Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

In this compelling conversation, John R. Miles is joined by Dr. Zach Mercurio, one of the world’s leading voices on purposeful leadership and the psychology of mattering. As the author of The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Cultivate a Culture of Significance (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025), Zach brings decades of research to a timely discussion on why people are craving something deeper at work—and how leaders can answer that call.Click here for the full show notes: Join the Ignition Room!Join the new free Passion Struck Community to win Passion Struck merchandise! - The Ignition Room: https://station.page/passionstruckTogether, John and Zach explore:Why mattering is a survival instinct—not a luxuryHow invisibility and disengagement are symptoms of a “mattering deficit”What truly great leaders do to make people feel seen, heard, and neededThe science behind “reflected appraisals” and how small actions affirm significanceA simple, powerful framework: Noticing, Affirming, NeedingWhether you're leading a team, a family, or your own life, this episode will change the way you understand human motivation—and how to ignite potential by making others feel they matter.Click to connect to Zach Mercurio - https://www.zachmercurio.com/Catch More of Passion Struck:My solo episode on Why Hustle Culture Is Toxic (And How to Break Free From It)Can't miss my episode with Homaira Kabir on How You Overcome the Tyranny of PerfectionMy episode with Susan Cain on What is the Happiness of Being BittersweetListen to my interview with Thomas Curran on Breaking Free From the Perfection TrapCatch my interview with Matthew Weintrub on the Psychedelic Origin of ReligionListen to my solo episode on Why You Should Avoid the Trap of Effortless PerfectionIf you liked the show, please leave us a review—it only takes a moment and helps us reach more people! Don’t forget to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally.How to Connect with John:Connect with John on Twitter at @John_RMilesFollow him on Instagram at @John_R_MilesSubscribe to our main YouTube Channel and to our YouTube Clips ChannelFor more insights and resources, visit John’s websiteWant to explore where you stand on the path to becoming Passion Struck? Take our 20-question quiz on Passionstruck.com and find out today!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on Passion Struck. Belonging is like you're being picked for the team. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and connected into a group. Something like inclusion is being able to play in the game, being able to play an active role in the group. But mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you. Mattering is feeling significant to individuals in the group. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, Jon R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the

world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become Passion Struck. Welcome to episode 610 of the Passion Struck podcast.

Whether this is your first time tuning in or you've been with us from the beginning, I am so grateful you're here. Together, we're building a movement grounded in one powerful idea. You don't have to settle. You can live with intention, lead with purpose, and make what truly matters matter most. Before diving in, I've got something exciting to share. We just launched the Passionstruck Clothing Line, and to celebrate, we're giving away free gear to new members of the Ignition Room. The Ignition Room is our free listener space where we go deeper after every episode with exclusive debriefs, reflection prompts, and a place to ask your questions and connect

with our team. Each new member this month will be entered into a drawing to win a passion-struck t-shirt and hat from the new collection. To enter, just visit the show notes and join the Ignition Room. It's completely free. Today's conversation is part of an ongoing series exploring a fundamental truth. Mental well-being is not a side note, it's the infrastructure of a purposeful life. And all month long we've been diving deep into Mental

Health Awareness Month and not just to raise awareness but to shift the conversation from crisis to capacity. Because mental health isn't just about coping, it's about mattering, it's about meaning, it's about feeling like you are seen, heard, and needed. Last week I released a solo episode outlining five foundational mental health habits that can create inner resilience and emotional sustainability in the modern world. And last Tuesday I sat down with Dr. Andrew Newberg, who revealed how belief, awe, and spiritual connection reshape the brain and restore our sense of wholeness.

And on Thursday, I was then joined by behavioral scientist Elizabeth Weingarten, whose work reframes uncertainty as a gateway to deeper courage, creativity, and emotional truth. These conversations built the groundwork for what we're unpacking today, because at the center of this entire month is one critical, often overlooked idea. Mattering is medicine. And that's exactly what we're exploring with today's guest, Dr. Zach Mercurio. Zach is a renowned researcher, speaker,

and author of the brand new book, The Power of Mattering, How Leaders Can Cultivate a Culture of Significance, out now from Harvard Business Review Press. In this conversation, we dive into the neuroscience and psychology behind mattering, how the lack of mattering leads to burnout, disengagement, and despair, why the best leaders are noticers,

people who affirm and elevate those around them. And how three deceptively simple practices, noticing, affirming, and needing, can transform entire cultures from the inside out. Whether you're a team leader, parent, or someone who's ever questioned their worth, this is a conversation about reclaiming your humanity and helping others to do the same. So let's get into it Here's my conversation with the brilliant. Dr. Zach Mercurio Thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now Let that journey begin

I am absolutely honored and truly ecstatic today to have Dr. Zach Mercurio on Passion Struck. Welcome, Zach. Thanks, John. Likewise, I think the feeling's mutual. I am so excited to have you. You are the author of a brand new book called The Power of Mattering. And I am so excited to do this conversation because this is right up the direct alley

of Passionstruck and our listener base. And this whole book is talking about the importance of mattering at work. But I'm just so glad you've gotten this into the world. You must feel relieved and really ready to ignite the world with this content. A lot of people have asked me like, Zach, why did you want to write this book? And I say, I did not want to write this book.

I felt that I had to write this book. The evidence is so clear as there's a reason why people more than ever right now are talking about mattering. There's a reason why you're writing a book. I'm writing a book. Other people are are talking about mattering. There's a reason why you're writing a book, I'm writing a book, other people are writing books about mattering. And usually that happens when people experience the opposite of a phenomenon.

So true. I reached out to Katie Melkman and I said, Hey, Katie, I'm working on what I think is the most important project I've ever worked on in my career. When I started down the most important project I've ever worked on in my career. When I started down the path of writing this book, because for me, it's really something deeply personal. It started when I was five years old after I had a traumatic brain injury. And I felt invisible at that point in my life because of the aftermath.

And so it's something that is in part of my life from a very early age. And so it's something that is in part of my life from a very early age. But I think something you and I share is I hear a lot of people talking about symptoms and you hear about the loneliness epidemic and the hopelessness epidemic and people feeling burned out and broken and battered, whatever word you want to use. And for a while, I thought they were all separate conditions, but the more I have been investing into it, I think they're all symptoms of an underlying lack of significance that people feel in their lives. And I think you feel the same way. I've been calling it our mattering deficit. For example, when you look at employee engagement, Gallup just released their employee engagement data. It's the lowest it's been in a decade.

And if you look at the two key drivers of that, one is just 39% of people said that they had someone at work who cared about them as a person. Just 30% of people in that survey said that they had someone at work that knew and invested in their potential. So again, like this is not a disengagement crisis. And it's not something that programs or platforms can solve. There are over 100 different validated surveys to measure engagement. There are 1500 certified quote unquote, engagement coaches on LinkedIn.

And yet we're still disengaged. And why, right? It's a mattering deficit. People don't feel seen. They don't feel heard. Just 30% of the workforce indicates 30% of the workforce says they feel quote-unquote invisible in work. And this is something that is solved through relationships, not through programs. And the same is true with loneliness. I'm so glad you brought that up. Loneliness is the most glaring symptom of the mattering deficit, right?

Because it isn't the quantity of connections that predicts loneliness. It's the quality. There's a great phrase in psychology called companionate love. And it's not passionate love, but it's the feelings of companion at love of having someone pay attention to us, affirm us, show us our uniqueness, show us our significance. And ironically, researchers find in the workplace, for example, that is the key, the quality of the interaction is the key to reducing loneliness, not the quantity. So I think you're right on. Well, thank you for sharing that, Zach.

And I want to jump into this. In the book you write, our first instinct in life is to matter. And that's a pretty profound claim. Our first instinct in life is to matter. When did you first realize that and how did it shape your mission? You know, to study this as part of your doctoral research to write this book, to write the book that you did before this? The first memory I have from when my first son was born is I remember him reaching out his hand and grasping onto my index finger really tightly with his tiny little hand. And that was so powerful to me because he immediately calmed down. But I started studying what it means to matter, what it means to experience significance.

And I realized that I was experiencing six million years of fine-tuned programming in that grip. Scientists call that grip the grasp reflex. It's one of several reflexes we're born with. Immediately after we open our eyes, we reach out our arms to matter to someone enough to keep us alive. A really interesting thought experiment for everybody listening right now is to think none of us would be here right now if at some point in our lives we hadn't mattered enough to another person

so they would keep us alive and in thinking about mattering as a survival instinct helps us to understand how as we grow up that instinct turns into the fundamental need to feel seen heard valued and needed and it gets out of this idea that mattering is a preference It gets out of this idea that mattering is a preference. It's not a preference to matter, it's a survival instinct to matter. And it's a fundamental need for most everything else that we say we want. Now, the way this has looked for me is that my first research study was with a group of janitors, with cleaners at a university. And we embedded ourselves with them for a year and a half,

a very difficult job, often overlooked. And we were trying to study what contributed to meaningful work, which is the experience that your work is significant. And I quickly realized that these people only experienced their work as significant when they felt significant. And it was in very small moments.

I remember one janitor told me that the most meaningful part of her job in a 20 year career was when a student walked into the building, looked her in the eye, said, hey Susan, and said, hey, it's great to see you today. A 20 year career, that is the moment. And then since that, for the last five years, we've been studying what is the architecture

of moments of mattering. What are the things people do that create these very small moments that can dramatically alter people's career and their lives? That's interesting. You've studied everything from janitors to CEOs to healthcare workers Since you brought that up. What are some common patterns you've seen across all these different various groups?

And how people experience mattering and maybe some common ways. I will first say this that Every group I've talked to I usually start with this question. Raise your hand if you'd prefer to feel insignificant at work. Nobody raises their hand. And most of the time these audiences are boomers, Gen Xers, Gen Z, Millennials.

No one raises their hand and said, oh, I'm a boomer or Gen Xer, so I'd prefer to feel unimportant. Or it's only those Gen Zers or Millennials want to feel things like seen, heard, valued. The uniting need that unites all generations is the need to feel significant. And I've actually haven't found any meaningful differences of the three components that we've uncovered create these experiences of mattering, which is we feel seen and heard. People notice us.

We feel affirmed. People reveal our unique gifts and show us the difference that we make. And we feel needed. And I think that ties back to thinking about mattering as an instinct first. That transfers into a fundamental need that is the essential prerequisite for everything else. I also ask people, tell me about a time something mattered to you when you didn't feel that you mattered. Tell me a time when you cared about something before you felt cared for.

And once people start thinking about it, it's very hard to not see how mattering comes first. It comes before everything else we say we want in our lives and organizations. It is so true, and I completely agree with what you're saying. Now, I think a lot of people get confused and you and I were talking about Professor Jeff Cohen who wrote the book Belonging before you join me on the show. I think people get confused because they think

belonging and mattering or self-esteem and mattering are the same thing. But I think you and I would both say they're not. What do you think makes them different? I have two elementary school kids right now, so I'm heavy into the recess drama. And I'll use a recess example. Belonging is like you're being picked for the team. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and connected into a group.

Something like inclusion is being able to play in the game, being able to play an active role in the group, but mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you. Mattering is feeling significant to individuals in the group. That's why what we've seen in terms of the belonging and inclusion interventions and initiatives that haven't worked is they tend to Theoretically focus on belonging as making sure people feel welcomed making sure groups generally feel connected Inclusion ish initiatives have made sure people have a seat at the table and can take an active role

But I think the evidence shows what those movements have missed is that people don't feel significant to the individuals in the group. And one reason why is that the individuals in the group don't have and haven't developed the interpersonal skills to actually see, hear value and show the person across from them how they're needed. So you can feel belong, you can feel like you belong in a group, you can feel like you're included in the group and you can still feel that you don't matter to members of that group. I can come on this podcast, feel like I belong with you,

but you could not see that I'm struggling or you could not know my unique gifts, my strengths and show me how they're needed. And so knowing the difference is vital because if you're doing a belonging intervention, you're focusing on making sure people feel generally connected and welcome. If you're doing an inclusion intervention, you're making sure people can play an active role. But if you're doing a

mattering intervention, you're making sure people have the skills to make sure the next person they interact with feel seen, heard, valued and needed. That's my perspective. What do you think, John? Well, I completely agree with you and I don't want to give out too much of my book coming up, but I have this model that has four components to it. And one of them is that from a personal perspective, we have to feel like we matter. But then there's a reciprocal component to it

where others need in turn to make us feel like we matter. And in turn, we make other people feel like they matter. And then what ends up happening, it ripples from there. And it reminds me of a line that you have in the book. People need to feel value to add value. And no matter how you look at it, it really turns the conventional model on its head. And I think this is where so many organizations

get it backwards. That's really well put and I like that because what is important about those interactions in which we see our significance is that those interactions give us the evidence of our significance. One of the ways they do that is it's called reflected appraisals. Reflected appraisals are the little components of evidence that are introduced to us that help build our beliefs

about ourselves. And what you're saying is spot on because there are two beliefs that we need to have of ourselves to motivate any action. We need to believe that we're worthy. That's called self esteem. And we need to believe that we're capable, called self-efficacy. Those are actually the two most potent predictors of things like workplace performance or productivity. And why is that? Because again, we need to feel valued to develop those beliefs so that we have the confidence to go out and add value. And then we know that when we come back after we're adding value, that someone has our back, that someone supports us. So I think you're right on that model. Well, and what you're describing, whether it's self-efficacy, Albert

Bandura, or you talk about in the book, learn helplessness, which goes all the way back to Marty Seligman's early work. You have all these people who are touching around the peripheral of this issue. And I think what your work, my work is trying to do is we're trying to show how all of this interconnects. These aren't separate distinct theories. They're all pulling towards this mattering deficit, as you've correctly put it. And this is why I love that a major component of your book is this whole idea that you can't have a healthy organization if you have unhealthy people.

And one of the people who endorsed your book is Claude Silver, who's been on this show. And what I love about Claude in this example is Gary Vee, who she works for, understood this very well. And that's why he made her the first chief heart officer, because he didn't want to look at the position as your typical CHRO, Chief Human Resources Officer. He really wanted someone who was looking at the pulse of the people.

And if you're looking at the pulse of the people, it's not just about them in the work environment, you gotta see all of them. And I think that's something that a lot of companies get wrong is they don't, they only tend, I ran into this myself, you tend to see Mike, the person you work with only for the role that they're in. You don't see all the work that they did before that, all the jobs and experiences that they had before that, because most people don't even go

to that level to understand them. But then you don't even understand. Like the conversation you and I had that they might be coaching a soccer team. They might be coaching a hockey team. They might have kids. They might be very involved with their church, they might have this or that going on. And so we don't take that whole communal aspect of them.

And so what ends up happening is we treat them more as numbers than we do human beings. And when people feel like a transaction, they usually act like it. When people feel replaceable, people feel like just a cog, just a means to an end, they usually act like it. When people feel replaceable, people feel like just a cog, just a means to an end. They usually act like that and they don't commit and they don't show up. And I think you're right on the first skill area that we uncovered in our research was that people who feel that they matter feel noticed.

They feel that someone sees them as a person before the employee, that someone remembers them, that someone thinks about the details of their lives. I love what you said about seeing the whole person in the sense of all of the experiences that they bring to being in front of you. One of the things that we tried to do is we tried to understand how employees felt that they mattered to their leaders and what leaders did. And there were four gifts that tended to be affirmed when someone felt that they mattered. One of those was strengths, what you love to do and what you're good at. But another one was your impact, the purpose that you had on a team, like how the team is different

because of you. But then the third was your perspective. People felt that they mattered when their unique perspective, whether it's a perspective as a parent, a friend, a someone who's involved in the community or in your particular area of expertise or how you see the world, when that perspective was affirmed.

And then the last one, which I think you're talking about too, in that example is wisdom. You know, what only you have learned. One of my favorite questions to ask people is what's something only you can teach me. And that is what it gets at to feel truly noticed and affirmed as a full human being. And so I'm glad you brought that up, but that takes time and that takes attention and that takes intention. And why do many glad you brought that up. But that takes time, and that takes attention, and that takes intention.

And why do many organizations not do that? Well, because many organizations and many leaders focus on the lagging indicators. Right? So, like, engagement is a lagging indicator. Productivity, performance is a lagging indicator. Those are all lagging indicators of human energy. And the way to regenerate human energy to deliver those lagging indicators is to keep a pulse, as you say, on the leading indicator, which is ensuring people feel

seen, heard, valued, and needed and supported. And I think that's what makes people like Claude and Vayner and other companies that are doing it well different is they obsessively focus on the leading indicator, which is regenerating the human energy needed to perform and produce and all of the other things we say we want. I think you're absolutely correct about that. And as I was prepping for this, I happened to have noticed that Seth Godin put out his 10,000 blog. And I can't even imagine how many man hours has gone into that.

Every day, right? I wrote him this note just to say to him how appreciative I was of his work and what it meant to me. And I happened to interview him about his book, Song of Significance. I know he's endorsed your book as well, so congratulations. I know personally, because he endorsed my book, getting a Seth Godin endorsement is not a trivial thing. But I remember when I was interviewing

about the Song of Significance, and I encourage any listener who's out there to read this book. It's probably not one of Seth's most well-known ones, but I think it's one of the most important, especially if you're a business leader to read, is he just felt, like you and I felt, compelled that he had to write this.

I remember when I interviewed him about it, after he did the Carbon Almanac, he didn't know if he was gonna write another book. And he said, this thing like came to him and he pumped the thing out really quick. It's not a very long book, but he was just like so upset of how so many people are just treated

like they're cogs in the machine. And we've lost the whole perspective of that people are what make or break a company. It's like the whole anatomy of why a company at the end of the day does well or goes out of existence. And they're the most important And they're the most important ingredient that any company has. And yet we have treated this as just a commodity for so long. And I've been in these discussions too in the boardroom where you're just getting so focused on shareholder value, top line revenue, expense cuts that you have to make that you lose sight of what's important. And I think that's what Seth was trying to say in that whole book. Not sure your perspective on it, but that's what I took away as the high level thing he

was getting at. The line I love about that book, and I'm probably going to get it wrong a little bit, but it was, he's talking about honeybees. I don't know if you remember this. Oh yeah, he talked about the whole hive. Honey is not the purpose of the hive. Honey is the byproduct of a healthy hive, right? And I think that all of the things that we say we want in organizations, those lagging indicators are byproducts. Now the problem in my perspective is that a lot of leaders, their own worth, their own sense of mattering, because of the systems they're in, have been tied

to quarterly earnings reports from what they do and what they acquire. I try to have a lot of empathy for leaders in that situation because I don't know who I would become if my worth, my sense of importance was judged every three months by a board on how much I produced. One of the things I think that needs to happen is we need to relook at systems. We can't rely on people to be morally good in systems that incentivize them not to be. And so rewards and what we're rewarding and what is considered good leadership is

really important because we often promote people who produce and perform, who treat people poorly. But we need to redefine success as people who treat people well, show people how they matter and perform. And I think that is a very important way that we can send a signal that this is what true leadership is in organizations. Well, absolutely.

I'll give you a great example of this and I want to use this to introduce this topic of anti-mattering. I end up taking this job at Lowe's Home Improvement. I've talked about it on the podcast. So if you're a regular listener, bear with me as I tell this story again. But I get hired because Lowe's had a few months before I got there had undergone the worst hacking incident in retail history up at the, up into this point. Two people outside the store were able to get through an access point and got all

the way to the general ledger on the mainframe before a computer operator in the group that I was taking over caught them. So I already know we've got a security issue, which means that security isn't a technology issue. It's more of a cultural issue because it goes well beyond that. But I remember my first week on the job, and this had never come up in any of my interviews, and I had eight rounds of interviews, so you would have thought it would have come up. But the head of HR sits me down, and I'm thinking we're having this discussion about my direct reports or something like that.

And that was like 10% of it. But she goes, we just did an employee engagement survey, first one the company has ever done. And do you know the group that you're going into has the worst scores out of 310,000 people? I'm like, and you couldn't have told me this before I accepted the job. So not only do I have to fix this security issue, I got to fix this group. And I start doing what anyone would do is I start asking my peers and customers of the group about the group and everyone is, you need to fire them all. This group has no clue what they're doing.

They don't care. They're tuned out. They're not responsive. And then I did the other thing that I think a lot of people don't do is I started just investing myself and trying to meet and talk to as many people in the group as I could. It didn't matter if they were a direct report, a computer operator, a print operator. It didn't matter. I'd come in at two o'clock in the morning just to figure it out. And what I

learned time and time again was that none of them felt like they mattered. They didn't know how their job mattered. They didn't know how the work that they were doing impacted a customer, impacted the strategy, where they fit in the whole wheel, nothing. And so this is something that Gordon Flett termed as anti matter. And I was introducing it like this. So people have an understanding of it. But what does that look like? I gave an example of it. But in some of your work, what does it look like in everyday life? And why is it so corrosive? Well, I have a very similar story

I got asked to go work with a group of maintenance workers and this was a story that really changed a lot for and how I look at work and I write about it in the book But I went and the supervisor said these people are unmotivated Similar to you and I went down to this group and I just what's going on here. Tell me if you were running this place What would you do differently and this group of maintenance workers said, what's going on here? Tell me if you were running this place, what would you do differently? And this group of maintenance workers, they were also window washers. So in the summer in Colorado, there's a lot of window washers that go on these industrial complex sites and wash the windows because that's something that's a lot of the clients like. But I went and I asked this group, I said, what, if you

were running this place, what would you do differently? And I did not see a motivation issue. They had more ideas than I could even have time with. And I remember very vividly, one woman followed me out of this conference room. She goes, Zach, I can explain everything to you. She goes, on my first week on the job, I was responsible for a team that had to go to this industrial complex and wash the windows of this complex like every day in the summer, every morning, they would go down there and do this. And she goes, I realized that at 3pm every day, the sprinkler system

comes on. And I saw it aimed wrong. So it was splashing all the windows and leaving these avoidable watermarks. And so I would get up and go do that every day. And I was so excited. I went to my supervisor and I said, Hey, I have an idea. What if we just aim the sprinklers differently, so we don't have to spend supervisor and I said, hey, I have an idea. What if we just aim the sprinklers differently? So we don't have to spend all of our time doing that. And the supervisor looked at her, she said, and said, that's the sprinkler people's problem. I need you to just do your job.

That was five years prior. She said that one moment, shut her down. She said she just clocked in, clocked out. And guess who she told? She told her team, hey, don't share your voice. Then nobody's gonna listen to you. And what quickly happened was this small moment, because I think we talked about this,

that mattering happens in moments and interactions. So too does anti-matter. The feeling that we're insignificant. Very small, often routine moments of being looked over, talked over, not listened to, can get that belief that I just don't quite matter. And then you go and tell other people and people say, nothing we say will matter. And that devolves into what's called learned

helplessness, which is the belief that I won't, can't, and never will matter. And it is such a killer on a team in an organization. It spreads like a brushfire. And one of the reasons why is because when people feel that they don't matter to behaviors typically follow, they either withdraw, they isolate, they stay silent, or the terminal withdrawal response has been branded by organizations as turnover. Usually turnover is the inevitable withdrawal response to feeling insignificant. Quiet quitting. I don't know if you remember that trend John, but that was a that quiet quitting again was misdiagnosed as a symptom of people who feel insignificant. So they're gonna withdraw versus people who are saying, oh this is like a lazy entitled generation. Or it can be much louder and I think this is important for listeners that People either act in withdrawal when they feel insignificant or they act out in desperation

They're desperate for the attention that they're not getting think about how We behave and our bodies and minds activate when any survival instinct is thread Think about how you feel when you don't get sleep think about how you feel when you don't get sleep. Think about how you feel when you don't eat. How we feel when we don't matter is we scratch and claw. And acts of desperation can be things like complaining, blaming, gossiping, protesting, all of these things that we've termed toxic. That's my toxic employee, that's a difficult employee.

And in my practice, when I've really dug deep, many of the most quote, unquote, difficult employees are also the most unseen, unheard, unvalued employees as well. So it can be incredibly corrosive in an organization and all it takes is a moment for someone to get evidence that they aren't significant for them to start believing they're not significant. Zach, there are a couple of things in the book that I think go into what you were just saying that are quotes that I want leaders who are listening to this to remember. One of the things that you write is that many motivation issues are really

anti-matter issues in disguise. And the important thing for a leader who's listening to this is you need to shift from managing behavior to restoring someone's sense of worth. And then another thing that I picked up that I want to highlight on this is you write that a sense of fertility is the enemy of mattering. And that really hit me because when we lose sight of our impact, that is what really starts leading to deep disengagement that you were just talking about. And to make this real for someone outside

of the work environment, I know you and I are both affiliated with Jennifer Wallace. She's leading a beautiful movement called the Mattering Movement and had a great book about overachievement culture with kids. But I remember one of the things that she and I talked about was when you talk about where we started the conversation about the first thing a baby is looking for

is to feel like they matter from a parent. Well, as a child is developing, that sense of mattering is still developed by their parent. But if you're in a work environment where every day you were treated like you don't matter, you are showing up differently in the household. And what that is doing is it's then causing a ripple effect where that kid who's coming to you because they're so excited that they've done this art project at school and they want to show it to you and you're tuned out or you're on your phone or something else and after two or three

times of that happening they just shut down they stop showing you the picture because they don't think that their presence matters to you well it's the same thing that happens in the work environment. What's interesting about that is that most of the things we talk about in work are actually adult attachment. It's childhood attachment in work, but we don't want to call it that because no one would invite us in to work with them. But childhood attachment, as you're mentioning, is knowing that someone supports you, that

you matter to someone as a child. And when you feel that you matter to someone as a child, you can go out, experiment, take risks, screw up, and do that because you know that someone cares for you no matter what when you return. What do you think psychological safety is? Psychological safety is just childhood attachment in the workplace. It's adult attachment. These attachment needs don't go away. So psychological safety is the belief that I can speak up. I can make mistakes

I can be creative without fear It's mattering in disguise as well Because someone can go out create take risks learn become confident because they know That their leader has their back when they come back With children we call that their secure base. Like parents are their secure base. One of the most exciting things for me when I go to a friend's house is if I see their kids being loud in front of them. That is a good sign because they know they matter already so they can mess up and someone still loves them. In a workplace, the secure base is a leader.

It's the same attachment need. The secure base is the relationship. And so I'm really glad that you brought that up and brought that tie up. But then if someone doesn't have their adult attachment, secure attachment needs met in work where they spend a third of their lives, do you know what happens?

When people don't have that attachment met as they go home, they're more likely to have outbursts of anger. They're more likely to lose their temper. They're less likely to show patience. They're more likely to have higher cortisol levels when they're at home. They're more likely to be in fight or flight because they spent all day not having a survival instinct

met while they're trying to provide for people. because they spent all day not having a survival instinct met while they're trying to provide for people. Now let's take that situation and say, you're that person coming from work, and you already have that deficit. And then you come home, and you're in an emotionally abusive situation, where you're getting it doubled down on you.

You're getting beaten down at work, and now you're getting beaten down in your home as well. And then we can even cycle this back down into the places in which many people occupy our communities, which one of those places is in schools. There was an education week study of students of 66,000 students from sixth grade through 12th grade.

They asked them, do you think someone would notice if you were absent? Over half of the sample said no. But what happens is you're talking about this cycle, this vicious cycle of anti-matter. Many of those same teachers don't feel that they matter. They feel burnt out. They have a job that matters,

but they're not experienced mattering in their job to other people. And so then their interactions with their students become just routine because they're not seeing how they matter. And then administrators aren't seeing how they matter. And the cycle continues. And where it stops is how we show up with one another in our next interaction. I think that's what's really hopeful about mattering as the root cause,

is that mattering happens through interactions. It's an interactional phenomenon. It's not something you can throw a program at or an initiative or a platform. It is something that we can do in interactions. And it's teachable and it's scalable. And also true. And the other thing that I've heard from many teachers

I've spoken with is that there's so much bureaucracy in the system and so many roadblocks now for them to teach the kids the way that they want them to teach, that they're getting burned out by having to follow so many protocols, so much like the medical system, that they can't even get to the important soft skills that they want to teach the kids to begin with, because they're so conditioned that they have to teach these other things.

And then you throw on top of that, the kids are now getting graded from the very first moments they're in school. And so everything gets driven by performance instead of the more important emotional intelligence type of skill set that many of them need to be developing and we could go on and on about the school systems. But I want to pick up something here because I think it's really important that this is also a skills issue at a large scale. One of the reasons why it is because we've also been able to evade the social situations

that allow us to develop the skills to see, hear, value and need one another. And the reason why is because of these things. Right? I can, we, for the past 25 years, and I'm holding up a phone for those who are listening, but the past 25 years, we have been able to communicate with one another via short transactions, short digital communication. So John, if you tell me that you have some bad news, I can just send you a little text with an emoji, a sad face emoji and say, I'm sorry to hear that. I actually don't have to sit with you and seek to understand what you've been going through and offer compassion. If you give me some good news, I can just say, hey, happy to hear that.

I don't have to sit with you and say, John, I've been noticing how much you've been working on this for five years. I'm really proud of you. I've seen your perseverance. Those are skills. And what's been happening is over the past 25 years, we have not been getting social reps, social repetitions that we used to get. So those skills are withering and

Now what's happening is people who have not had those skills including myself through using phones and platforms are leading teams and more than ever People don't know how to respond to feedback in real time. They don't know how to affirm a person's gifts They don't know how to affirm a person's gifts. They don't know how to check in with somebody. They don't know how to remember someone's details of their lives and offer an action to show them their thought about.

A lot of people don't know how to show compassion when they feel empathy. They don't know how to listen. There was a study done that found that less than 2% of the world gets any formal education on how to listen well. So I think we're in this place where we need a

massive re-skilling to relearn the skills to see, hear, value, and show the people across from us how they're needed. That's such a good point. I recently did an episode with Alison Woodbrooks. I'm not sure if you know her, but Alison teaches the most popular course at Harvard Business School, and it's called, How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. When we were having this conversation, we really got into the topic of mattering, and we were talking about how active listening has become a lost skill.

But when you think about it, it's really as if you're, you don't think about it this way, but it's really putting up a mirror to yourself as you're listening to the person because you can start to see yourself in their stories if you're truly paying attention. And that's how you see them and in turn can help to magnify the situation by letting the other person know that they're valued because you're listening and you can lean in on how they're impacting you but you also have a chance to share how

They're impacting the world by what they're sharing with you And because we're not active listening anymore the whole I guess loop that I just talked about is disintegrating Absolutely, right? You don't get that evidence that you're important to somebody. The person that influenced me the most is the psychologist Carl Rogers. He was the father of active listening. But what we've gotten wrong though about teaching listening, in my opinion, and is that in leadership programs, we've teached people how to say, yes, make eye contact,

do all of the things that physically demonstrate that you're listening, not the things that ensure the person feels heard. You can be physically listened to and not feel heard. And feeling heard comes from knowing that true voice, the meaning behind the words is invited out and explored. And to explore that means that we have to be attuned to people's feelings. We have to name feelings.

We have to go beneath the surface. We have to check whether our perceptions are right with the person. And it's both an art. I think Picasso said the true art is loving people. It's a skill and it's also an art, but it has to be practiced. And what I worry about is that kids in school, for example, aren't getting the social reps, the social repetitions to practice

these things. And so when they go into the organizational world, which I work in organizations because that's where the people are. When they go to the organizational world, they're also not getting the skills. And yet now add on AI that's eclipsing our operational technical skills. And what do we have left? We have left the skills to see, hear, value and understand the people around us. So I really believe that this requires a re-skilling. And I think organizations have to take it seriously and may have to fill the gap in what we're seeing in our educational system.

have to take it seriously and may have to fill the gap in what we're seeing in our educational system. Zach, I can't go through this conversation without talking about two of my favorite things, the University of Michigan and hockey. So as I was reading your book, about a year and a half ago, I did this interview with John Bacon on the podcast. Oh, yes. That's great. I got to listen to that one. And I was reading your book and I'm like, how did I forget about John Bacon? And I didn't use him in the book. I'm like, this is like the perfect story. And I was hoping maybe you can talk about how he turned around this hockey team and why mattering was at the core of it.

I think the Ann Arbor High School River Rats, right, were 0 and 22. They had not won a game. They were literally ranked in ranking systems as the worst high school hockey team in the country. And John writes in his book, great book, let them lead. He writes that they were so proud of how terrible they were. They printed off Oh, and 20 t-shirts and wore them to the school dance.

And he got hired from them after an interesting hiring process. He got hired to go turn them around. And he says that the first thing I knew I needed to do is make sure they knew that they mattered to me as people before players. And the first thing he did when he went into the initial meeting is he sent a questionnaire and the questionnaire had questions about their personal lives, their goals, their dreams, their ambitions.

And he gave it to them and he asked them to turn it in at the first meeting. He sent it to them and he asked them to turn it in at the first meeting. He sent it to them. Well, only a couple of them turned it in at the first meeting. And he realized that they didn't think that he was serious. And so he went around this room and asked them questions about their personal lives and spent all this time repeating their names back to them, going around, repeating what he heard about their personal lives as they shared. And he said, I'm serious about this.

I want to know you as people, not just players. And he said, after he did that, after he said each person's name, after he invested time in each person in one meeting, the next Monday after workouts, everybody turned in their questionnaire. When one of the players was asked why they didn't turn in the questionnaire, they said, we did what was expected of us, which was to fail and fail epically. And what was amazing is that he saw their potential invested in their potential. And so they acted as if they had potential. Now here's some other practices he used when they went on school buses, he would go sit with the players. A lot of coaches sit up front, but he

would go sit with them. He would move down the aisle and talk to them about their lives and what was going on with them. He would go to their other sports games. He would show up outside the cafeteria. He would become friendly with their friends so he knew them better. And he also was a great listener. One of the things that happens in hockey is that lines need to be changed. Lines are the configurations of where hockey players are sent off the bench to get on the ice together. And if someone wanted to change lines, he would say, okay, go talk to all the coaches and let's see if it's a good idea to them. If they say it's a good idea, let's try it and see how it works. And then I'm going to schedule a meeting with you to see how you think it went. He would let them try these ideas. I think the next year, they lost five games.

And then repeatedly, they were ranked in the top percentages of high school teams without any major change in talent level. And I think that you see this when you look at studies of athletes, when you look at studies of coaches, the best coaches seem to see the person before the athlete. They create what we just called that secure base. I can go out and try and fail because someone has my back and he has an amazing story. So I highly recommend his book. Let them lead. Yeah. And if you want to listen to it, you can listen to the just search passion struck John you bacon and you'll find it. And it really leads back to that whole story that I talked about with Lowe's

because the part of the story I left out was two years later when they did the employee disengagement survey or employee engagement survey again, that same group went from the worst in the company into the second highest in performance. And similar to his hockey team, a few of the chairs I switched out, but I would say 85 to 88% of the organization was the same as what I inherited. It was just treating people differently that made the huge difference. Yeah. And seeing them differently too, there's something I write about in our research

on why people struggle with this is that we have labels for everything in our organizations, high performers, low performers, high potentials, difficult people, toxic people, introverts, extroverts, right? But the moment you label someone is the moment you're seeking to understand them. And you're susceptible to the self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you see someone as a low performer, you tend to treat them as a low performer. And when they see themselves as a low performer, they tend to act like a low performer. And the cycle continues.

And what I love about what John Bacon did is he broke the cycle. He saw them all as having potential. He saw them all as unique, important people. And I think that's so important that seeing people for the full human being that they are before their role is essential for them to perform in that role. I think you're so right on that. And it really, in the book, you also have a story about Japan Airlines that really is reiterating these same things.

And a major component of your book is highlighting three practices, noticing, affirming, and needing. And this is something John Bacon did, and it's something that Japan Airlines did. And it reminded me, I worked for a global construction company called Lenlis. And one of the things that reminded me of the Japan Airlines story is they had this huge imperative focus on safety. And safety really showed up by

the way that they had their leaders go out and evaluate the projects that they were working on to make it as safe as humanly possible for the workers who were there. And one of the big things that Lend-Lease did was they really involved the employees to help educate the leaders on how they could make a work site run more safely. And it reminded me of what Japan airlines did as well in their safety procedures. But it all comes down to the three fundamental things that your book really concentrates on.

Yeah. I mean, I think that first part, right, of noticing people is important. They have to feel seen and heard. I think that's what John Bacon did really well, is he came to see them. I worked with that distribution center where they were all very disengaged except for one team and I love outliers. I went to the team and I just said, hey, what's going on here? They all said, oh, it's our supervisor.

She just gets us. We'd do anything for her. I asked her, I said, what do you do? She had this notebook that I write about because I was just astounded by this practice. She had this notebook that on Friday, she writes down each of her team members' names. And one thing she heard them talk about, complain about, one thing that they were struggling with. And on Monday morning, she looks at that list of names and looks at what she wrote down and schedules a three-minute check-in with each of them and said,

Hey, I remembered last week that you were struggling with this. How's it going? And I remember she looked at me, she goes, there's magic in being remembered. The reason why I love that story is because it was a practice. That's what she did. And that's what contributed to the engagement. You flash forward to the Japan airlines story and the Japan airlines stories a couple of years ago, there was a Japan airlines plane. It was about to touch down on the runway and it burst into flames.

It hit a coast guard other plane on that runway and it burst into flames. It hit a Coast Guard other plane on that runway. It burst into flames. It was a very large plane and it was like a textbook evacuation. Everybody survived. And one pilot that was talking about this said he's not really surprised that this was Japan Airlines because in 1985, one of the most deadly disasters in air travel history happened with a Japan Airlines flight. And the executives at Japan Airlines in the 90s wanted to make sure nobody forgot about this. So what they did is they created a place in their headquarters that had pictures of all

the passengers, all the crew members and stories of their lives. And they invited all of the employees to go through and look at how the safety procedures mattered through hearing these stories and how they mattered. And one of the pilots said, those safety rules were written in the blood of people who came before us. But the organization invested in making sure nobody ever forgot of the significance.

And that's making sure people feel affirmed, right? So making sure people see the difference that they make through what they're doing and never forget that, no matter what it is. And then that last one is making sure people feel needed, making sure people feel indispensable, irreplaceable to something bigger. But it all happens with interactions

and with the Japan Airlines story, it happens with investment. The organization made an investment to make sure nobody forgot that. And the result of that, you know, hopefully they never need it, but the result of that motivation is that nobody ever forgot.

They're one of the safest airlines today. Thank you with that. And I just wanna close with two final questions that are really directed at our audience. And the first one, Zach, is for someone listening today who feels unseen or undervalued right now, what would you say to them? You matter more than you think.

And I would say focus on the small things today. There's someone who needed you today. One of the lines that other people do for them when they feel that they matter is say these five words if it wasn't for you. Look at your own life though and say if it wasn't for me. There's someone that relies on you. There's someone you had to take to practice or to school.

There's someone who needs you at work who wouldn't be able to do their work with you and think about that, right? Think about these two questions at the end of today. Who did you help today? Who helped you today? Often what we think about is what we look for. What we look for is what we see. I'd also say start small. If you just say hi to a grocery store clerk, learn their name, learn something about their life. What research finds is that you will typically then see the reaction that they had and

you will start to see that, whoa, my presence, had and you will start to see that, whoa, my presence, my inputs into this system around me that I call life make a difference for someone else. And start doing those actions. I always say mattering, but gets mattering. The more we show other people that they matter, the more we see how we matter, the more we believe how we matter. And then the third thing I would say is think about those people in your life who help you feel that you matter. And invest in those relationships. Invest in those relationships. Hold those people close to you.

Make sure those are the people that you're talking with when you have these feelings. Because I think Gordon Flett says that mattering is modifiable. While we experience it from other people, we can also do some things that help to give us the evidence of our significance around us through relationships, through doing this for other people, through seeing how just our absence and our presence means something to just one other person.

And I will tell you this, no matter who you are, it does. And I'm going to steal one thing from you, Zach, and this is for any parent who's out there. I recently did an episode, if you want to go and listen to it, on mattering in families. But you've reiterated the same thing that I said in that episode. And that is we often ask kids, how was your day at school?

And you can rephrase it by saying something like, who did you help today? That opens up a completely different discussion and way of talking about mattering with your kids. And I just wanna point out that you can do this when you stop this podcast, you can do it in your next interaction. You can start to address some of the biggest crises of do it in your next interaction. You can start to address some of the biggest crises

of our time in your next interaction. Zach, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on your new book, The Power of Mattering, a must read for any leader in any business, but really anyone who's in a relationship, who's part of a family, who's in a school environment, it really applies universally to all those situations. Congratulations and thank you for all the work that you're doing to put this into the world. Thank you, John. You too.

And that's a wrap on today's episode with Dr. Zach McCurio. From the hidden epidemic of invisibility in the workplace, to the healing epidemic of invisibility in the workplace, to the healing impact of being seen, affirmed, and needed, to the simple truth that significance fuels performance, Zach reminds us that mattering isn't just psychological, it's organizational oxygen. The opposite of disengagement isn't productivity, it's being valued, and the most important leadership skill

might just be noticing. If today's conversation resonated, pick up Zach's brand new book, The Power of Mattering, How Leaders Can Cultivate a Culture of Significance, available now from Harvard Business Review Press. You'll find the link in the show notes at passionstruck.com. And if you're continuing the journey through Mental Health Month, go back and check out my solo episode on five mental health habits, Dr. Andrew Newberg on the neuroscience of belief and spiritual resilience. Gretchen Rubin on the secrets of adulthood and Elizabeth Weingarten on the power of uncertainty and emotional clarity.

If you'd like to bring these kinds of insights to your organization, conference, or team, I'm currently booking speaking engagements for 2025 and 2026. Visit JohnRMiles.com slash speaking to learn how I can help your audience ignite intentional growth and build lives that matter. You can also join the ignition room, our free community for those looking to live with greater clarity, purpose, and momentum. Subscribe to the ignited life newsletter and also watch today's full episode plus exclusive bonus clips on our YouTube channel. If you found this episode helpful, please consider sharing it and leaving a five-star

review on Apple or Spotify. It helps us grow and reach more people ready to live with deeper intention. And coming up next on Passion Struck, I sit down with Biet Simkin, the spiritual teacher and artist, often dubbed the David Bowie of meditation for a raw and so stirring conversation about grief transformation and creative awakening. You don't want to miss it. I got sober and immediately things became different. It was like as if I stopped drinking and devoted my life to what I

call God with a higher power of my own understanding. And in that moment, everything became opulent. And it was almost like one of those movies where everything's black and white, and then it becomes color, like Wizard of Oz. Like it was like that. All of a sudden, I saw the world in technicolor. my life got immediately better. Until next time, live boldly, lead with purpose, and as always, live life passion strung.