EntreLeadership - #270: Alive at Work with Dan Cable

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

If you’ve ever felt bored or less than inspired at work, Dan Cable, professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, has good news: Your problem is biological, not motivational. Sure, that may sound a bit alarming at first, but the scientific explanation is rather simple—as is the solution. Tune in as Dan shares three easy ways to reactivate a crucial part of our brain called the seeking system so we can feel more motivated, more purposeful, and more alive at work. entreleadership.com/podcast The EntreLeader's Guide to Delegation from EntreLeadership 27 Email Templates from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Our feature conversation this episode is with Dan Cable. He is the author of a book entitled, Alive at Work, the Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do.

I think this is fantastic. I love the science behind how our brains work and everybody knows how powerful the brain is, but sometimes we forget that we can harness that power to really do greater work. And of course, we're going to give you some great free resources, so let's get to it. This book, Alive at Work by Dan Cable, The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do, came across my desk, and I immediately was intrigued because I love to know why the brain is the way it's. is and how we can harness its power. Dan is a widely respected thinker as it relates to the community of management experts, scholars, and beyond. And as a social psychologist, he really understands the work and he understands how the brain works. This was a fascinating conversation for me. We sent our equipment across the ocean to do this interview with Dan in London and the quality just didn't turn out like we are used to. We are a way.

of it, but the content is so good we want to bring it to you anyway. Here is my conversation with Dan Cable. Before we dive into some of the content, I'd love for you to set up for our listeners the scope of the research that went into this book. Well, I'll say a little bit about the psychology and a little bit about the biology. In terms of the psychology, I'm really a big fan of this idea about what we bring to work and how much choice we have over that. You know, like a lot of people just bring their hands and just kind of show up and say, what should I do with them? and that's a really transactional way of looking at work. It's not illegal or immoral,

but it leaves a lot of value on the table. And then some people decide to bring their heads to work, so you can actually try new things and innovate and solve problems, not wait to be told. And then the last thing is you can kind of bring your heart to work. So the idea of bringing your emotions in and actually caring about it. So we're going to talk about that being the psychology. But the newest thing for me was this biology.

You know, I'm not a neuroscientist. just at all. But when I learned about this part of the brain, this seeking system, you know, maybe we'll spend some time talking about that, that really kind of showed me the deep root of some of this motivation and some of the dopamine, you know, some of the legal drugs that the body uses to motivate us. I found that to be really interesting. Well, you mentioned it. Let's stay there. Now I'm super interested. Let's talk about the seeking system. Yeah. Some of the neuroscientists out there call it the ventral striatum. Other folks call it the seeking system. I went with seeking system. A little bit more straightforward for me.

But what it is, is it's this part of our brain that urges us to explore what we don't already know, kind of pushes us to explore the limits, tries to help us get out there and figure out how to be curious, how to push on the limits of our knowledge. But it's also really interested in understanding the effect of our actions. So it's urging us to understand cause and effect. And by the way, this is really shocked me. Not just us, not just humans, but mammals. You know, this might be a bear or this might be a cat or this might be a mouse. Mammals have this part of the brain. And so, you know, one of the things I found so interesting is if you got like a zoo animal and you just give it its food, you just put it on a plate and shove it out there, it is actually less happy, less engaged with

life and more likely to be sick than if you kind of hide the food or let it chase it. So it's just really interesting how this part of our brain wants for us to not become bored and have everything just available to us. It wasn't used to acting that way. This thing with the dopamine is really interesting. When we follow these impulses and we go exploring, we kind of get out there and figure out what we don't know yet and experiment, this dopamine is released into the system and it's a feel-good thing. You know, it's a feel-good drug. It's the legal cousin to co-coated. cocaine, I guess. So it kind of makes you feel enthusiastic and it makes you want to do more of that. In a way, it's kind of rewarding you and asking you to do more of that. But it also makes time go fast. So dopamine controls our time regulation. So if you have lots of dopamine, the morning's just zip right by. You can't believe a morning's gone. But if you don't explore much and therefore you don't have much dopamine, it just crawls by. I mean, minutes start to feel like hours. And I think, maybe you and I have both lived that world at some point. Yeah, well, I think everybody has.

And, you know, it's interesting, this is the science behind this idea of when we all talk about work that we love so much that time seems to disappear on us. And it's the actual chemical release of dopamine. That's really fascinating. But I want to stay here for a moment and dive into that you're using the word explore. And I think that that's a much deeper meaning of explorer. It's just constantly searching for the next, whether it be progress. I just want to you to unpack that a little bit more because you're not insinuating that we're all outside looking around for, you know, in a scavenger hunt, but the true sense of the word to explore. And that's the human need for advancement for progress. Yes? I mean, one way to say it, a couple great ways

that you just said it is, first off, it would have been originally developed because of our need to just get out in the environment and explore. Right. You take a bear, it's got food, it's got shelter, it's warm. Yeah. It goes out ambling. It goes out exploring. It just goes out and figures out, well, anything new out here. And it's not doing that for money. It's a motivated reaction just to get out there and see what resources. By the time you get to humans and you think about our ancestors, they had things pretty good in Africa, pretty easy to grow crops, you know, lots of sunlight, lots of water. They left Africa, didn't they? And they went into some pretty inhospitable conditions as well. Right now, it seems like, you know, we went to the moon, didn't we?

We got this planet. We're going to go to that one. And now apparently, Elon Musk says, we don't need to be a one planet species. Right. Yeah. It is that kind of thing. But let's lower it down to you and me and every day because that's actually where you want to put your finger. And I think that to our listeners, that is the most important piece of this, which is people who have jobs that start to feel repetitive, that start to feel sequenced, highly predictable, highly scripted.

this becomes a little mini cell or even a mini hell for this part of the brain. After six months, eight months are doing the same thing, starting to be able to predict exactly how it's going to work out. This part of our brain starts saying, hey, come on, you're better than this. It starts shutting off some positive emotions and starting to let us feel some boredom, bit of anxiety. It lets other systems start to kick in and we're not really feeling that. The word is zest.

It's a zest for life. It's the feeling that life is an adventure and that work is kind of interesting because we get to learn. After eight months, ten months, a year are doing the same repetitive actions. It doesn't feel very zesty anymore. Yes. It starts to feel annoying and bothersome. And it feels like a commute to the weekend, if you know what I mean. Oh, sure.

Absolutely. So why so many people live for the weekend and can barely drag themselves in on Monday. Okay. So this is fascinating. I love, we just dove in deep, which is fantastic. The psychology and biology. So let's stay here again in the biology side of things. I get the psychology.

I think we all get that. Okay, I've got a choice to come in with an attitude of gratitude or whatever you want to say. Go a million ways there. But the seeking system, what did you learn from the research and what do you tell us in the book? How do we fire this or reboot it if it has been covered by years of humdrum and, as you say, you know, this cycle-type work? It's just another cycle. That's right. Let me tell you a little bit about the problem and a little bit about the solution.

And then you just keep leading the conversation. But in terms of the problem, what lots of organizations do, not because they're evil, but because they want predictability. They want to be able to make the promises that they have made to customers. They want to make good on that. That's not evil. That's just practical, right? They want to fit the regulations.

You know, the law is out there, and we can't break that law. We've got to follow that. And also in terms of policy, you know, I don't know what our listeners are like, but as a lot of companies move from 300 people to 3,000 people, they've got to have a lot of rules and regulations and ways that we do things and dress codes and forms and scripts and how do we answer the phone and how do we look at meetings. So what happens is, is you go from, let's say, 10 or 15 people where there's lots of innovation and lots of trying new things.

As an organization scales, it often starts to make it tighter. It takes the frame of what you're allowed to do on your work quite tight. So things start to become, again, predictable, controlled. There's a lot of measurements, a lot of KPIs, what you should be producing each hour, each day, or each quarter. It starts to get measured. Then we start rewarding you if you hit them, but then if you don't hit them, we punish you.

And so what happens is across time, these rules and regulations and these policies, and these ways of doing things and these measurements, they start to make it feel as though we can't really learn anymore, we can't really experiment anymore, we can't try something new in our job that might solve the better problem, but it might not go exactly the way that we expected.

And that use of the word exploration is the one that the seeking system's looking for. What it's urging you to do is, hey, try it this way. You've got skills here that you could go around this thing. you wouldn't have to do it that way. And so that demands that you try it a new way, that you use your own approach. So what we've done that, I hope, what I've done anyway is I've kind of laid out why this is a problem for most organizations. They want control. They want to promise the customers and regulations.

The way you said fire it up, that's really good. Because from my perspective, there are three ways that a leader can do this. But we might be able to later go and say, even if your leader isn't willing to do this for, you, what can you do? Right. Sure. Let's start with the leader one. If you are a business manager, you're an owner or whatever, there's three triggers of this

thing. And the first one is this notion of giving people room to play, giving people room to explore. And that might be once a quarter or it might be a little bit every week or it might even be just a couple of hours a day. But this idea of giving folks an opportunity to try to meet the goals of the job, to try to stay within the frame of the job, but have freedom within that frame to try to do it in a new way or try to play around with that process of doing the work. So that's the first one. Talk about ways of doing that in a little bit. A second one that we could talk about is trying

to activate people's best selves. That's this idea of letting people think about what they're best at doing. What are their signature strengths? What are the things that really make them come alive, perspectives or knowledge or passions or interests, and allowing them to bring those into the job and kind of customize the job around themselves and their strengths. It's the second one. And the third one is this notion of personalizing purpose, the idea of trying to let them experience the effect of their work, be it talking to a customer or talking to an internal recipient of their work.

Whoever uses the bundle of their work, letting them. them understand how that person feels if you mess it up or if you do it well so that they have a face to go with the work. Yeah, I love that. That's the connection so that they see the work actually matters. That's right. And this really speaks, Dan, too, the question that all of us ask, do I matter? You know, am I making a difference? Love that. Okay, well, let's go to giving people room to play. Let's come back to that. You said you would show us a few ways to do that. We've heard that before, certainly not a new idea, but it's something I think we need to be reminded of as leaders. What does that look like and how can it be most effective?

Yeah. Let's start with like the lowest hanging fruit. And then we'll go to something that's a little bit more aggressive. I wouldn't call it dangerously aggressive, but I would say it demands more of a commitment. So what seems really easy is this idea about giving people three, four hours a week or every other week where you just tell them, we want you to work on something that's not your job. If you had to fix something about your work or about our work processes, what would you focus on? And that approach of just kind of literally scheduling the work around the assumption that people need some time to work on things their own way, I think that leaders out there will be amazed at what it does in terms of lighting people up. And that play space,

that sort of psychologically safe place to fool around with a new programming language or new way of doing our billings or our receivables or new way of creating my talks or my sales pitches, I think that you'll more than get that return on that investment of time in terms of, you know, basically creating more enthusiasm, more innovation, more creativity. I call that the low-hanging fruit. An area that might be a little bit more exciting and I've helped a couple of different organizations do is this idea about giving people a little bit of free time as much as say 24 hours where you say, okay, for the next 24 hours,

we're going to shut down this part of the organization. You know, all you programmers, you're not going to be doing any programming. All you folks that are usually coming in and kind of helping the customers right here, we're going to bring in a second shift to handle that. For the next 24 hours, you can work with whoever you want on whatever you want.

The only rule is in 24 hours, we're all just going to get back here, and you're going to describe, here's what we tried, and here's what we learned. And when I've helped organizations do this, what we'll do is we'll get the senior management team listening in on that. You'll get a COO and maybe one of the board members and you'll get pretty senior level management. And as each team describes, here's what we tried to do.

We tried to build this little app on our phone and we tried just to build a basic prototype that would use some AI to search the internet and then automatically send this text if it found what it was looking for. Kind of worked a little bit and they'll be kind of excited about this. If the senior leadership team likes that, they think, oh, there's some value there. What they'll do is they'll invest in it. But not money. They'll invest time.

They'll say, listen, that's really cool what you've got there. Next week, we're going to give you four hours. What we want you to do is spend that four hours as a team trying to perfect some of those problems that you showed us and build that prototype into a platform where we could firewall it. And then literally they'll work on that for that four, six hours. And then they'll come back. They'll say, oh, that's great. Now, can we shift that onto an HCL platform? Can we do that open source?

And what I've learned is over the course of three or four weeks, they'll build new product lines that totally jazzes up the team. You know, they just feel so empowered and they feel so excited. And you can see the dopamine in their eye. I mean, they often don't want to go home. They're so excited about doing this stuff. They don't even want to leave. Sometimes they pull all nighters, not kidding. So what happens is they get to see their stamp and see the impact of their ideas on the world.

And all of a sudden, this is a product that launches forward. weeks later. And I've had such good luck doing that within companies. It doesn't take money. It takes a commitment to activating that seeking system. And it takes a commitment to understanding that this is what the biology needs. You can't expect people to be bringing that attitude every day when there's no dopamine. Right. That's a great statement. This takes, it's like a two-part question. So I'll stop. My brain is just flying. I could. You got dopamine, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that example where you helped lead that with that company, what were the leadership concerns or fears? I can tell you all about that. Because I think that's important for our

listeners to go, okay, these leaders felt that, but they still did it because that's outside the box. If there's anything outside the box, that kind of thinking and what they did is really unique. Man, you're so on. And our leaders will love to know this company. It's called Deal Logic. And it's headquartered here in London. It's got offices in New York City and in Budapest. And we've tried this on all three, you know, so I know this thing works. It's really interesting, but you're really putting your thumb on the right issue. So I think that what's cool to think about is, first off, what the leaders were worried about, what the COO, Toby Haddon was talking with me about is that we're losing our best people. They'll go out and hire these, not kidding about this,

physicist with PhDs to do this programming. These are like 25-year-old whip smart people. And what they'd come in all full of energy and they'd be so interested in learning new languages and programming. But after two years, two and a half years, they'd leave. They'd take less money. They would just go somewhere where it was a little bit more exciting, where they could be on the learning trajectory, where they were sort of pushed into new areas and new programming languages. And so his concern was we're losing our mojo. You know, to be honest, we keep the worst people, we lose the best ones. And so what they saw is. is the risk of not taking the risk. They saw that the short-term quarterly risk is, oh, we give up

four hours of their time. We miss one of the quarterly targets. That feels like a big risk if you think this quarter. If you think three years, you say, we lose our best people and we forget how to learn. We forget how to push the envelope and take risks and learn new things. And so what this leader and this leadership team were able to do is to say, we need to balance the short-term risk by taking some long-term investments in risk. It's actually a way of thinking that they sort of got themselves over the hurdle. Because what you're giving up is what appears to be controlled. You're literally saying you work on what you think's important.

You work on what you think is cool. And for a lot of leaders, the word to manage, that means to control. It's just not what they cut their teeth doing, if you know what I mean. A second thing is this idea of you work with whoever you want to work with on whatever you want to work, this is cross-disciplinary. This means somebody in marketing might be working with somebody in programming, might be working with like a sales staff to put together some new product lines. You're kind of breaking the organizational hierarchy.

And again, I think that for a lot of leaders, they don't like, they want you to stay in your lane. They don't necessarily want all that information sharing if it means that you're going to try something. It might make customers mad. Or you might try something. actually goes against our brand. You know, we got to control that away.

And so you're really right on the idea that this isn't risk less. Absolutely. But it is a way to balance the long-term risk that we talked about. And I think that that's leadership as opposed to management, if you know what I mean. The leadership is, I've got to think five years, how are we going to be relevant? And how do I build a culture where people want to learn and grow and try new things? I'm guessing there are some other bonuses besides what we've been talking about, which is firing them back up, you know, playing to their creativity, actually coming up with real solutions. The example you gave was a great solution. So it ended up being a real payoff.

That was launched in three and a half weeks. Yeah, yeah. Not even something the senior leadership team had ever dreamed of doing. No. I want you to speak to what that does for the culture of the organization too. and the relationship between the leader, the direct leader of those men and women who were given the freedom, it has to probably create a great bond, yes? Absolutely. Well, let me give you some direct quotes because we interviewed some of the folks that actually took part in this.

One of the direct quotes was, this is the most fun I've ever had at work. Good grief. Work can be a platform for fun and learning was something that these people hadn't experienced for a while. It was just like, follow the drill, hit the target. make sure that everything's on on time. And so, you know, for like people that want to explore and learn something new, that kind of puts you in handcuffs, if you know what I mean. So that's part of it, the word fun or that it's sort of alive in the culture,

as opposed to one that's kind of dead and boring. You just got to, like, get through it. I think that's one really important part. I think the idea that you have a psychological safety that we're allowed to try new things. Yeah. We're allowed to bring our ideas, our own ideas, not bosses' ideas, but I'm allowed to do something on my own here. I think that for many of us,

that is lacking to the point of we shut off at work. We kind of shut off in order to get through it because we know that if we try something new, we'll miss our quarterly target. If we try something new and it doesn't work perfectly, we miss our raise or we don't get our bonus. So that's a good way. When you use the word culture,

it starts to shift the focus from being extrinsic motivation. I do my work for money. That's not a really good energizer when it comes to creativity or innovation. And it pushes it intrinsic. And it says, why do I do my work? Because it's interesting. And my boss allows me to have this certain amount of time each week or each month or each quarter where we just fool around. I mean, we're just learning and trying new things.

And if we come up with something cool, we can push that thing the whole way through to launch. Yeah. What's the effect when you turn somebody loose like this and they go over to another department? So I think you mentioned cross-departmental or cross-pollination, what are you going to call it? And so they go learn about something else and they observe something and go, hey, I'm going to tinker around an idea. How does it lift the other team members who are observing this as well? And somebody has come in from not their team, fresh eyes, and has come up with a fantastic solution. And eventually it goes from not just an idea, but leadership approves it, and then it becomes the product, you know, or a new system.

How does that lift everybody else? I think what it does is it helps us all remember that we're building one thing from the customer's perspective. A lot of times you know how this gets when you go from 300 people to 3,000 people, the silos get entrenched and the walls get built and you do your thing and we'll stay in our lane and do our thing. And what a lot of times we do is we start focusing on internal processes rather than the big picture of what do we deliver as a team. So what starts to happen literally is the information sharing. So we start to kind of put on each other's shoes a little bit and see how it looks from that perspective. I can tell you that the tone in the office, just, again, the fun in the lunchroom, the idea that lots of people know each other across the divisions, I think that that's really valuable. And there's another thing that I wanted to highlight.

It's actually moving to the second trigger as well, which is when you encourage people to play to their unique strengths, as you just said, if I go over into marketing and I bring some of my unique. perspectives and things that I'm good at and I help build your team and we together build something really cool that feeling of being valued for something unique that I can do is like again that's a seeking system light yes that makes you think oh wow I've got the potential to make a difference using what I'm best at and I'm being noticed for this thing that I'm bringing your team that's kind of unique and you know I believe that that is especially for a human being well I actually know it's the case because there's a woman

named Janine Dutcher at UCLA. And she has actually done a study, actually two studies now, where she hooks people up to these fMRIs. And she gets half of them randomly assigned to write about themselves at their best and to kind of write about their unique values. She has other ones write about like household items, like a toaster or something like that. And what she sees is that statistically significantly in the team that are writing about their best selves and reflecting on their unique strengths, the blood rushes to this ventral

striatum to the seeking system. This isn't sort of like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if that happened? It's more like, no, no, it's been demonstrated. The brain reacts to us thinking about our potential and what makes us unique and what gives us a signature strength. And when we light that part up and we get this dopamine, we feel enthusiasm for the job,

we start bringing our hearts to work, we start having pride, we start empathizing with other people. I mean, all these outcomes, as you say, start to infect the culture. Yes. All of a sudden, lots of people kind of care more about work. And they're bringing it energy and excitement as opposed to just, you know, getting on the conveyor belt on Monday.

And so we're now into the second trigger again and coming back through here. And I want you to speak to leaders who are sitting there hearing this and they're going, okay, I get this. Obviously, I want to hire somebody who is bringing their best selves in on day one. but that's just not reality. Life happens. They may have all the skill sets and they know their strengths, but they're not making the connection

to how important their strengths are. So how does a leader reawaken that part of this trigger? Yeah, that's really strong. Let me just replay that back to you because you said something really important there, in my opinion, and that is the old war for talent was, can we recruit the best and the brightest? Can we get them in the door?

Right. The new war for talent is, given that we've got the best and the brightest, How do we wake them up and have them bring their bests to work as opposed to, you know, playing World of Warcraft all day? That's right. Exactly. So that idea about keeping us lit up is important. And so why don't we talk a little bit about the second trigger, which is a really interesting area that I've done some pretty solid research around.

And then we could even shift into the third trigger, which is around personalizing the purpose. Yes, let's do it. Start with the sort of activating the best self. I've done one study at WIPPro, which is a technology. firm in India, where as people were being hired, to start with your hiring comment, we had in one condition a senior manager step in front of them and say, okay, listen, guys, it's your first day on the job. But before we even talk about the job, I want to know more about you. I want to know who you are when you're at your best. So I'm just going to give you some time right now. I just want you to

reflect on times you have felt like you're at your best when you had your biggest impact. And I want you to kind of write that down, write it down like a memory, you know, write down like almost a journal entry. What do you remember about that time? Who was around? What were you doing? So we had him do that. Then he said, okay, now you folks haven't even met each other yet. So I'm going to put you in this room over here and I want you to introduce yourself, but introduce your best self. Tell each other what you can count on each other for when you're at your best and maybe read one of those stories. And what we learned, we tracked those people for six months. And we learned that they were making customers 11% happier statistically significantly. And

they were 32% more likely to still be working there. So we reduced quitting because they were more engaged and more enthusiastic. They were handling customers better. We didn't spend any money. It's pretty incredible what happens when you activate the seeking system and when you get people to feel less like a number and more like a human with strengths. So that's one study. Now, in a second study, in a whole series of studies, we put that on steroids,

where what we did is we went out and we got employees like intact sales teams, say at Erickson or at Vodafone, what we would do is we'd take intact teams and we'd go out to family members of theirs or friends. We'd go up to relatives. We'd go out to mentors or colleagues. And we'd have all those people write stories about when they've seen that person at their best. So what we ended up doing is putting together a booklet of what the people who are important to you in your life think about you at your best. best. Oh, sure.

Each person got that. It's pretty emotional. It's very personal. It's very emotional. And then what they'd do is they'd read that the night before. Then we'd have an offsite. The whole team would get there and they'd share. This is what I learned about me.

This is what surprised me. This is who I'm at when I'm at my best. And here's what parts of work really light me up. And they all went around the table and everybody shared that. What they learned is there's ways that they could start reworking the work. That's called job crafting. You don't have to. do all your work, if there's parts of it to shut you off, if other people want to pick that

part up because it turns them on. That's right. And so we found again and again that there's this complementarity that by sharing, these are my strengths and this is when I'm at my best, you first off get other people to see you at your best, which is very valuable. It lights you up. But then second off, you actually can start being that more often if you can design the work around your passions and interests and strengths.

Well, I believe it. That's the mission of my life helping people. do that on the Ken Coleman show, and I got to lead you into personalizing purpose because I love the way you've worded it. I absolutely think this is fantastic. Again, how can we as leaders help our team personalize their purpose? That's right. One of the things that I stumbled on that I think many of us know in our hearts is purpose is a very personal thing. Yeah. It's not something you can just put on the website and then everybody buys it. And it isn't something you can just hand out like playing cards, if you know what I mean? It doesn't work that way. Purpose is something

you have to feel. It's not something you have to hear. So what I think is really interesting, and I also know that it's effective, is trying to help people get in touch with the impact of their work. We give you a study, and then we give you a story. In terms of a study, there's a fellow you probably have heard of named Adam Grant. And in one study, he looked at a bunch of call center operators. And he randomly assigned some of them just to meet really briefly with one of the recipients of that money. They basically were fundraisers and they raised money. And then they helped put kids through school. And in one of the conditions, they just brought in one of these scholarship students and said, thanks. The person said, thanks. I couldn't go to college without you. Ten minute

conversation, really. But what he learned is statistically significantly more money was raised by that team than the ones that just sort of, you know, did their work, the control group. And it's not that they changed the money. It's not they changed the technology. It's not like they changed the call sheets. They didn't paint the walls of funky color. They didn't get bean bags. What they did is they allowed people to see the impact of what they did all day long. And it made this big, robust difference in terms of bringing in money and making calls. So that's one empirical study. And you can find that one. But just in terms of a story, I was doing some work with Microsoft here in Vienna.

And the country manager was telling me about something that she's doing where she'll take a team, say they're going to go try and do some work for like Tesla. They're moving out of software and they're moving into solutions. And what they'll do,

instead of just her and the client manager going on site at Tesla, she'll take the whole team. She'll take programmers who are going to be doing like the basic coding. That's like an entry level job. She'll take like the logistic managers

that are going to try to keep the project online. She'll bring out. IT people. She'll take 12, 15 people there. And then they don't just talk to their point of contact in the Microsoft side. They'll talk to engineers who are building the cars. They'll talk to logistics managers that are getting the parts. They'll try to understand the full problem as a team. End up taking a whole day. So you're not spending money, but you are investing time. But what happens is this whole team goes back. And then the whole team understands the why the work. They understand the task. They understand Tesla. They got to meet.

some cool people. They got the stories ringing in their ears of what we're trying to solve. And she said that you start slow to go fast. Yet it seems like you're using that time in a way that's less efficient. But what happens is when everybody knows the scope and the purpose of the mission, everybody works together toward one end. And it becomes like a volunteer army. And there's just something so powerful about giving people that firsthand opportunity to hear and to see and to understand firsthand what it is we're doing all day long, eight, 10, 12 hours a day, what's it for? Who's it effect?

Why are we doing it? And again, that's lighting up that seeking system. You know, when you're on site seeing that, and then you get kind of lit up around it, you get enthusiastic, you get zestful, you care more about the project. You feel these positive emotions, don't you? Oh, I love it. You've reintroduced a great word that I haven't used in too long, and that is zest. There you go, folks.

Everybody needs to use zest at least one time in a working setting over the next week. He is Dan Cable. What a delight. The book is Alive at Work, The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do. We only cover just a smidge of it, which is great because you need to run out and dive into it, get it, and apply it after you read it. Dan, thank you for being with us from all the way across the pond. We appreciate you. I know you got a lot going on, and we're better for our time with you. Thank you, Ken.

fun. Big thanks to Dan Cable. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I told Will the producer, I'd like the book, please, when I leave, and it went straight to my desk. That's how much I enjoyed it. Again, the book is Alive at Work. The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do. I highly encourage you to go get it wherever books are sold. Well, our team at Entree Leadership has got a great free resource for you. This episode, it's entitled The Entree Leaders Guide to Delegation. Now, we think of Delegation, in terms of a rope because Dave teaches the rope lesson at our live events and in our staff meetings as well. The idea of delegation being a rope. The more rope you give, the more delegation you are

giving, which is really, if you think about it, I like to think of delegation as a transfer of trust. And if you get that, then you can really win. The 10 basics of delegation, a chart called the Entree Leader Time Tracker and a delegation checklist to confirm that you're doing it the right way. All of that and more are coming to you in the Entree Leader's Guide to Delegation. Here's how you get it. Text episode 270. Episode 270, no space. Text episode 270 to 33444.

That's 33444. And while we're giving away free stuff, how about InfusionSoft? This time they're giving you the... templates for the taking. 27 email templates you can use right now. Now, I love this. As a guy who thinks that email is just north of torture, I love templates because it just makes your life easier.

It's just a no-brainer. You get your templates. You just boom, boom, cut, paste, drop. Whatever you need to do. It doesn't come with the sound effects, by the way. Those are provided by me. But how would you like to just make your email so much more efficient? That's what this is going to do.

You're going to get some blast emails. some sales templates, some thank you email templates, and some re-engagement templates. All of this absolutely free. You can get it by going to infusionsoft.com slash 27 email templates. That's infusionsoft.com slash 27 email templates. Now, if that's too much for you, because I'll tell you, it's too much for me, just go to episode 269 at entreleadership.com. under podcast and we've got the link for you.

Well, hard to believe another episode in the books. On behalf of Will the producer, Tim the engineer and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of the Ken Coleman show. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly 70% of Americans are disengaged at work. If you dread going into work every Monday morning and you're just trying to make it to the weekend,

the Ken Coleman show is for you. Everyone has a sweet spot. Your sweet spot is at the intersection of your greatest talent and greatest passion. We will help you discover what it is you were born to do and then will help you create a plan to make your dream job a reality. You matter and you have what it takes. Join the conversation on the Ken Coleman Show. To hear full episodes, just search Ken Coleman in iTunes or go to Ken Coleman Show.com.