How Treating Employees Like Customers Transforms Performance and Belonging | Mark LeBusque, Revisited

Summary

Podcast Summary: Work For Humans Episode: How Treating Employees Like Customers Transforms Performance and Belonging | Mark LeBusque
Host: Dart Lindsley
Guest: Mark LeBusque
Date: May 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the transformative idea of treating employees like customers, based on Mark LeBusque’s journey from a results-obsessed sales leader to a human-centric manager and coach. Together, Mark and Dart grapple with the limitations of the traditional, top-down, output-focused management style, reflecting on the real consequences for employee well-being and organizational performance. The discussion is rich with personal stories, practical experiments, and philosophical insight—centered on belonging, individuality, trust, and the “whole human.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Journey from Technocrat to Human Manager

• Mark’s Early Management Lessons ([02:47])

  • Mark shares how early success as a technically proficient leader led him to “bad Mark” behaviors: micromanagement and treating people as labor units.
  • “I practiced all of the traits that I said we shouldn’t do. I practiced them very well as a young manager…” (Mark, [02:47])
  • The realization: Over many years, he questioned if his reward-driven, output-centric approach actually served himself, his team, or the company long-term.

• Dart’s Perspective as a Technocrat ([05:29]–[08:21])

  • Dart confesses to spending years building systems that “turned people into things” for organizational efficiency.
  • “Every time a human being goes into a computer and is represented by a computer, they become a thing.” (Dart, [05:29])
  • Neither felt the old industrial approach added up, nor could they fully rationalize making employee wellbeing serve only business outcomes.

Employees as True Customers

• Reframing the Employee-Company Relationship ([09:43]–[15:21])

  • Dart and Mark argue that employees are essentially “outside” the company, like customers, due to their free will and capacity for choice.
  • “A customer is somebody who exchanges value with your enterprise and is free not to. And that's exactly what people are.” (Dart, [09:43])
  • Shifting from seeing employees as “inputs” to seeing them as whole humans changes everything about motivation, engagement, and mutual respect.

• Moving Beyond the Numbers ([08:21]–[14:15])

  • The false dichotomy between focusing on shareholder value/customers vs. employees.
  • Mark advocates starting with what employees “expect, how they do their best work, how they get balance in their lives…”

Making It Real: Humanizing the Workplace

• Self-Awareness and Vulnerability as the Foundation ([15:54])

  • Mark describes his “first experiment” as transforming himself—recognizing personal flaws, the need for belonging, and openly inviting his team into the process.

• Openness and Shared Values ([18:58])

  • Mark eschews traditional empowerment rhetoric, instead opting for radical permission, giving the team license to co-create values and name positive/negative behaviors.
  • “We created our own set of values as a group… what does it look like when we do this? And more importantly, what does it look like when we don't?” (Mark, [19:00])

• Navigating Resistance & Organizational ‘Antibodies’ ([20:13])

  • Both Mark’s team and his corporate peers initially resisted his unconventional approach, labeling him “Kumbaya Mark.”
  • He had to “hold his nerve” and endure skepticism, holding fast to his belief that this was the right thing for his team and business.

Trust, Friendship, and Love at Work

• Can Managers and Employees Be Friends? ([23:17])

  • Mark supports the possibility and value of genuine connection, even love, at work—so long as these relationships don’t interfere with necessary tough decisions.
  • Story: Years after leaving, he reconnects easily with a team member not because of work accomplishments, but because of a shared bond. ([23:17])

• Redefining Trust ([26:09])

  • Mark reversed his old model (“prove it and I’ll trust you”) to “I’ll trust you unless you give me a reason not to.”
  • “What if I thought that my people turned up with good intention to do good work… I’m going to trust you now, implicitly…” (Mark, [26:09])
  • The resulting vulnerability paid off with greater positivity and engagement.

Rethinking Organizational Structure

• Flipping the Org Chart ([27:40])

  • Dart describes his habit of literally flipping the org chart: “It’s the branches and the leaves where the growth happens and it’s the trunk where the support happens.”
  • This frames leadership as support, not control, and emphasizes nurturing individual growth and “wholeness.”

• Tailoring Work and Recognizing Whole Humans ([29:34])

  • Mark: “Our ability not to try and put everyone into the one box… I want you to be like Dart... not me.”
  • He underscores the importance of personalized conversations about life design, not just “work-life balance.”

Specific Experiments and Metrics

• Blending Work & Personal Goals ([32:36])

  • Mark built self, family, and community goals into performance plans, tying 15% of sales bonuses to non-work targets (e.g., walking on the beach, reducing golf handicaps, volunteering).
  • Result: The team hit sales by 275% and 427%, while reducing work hours.
  • “He reduced his face to face work hours by 22 and a half hours per week… And then we started to measure that like we measured our work related goals.” (Mark, [32:36])

• Prioritizing Helpfulness, Thankfulness, Care, and Fun ([39:55])

  • Mark paused numeric measurements for three months, instead focusing daily on human behaviors.
  • The simple thank-you card: “It’s so powerful when someone receives a written thank you.” (Mark, [39:55])

The Manager’s Experience & Transformation

• Compounding Positive Change ([43:08])

  • Sticking to the human-centered approach led to exceptional retention, engagement (over 90% scores), and sales results.
  • “If you can get to that six month period, it absolutely, the impact, it compounds so quickly.” (Mark, [43:08])

• The Vulnerability of Growth ([46:09])

  • Both agree: you have to go through “bad” early stages to become “good.”
  • Mark: “I do think we almost need to have a version of bad whatever our name is in order to become good.” ([46:09])

Reflection, Belonging, and the Deeper Why

• Filling Your ‘Good News’ Filing Cabinet ([47:20])

  • Mark suggests people focus more on positive achievements than old failures.

• Belonging as a North Star ([50:55])

  • Mark’s personal mission, shaped by his father’s suicide and its message of not belonging: “I want people to feel a sense of belonging, but I also want to feel that sense as well.” ([50:55])
  • The real measure: When people independently report life-changing impacts, years later.

• The Cost of Human-Centric Work ([55:24])

  • Mark shares that pioneering this approach costs him acceptance and the comfort of conformity; he must live with being different.
  • “We like your results, Mark. We don't particularly like the way you go about it…” (Mark, [55:24])

• Suffering, Discomfort, and Growth ([56:05])

  • “We need to be able to sit with the conflict of these things as human beings... that’s where the real work happens… I want to be a bit more selfless and accept that there's going to be some pain that comes with that.” (Mark, [56:05])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you're living for some outcome other than being human with the people you work with, you're going to treat them badly.” (Dart, [00:00])
• “What would happen if I truly treated my people like human beings?” (Mark, [02:47])
• “You become the technocrat behind the scenes building the systems… and it didn't add up.” (Dart, [05:29])
• "My job is to guide and help my people to go out and do those things by giving them space and coaching them..." (Mark, [20:13])
• “Love can occur in workplaces and I think it does… courageous managers will use that word and talk about that very openly.” (Mark, [23:17])
• “If you optimize a complex system for one output, it comes at the cost of all the other outputs…” (Dart, [37:11])
• “The dough on the outside—that's where the magic is.” (Mark, [39:55])
• “I want the work itself to make them feel whole and alive.” (Dart, [27:40])
• “The thing I ask myself every day is what have I done today to make another human being feel like they belong?” (Mark, [50:55])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] – Framing the episode: Human vs. Output-focused management
• [02:47] – Mark’s personal management evolution, and the “Bad Mark” phase
• [05:29] – Dart’s confession as a technocrat
• [09:43] – The case for employees as customers, not “inputs”
• [15:54] – Mark on self-experimentation and cultivating openness
• [20:13] – Resistance & holding your nerve with a new approach
• [23:17] – Can managers and employees be friends? Love at work
• [26:09] – Radical trust, vulnerability, and its impact
• [27:40] – Flipping the org chart: leadership as support
• [32:36] – Performance plans integrating whole-life goals and results
• [39:55] – Awareness of human qualities: thankfulness, care, fun
• [43:08] – The compounding impact of staying the human course
• [46:09] – The necessity—and forgiveness—of early “bad” behaviors
• [50:55] – Mark’s north star: Creating belonging, rooted in personal loss
• [55:24] – The personal cost of doing human-centric work
• [56:05] – Embracing discomfort and conflict as the price of leadership

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Tone and Style

The conversation is candid, philosophical, and grounded in real business experiments. Both guests openly share their own failures and lessons, balancing vulnerability with pragmatism and occasional humor. There is a bias toward action: practical examples, experiments, and metrics balance the broader philosophical dialogue.

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Summary Takeaways

• Reframing employees as customers radically changes motivation, trust, and belonging in the workplace.
• Sustained human-centric management requires self-awareness, openness to discomfort, and willingness to challenge the status quo—even at personal cost.
• Small, personal experiments (honest recognition, permission for life goals, flipping control structures) add up to massive gains in engagement, performance, and fulfillment.
• The deepest outcomes are human: “What have I done to make another human being feel like they belong?”

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For more from Mark LeBusque:

• LinkedIn
• www.marklebusque.com

Listen to this episode for a compelling blueprint on making organizations more human—and more successful.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Is a sales guy. It's a part of the business that's supposed to run on numbers and motivation is supposed to be driven by big bonuses for big sales. This episode stuck with me because Mark's journey proves that even in sales, it's about a lot more When Mark became painfully aware that he cared a lot more about the dollars than about the well being of his employees, he began to question his management philosophy. It clearly wasn't good for his team and it wasn't good for him. The epiphany came when he realized he should treat his employees the same way he treated his customers. When Mark started thinking of each team member as a whole person instead of just a means to an end, the team reached unprecedented levels of growth and a newfound sense of belonging. Our conversation goes surprisingly deep. Mark's a Harvard trained speaker, facilitator, mentor, coach, and author focused on making businesses more human centric. After a 25 year career in sales, operations and general management, Mark has established a human manager model of business that focuses on people to improve outcomes for employees and the business. In this episode we discuss how the suicide of Mark's father transformed his view on relationships. Why technical proficiency is a poor measurement of management ability, the hazards of viewing employees as simple inputs to production how thinking of employees as customers grew Mark's team's sales by 427% how traditional org charts mislead us what leaders can do to create a culture of trust and appreciation as well as other topics. So if you enjoy this episode, remember to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I'm very pleased to bring you my conversation with Mark Lebousk. Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. I've just been reading your book Being Human. If I was going to try to summarize Being Human, it basically says to me, if you're living for some outcome other than being human with the people you work with, you're going to treat them badly. You're going to be subhuman in some way. And I'd love to talk to you about how you figured that out. And upon starting to come to that realization, could you just do it right away or was it a learning path?

[B]

Great question. So how did I figure it out? I figured it out because I practiced all of the things, all of the traits that I said we shouldn't do. I practiced them very well as a young manager who was promoted way beyond his level of competence. So I was very, very fortunate, like many are, to be technically Proficient, and I worked in the logistics space. So I put the parcels in the right part of the plane, and I put them in the right bag so they went to the right destinations. And then I got promoted into the call center and I could find missing parcels. And then I got put into sales and I could sell things. And then all of a sudden, Dado was in charge of people. And what I did, like I think many of us do, is I continued to go down the pathway of behaving in a way that I was rewarded, which was doing all the technical things and so interfering, micromanaging, treating my people. And I've seen some of your work, which I love, treating my people like units of labor and outputs. So I did this through my 20s because it was getting me to a place where I wanted to be, which was a fancy title before I turned 30, which was this estate manager. And I think this is a really important point, is that I called it Bad Mark. We know it's Bad Mark. I learned just as much as when I was Good Mark. And then the second part of your question, I think the realization happened over about 15 to 20 years. There wasn't a moment in time where it was like, I need to be more human. It was more like, I don't think my behavior's serving me well, but I'm finding it really hard to stop that behavior because it keeps rewarding me, but it doesn't feel right. And then I think as you get a bit older and, you know, kids came along and I started to think about the impact I was having on people, more than just them as individuals, but what's the ripple effect out into their families and communities and things like that. And I also started to become a little bit disappointed with the system that we were saying was going to change. And, you know, the terms of our people are the most important part of our business and these types of things. So I reckon I gradually became a bit of a maverick. And then I got to the point where it was a bit like, well, it feels right. So now you're going to have to really step into this, what I call good mark phase and ask yourself this question. What would happen if I truly treated my people like human beings? So it wasn't a moment in time. I think it was a series of micro moments. If I reflect back, that came to the realization that there has to be a better way to help people want to come to work and do good work, be happy, be engaged and feel like they're contributing.

[A]

Yeah, I didn't start off quite the same place. But I started off maybe equally far away from being a human manager. I am the. What I say is, I'm the artistic child of scientists. And so I was really raised in the sciences. I spent years writing literary fiction and publishing literary fiction and teaching writing. And so I spent a lot of time in a more aesthetic space. But what companies wanted to hire me for was my technical skills. And the really negative thing that I say is that I spent the first 20 years of my career making myself wealthy by treating people like things in order to. To ingratiate myself with the people who allocate power and money. Yeah, that's like the most negative way that I can say what I did. And for me, it wasn't that I was a manager treating people like things. I was a technocrat. I was the person behind the machine. I was the person building the machine that was ultimately going to treat people like things. And every time a human being goes into a computer and is represented by a computer, they become a thing. Every time they are a number in a system, they're a thing. Every time you classify people into subcategories and job codes, they become more of a thing that you're going to manipulate. That's what I was. I was the technocrat behind the scenes building the systems. And it didn't add up. It didn't add up. And a part of the reason it didn't add up is that every time I thought, well, we should treat people better, and then I sort of did the math, I went, so we're going to treat people better because they're going to produce this output, because then we're going to sell more, because then. And I couldn't actually believe in that chain of reasoning. And so I was the head of business architecture for a Fortune 50 company. And so my job at that point was to build these really big abstract models of how the whole company works. And they were so big and abstract, they represented the whole company. And the way I describe it is they're abstract enough that if I was to use one of these models to describe a mouse, I could use the same model to describe an elephant. Because, you know, functionally, they're about the same. They have a liver, heart, you know, So I was. I was doing that. And the math of those models kept showing me employees outside the company as a customer. And it was such a relief, honestly, because I always knew that there was something wrong with the conclusions that I was being led to. I felt that there was something probably immoral about the Conclusions that the old model, the sort of industrial model of treating people as inputs to production, that I thought that that was leading us to a bad place, but I couldn't argue myself out of it until I started recognizing employees as outside and as customers.

[B]

There's such a challenge with that because I look at two things I love the adaptive leadership, the framework heifers and Linsky's work. And they talk about leadership above and below the neck and that sort of feeling below the neck that you just know there's another way and it's not right. But you kept getting driven back up above the neck to go. But it needs. It doesn't make logical sense, or the logic says this, or I've done this report, I've done this study, and it's not going to work. And I think that the industrial system, the management system, has such a strong hold on us because as human beings, we want to be connected. We want to feel like we're part of something. And I think it's very easy to feel part of something when you know that you're going to get rewarded for being technically good. Because we can see that. And you know, what you can't measure, you can't manage. Comes to mind for me here as well, Doug, where I found it really challenging, early days with doing this work was that people would say, well, how do you measure it? And I would say, in the end, I'd say, well, you can't measure it, but you can feel it. I wonder what your thoughts are around that whole idea of when you tell someone you've just got to feel it, but you tell them that in the workplace, what sort of response do you expect to get?

[A]

Hey, everybody. On June 16th, I'll be speaking at one of my very favorite venues. It's the Future Talent Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. To get Tickets, go to futuretalentsummit.org that's all one word. And enter my speaker. Promo code elevenfold, which is eleven fold, to get a big discount. If you're in the area, I would love to meet you there. That's futuretalentsummit.org, promo code elevenfold. Well, first of all, in general, I think that spreadsheets are so visible and charts are so visible and they feel so precise that they are very, very compelling signals inside the system. And you've done a really good job, by the way, in your book Being Human, which is that you've done a really good job of just pointing out this is what it looks like to be human. And over here Is this is what it doesn't look like to be human. I feel like until I can actually make a business case for this, that I can't win the day. And so the way that I've gone about doing that is to say, look, when you have a customer. And this is why I frame employees as customers, partially because, honestly, they are. It's not like they're like customers. A customer is somebody who exchanges value with your enterprise and is free not to. And that's exactly what people are. So as soon as you start to see them as a customer, you can say something along the lines that is, look, when a customer walks into your establishment, if the first thing you do is look at their wallet and ask yourself, how much can I get out of that wallet? They're going to feel it. And you've felt this too, which is you go to a hotel and they charge you for parking, and then they charge you for the water, and then they charge you for something else. I recently, on an air particular airline, used to you could buy the tickets. The tickets were inexpensive, but you could not get a seat without buying it. And I was like, seriously, that's such a con, right? So what I say is, if you really want to win a customer, you don't start off with the wallet. You start off with saying, what does this customer really, really want in their hearts? What are they after? And you start from the concerns and the whole human. And one of the things about the traditional model is that if you're my employee, I'm only going to look at you for your output, like you were saying earlier. And that's 10% of your whole person. And that's your wallet to me. But if I look at you as a customer, I'm looking at all of you. If I'm a good business, I'm looking at all of you. And I'm asking, what can I do to make Mark's experience here whole?

[B]

I think this is one of the things that really attracted me to that we're wanting to have this conversation. And I think this is part of the human thing is I felt connected to you when you were talking about employees as customers, because I used to say that exact thing. It was like I'd say internal customers and external customers. And I was reminded many times by our marketing team where I worked, there are no customers inside the business. The customers are outside the business. And I'm like, well, what if we started instead of starting at shareholder value and customer experience, what if we flipped it over and we talked about what if we treated our people in the business like we treat our customers? What sort of conversations would we start to have that are different to the ones that we have today, which are very spreadsheet driven? I love when you said that very much about your KPIs. These things are important, by the way. Don't get me wrong. I think it's important we can measure. But if we truly believe that we put our people first and that people are the most important things in our organization, well, that just generally tells me, logically tells me that we should treat them as customers and understand what they expect, how they do their best work, how they get balance in their lives, what great leadership looks like and what they value. And I love what you said before Dart, that we look at the 10%, which is what can they do in order for this organization to be successful rather than what can we do for them as a unique human being to allow them to be the very best that they can be? And I think that's the opportunity that we tend to miss at the moment.

[A]

There's one thing I want to go back to, but I want to finish this conversation about what you said about the marketing person. There are no internal customers. That's a red herring and it took me a while to realize why. So, first of all, people are scared to death of not focusing enough on the paying customer. People are scared to death of that. And appropriately, because you don't want to be navel gazing and just trying to make your life better, your personal life better at the cost of the company and things like that. I understand where that comes from. And I lived that for years. You know, that was my opinion too, until I realized that employees are not inside the company. Employees are outside the company. And why are they outside the company? Well, because when I buy some capital equipment, it's inside the company. I own it, I control it. It can't do anything I don't want it to do. It's just a table. But employees have free will and can come and go at will. And so to say that employees are inside the company is actually inaccurate. And so there can be customers outside the company who are employees.

[B]

Yeah, I like that.

[A]

Yeah, I really think that that's a danger because that's exactly what I used to say is no, we don't focus on ourselves. We focus externally on our customer. Yeah, well, the employees are external. But here's what I wanted to get to because we've talked about the word human and being a human manager and we've talked about how it's looking at people whole. I wanted to ask you examples so that we can make it real. Recent examples, things you've seen other people do. What does it look like?

[B]

The example I'm going to start with is the example of self. Because in order for this work to be effective and to truly see other humans as humans, I think you've got to truly see yourself. This work was successful for me because I took an experimental mindset and my first experiment was. Was me. And to understand and accept and I say these things, to be human is to be structurally unstructured, is to be loved or feel belonging, but also be isolated at the same time. There's all of these things that go on. It's to be flawed but perfect at the same time or imperfectly perfect. I think the first example for me was to look at myself and go, what are the human elements? As in the need for deep connection, a sense of belonging, to feel relevant and contributing as a human being to a group, whether it's a family group, a work group, whatever it might be, and then have a bit of a look and say, how am I lining up with that right now? And so I spent a lot of time doing the work of Mark because I'm a flawed human and I've done a lot of things very poorly to people and I've done some good things as well. But that was the starting point. And I think being very, very open then with others to say, hey, I want to come from a place of good intention and I want to help you make progress. But at the same time, it's going to be hard because there's not really a rule book for this. We're going to make mistakes. But what I started to see was people being more open. These are the examples, people starting to say what needed to be said rather than what they thought I wanted to hear because they were given permission to do so. The other big one, here's an example when people understand why they're relevant and how they contribute, and I'm going to say from two areas here, from a technical perspective, which we all know that, but from a human perspective, and I'll give you a quick example here, this is really powerful. I think talking to my people about why they were relevant and how they contributed as human beings really started to get them stepping into the work they could do. So for an example, I had a guy called Trevor in my team who was a bit of a professional agitator, but for good reason. So he would be the person in the room that when we were practicing groupthink, Trevor would speak up and go, hang on a minute. I think we're going down the pathway that is not going to help us get to where we need to get to. So his relevance and contribution was around agitation because we needed that. And these sorts of things. We don't talk about this stuff enough, but these are the things that start to change the way you work. So we now accept that Trevor's our agitator. We don't accept that Trevor is a. He's being an impediment to us making progress. He's actually there to help us make progress. I hope that makes sense.

[A]

Yeah, it does. One of the things you said is that it sounds like this is something you co developed with your team.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

How did you go about that?

[B]

By being really open from the start that regardless of hierarchy and title, we are all here to bring whatever we have that's unique to make this thing work. So it's like, I give you permission. I'm not into this idea of empowerment. I think empowerment is a word. It's been used so much that it has no power. We talked about permission and one of the things that we did in that space is we created our own set of values as a group. And we were really, really strong on not just having the word, but then saying, what does it look like when we do this? And more importantly, what does it look like when we don't? And that then we all have permission to both acknowledge and appreciate the good work, but also call out the stuff that's not going well. So it was almost like there was no hierarchy as such. We are a group of 40 human beings who all have an opportunity and capacity and capability to make this work. And I'm not going to be the heroic soloist as the leader who's going to make this happen, because I can't.

[A]

Did the organization around you have antibodies against what your team was doing?

[B]

Let me just first say this. Some of my team had antibodies. And I'll say this too, I think this is an important part as well, is that if I think about it now, I tried to do too much too quickly. And this is a really important part in adaptation. We should change incrementally over time. I tried to do it all in one go. And so some of my people, they told me later on, they told me that they tried to arrange a sort of a mutiny at one stage on me because they just couldn't keep up with the pace that I was running at. So there was that. But Then there was the. I remember. I remember sitting around with my peers, and they're all good people, but they used to call me Kumbaya Mark. And I'd get a little frustrated with that dart. But now when I sit back and think about it, that I think there was just this level of. There was a level of threat about what if this works? Because he turns up the meetings and he doesn't talk about his pipeline and he doesn't talk about what's signing up in the next three months, even though he's a sales director, he talks about his people being happy and being engaged. And it was like, this is foreign to us. They would say to me, why aren't you out on the road selling things? And I go, because that's not my job. My job is to guide and help my people to go out and do those things by giving them space and coaching them and doing that stuff. So I had some people who were, I think, either actively working against me or some ways being passive about it, but maybe, as we call here, sticking the boot into me a little bit when they could. And I think with that, just quickly, I'll say this. There was a moment in time where I said to myself, and this is where I think the leadership came in. I heard a voice that said to me, even though it's getting a bit challenging for you, you need to hold your nerve, because what you're doing is the right thing. It may not be the popular thing, Mark, but it's right. So hold your nerve and keep going. Because it would have been easy at that point in time to go back to the usual way of the KPI in the spreadsheet.

[A]

You know, I just interviewed Fred Reichhold. He's the person behind Net Promoter Score, and he's the person behind customer loyalty. And what I think he's done that is so fascinating, which is that he's gone through all of the sort of the major pieces of business, and instead of saying what their function should be, he's said what they should feel. And he said that customers, you're trying to have them feel loyal, and employees, you want to put them into a situation to love their customer. And so I asked him, I said, how should management feel about employees? And he said, management should love their employees. And so I want to ask you this question. Is that in there? And does that mean that your team is your friends? On the one hand, I want that to be the case with my team. I want us to be able to be friends. On the other hand, sometimes I Feel they don't want it. So I'm wondering, what are the feelings?

[B]

It's a great question, Steve. I'll just quickly say this, that even when I ask people how they feel today in the workplace, their immediate response is, I think so we're sort of conditioned to go straight to the thinking pieces. And then the word love, love and work, or loving the people in work. I think that horrifies a lot of people to hear that. But what's important in this question is that we understand that each human being we're working with within our team is unique. And some of them may be very comfortable with the term love and others will not be comfortable at all. So I think it's about finding your mark with that and understanding. And you only do that when you spend time in talking to your people at an individual level about what they're comfortable with and what they're uncomfortable with. When I ran this two year experiment and I had a great love for the people and the great example is I've been gone now for 10 years, but I bumped into one of them in the airport here in Melbourne in Australia only two weeks ago. And it was like, we only saw each other yesterday. Now that doesn't come from a place of I'm really. And this is Trevor. This is their guy, Trevor. It's not come from a place of. Trevor did really well and he always hit his targets. It's like, no, no. Trevor and I had a. Had built a connection that was like a couple of guys who had a level of love for each other that was also not just about work, but it was about outside of work. So understanding about Trevor's family and his two young girls and the things he liked to do. I think it's a myth that we can't be close to our people and that we can't have some sort of friendship as long as we know that the friendship should never impact on decisions that need to be made at times. But I think love can occur in workplaces and I think it does. And I think that courageous managers will use that word and talk about that very openly rather than try and hide it into something else that, you know, we've got a good relationship and we're doing good work together. And it's like, actually, I have a love for you because I see you almost as much as I see my family. I think it can exist.

[A]

Right. When I switched companies, I switched from a company, Cisco Systems, where I'd been for 18 years, and then I came to Google. I didn't know how much I depended upon my friendships on my own team. And you know what a part of it is, is that your friends will have enough of a history with you that they'll forgive you when you screw up. And I didn't feel like I'd put enough sort of markers on the table where I could screw up. I have to have a track record or something before I can screw up. That might not have been necessary, but that's what I felt.

[B]

What came to my mind then was the concept of trust. And I guess this was the other thing that I didn't mention before, which is remiss of me that I didn't. But part of my experiment was to reframe how I looked at trust. And trust to me was under the bad mark regime was all about you show me that you are capable, as in demonstrate to me you're technically capable. You get the runs on the board and then you make me look good. And I think this is the important part. You make me look good and I will trust you. Now what usually happened in that I was looking more so for things that people were doing poorly or badly, which took a lot of energy. And I flipped it over to the situation of saying what if I thought that my people turned up with good intention to do good work and to help this organization and its customers to get the outcomes that they wanted. So what I'm going to say is I'm going to trust you now, implicitly trust you until you give me a reason not to. I think that was one of the hardest mindset changes I had to make because I immediately felt that I'd put myself into a position of vulnerability and danger. And I think this is really important. But what I found was I stopped spending so much time looking for what was going to go wrong and and searching through what I call my bad news filing cabinet for stories about people. And I spent more time on looking at what they were doing right and acknowledging and appreciating it. And it just totally changed the relationship with people.

[A]

I don't know if you happen to run across this article I wrote which is about flipping the org chart. What I've done is I've taken the org chart and I've flipped it upside down. And in fact it's always represented upside down when I have a choice. The principle is that it's the branches and the leaves where the growth happens and it's the trunk where the support happens. And the entire metaphor of tops down org charts is control. And all the metaphors of Control are up means strength and down means weakness. And up means control. And down means the controlled. And up means health and down means sickness. And so by flipping it and thinking about it differently, my role becomes one of support and importantly. And this is why this metaphor goes on and on. And you know, sometimes metaphors go on and on and they fail. This one goes on and on and it keeps working, which is that you want every branch to grow its own way, you want every branch to find its own light and you want it to be free to grow the way that it needs to grow to find that. And what I want every person in the organization to feel, not all the time necessarily, but a lot of the time, is I want the work itself to make them feel whole and alive. And so my job is to really know the whole person and what they want from work and make sure that I can bring that kind of work into the team and allocate it in a way that's going to align to people's passions or interests or I'm going to bring it in and let the team self arrange itself so that it's going after the thing that it, that's going to hopefully make it feel whole and alive, each person. And that term whole and alive actually comes from an architect, Christopher Alexander, who pointed out that great architecture makes people who experience it feel whole and alive.

[B]

I think whole and alive. And this idea of getting to know the people, I love that idea of letting the tree, the branch, the leaves grow as they should. I think the old system is very much, here's the trellis that you need to grow up, here's where you need to go. And, and if you start to go outside of that, we're going to rearrange your, the stem and the leaves to push back where they need to go to. And this ability for any of us to again hold our nerve to allow the other human beings to go where they will flourish. I talk about a thing called work style preference. One of the questions I ask my people is what's your work style preference? If you're going to thrive rather than survive, what is it going to be like for you? And they would say things like, I do my best work between 8 and 10am don't interrupt me or give me a little bit of guidance, but then let me go and run it like my own business. One of my people said to me, if I don't hear from you every two days, I think I'm doing a bad job. Our ability not to try and put everyone into the One box. And usually the box we try and fit them into is the box that we created and success for ourselves. Like, be like me because I'm now your boss and it's like, I actually want you to be like dart. So how do you do your best work Dart and then say, and the other thing I then want to know is, and I call it life design, not work, life balance. Because I think work's part of your life and an important part is how do you get balance in your life? I think that was a question that really opened up a lot of great conversations with my people because I wanted them to live a full life that incorporated work as one of the elements on top of self and family and community and other things. So we have to have these conversations. Rather than have a lunch and learn session on work life balance, we actually need to talk to our people. Like, for instance, I'll ask you this question now, if you don't mind. How do you get balance in your life? What are the things that you love to do that help you to live a whole and fulsome life?

[A]

It's an interesting question because I don't quite get balance in my life and I don't get balance in it because there's four things I want to do and there's not enough time in the day to do all four of those things. And three of them are not work. And so I had a friend who said, yep, I've got these three things, I've got this project, I've got. I need to manage my team and I've got my home life. Here's how I manage it. I can do two of those well at any given time. And so the answer is I don't. But everything I, almost everything I do, I really enjoy. And so do I spend enough time with my family sometimes. But am I 100% there in my brain? No. I'm often thinking about stuff like this. You know, I would like to work out more. I get back into my brain and I'm thinking about stuff. And so, yeah, I don't do a good job of it.

[B]

Interesting. I'll say this. When I had that conversation with my people about achieving balance, I then set them a task to. I actually got them to go through an activity where for two weeks they, as accurately as they could, they looked at their time across five things. It was work time, self time, family time, community time and sleep time. And after they'd done that, some of them got a bit of a shock to go, oh, there's some time here that I actually don't know what I was doing. And sometimes it could be three or four hours a day. And I do wonder if we get on the hamster wheel and away we go and we just, we miss a lot of things. But then I challenge them to set a goal for themselves, a self goal, a family goal and a community goal. And I build them into their work performance plans and put 15% of their at risk bonus, they're in sales against these non work related goals. And I'll give you a quick example. There was one fellow who over two years, this is what happened. He was a bit of a, we call it an office rat. He was a 16 hour a day guy and he was a lovely, he's a lovely fellow, still a dear friend of mine. Over two years he got his bonus, 15% of his bonus for going for a walk on the beach with his wife two nights a week. This one will spin people out a bit. For reducing his golf handicap by three strokes, a self goal, and then for speaking at a local high school on leadership once a month. And what we saw over two years, he hit his targets by 275 and 427%. But here's the real kicker. He reduced his face to face work hours by 22 and a half hours per week over that time for two reasons. One, he was given permission to live a full and wholesome life. And then secondly, he actually we started to measure that like we measured our work related goals. And I think there's something in this that if we're going to truly humanize the workplace, I think we've got to look at the whole human and what can we be doing in the workplace to help them to be that engaged, motivated, family member, work member, whatever we might be.

[A]

That's a great story. That is a great story. So first of all, a couple of things in there. One thing I've noticed is that if my work has a gym, then that's given me permission to work out. And I don't know why I need permission permission but I seem to like they built that gym. They must want me to work out, so it's okay to work out. During my workday at Cisco we had a clinic and so I had a chiropractor. And I was like, well if they gave me that then I feel good about going and spending that time. What I noticed is how many of these controls are internal and how much somebody like you needs to come along and say look, this is going to be part of our goal. You make your goal and some percentage of it's going to be this and we're going to build it in. And otherwise people will apply their own rules of what they think you think,

[B]

and that's what they do. And I think I talk to my clients a lot about no one's a mind reader or has a crystal ball that knows what we're all thinking. So the thing is, you've actually got to put it out there. You've got to take these steps. And look, hr, the HR team were horrified when I did that, by the way. Dart, they're like, you can't do that because it's not part of the process. And I'm like, well, you're happy to see the results, but you're not happy for these sort of changes to what we do. So I think, again, you've got to just be prepared for the pushback. This is leadership. You've got to be prepared that some people are going to be disappointed with what you do. Even though they talk about we need to have more balance and all these things, you've just got to be prepared to hold your nerve again, as I'll say, and do that work. And the other thing that came out of that was people stopped doing work when they were on holidays as well and vacation. And I think that's another big one, is there's almost this craziness that we need to still be involved when we're supposed to be off, you know, rejuvenating, resetting, replenishing things. And I have this view on this one. People tell me that they need to be involved still, because what if they're not there and something goes wrong? And I offer this to them, I say, I think you might have this issue. I think you're worried about if you're not there and it all goes right. And that comes back to our human desire to fit in, to be relevant, to contribute. And in a time where restructures and you talk about top down and it's easy to put a line through someone's name, people feel like they've got to be there all the time, even when they don't need to be there.

[A]

Yeah, I'm guilty of that. I understand that. I want to go back to the thing you said about HR being unhappy. Here's the pattern I see. We're running a company from above and our job is to optimize the workforce, hr. And by the way, I'm talking about me here. And so what we say is, you know, it's really hard there's all these people. I need to put them into job codes and classify them so that I can count them and so that I can move them around in an intelligent way. And so I create these job codes. But you know what? It's hard to create really accurate job codes. And so I create these oversimplified descriptions of job roles. And then I'm going to ask people to perform against that description. And if they don't perform against that description, I'm going to dock their pay potentially. And what's really bad about it, there's a lot of things bad about that. First of all, I'm saying to the whole organization that, okay, you people over there all become the same. I, I want you to be more the same, and I'm going to reward you for how much the same you can be. That's one challenge. The second challenge is that I'm not going to reward you for being bigger than your job role. So I've got this cookie cutter and there's going to be all this dough that is off to the side and all that other stuff that may be value. That's the rest of you. I'm not going to reward for that because it doesn't fit my rubric. And I have to admit, I bring up this thinker in practically every interview. I think everybody should read him. His name is James Scott, and he wrote a book called Seeing Like a State. And in it he described a lot of situations where we try to optimize complex systems like cities or forests or agriculture. We try to optimize them for one output. And what he pointed out was if you optimize a complex system for one output, it comes at the cost of all the other outputs that you might want to get out of that system. And ultimately it comes at the cost of the one output you're trying to get because you don't recognize how all those other things, those things that are beyond the one output that you're after, are actually feeding back into the system to create something that can create that one output. So if you optimize a country for gdp, it comes at the cost of tons of other things. And at the end of the day, it may come at the cost of gdp. And so when you talk about how the HR department said, look, you really can't be docking people's pay if they don't improve their golf score. A part of that is that you were looking at a bigger person than the job role could describe.

[B]

Absolutely. And I can understand where they were coming from. But. But I also think that they looked at it with a, I guess the process mindset of what are the risks associated here? And I think there are greater risks associated with a poor conversation in a performance management 6 monthly performance management conversation or a difficult conversation than what there would be if someone, hey, you know what? His name was Greg. Hey, Greg, you only reduced your golf handicap by two strokes. You're not getting your 5%. He'll be okay with that. You know, you might think, yeah, I should have worked more on my short game, but I didn't. So I think there's that situation. But I love your point that you talked about that when you're talking about, you know, we drop it in and there's the dough that we want and there's all this dough on the outside. That's where the magic is. That's where you find out the other things that get people out of bed in the morning that get them doing what, what they wouldn't usually do. If you're just looking at a KPI sheet, this is one of the reasons why the mutiny nearly happened on me was that I told my team for the first three months, salespeople, you're not going to be looking at your numbers. Each day. We're going to focus on four things, people. Helpfulness, thankfulness, care and fun. And we're not going to treat them like KPIs, but we're going to become more aware of them. So, you know, how often have we been helpful or how often have we been helped? How often have we been thanked or thanked other people? How often have we just checked in with someone to see if they're going okay? And then the other one was, how often are we having fun? I think that that had a significant impact on the way that we actually turned up with each other, but also turned up with our customers and other people in the organization because we got really. We didn't have to measure it as a KPI, but we became really aware of the importance of saying thank you to people. I have these little cards I take into my room when I'm working with people and it's a blank. It's called a very human moment. It's a thank you card. And I give people the opportunity, an invitation to write a thank you for somebody in the room. It's so powerful when someone receives a written thank you. I think these are the simple things that we miss because we're looking for the complex and complicated next atom splitting moment in the workplace. We just forget that being human is all about Those things.

[A]

I'd like to talk about the experience of being a manager in this model because a lot of the things that I've done have been very architectural, which is we're going to change the company over five years. It's a big structural change, it's a big company. But I find that there's an opportunity to actually see improvements in the team and in an individual person's life so much more quickly than some of those other efforts that as a manager who recognizes two big customers, as a manager who recognizes that there's two big parts of the world and that the team is an equally large part of the objective, it just can move so much faster. So I found that really rewarding. Even in a six month period, you can really change the world for your team.

[B]

I agree. And look, this was not without significant challenge and significant conversations going on in my mind. My cognitive immune system saying this is bad. You are going to get found out. You've always been successful because you've been another way and now you're doing this to yourself. What are you doing? So as an experience, as a manager again, I had to hold the three words, hold your nerve. This is going to take some time because this isn't going to be on a spreadsheet every week and showing you how you're going and it's going to go well for one week and next week it might not go so well. And maybe one week you'll have a bad experience with the person but you've just got to continue to go that way. What I found was if you can get to that six month period, it absolutely the impact it compounds so quickly. And you know, we always got measured in sales on our, on our results, don't worry about that. But at the same time I looked at it this way. If my people were happy and well engaged then the results would speak for themselves. And this is what I found was if you stick with it, people were turning up to work. Our attrition was low, our absenteeism was low, our engagement scores were in the 90s. And then for two years we hit our sales targets by 237%. And then in year two when they tripled our target, we hit it by 198% on a triple target. And someone asked me the question, what are you doing? And I said I'm just treating my people like human beings. But what I do know is if you hold your nerve for that period of time, it just compounds. It's just a magical thing. I think a Lot of us, because we get measured weekly, monthly, quarterly, we don't have the ability to hold the nerve when things don't quite go exactly where you want them to go in the first month or two.

[A]

Yeah. One of the things that I feel sometimes is that it takes so long. So Peter Drucker said that management is a liberal art. And so the way I say to people is that management's not something you stop getting better at. It's something that you work on forever. And it's probably true that nothing's something that you stop getting better at. So I feel like my management career is actually going to end while I'm just getting good. And I wonder if it's possible to accelerate that somehow. When I was reading Being Human, I kept noticing that a lot of your bad mark years were your youngest years. And that's because you come in as not a whole person yourself. You're still a developing person as yourself. And you come into an environment where you are and let me check and see if this is true. You come into an environment that is actually treating you as an incomplete person and is rewarding you for being an incomplete person, which is part of the thing we need to forgive ourselves for. Right. Being an idiot when you're 25 or something is you have to look back and say, I was learning.

[B]

I agree. And look, and I think I spent a lot of time then trying to impress other people and to be like them. And not everything was bad. There was some good stuff that I learned as well, but I spent a lot of that time trying to impress others. And I think as I've got a bit older and there's been a few more candles on my birthday cake that blow out every few years, you just sort of start to think, well, it's not about impressing other people, it's how comfortable are you in your own skin now, can you put your hand on your heart and say, I've had a go at being a good human and I'm never going to get to that point. There is no point to get to. I love what you said. I won't be a finished product whenever that day is that I'm no longer here. I'll just be continuing to become perhaps better, whatever. Better means tomorrow and the next day. I think I'm better at what I do now than what I was eight years ago when I started. But there's something in it. I. Actually, this might sound a bit weird, but I do think we almost need to have a version of bad Whatever our name is in order to become good.

[A]

That's probably true. Or at least we may not be able to recognize that we've gotten good if we can't compare it.

[B]

The other thing I think that comes with that is just to appreciate yourself and acknowledge yourself that you've become good. Because I don't think we do enough of that. We're too busy looking for the thing that hasn't quite worked. I purposefully refer to these things as good and bad news filing cabinets. In our head, 80% of our thoughts are negative, 20% are positive. An eight drawer filing cabinet full of bad stories with a massive file that's got our name on it that we go to all the time. And if we don't go there, the uninvited guest reminds us of it anyway. And then there's the two drawer one with not enough stories in it. And my suggestion to people is you need to spend more time regardless of how old you are and whatever else we are in your career is putting more stories into your good news filing cabinet, stopping and reflecting on what you're doing that you're proud of rather than always about. I didn't quite do this. I didn't quite get there. Because that's the old way, I think.

[A]

Yeah. A friend of mine, Betsy Burrows, who I hope to get on the show at some point, studies the neurophysiology of insight. It's very interesting what she does, but one of the things she points out is that your brain's like a Google search engine. If you ask it to search for bad stuff, it's absolutely going to pull it up. If you ask it to search for risk, it's absolutely going to pull it up. And so she's come up with a whole lot of techniques to actually change the search algorithm so that it's searching for other values. And one of the things she does that I find super powerful is she says, list all the bad things. List them all out on the left side of a sheet. Just list them out. And you list out all the bad things and you don't want to show those to anybody because they're the bad things that you're afraid to share. And then she says, okay, great. Say the absolute opposite of those bad things on the right side of the sheet, the absolute opposite. And so if you say, you know, I'm a bad father, I've abandoned my children, you say, I am the best father that's ever lived, if that's what you want to say. So you go through like that. And then what she Says is look down the best side and tell yourself reasons why those are true. And what you find is that you can tell either story equally because the left one is the narrative you may tell on a routine basis and it's slowly burning into the neurons in your brain over and over again. But if you look down the right one, you actually realize, you know what, I could just as easily be going down that right side and I could be telling that story. And you realize that so much of it is really self telling that story.

[B]

And we're very, very good at spending a lot of time in our bad news filing cabinet because that's the way that we got bought up from school when I was seven. In my second book, I write about this, I got told and my parents got told that I did well, but could do better at everything I did. Now that's been imprinted in my brain for the last 48 years. So I'll always be thinking that I could get off this today and go, I should have been clearer in my answers. Or I could get off and go, that was fantastic. I've made a connection with a very, very good human being on the other side of the world and I'm pretty proud of what I shared with them. And I think that's our choice.

[A]

Yeah. And it helps to have a good producer.

[B]

It does too. I have a good producer of mine as well. It certainly does help when they can.

[A]

And then you can look back and you say, oh, actually, you know, in retrospect, I was kind of a genius.

[B]

Very good.

[A]

I have no idea how long we've been talking. I have a question I ask at the end of every interview though, which is, what job do you hire your job to do for you?

[B]

What job do you hire your job to do? The word that's coming to mind for me is, and this comes back to the fundamental human stuff. I guess my thing I ask myself every day is what have I done today to make another human being feel like they belong? So for me, I am big on belonging and I think this is the big part for me. It's like I do this because I want people to feel a sense of belonging, but I also want to feel that sense as well. It's a very important part of my life to feel like I belong. I won't go into too much detail, but I did lose my father to suicide and he left us a note that said he was a burden and he didn't belong. And that's driven a lot of my work. Even though when I did that experiment and he repassed by that stage. I did it because I thought it was right. But when I got to reflect on it, when I left the corporate world and did my own thing, belonging kept coming back to me. And I have a really strong sense that in a privileged position that I'm in, if I can help other people understand the importance, whether they're a manager or a father or a mother or whatever, if they can help other people feel like they belong, well, then that's a pretty good day. And I think by me helping others feel that, I actually feel like I belong to them as well. So I think that's it for me. That's a really, really good question. Da. Thank you.

[A]

How can you tell when you have.

[B]

For me, it's what I feel. So I'll get some external data on that from people who. You talked about changing people's lives before I get quite embarrassed when people say to me, you've actually changed my life. And I go, oh, no, I haven't. And they go, no, no, hear me out. This has fundamentally changed me in some way that's going to make me a better human. Then for me, if I go away and stop jumping into my bad news filing cabinet and accept that that's true, that gives me an enormous sense of belonging and contributing to more than someone comes to a program and they're now a better manager, they're actually a better human being. So I hope I've answered that. Okay.

[A]

Yeah. And the reason I asked that particular question is that, I mean, to some extent it is people saying that. So when we want something from our work, when we hire our job to do something for us, a lot of times we need to be able to see that it's actually doing that job. In other words, you need to see the feedback that's going to tell you that you've been successful at that. And so if I hire my job to build things that nobody's ever built before, at the end of the day, I can point it, I can say, look at that building over there. And I will tell you that that part about belonging, I don't know how exactly you would know. It would almost be in somebody's posture. It would almost be in their freedom to dissent. It's not going to be direct necessarily. It's going to be through some other route.

[B]

I tend to hear people say to me, how do I know sometimes that it's working for them? And maybe for me is people say this to me, I worked with you five years ago, and I'VE still got little Mark on my shoulder when I'm about to go and do that thing that I used to do going. Do you just want to have a bit of a think before you go back to where you were? And look, I also see engagement survey scores and they go up and that sort of stuff. But the little moments where people tell me that from a five year ago experience, I'm still doing this thing that makes me feel like something's working, that it's embedded rather than. That was a good couple of days with you, Mark. But I went back to work and I just stayed where I was.

[A]

And since iframe work is a product that companies sell, essentially, which by the way, just shows that I'm still sort of in the technocratic mode. I've just turned it around a little bit. The way you're approaching this I really admire. Which is, let's forget the mechanism that's delivering it as a company and let's just be it. Right. It's a different approach and I admire it. But as a product, when you buy a product, you pay something for it. And a part of what we pay to get our work is the value that we produce for the company. But it costs us something that's not exactly what we pay. What does your job cost you?

[B]

Acceptance would be one thing. We like your results, Mark. We don't particularly like the way you go about it are some words that continue to ring in my ears. Acceptance that you are a little bit different. We don't ever see a PowerPoint deck. We never get an agenda. So it's about fitting in the very thing that we want as human beings to be accepted and to fit in. I think my role and my job and my product actually costs me some of that.

[A]

Isn't that interesting that on the one hand you hire your job to belong and to create belonging in others, and yet your mission to do that costs you belonging.

[B]

And I think that's why the work is worth it. Because we need to be able to sit with the conflict of these things as human beings. And I talked before about structurally unstructured and imperfectly perfect and all these sort of stuff. Loved but isolated. I think that's where the real work happens. When we can sit in the disequilibrium and discomfort of that and exist knowing that there's something. I'm doing this because it's bigger than me. And if I wanted to be selfish, I could be. But I want to be a bit more selfless and accept that there's going to be some pain that comes with that. For me, I think that's part of leadership.

[A]

You know, a part of that is. I don't know if you've ever had to run a layoff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I have.

[A]

So if you could be a cold, bad mark, and that's just tough. This is business that would be a lot more comfortable. I've only been asking this question about cost recently. That's new. And it's so interesting what people are saying. What one person said was, it costs me emotional labor. This person said, I get up on a stage and I talk about. He talks about belonging, as a matter of fact. And he says, I take anonymous notes from the crowd that they hand to me. They're not named. And so they tell me the truth. And he said, I have to have empathy for what comes to me in that note. And I'll tell you, it's harmful to me to know what is going on. You'll like his interview. It's coming out pretty soon. His name is Anu Gupta. Another person said it costs me risk, which is I have to go. I'm going way out on a limb here, and I'm being vulnerable out on this limb. And so the cost to me is that risk. And a lot of people say, and by the way, the most famous people say that I've interviewed, it costs me family. And because it's very hard to become as famous as some of the people that I get on the show and still be around your family. My father was quite famous. And, yep, it's true, he was pretty much at the lab.

[B]

These are the conflicts. These are the, I guess, those moments in time where people make a choice. And it's really got me thinking now with that question of the belonging and then the acceptance. I've never thought about it like that without being asked such a powerful question. And it makes me more determined to do what I do, that perhaps I believe there's a need for us all to have some level of suffering in order for other things to be good.

[A]

Yeah, it's a little bit right. It's like metaphors are coming to mind for me. I spearfish. And so I like to walk three miles to the remote piece of coast to go spearfishing. I like the hike because that's. I don't know. I like to pay the hike and I like to pay the sunburn to get all the way there and then go spearfishing. And I like the hike back with the fish. I don't know exactly why it is, but it's something like. Because that's living. I don't know. And so maybe a part of your detective, by the way, that's what I call the feedback loop, which is in design, there's this concept of a detect, which is this pen right here. It has a detect. When I put the cap on, it goes click. And that's how I know I've completed the action. And so when I think about your detect, a part of your detect might actually be isolation. I'm doing something different here. How do I know I'm doing something different? Because people keep telling me I'm making them uncomfortable.

[B]

I actually have an offer that I call provoking with purpose. And people are like, oh, what's that? And I go, I'm going to make you feel uncomfortable because I'm going to call things out in the room that most facilitators won't call out. Like when someone rolls their eyes. When someone else speaks, I'll ask the question in a curious way. I wonder what's going on there? And they're like, oh, can't we just do team building? And I go, well, this is team building. It's just done in a different way. And so you walk away. And then they're like, oh, I think we'll go down another pathway. And then you go, oh, should I go back to calling it team building? And I say, no, you need to be different because that's your place now.

[A]

Well, thank you, mate.

[B]

Thank you very much for having me. Hope you've enjoyed the conversation as much as I have.

[A]

I really have. I really have. I keep getting this lesson from the people who come. I get lessons from everybody comes on the show and I talk to. But the lesson I've been getting a lot lately is that work is a relationship and that we need to pull out the tools of relationship if we really want to get it to work right. And that's what I keep learning. If people want to learn more about you, where should they go?

[B]

A couple of places. LinkedIn's a good one. I love LinkedIn and so I find a lot of great connections, like yourself. So just that. Mark Lebusk on LinkedIn. My website's www.marklabusque.com and there's all sorts of things in their podcasts and blogs and a bit more information about what I do, a few little things that people can use if they'd like to go in there and grab them.

[A]

I'm going to spell it. M A R K L E B U S Q U E. So Mark

[B]

Lebusk yeah, so that's where people can find me. But please reach out for people and connect on LinkedIn. I love to meet new and interesting humans to learn from them. So thank you Dart for having me. I appreciate it.

[A]

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.