with you, you've got an onboarding process where there's no one going through it with you. You've got a customer experience where you are clearly the only customer here and no one is no one going through this experience with you in any way. There's no one here to help you. Then you will lean back because you're isolated. We humans hate that. So for us, as we live in the world that we're in today, many, many leaders and many companies don't take the warmth of others seriously. And one obvious example of this is we live in a world of handoffs where we have designed many of our experiences not as though there is a person going through the experience, but as a series of vertical processes. And you, the person, unfortunately, have to kind of do the jump from one vertical process to another and hold your narrative all the way through. That obvious example is hospitals. You, the patient are checked in, the person who takes your vitals is not. Then the person who comes in two hours later to check on how you're doing. The next healthcare professional who comes in is a different person. Then there's another physician, then there's a different nurse. And you're handed off from one healthcare professional to another. And the person who's supposed to hold it all together with all the details of your condition and your feelings is you, the patient. Which is massively stressful for you because deep down you don't know really what's going on. And one of the reasons why we spend so much money on healthcare in this country, but gets such comparatively poor outcomes, health outcomes, is we've created inherently unloving, stressful handoff experience where you're all by yourself as you're handed off from one professional to another. Call your bank, it's the same thing. Call your airline, it's the same thing. Call your insurer, it's the same thing. It's one handoff after another with you having to explain your story again and again and again. And what we look for in any experience is we need a guide to move us through that experience. And interestingly, in the healthcare environment, there's a role called a hospitalist that a couple of doctors came up with who when they're a physician, but their entire job is to explain you to all of these different healthcare professionals and to explain all the healthcare professionals to you. When you have a hospitalist, your patient outcomes go through the roof because there's someone moving through the experience with you. So in the world that we're living in, part of the thing in the book is it's not that we should live in a world of no handoffs. Handoffs happen all over the place. But we should see them for what they are. They're unloving. And therefore, from a business standpoint, they're unintelligent because they drive the customer away or they drive the employee away. When we, you think about, you know, human resources, the last 30 years we've disintegrated human resources, so that basically every single aspect of your human experience at work is siloed. If you've got a compensation issue, you call one place. If you've got an insurance issue, you call another. If you've got a family leisure issue, you call another. And you are the person having that holistic experience. But you're having to go from one handed off process to another as a human. And we humans hate that because we're all by ourselves in it. If human resources wanted to fix the distrust and loyalty problem that we're currently experiencing in work today, they would turn their brains and think about how do we design an experience where that particular person feels the warmth of others as they go from one vertical siloed experience to another? If you don't do that, we humans lean out, which of course you don't want.
- [31:16]
A
The fifth feeling is growth. And I think this one is really fascinating. Just because a lot of us as leaders have this illusion that someone comes onto our team and they're going to work on our team for the rest of our lives. All their needs are going to be satisfied by this organization. And they couldn't possibly have any other aspirations beyond working in this organization, this team. And of course that's not true. And we all know intellectually that it's not true. And yet in practice, we don't really think to address that real need for growth and that love behind it. And you cite Lululemon as an example of an organization that actually thinks about this a lot differently. What is it that they do?
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B
Yeah. So the fifth feeling is growth. If you think about it, love is a forward facing emotion. If you love anyone, you know they're never done, they're never finished. They're going to have to wake up tomorrow and face the world again. And so when you love someone or when you're trying to create a loving experience, you are always thinking about, how can I help that person be more capable tomorrow? Even if it's in a small way, I'm always thinking about tomorrow. And they're going to face it tomorrow and they're going to face it tomorrow. And I'll try to design that into everything that I do in ways small and large. Lulu is really interesting because you walk into those stores and they all have black and white, really nicely done black and white pictures on the walls of people doing running kinds of things or yoga kinds of things or getting fit kind of things. And these are ambassadors for that particular store. And they've got names and stuff. What many people don't know, but the people inside of Lulu know, is that many of them are ex employees. They joined as what they call an educator who works in the store. But they're really clear at Lulu that we know that you're going to keep growing, and we hope maybe that you're going to stay here for 20 years and you'll keep growing with us. But if not, we know that you'll still keep growing. You don't vanish if you leave us. So for many of those people who joined as an educator working in one of the stores, they then had an aspiration to open up their own studio, or to launch their own running shoes, or to start their own yoga camp. And so Lulu, rather than having them become invisible once they left the company for a select number of these employees, they go, no, no, let's go. Take, we love you. You're still alive. You're still a human. Let's take a picture of you and put you on the wall. Think about what that does. Yes. To customers. Because the customers are like, oh, that's cool. That person's there, they're in the community and Lulu's connected to them. And that's cool. But think about what that does to everybody joining Lulu. What it says to every new educator is that we see you as a whole human we are morally connected to you as a human for the rest of your humanness. And for some of you, that will mean that you're going to go off to do other wonderful things. And for some of you, you want to take your picture and put you on the wall. Many, many, many other companies, when you leave the company, it's like you're dead. No one can mention your name anymore. No one can talk about you anymore. It's like you're erased from existence. Well, that's such a functional and dehumanizing way to think about the people that come work for us. And the best companies won't do that. They'll see the human as a person who has ongoing worth, whether they're with us or whether they're not.
- [34:41]
A
Marcus, this is so helpful. There is so much more in the book we are not hitting on. We're just hitting on a couple of pages. I have two invitations. One is for folks to go grab the book. The second one is you've set up a resource on one of your sites to be able to help people to take the next step on this. Would you say a bit more about where folks could go if they want to really get into some more of the details?
- [35:03]
B
Yes. Well, there's two places you can go. Designlovin.com if you order the book we created in partnership with HBR, we created a 10 part series, 10 minutes per episode, just on some of the discoveries that were the foundation of the book. So if you want to experience that and you want to learn in that way as a leader, if you go to designlovin.com, you'll see how to get access to that. The other place though is if you're interested really in building this capability, which I've called experience Intelligence, then go to lovethat.com lovethat.com is focused explicitly on how can you as a leader build this particular capability that differentiates you from anybody else as a leader? So many leaders think of themselves as directive. The emotionally or the experientially intelligent leader understands that they are an experience maker. And therefore I've got to be super intentional and super intelligent about the kinds of experiences that I'm making. If you go to the big business schools, they don't teach anything about this at all. And yet it's the thing that drives sustainably productive human behavior, whether customers or employees. So if you're interested in driving sustainably productive human behavior, it would behoove you to build this capability. If that's interesting to you, go to lovethat.com and you'll see how to step into that.
- [36:26]
A
Marcus Buckingham is the author of Design Love how to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. Marcus, thank you so much for your work.
- [36:35]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [36:42]
A
If this conversation with Marcus was helpful to you three other episodes I'd recommend one of them is episode 299, how to lead top Line Growth. Tim Sanders was my guest on that episode. I'm thinking about him not specifically because of that episode, but because of a book Tim wrote over 20 years ago called Love is the Killer App. He was at the forefront of using the word love in the workplace when a lot of people weren't, and nudged a lot of us to be thinking about that word in the relationships that we bring into the workplace. Shout out to the Original Lovecat Episode 299 More of his perspective on also Leading Top Line growth. Recommended. Also, episode 692 transcend leadership struggles through your strengths Lisa Cummings was my guest on that episode. Lisa is a pal and leads one of the best organizations I know of Lead Through Strengths, helping leaders to utilize the tools from Strengths Finder, now called the CliftonStrengths assessment, to help us to really understand our strengths. And I'm thinking about her work because Marcus Buckingham was one of the original lead authors on Now Discover your Strengths did so much of the work on building the Strengths Finder Assessment and has helped so many of us in our work. Lisa helps us to navigate a lot of the tools of Strengths Finder and episode 692. We talk about that in many of the resources. A great starting point if you've not been exposed to the assessment before. And then finally, I'd recommend episode 712, clarifying values for a Workplace People love. Ann Chow was my guest on that episode. Former CEO of AT&T Business. We talked about the importance of values and how to articulate them and clarify them and have them show up in the workplace to line up with the love that we talked about in this conversation. A great compliment to Marcus's message today. Again, that's episode 7 12. All of those episodes you can find on the coaching4leaders.com website. I'm inviting you to set up your free membership@coaching4leaders.com because it'll give you access to the entire library of episodes. You can search by topic to find exactly what's relevant to you. We're filing this episode under Talent Development, one of the key areas of helping people to learn and grow that we have inside of the library, but it's one of the dozens of sections that we have in the library so you can find exactly what you're looking for. Right now, it's one of the best places to start is the free membership because you can go in, find what's relevant to you and be able to track down what you need. Right now it's harder to do that on the podcast apps. We've made the website really accessible so you can find that. Plus, as part of your free membership, you'll get a number of other resources, including my weekly Focus 5 message, a message from once a week with five key things that will be helpful to you tools in your daily leadership. You can again access all of that by going over to coaching4leaders.com coaching for leaders is edited today as always by Andrew Croker Next Monday, I'm glad to welcome Nilfer Merchant to the show. We are going to be talking about how to address bad behavior. Join me for that conversation with her. Have a great week and see you back Monday Sat.