Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Jessie Wisdom on How to Make Every Manager a Great Leader EP 195

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Jessie Wisdom joins me on Passion Struck with John R. Miles to discuss her work at Humu to help nudge every manager into becoming a great leader. Based on Jessie's research, she has found the difference between an engaged employee and one ready to walk out the door is their manager. Jessie Wisdom, Ph.D., is co-founder and head of People Science at Humu, a behavioral change platform that nudges people towards better working methods. Before building Humu, Jessie led projects for Google’s People Innovation Lab (the research arm of Google’s People Analytics team), focusing on improving organizational decision-making and driving behavioral change. Jessie received her Ph.D. in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon University. -► Get the full show notes for all resources from today's episode: https://passionstruck.com/jessie-wisdom-make-every-manager-a-great-leader/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/ZVK8ugW5eKY  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles --► Subscribe to the Passion Struck Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/passion-struck-with-john-r-miles/id1553279283 Thank you, Dry Farm Wines, For Your Support Dry Farm Wines have No Chemical Additives for Aroma, Color, Flavor, or Texture Enhancement. Dry Farm Wines - The Only Natural Wine Club That Goes Above and Beyond Industry Standards. For Passion Struck listeners: Dry Farm Wines offers an extra bottle in your first box for a penny (because it’s alcohol, it can’t be free). See all the details and collect your wine at https://www.dryfarmwines.com/passionstruck/. In this episode, Jessie Wisdom Discusses How to Make Every Leader a Great Leader. We discuss how behavior science can be applied to understanding employee engagement and why great managers make the difference between organizations that fail and those that succeed. Those managers who are effective are 2.2x more likely to retain top talent. In today's episode, Jessie explains why effective managers have a 22% higher employee engagement. We explore how to create a workplace where every manager is great and how to increase their effectiveness using nudges delivered in the workflow. Where to Find Jessie Wisdom Website: Our Team: Jessie Wisdom, PhD (Co-Founder & People Science) | Humu Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jrwisdom/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wisdomj/    -- John R. Miles is the CEO, and Founder of PASSION STRUCK®, the first of its kind company, focused on impacting real change by teaching people how to live Intentionally. He is on a mission to help people live a no-regrets life that exalts their victories and lets them know they matter in the world. For over two decades, he built his own career applying his research of passion-struck leadership, first becoming a Fortune 50 CIO and then a multi-industry CEO. He is the executive producer and host of the top-ranked Passion Struck Podcast, selected as one of the Top 50 most inspirational podcasts in 2022. Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/   ===== FOLLOW JOHN ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Twitter: https://twitter.com/john_rmiles * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesjohn/ * Blog: https://johnrmiles.com/blog/ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast

Coming up next on the PassionStruct podcast. I've seen this in many places where they have great ideals, right? They put together a cultural framework or a transformation initiative or they work really hard on figuring out what are the values of this company and how do we want people to behave and ultimately where it usually falls apart is in actually getting people throughout the organization to change their behaviors in ways that are conducive to that. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, 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 guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 195 of PassionStruck.

Recently ranked as the number one alternative health podcast by Apple. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. In case you missed my interviews from last week, we had on the one and only Rachel Hollis. We do a deep dive in how her life has changed over the past two and a half years, and how her life has become so much better on the other side of hardship.

I also interview Douglas Rushkopf, who's a professor at Cooney, an author of over 20 novels, and we discuss his newly released book Survival of the Richest. My solo episode last week was on the power of perspective, in five ways that you can alter yours. Please check them all out, and if you love any of those episodes or today's, we would appreciate it so much if you gave us a five star rating in review. They go so far in expanding the reach and the popularity of this podcast. Now let's talk about today's episode. In my interview from earlier this week, I spoke to professors Max Bezerman and Don Moore about their new book, Decision

Leadership. Today's episode builds on their research and shows how to use their guidance practically in a company setting. Today's episode tackles subjects such as how managers can empower their teams to drive measurable improvement, how to change behavior at scale so organizations and individuals can grow. How to use the power of nudges to improve overall employee performance, and how to fight your way and eliminate administrative sludge. Our guest today, Dr. Jesse Wisdom, discusses all those topics and so much more. performance and how to fight your way and eliminate administrative sludge. Our guest today, Dr. Jesse Wisdom, discusses all those topics and so much more. Jesse is co-founder and head of People Science at HUMU, a behavioral change

platform that nudges people to better ways of working. Prior to building HUMU, Jesse led projects for Google's People Innovation Lab, the research arm of Google's People's Analytics team, with a focus on improving organizational decision-making, as well as driving behavioral change. Jesse received a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon, where her research included human decision-making around food choices and healthy eating. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey creating an intentional life.. Let that journey begin.

I am ecstatic today to welcome Jesse Wisdom to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome Jesse. Thank you. It's great to be here and great to meet you. It's nice to meet you as well. And I always like to start out the interviews by allowing the audience to get to know the guest. And so a question I like to ask is, we all have moments that define us. What is a moment that defined in many ways who you are today? Yeah, so I don't know if it's a moment exactly

so much as a series of moments, but I think a lot about sort of a recurring theme in my childhood, which was that my mother's family had a lot of heart disease and sort of high cholesterol, high blood pressure on her side of the family. When I was in second grade, I was also diagnosed with very high cholesterol, despite the fact that I weighed all of 40 pounds at the time. And I had heard these stories from my mom and in particular her father had died young of a heart attack. And so as a child, I remember being scared about my mom's health and her choices.

And obviously wanted her to live a long and healthy life. And so that was a topic of discussion in my family, right? Eating healthier, exercising more. I saw from an early age, just how hard it really could be for someone to enact these behaviors that they wanted to for themselves. So you must junk food, exercising, and of course I also struggle with this, right? I'm human. I have a sweet tooth. Everybody knows that a good piece of cookie is the way to my heart. So what was fascinating to me about that was that most of us know in some way or in some realm what we should do or what the healthy thing is for us to do, but we just fail to do it because it's hard, right? It's really hard to deny yourself something that you want in the moment or to force yourself to do something that you don't want to do in the moment and it involves sustaining those types of behaviors over time, right? So even when it's not clear to us

what any one single choice, what impact that will have, these choices add up over time and can have a huge impact in your life. But it's hard enough that even in the realm of health where it can be literally life and death, people continue to make choices that are not in line with what they want for their long term selves. And so I became really interested in sort of how we can make it easier for people to actually follow through on their best intentions, be their best self, and in doing so how we could help people live sort of happier and healthier lives. I now work outside the realm of health, but I'm still focused on that same issue. How do we get people to follow through on their best intentions? I love that backdrop. I had a guest a number of months ago, Dr. Michelle Seager. I'm not sure if you're familiar with her, but she's a professor at the University of Michigan, and she just came out with a book called Joy Choice. And in there, she points out and in our interview, she did the same thing.

She says, we are taught by society how to start and stop, but not necessarily how to sustain a new behavior. And she said, it's those ugly middle points that are some of the hardest things for any habit formation. So love that. You found the same exact things. Yes, I absolutely agree with that. And it's interesting because those types of choices,

there are some choices that we can make once in life and then kind of let it go, right? But choices where you have to make good decisions over and over again in a sustained way is really hard. Oh my gosh, it sure is. And I think from the standpoint of habits, those that are around eating and exercise are different than other types of habits that we form. And in some ways, more difficult to correct. Well, it's interesting. I first found out about you

by one of your personal friends, Professor Don Moore. And I understand that you both were at Carnegie Mellon at the same time and that you helped to create the Center for Behavioral Decision Research. Can you tell me what that is and what its goal is? Yeah, absolutely. So I was lucky enough to work with Don and others sort of running that center for a year or so. And essentially it worked with interdisciplinary researchers,

so folks in psychology and public policy, human computer interaction, and provides them with resources for conducting behavioral science research. So I ran that lab for a year, and then I went on to join the social and decision sciences department at Carnegie Mellon, which I learned about through that lab,

and there I studied behavioral economics. So it was a great start and a place to learn all about behavioral science research. Well, for people who are going through their PhD, I know that their mentors play an extremely important role in shaping their research and guiding them along that arduous path. Who were some of your mentors during that time and what

significance did they play in you becoming the behavioral scientists that you are today? Yes, so I worked with a bunch of different folks at CMU, but I've also worked with researchers outside, so I think you Katie Melvin, someone that I've worked closely with in the past, we've done research together on exercise, and then at CMU, I actually worked on food labeling. So calorie labeling and how that affects people's choices. And I worked on that with Julie Downs and George Lowenstein. It was really interesting to look at how information like that can change people's choices or not. I did a study where I was able to stand out on the streets of New York right before and after the calorie labeling laws went into effect. So they were putting them up on right on the menu boards and fast food restaurants. Was able to sort of talk to people, get

their receipts, see if the information had actually changed their decision from before it was up to after. But the really interesting thing about that in terms of just what I remember and my experience, but by obviously the data we got out of it was interacting with people in those restaurants when the calorie information first went up and really seeing how it can miss the mark in terms of what people need to make the right decision at the time. So I remember in particular standing next to one man, who I think he saw I had a clipboard and was taking so I think he thought I worked there and he leaned

over to me and up on the board there were these calorie posting numbers and it said things like seven hundred two a thousand and he leaned over to me and he tapped me on the shoulder and he says why are there phone numbers on the board? And I said I kind of was like what and then I looked and I thought oh, yeah If you don't know what that is right a three digit followed by a dash and then a four digit number is a phone number And so it showed me sort of how Information isn't always framed in the right ways to help people. That was what my dissertation on was on there It's interesting just a few weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Cara Fitzgerald, who is one of the leading researchers on how to reverse your biological age. She does a lot of work on epigenetics

and DNA methylation. What she has found is that it's really our lifestyle choices. This goes very much to Katie Milkman as well. When I interviewed her and in her great book, how we change, I was startled to see that almost 40% of premature deaths are caused by lifestyle choices and the decisions we make, which are all preventable. Yes.

To your point, if you put the focus there. Yes, absolutely. I remember that graph seeing that in graduate school and just being shocked by that. And that was one of the sort of major motivating factors doing right is in addition to having seen it personally. All these choices can make a difference in our lives. Really seeing that statistic and thinking about how much impact we could have if we were able to help people make better decisions for themselves that really motivated me

Yeah, so why do you think it is that even when you put the information out there People have such a hard time acting on it. I know one of the things I like to think even when it comes to the podcast Just people like to consume information, but oftentimes they don't know how to apply it Yes So I think that's exactly right. And that's actually one of the things that the company I founded, who tries to work on, which is essentially that people don't always know how to use the information. They don't always get information at the right time to use it. Sometimes the information is not framed correctly. So it's too much information at once.

And you don't know how to actually get started, right? There's sort of lots of barriers that can get in the way. And to Katie Milkins research, this is exactly what she looks at, right? Is what is the barrier that is preventing us from actually making the choice that we want to make? And that can be lack of knowledge. In that calorie posting situation, that man didn't even understand what that information meant, right? So it could be, to understand how to interpret it. It also could be that it just doesn't hit you emotionally in a way that maybe it could. So I've done some research on how we can actually reframe calorie information to maybe make it more impactful. But I think,

as I said, people generally have good intentions, not everyone is good, but a lot of people are. And I think in the workplace as well, that's another place where people often know what they should do. They know how to be a good manager. They know what the right steps are to take with their direct reports, but they don't actually follow through on those things. They forget, it's hard.

It's not top priority, right? So there are kind of all these reasons why I think information doesn't always have the impact we think it might. Yes, I think that's a very true point. Well, it's interesting to me because most people in your space who get their PhD end up going down the academic route. And you took a completely shift to the other direction. And I was wondering, was that a difficult decision and why did you end up making the decision? Obviously, it's turned out to be the right one. But at the time, it was very different from probably where you initially thought you might end up.

was very different from probably where you initially thought you might end up. Absolutely. I really do love teaching, so I think that that was something that I thought I wanted to do in doing academic research. And honestly, I think I actually kind of fell into or stumbled into industry, not particularly intentionally, but I actually just didn't have funding one summer and applied for a Google internship. And at the time, I didn't know what I was going to do working in a company, right? I didn't know what they would be interested in my skillset for. But once I got there and saw the impact that I could have, that really had an impact on me. And so I think there were kind of,

there were probably three things that really influenced that decision. So the first was pace of work. So I really love a faster pace of moving through things, academics. Obviously, it takes a while for things to get published. And so that wasn't always super gratifying to me. I also really loved the collaborative nature. So I joined the people analytics team at Google and haven't been there in a while, but it was a great team. I really enjoyed sort of working more alongside people towards a similar goal as opposed to everybody being focused on a little bit on their own research and their own thing. And then the thing that really got me was just the impact. I ran 10 experiments and we looked at what actually worked and then I was able to see that our findings were actually put into practice at Google and were therefore able to have an impact on actual people and actual lives.

And to me that was a really gratifying experience and something that I wanted to continue. And so it was difficult to leave academics. I think people don't often even get let back in. So it definitely felt like closing a door. But I'm really happy that that's the way I went and ended up being a better fit for me. Yes, well, I want to talk about Google here in a few moments. For me, also being in some large organizations, I was at a company called Lentlies in Australia, Lowe's, I'm an improvement, and then Dell were my three big companies I was part of. The only PhDs are scientists that I was aware of, and any of those companies actually reported to me, in most cases, and they were data scientists.

And we were looking at things such as supply chain ramifications and measuring time it would take for people to perform their jobs and distribution centers. We'd look at customer saturation reports and things like that, obviously financial analysis. But what really intrigued me about your work, and I really wish at lows we would have had this, especially with the almost 400,000 employees that we had when I was there, was some more people in the HR organization who were really looking at employee engagement, kind of employee satisfaction, how they were operating.

And so I found your role when you went to Google quite fascinating because you found yourself in the role of a decision architect from what I've researched about you. I mean, what is that? What does one do in that role? Yeah, so I was officially on the People Analytics team and I got to work on lots of different projects, so everything from leading the annual employee survey to understanding what makes for good managers. But sort of the main place where I focus specifically was on just how we could help people make better decisions. And by that I mean decisions that were more in line with their long-term goals around everything from eating well to exercising more to

choosing health and financial plans that were most appropriate for them to following through on learning opportunities that they got. It was a really great way to sort of take scientific rigor, what we know from research, behavioral science, and really apply it to management and people at work to try and improve their experiences. It's becoming more common, but it is a pretty unique team and position for a company to have. And it was great for Google and still is, but I think all workplaces should be as thoughtful

about how to create great work experiences for employees. That's one of the founding ideals behind what we do at HUMU is we basically try to enable every company to do this at scale in a personalized way by helping people follow through on their best intentions make better decisions. Well for someone who's spent two-thirds of his career in these companies on the technology side I mean my primary job was doing digital disruption or digital transformation. And I remember working with the business and talking about these initiatives that they would want to do, and they put so much

bonus that it was going to be the technology, whether we were implementing Salesforce.com or Oracle, or it didn't really matter what. They were like, the technology is going to save us. And I would always tell them, from my experience, and it's even worse when you're doing a mergers or acquisition, I think 50% of any of these changes is people related, culture related, 30% gets into the processes that you've got to reconfigure. And only 20% or even less is really the technology. And so that's where I thought having a role like yours on these major initiatives where you could partner with them on change management

would be so critical to making those initiatives more successful in having the payback and the RRI That you're wanting to get out of them. What are your thoughts on that? Absolutely, and that is absolutely one of the things that we work the most on that who moves. So We see all the time we work with companies, right? I've seen this in many places where they have again great ideals Right, they put together a cultural framework or a transformation initiative. They work really hard on figuring out like, what are the values of this company and how do we want people to behave?

And ultimately, where it usually falls apart is in actually getting people throughout the organization to change their behaviors in ways that are conducive to that. So people generally don't like change, change is hard, change usually means you're losing something as well as gaining something and we know that we dislike losses more than we like gain. So I think that there's a lot that can be sort of done from a behavioral science point of view to help people through these change efforts. And part of that is really getting to the ground level of the organization, right?

In these big organizations, leaders at the top can have lots of ideas and lots of things they want to do. But ultimately, they are a small fraction of the organization. And one of the things that we've seen is just how important managers are. So managers throughout the organization, all the way down to frontline managers, in driving these changes. People see their managers as a face of the organization all the way down to frontline managers in driving these changes

People see their managers as a face of the organization, right? And what's coming from their manager is what's important Even more so in the case of remote work And so I think when managers really get on board with these change efforts and when they Indicated how important it is and when people know what they can do, what's in my control, and why does it matter, that's how you start to get changed. And trying to do that only from the top down is usually a pretty doomed effort. Oh, no, it absolutely is. When I was at Lowe's, one of my favorite books, Nudge came out, and I was in this role

where I'd picked up a new team. And at the time I picked them up, they had the second lowest engagement scores in the entire company. Out of 400,000 people, the second lowest. And so I got in this role. And I did the typical thing where I would talk to the customers of the function and some of my peers about what was going on and got an earful about how they weren't responsive and whatever. But then I really spent a lot of time talking to the employees and it didn't matter to me if you were the newest employee on the tone and pull or you were one of the directors or managers. I wanted to hear everyone's perspective.

And what I found was that none of them understood how their job, whether it be in a call center, an operation center, the security operation center, the data center, et cetera, impacted customers or impacted shareholder value or the bottom line. And none of them were empowered to make decisions on their own and to have any input in what we were trying to create. And so, for me, I laid out this multi-year plan, but one of

the most critical factors of it was this idea of you can't take a group that's that far behind where they need to be and get them to where you wanted to be overnight. You've got to do it, and I always called it incremental steps, which is another word for nudges. So I know that this is something that you are really an expert in. And I was hoping you could talk about for the audience, what is a nudge? And how can you apply this not only in a business, but also in your personal life? Yeah, so I love nudges.

So nudges are essentially small interventions and small changes in the way choices are presented that predictably alter people's choices and do so without taking away choices from them or altering their economic incentives. So it's basically little changes in the environment, little changes in way you give people information and those can actually build to much more, right, Then those little changes incrementally over time, they add up, they make a big difference. And so those are the topics you hit on, right? So autonomy is super important.

People feeling like they have a sense of creativity and autonomy and how they do their job is something that we work on and think a lot about at HUMU. And that's actually something that we see come up in call centers quite a bit, right? Is how can you give people just a little bit more of that sense of autonomy, a little bit more of that sense of control?

And as I mentioned, a lot of it comes down to the manager, right? And the manager being supportive. But one of the things that we think about it, humo is sort of nudging the entire ecosystem. And that's somewhat different than what's been done in some of the more academic literature, which is really more about taking kind of like a blanket approach to everyone. So it's we're

going to move thing unhealthy food out of sight or we're going to change the language for everybody who reads this. And one of the things that we try and do is actually really personalize our nudges to what is it that you need to work is actually really personalize our nudges to, what is it that you need to work on? What is it that's important to you? What is it that's gonna actually really make a difference in the team environment that you're on? And then we nudge everybody to do the things

that are under their control in order to create that environment. And one of the things I love about that approach is that we see change because even if everybody doesn't take action on our nudge, which we don't expect every single person to take action on every single nudge, usually someone does. And that makes a difference in the team environment and actually causes new norms to be created,

right? And you have it, Stuie, Bill. I think it's really daunting to try and change by some huge measure all at once. It's hard for people to wrap their head around that or get on board with it, but small changes and things that are easy to do and things that you can sort of direct people to how to do them are much more,

I think, fruitful ways of changing behavior in the long run. I think you're exactly right. The other thing is, I think there are very few people who have the inherent gift to be able to look five, six years in the future and be able to see the end goal. Most people can see, I think, six months out, a year out, maybe two years out. So if you try to throw something on them, that's too far fetched. A lot of times they can't buy into the change that you're wanting them to make.

And I think that's also the same thing that we go through in our personal lives. When we're trying to look at where we are today, and let's say tomorrow I want to be this person who's got 40 million views on a TED Talk. I can't expect myself just to be where I'm at today and a week from now to be able to deliver that and get that result. It takes the area of actions along the path. And it's the same thing with leading companies, leading groups, and as you're saying, managers leading teams that they're over. Yeah absolutely it's hard to connect when something is that far out temporarily right or so or seems so distant so I often think about exercising which I'm not a huge fan of one of the ways I get myself to do a

difficult task both at work or to get myself to exercise right is not thinking about the ultimate outcome I want right which, which is healthier, lower my cholesterol, whatever it might be, because that's hard, that's hard to see changes in. But what I can do is I can convince myself, let me write one sentence, let me do five push ups, right? And once you're actually there and you've got no where that first small home, it's like a first small win, often you're bed motivated to actually keep going. So I know I'm tricking myself when I say, I'm going to do five sit-ups or five push-ups.

I know I'm going to actually do more, but that's how I get myself started. And so it's good to have that, like, here's this end goal that I'm thinking about, but also what are the small wins we can create for ourselves right now in order to get over that big home. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I'm going to bring up Katie Milkman and Michelle Seaver again, because when I talk to him, one of the most important things that they brought up,

and it's something that I talk a lot about in my solo episodes on the podcast is the power of choice. And I think people don't realize just how many choices we make in a day. I think it's been measured at somewhere between 250 to 300,000. So we're making all these choices. And I kind of like to look at it that in a house, you've got three floors and one of them is consciousness, subconsciousness, and then you kind of have super-consciousness. And depending on your actions, it really determines the long-term outputs that are going to appear in your life.

And it's just like you talked about earlier in the interview about eating a cookie. Well, having a few bites of a cookie might be fine, but are you pairing that with a salad or are you pairing it with a hamburger? Yep. Yeah, absolutely. And you find ones to immediately go to, I want that hamburger and fries. And it takes so much focus and intentional willpower to make the choices to shift where you are. But as you've probably seen yourself, when you start cutting out that sugar and other things, the body craves it less. But just like you mentioned in going to the gym, those first few pushups are hard, but once you get through it, your body kind of loosens up and you're able to do more.

And I think the same thing with making wise choices. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, absolutely. And I love the piece about sort of our daily choices adding up, right? I think that piece is really fascinating because we are generally pretty intentional about what we see as pretty large choices in our life, right? So we think a lot when we make what we perceive

is a big decision, but big decisions don't come around all that often in our life. And yet, as you said, we're making tons of little decisions all the time, but we're not thinking about how important they are or how much they add up. And of course, it's also, the thing I think is really hard is, at what point does it make a difference, right? So, with eating, if I eat a huge piece of cake today, well, that one choice is probably

not going to have any impact on my life, right? But if I make that same choice every single day, that's a huge impact on my life. It's hard to even see the impact of one choice and when that sort of tips into being too much, which makes it really difficult, I think. In grad school, I remember that one of the domains that was sort of easier for me to see this in was finances because I was in grad school. I certainly needed coffee. I loved going to coffee shops and lattes were like $4. $1.4 latte felt okay, but then one day I sat down and actually added up all those choices, right?

And I said, like, oh wow, that's almost $1,500 a year that I don't have. Right? Like, can't do that all the time. So I think you can sort of bundle choices like that. It can help you to make better ones as well. Yeah, absolutely. So that kind of is a great lead in to while you were at Google, it's an environment like many Silicon Valley environments are actually. Lendless was the same way where

they would bring in food for their employees. And I thought lendelese was the same way where they would bring in food for their employees. And I thought Lennelese did it the right way because they didn't really have any desserts. They had fruit and things like that. But you faced a situation where Google employees were almost loving it too much and they were loving some of the junk food that was in there.

I wanted to just talk about how did you address that situation? And by first, how did you approach it? How did you measure it? And then how did you counter it? The food team was working on this and they had heard from Google employees that they wanted some health eating healthier because they were having a hard time resisting all of these foods that were being put out for them. We basically took a scientific approach of running experiments, summer nudges, some were more overarching things like policy changes.

And for each of them, we wanted to look at the effects on choice and what people actually chose for to eat, but also how they felt about it. So were they upset about how we changed the things? Did it feel okay? And so one of the experiments we did was actually with M&M. So M&M's used to be sitting around Google Kitchens and these giant, clear containers. And so you'd walk in and it would be like, oh, wow, all the colors, right? I want some M&Ms. In one office, we took M&Ms from some of the kitchens and put them into opaque containers. You couldn't see the colors, but it just had a sign on it that said M&Ms. And what we found was that we were actually able to reduce the number of calories the Google employees in that office, eight by millions.

I can't remember the exact number now, but millions of calories are of course of a month. And people didn't even really notice, right? Like they knew that the M&Ms were there, but they just weren't as enticing to them. No one was upset about it. And then to your point about the power of choice and not actually taking choice away from people, we also ran some experiments where there was one in particular on meatless Mondays where the food team decided that in one of the 19 cafes on campus or something like that they were going to Take away the choice of land-based meat for three different Mondays in a month Google employees could have gone to another cafe. They could have chosen to just not eat meat for three days But they really did not like the fact that their choices were being taken away. And so there was

a lot of sort of like protest and there was actually a pig roast in the parking lot one day. It was not a great response. I think the important thing was that Google really was intentional about understanding like what's important to people, understanding that experience, and being scientific about how they changed it and thought about it. I think that's the right way to do. But of course, understanding. Not all companies have the expertise or resources to do that. And that's exactly what we're hoping to do with Humu is to actually bring this to more companies, be able to help people across different types of companies. Yeah, well, that was the next place I was going to go was the origin story of Humu, because I use this as a lead-in. One of my friends Jim McElvy found it square, and if you put on understand how square came into being, he was a glassful or had this great multi-thousand of dollar piece of art that he wanted to sell and was unable

to because he couldn't accept payment. And so he started thinking about there's got to be a different way for this. And he's the one who actually designed the Carterieter aspect. Oh, one of my favorite things that he said to me in the past is that we are all born with a novel problem that we were meant to solve. And when I think of you and your two co-founders, what was the novel problem that you were trying to solve when you created Huma? I admit, Lavo Bach, who was the head of people operations at Google, and then my other co-founders, Wayne Crosby, who did not know at Google, but then my other co-founders Wayne Cosby, who

did not know at Google, but was on the product and end side there. I stayed in touch with them. And ultimately, I really loved working at Google. But what I wanted to do was take this idea of applying scientific rigor and using it to improve the workplace experience and apply that to all different kinds of organizations

and employees. And I also really felt that to all different kinds of organizations and employees. And I also really felt that there was a lot of promise and a novel idea in this, I combining behavioral science with technology to allow us to scale these better practices from research, personalize nudges in better ways and basically sort of spread the things that we knew were actually having an impact and having an impact in improving workplace experiences that companies. Yeah, well, one of the reasons I found a passion struck was I was in these roles as a fractional executive going in and out of a lot of mid market companies and private equity owned companies. And I started to see more and more employees were facing burnout, disengagement. And when you look at some of the things that have come out of Gartner's studies, I mean, the statistics are crazy. And it's not just the US.

It's like 70 to 80 percent of all workers full-time are disengaged. And I thought there's gotta be a reason for it. And I think we've got so much chronic, I call it helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness going on right now, but if you're not engaged at work, the likelihood is you're not gonna be engaged in other areas of your life, at least from my personal perspective. So I wanted to ask, how are you

addressing that issue and how are you helping companies recognize where their problems lie? I think managers have a huge influence and are one of the most important drivers of employee engagement. This has been one of the most consistent signals that we've found in our data is just how important managers are for that. For example, our research found that there's 22% higher engagement across teams that have great managers, and we've seen that the workplace experience is really driven by them, and so they're key to employee retention and engagement and team performance. So what we're trying to build is essentially a way to innovate, to make it easier for managers to be great

managers, until we get a fact of team, and to engage their teams. And one of the things that we're seeing is just how important what has traditionally been called soft skills are. Right. So communication, creating inclusion, creating a psychologically safe environment, listening to people. We recently ran an analysis where we looked at what predicts people staying around in terms of the manager's behavior. And what we found is that all the things you think

would be important, our important managers should provide goal clarity and they should provide structure and they should provide recognition and all these things. But the thing that was most predictive of their teams wanting to stay is how much they gave them recognition, right, that the people on their team feel like they're recognizing valued for their work.

And so I think there's a lot that can be done again in these little moments, right, little things like recognizing people more that doesn't cost you anything. Those types of small behaviors can really, really make a difference in how engaged employees are. We've seen this across all types of workplaces from food service, frontline retail, where we were able to get people to have a little bit more autonomy to financial institutions and call centers. So I think that's one of the biggest levers

that we can work on right now. Yeah, I've got a great example of that. One of the best leaders that I know is a gentleman by the name of rear admiral Tim Gallaudet, who was the former Undersecretary of Commerce, and he at one point led Noah. But he did this incredible thing, and it's not a trait that he was born with. It was something that he had to work on very hard. But before he would go into a meeting, especially if it was with people he had never been in a meeting with before, he would do research on each one of them so that he would get to know him before the meeting. And then when they came in, he was able to very personalize the meeting, his interactions with them. But then he also reached into the organization when he saw people doing really valuable things,

he would write them personal emails, he would send them personal notes. And I will never forget it because a friend of mine was the controller and she's like no one even knows I'm alive. And the other day, I got an email completely out of the blue and she's a veteran as well. And she goes from Admiral Gallaudet who had seen some of my work doing financial analysis and just wanted to tell me it was some of the best work he had seen. And those small things like that,

it doesn't matter what level you're at, it goes such a long way, whether it's recognizing people with birthday cards and thanking their families as well for the sacrifices that they're making or other things. And I think the other thing that's huge is empowering people like I brought up earlier that they can make decisions as long as you give them the parameters. I'm a big believer of eyes-on, hands-off leadership,

because I always look at it as if I was an NAVY SEAL team. The four-star general or admiral who's back at SOCOM is never going to be able to see what the operators in the field are. The same way that the CEO of a major company isn't going to be seeing what the rank and file are doing, but you've got to find a way that you can give them the box that they can operate in and let people make intelligent decisions, especially in customer facing roles

where they're trying to do their best on those interaction points. So just a couple of tidbits for me on that. I think what you're doing is really important. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's also ways that companies can sort of build in more of these norms, right? So like on the recognition piece, one of the things that we do internally at Intermeoi is we have a Slack channel called Cheers for Peers. And it is a very active channel in which people just put up shout outs

for like someone did this awesome thing. And I appreciated or someone's been killing it at their job recently and here's why and the whole Company like emojis right like it feels like a little celebration. It's a small thing, but it makes people love it right it makes a big difference I think there are ways that you can as leaders you can signal that these things are important and That you value them and I think that also can help to set that culture within an organization that it does matter to take the time to do these little things. It sure does and as I was researching you I found a tool by looking at a blog that Lazlo did on

your website and I'm going to throw it out to you. He called it the easy framework as a way to help people with their nudges. I'm not sure if it's to you. He called it the easy framework as a way to help people with their nudges. I'm not sure if it's something you're familiar with, but it's easy, attractive, social, timely. Yeah, I believe that came out of behavioral insights team. Maybe I could be wrong, but yes, I think all of those things are very true. And I particularly think that ease is a huge component, right?

Like making things easy for people to do actually goes an incredible long way. We like to think that our behavior is predicted best by our intentions, right, so if I intend to do something I'm going to do it, but actually our behavior is predicted best by other things, like what did you do before, and how easy was that behavior and things like that. So I think that's a super useful framework. Yeah, I liked it because I thought it was something that only could you use in a company, but you could use in your own personal life.

Make the change that you want easy, make it attractive, make it something that's socially approachable, and of course, timeliness of when you implement something is extremely important because if you're in the mindset, even to start a new exercise regimen, then you're going in and you getting myself to the gym even though I want to, then you can use a framework like that to really set yourself up for success and think about all the things that you can do to make it easier and more attractive

and all those other things to actually get that behavior done, right? Exactly. Well, I know some of the trailblazers in your field of behavioral economics, you know, people like Thaler, Sunstein, Tversky, Canaman relied so much on laboratory experiments for their initial work. And we've talked about Katie Milkman and Don Moore. I also wanted to mention Michael Luka, who's at Harvard, who are all trying to do a lot more practical experimentation to combine it with

that. It seems like in your role, you're in a great position to do both. And not only on a small segment, but you can do it almost in the way the behavioral change for good initiative is doing it by looking at megastudies. I wanted to ask how are you incorporating the research and the practical in what you're trying to do? I love the movement towards more real-world experimentation. I think both have their purpose and their pros and cons, so it's not get rid of one and keep only the other. But one of the things I love about the movement towards real-world experimentation is that it tends to be more likely to focus on sort of real problems that real people are having because in order to be able to do that kind of work,

there's usually someone in the organization or in the real world who's seeking out the results to actually inform a decision and therefore it's more likely to get actually used and put into practice. Obviously, there's also lots of issues with laboratory studies that have are very well known in terms of mostly Western educated industrialized rights college students participating for extra credit. And it's not clear how that will generalize to other populations. So at Whom we don't use lab experimentation in the like typical sense where we bring people into a lab, but we do a lot of other types of research and experimentation across the platform. We borrow from a variety of different

methodologies, so we run randomized control trials when we can. Sometimes customers don't want to let us do that, right? We have to work on sort of the practical side, but we run a whole bunch of randomized control trials where we can prove causality that the nudges are actually causing, randomized control trials where we can prove causality that the nudges are actually causing particular effects. We are able to look at engagement with our platform and how does that lead to different outcomes. We are able to run experiments on we're able to look at our own data, we're able to run experiments on other platforms if we want to learn more about a particular population or a particular new topic that we are going into. And I think

we really try and rely on meta-analyses and published research where we can and apply that and bring that in, right? We don't want to just say we're ignoring hundreds of years of research, right? We're actually very reliant on that. But my team is composed of the people science team there, the P. Ed Humeil. The people science team is a group of behavioral scientists with backgrounds in social psychology, industrial organization psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive neuroscience, and then the data science side,

which is folks with data science backgrounds. They bring sort of a variety of different methodologies and backgrounds to studying people. We try and pull from all of them because they all have something to offer and each one is unique. Well, that is for sure. And I think that's a really interesting approach that you guys are taking. That's kind of groundbreaking compared to the way you were trying to tackle these issues. So it's really intriguing for me and I can't wait to see where the company goes in the future.

Thank you, yeah. Well, I was looking at an article and I wanted to congratulate you because you were recognized as one of the top 40 under 40. Oh yeah, I could not believe that, thank you. But an incredible honor, never the last, but in it, I loved one of the things that they said in the write-up, and I'm going to introduce this because I recently launched a book by

Dr. Casey Holmes, who's actually a social psychologist at UCLA, and she's an expert on the topic of happiness and author of this new book, The Happier Hour. Why, if it were up to you, would you nudge everyone towards a happier and more productive life? And how do you recommend they do that? Yeah, so she's a great researcher. I don't know her personally, but I know many of the folks she works with.

I think first it's important to clarify what is meant by happiness there. In this sense, I'm talking more about Udaemonic Caffiness, which is a sense of meaning and purpose and connection with others and flourishing as opposed to idonic happiness, which is more of what people tend to think of when they think of happiness. So fun, joy, pleasure.

I don't think that those are necessarily the key life, but I do think that monocaptionist and feeling that sense of purpose in your life is really important. In my mind, obviously the answer is right, small changes that incrementally bring us closer to the person that we actually want to be. And I think change is hard, change is overwhelming. If we cannot make it easier for ourselves, then it's really a constant battle to just push through that. But if we can take the first small step, it can cause momentum,

it can build up over time. And so I think that's the idea between time nudging everyone towards a happier life is, what are these small things that people can do for themselves, these small changes they can make and make it less hard, more likely that they're going to follow through on things that they really want? I think that's a great answer because this whole idea of being passion struck is really, how do you pursue being yourself or yourself? And to me, that pursuit is in many ways what I think brings you more joy and happiness in your

life, whatever you want to call it, because you feel like you're living a life that you're supposed to. Yep, well, exactly. Well, I wanted to end on this question. So one of the things I'm trying to get more people aware of is we are at the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to this cascading, I think, tidal wave that's going to come with automation, robotics, AI in the future. And every

single report that I'm reading is saying somewhere between 400 to 800 million jobs are going to change. Many be eliminated completely. And so when you were talking about the soft skills earlier, it's interesting because my son is 24 right now. He's wanting to go back and get his master's in studying. He goes, I just don't know what to dive into because it seems like everything is changing so fast. I'm worried if I go into this area by the time I'm done the degree, it's going to be obsolete. And I told him, I think the things that are going to be so important in the future are adaptability, quotient, emotional intelligence, being a constant learner, because people are going to be thrust to have to learn. And I'm wondering if you guys are seeing that and how you're trying to prepare organizations to think that way.

Yeah, so first I would say he should check out the work by Barry Schwartz on intellectual virtues, which is new things he's writing about essentially around what are the values that we should be learning in our workplaces and in schools as we prepare for the workplace. It's all of those types of things and how important they're going to be. I think in terms of automation and robotics and things like that, it's definitely less close to my sort of day-to-day life, but I think we've seen over the past few years just how fundamentally work can change and shift, and I don't think that's necessarily going to stop, right? So I think the thing for me is that however work changes in the future and whether or not that happens, I think there's always going to be a human element to work.

People want to create things, they want connection with others. I don't think people are going to stop working even if work looks different. But I think the thing that is really important in all of these changes is keeping the human element at the top of the stack of what you're thinking about, right? Many of the tools and technologies that people come up with are well-intentioned, but they don't necessarily think through how humans will interact with it or the ways in which

humans might use it in that weren't expected. Those tools can essentially be used for good for improving the human experience, or they can be deployed in ways that hurt. For example, I'm personally not in favor of technologies that monitor employees every move and intruse the ways, right? I think that can backfire in many different ways and is not going to lead to a longer term outcome that people desire. I think really keeping a human experience and how are people going to interact with your technology or whatever it is is so so important to keep in mind?

Yeah, I'll give you a great example of that. When I was the CIO at Dell, we were going to a work from home, more policy, primarily because we were running on a room at Round Rock to facilitate everyone. And the Luger group wanted the ability to have the cameras to be able to be turned on at any moment and observe what the employees are doing. And for various reasons, one, personal privacy, I mean, the person could be naked or Lord

knows what. But there were various reasons. And I said, the next thing is, is if you put this out, you can't make this a policy and not tell the employees. So do you understand the backlash you're gonna get when you do it? And they ended up moving forward with it.

And everything that I had told them started happening. And people even started leaving the company just because of the policy and sometimes big brothers you say can get way overbearing to the point where you've got to trust the employees are doing what they're supposed to be doing and there are other ways that you can track their progress without doing that. I think what you just said is key right? Trust is such an important thing and it's very easy to break and it matters for how people work for your organization. If they feel like you don't trust them, well, why should they treat you well? Right? Like, you already don't trust me. So

okay, I'll ask the act of trust for you, right? It's not, I don't think it's a good sort of behavioral loop together. No, I don't either. Well, Jesse, I wanted to end by allowing you to either give a shout out about Humu and maybe something that's coming down the pipe could be a product that you're launching. And then maybe just tell the audience if someone wants to learn more about you and the company, what are the best ways to do it?

Sure, you can check out whomoot.com, the best place to learn more. And there are ways to contact us through the website. Right now, we're, as I mentioned, really focused on managers. I'm so excited about that because I just think it gives us the opportunity to have a huge impact not only for the managers,

but for everybody. We're seeing how the world is changing and how managers are really pressed. There's statistics right. We've seen that managers are actually much more likely to quit now. But an individual contributor is and all these things. And they're going through a lot and they're people too, but they also have a huge influence on everyone else. What we're building right now is really focused on supporting connection

and interactions between managers and their teammates and really building good relationships that lead to all of these outcomes that organizations care about like performance and retention. But that ultimately makes the work experience better for the manager and for their teams. That's what we're working on right now.

Well, awesome. Thank you so much for being here today and for sharing everything that you're doing at Huma, but also all the incredible work that you did prior to that. So I know. Thank you for having me. It was great to meet you. Yes, you as well. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Jesse Wisdom. And I wanted to thank Jesse Megan Day in Huma for the honor of interviewing her. Links to all things Jesse will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.

Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles. Please go there and subscribe. We have over 400 different videos for you to check out. Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at John Armiles, both on Twitter and Instagram, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book incredible guests like Jesse Wisdom, it's because of my network.

Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview from the PassionStruck podcast of an interview that I did with Daniel Pinc. The repeat, number one, New York Times best-selling author, and we discuss his new book, A Power of Regret, how looking backwards moves us forward. Positive emotions are awesome, right? Positive emotions make life more worth living. But you don't want to have only positive emotions. You want to have some negative emotions mixed in there because negative emotions are functional, and one of our most functional negative emotions

is regret. So you don't want to extinguish it, you want to be able to harness it, and then we haven't been shown how to, we haven't been shown how to do that. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends or family members. When you find something useful or interesting, if you know someone or a company who could use some advice on how to get rid of sludge and how to use nudges to improve their overall performance and definitely share this episode with them, the greatest compliment that you can give us is when you share the show with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life-assioned struck. you