Start With A Win - How's your awareness of your employees? The secrets in this episode.

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Leadership is Awareness.  Awareness of Self, Awareness of Others, and Awareness of Business.  But, do you have an awareness of your employees' needs?  Do you know where they sit emotionally?  This all plays in to how your company functions and the results... and PROFIT that you realize from their actions.  In this episode, we dive deep in to understanding the psychological needs of your employees and how to use this awareness to maximize their experience and the performance of your company.  It also helps to understand where your customers sit on this hierarchy when working with them for the same reason - getting things done that are mutually beneficial and fulfill their needs/overcome their challenges. Main Topics 01:33 Maximize your people with the Five Categories of Needs04:25 Compete on this… not salary or benefits!05:37 Bottom need #107:57 Next need #211:27 Half-way – Need #313:51 Getting to the top needs, #414:46 Use these two things in your business and see MAJOR changes from Dale Carnegie!17:58 Need #519:56 Secret need… #622:16 What level are your employees?        Connect with Adam: http://www.startwithawin.comhttps://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcontos/ https://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/ https://www.youtube.com/@LeadershipFactoryhttp://twitter.com/AdamContosCEO  Listen, rate, and subscribe! Apple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle Podcasts

What's the best way to maximize your business results? It's to maximize your people. We'll talk about how to do that today on Start With A Win. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we talk franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. And coming to you from Area 15 headquarters, Start With A Win headquarters, it's Adam Kantos here

with Start With A Win. Wow, I'm excited about today's episode because we're talking about one of my favorite topics, and that's how to maximize your people. Not just how to get the most out of them, but how to have them be the most fulfilled and enjoy what they're doing the most. Same with you. Do you like what you do? Is there something that's giving you a rub in what you do where you're like, I'm doing it for the paycheck? Well, there's some realities here in the psychology of how we work. And I want to dig into that today. It's one of my favorite tools for doing so. It's called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And I want to give you a little bit of a

background before we dig into this. But I want you to listen to this whole episode, because at the end, I talk about the final portion of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is incredibly important. And this is what we're all seeking. It's what we're all seeking and what we do and how we do it. And it's what puts a smile on your face when you're walking in the door at the end of the day after a hard day's work. So down to the basics here. Maslow, Abraham Maslow, who's a renowned psychologist. And in 1943, he proposed a theory that suggests that people are motivated by five basic categories of needs. What are those different categories of needs? And then I'm going to dig deeper into those, but they're physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. So this is actually regularly depicted. And if you're watching the video, I'm showing the picture of it here as a triangle. It's called Maslow's hierarchy of needs or a pyramid, if you will. But at the top is that

self-actualization and at the bottom are those physiological needs. So this is not just applicable to personal development, but has a huge impact on your business leadership. I was going to say business management, but business management is not about people. This is about business leadership and how you get the most out of your people. Because in fact, studies have shown that people only show up to work with about 25% of their effort and concentration and focus. And that's what the outcomes are that we create with these people in our business. So think about this. What if you could, and I'm not just saying take and quadruple your profits,

but could quadruple your outcomes in your business, your customer experience, the longevity of your employees. How long does it take you to hire and train an employee when somebody else leaves? Or even better, how long does it take for you to recover from a bad employee before they leave or after they leave and you rehire? It takes a long time. So if we manage or lead these different situations around Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we can maximize our business because we're not focused on trying to maintain our business. We're focused on trying to build our business because we're getting more potential out of our people. So instead of showing up with that bucket of 25% of effort that people show up with each day, what if we got them to show up with 75 to 100% of that effort? Well, a lot of it has to do with what's going on upstairs in their head,

in their head, the psychology of how they're thinking and what they're concerned about. So ultimately, understanding the hierarchy of needs can help you create a work environment that meets your employees' basic and psychological needs. And it allows you to actually do something that we talk a lot about around here. And that's to create an environment where they can be as successful as they want to be. It's a safe, comfortable workplace. And I don't mean safe as in, okay, there's nothing difficult. I mean safe as in they're confident that they can overcome anything that they need to overcome. We all try to offer a fair salary and decent benefits, but we also all try to compete on those things.

And that's not what you should be competing on. What you should be competing on is your leadership and how these people are excited to work where they work in your business. Or even you, if you're a business leader, a business owner, or maybe a solopreneur, or maybe you work in your business, or even you, if you're a business leader, a business owner, or maybe a solopreneur, or maybe you work in a business and you want to feel more happy and fulfilled about what you're doing, this is the podcast for you. So a study of the Harvard Business Review found that employees whose psychological needs, their safety needs are met, are more productive and less likely to leave their jobs.

They're more productive and less likely to leave their jobs. So the studies are there. Let's start applying Maslow's hierarchy of needs here. Like I mentioned, there are five different parts of this. And then there's an Easter egg, a sixth one here that I'm going to get into at the end. But ultimately, the bottom, and Maslow says that we have to do these in order. We have to do these things in order. Otherwise, you can't skip a step. It doesn't work. So ultimately, we need to start with the physiological needs that we have.

This is obvious, folks. Physiological needs are things like breathing, food, water, able to reproduce. We're a reproductive species. Sleep. I mean, what happens to your employees when they show up for know that they have the ability to sleep under a roof, have shelter, have food, have water, have an existence. Now, let's break this down just a tiny bit. Because do you have any people who are struggling to make ends meet in your business? Are you a minimum wage company? We own quite a few franchise companies, a lot of them are minimum wage companies. And ultimately, you have people who have two, three, four jobs because they need to be able to

pay their rent, pay their car payment or their bus pass or whatever their transportation needs are, put food on the table. Maybe they have kids and those kids might be in school. And I'll tell you, having kids in school is expensive. It's expensive. You know what a meal plan at a school costs, which is why so many kids go to school hungry now is parents can't afford that meal plan, which is highly unfortunate because as you'll see here, if you're worried about food, you're not worried about anything else. That's your focus is eating because we can't function without food. We need that to sustain thought and productivity. So if you think about this physiological need, how do we

accommodate this in our business? Well, it should be automatic that it's being accommodated because people shouldn't have to worry about those things if they've planned for that in their life appropriately. This is also why bringing food into the office, having lunch or breakfast or snacks available to people is helpful because you meet that need and people are back at work instead of worrying about, oh, where do I get something to eat? Or they're standing there at the vending machine full of garbage, looking at it going, what's the best of the worst things for me? They're not dealing with the physiological needs. So that's the foundation for existence. And then we get into safety. Safety is the next level. That's level two on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And that has to do with security. Security of your body, of your employment, of your resources, of morality, of your family, health, property, things like that.

So do you remember during the pandemic when there was like this huge crime wave and it was all about the crime and the riots and, and being shed in your house and all this other stuff. I mean, everybody was living at this low level, this low level, which is safety. They had generally had food and shelter and they could breathe and had water and things like that. So they weren't at the physiological needs, but they were at the safety needs because they, they, first of all, they, they need to make, make sure that they weren't going to get sick. And that was being beat into their heads by, you know, the public, the press, things like that. And that was their key concern. You know, when you ask people, what are you thinking? They're like, I'm afraid, I'm afraid about my health. And maybe rightfully

so, uh, you know, a lot of people got sick and died or whatever during the pandemic, but ultimately what it came down to is they were living in a space where they were worried about their safety all day, every day. And that's not a happy place to be. And that is difficult for employment as well

when you're living in that space. So do your employees live in a space of safety needs? You know, do they eat? Do they drink? Do they, you know, have existence? And then do they have safety? Is there crime where your business is? A good example of this might be, you know, you look at like Whole Foods, you look at Nordstrom, you look at Starbucks, you look at all these other well-known companies that had, I say, had a place in San Francisco. Well, the crime rates, the drug use, the homelessness, the difficulty to run a business, and also the lack of customers because of all of those safety issues in San Francisco ran a lot of these companies out. In fact, a major mall, I think

it's Westfield or something like that, gave back one of their properties to the bank in San Francisco recently because they couldn't sustain these businesses because safety wasn't a priority there. It wasn't happening. And whether or not, I mean, I used to love San there. It wasn't happening. And whether or not, I mean, I used to love San Francisco. It was a beautiful city. And last time we were there, it was actually a couple years ago, you were stepping over homeless, drug use, feces. I mean, it was horrible.

I look at my wife and I go, I'm never coming back here again unless this place gets better than it is today. And we haven't. And nor have a lot of other people because of this, the safety needs. If you don't have to put yourself in those situations, you don't. So those are the bottom two. Those are, you know, you think of those things are generally generic in society in a first world country, but they're not, you know, San Francisco, hello. But the reality is if our customers and our employees can't work or have to deal with those situations, we're likely to lose them. It's unfortunate, but we're likely to lose them as

customers or as employees. And guess what happens then? Our business falls apart. So we have to make sure that those things are in place. You're taking care of your employees' personal needs and their safety needs, both health and crime and things like that. What's the third one? The third one. So we're halfway up these five steps. Now we get into love and belonging, friendship, family, having some sort of a partner in life, a spouse or whatever it might be. And this is where people really feel this in their heart. Now we're starting to get more fulfilled here. Little by little, we're not worried about safety anymore. But you know, do you have a dog that you love? Do you? And I've got several and they're

my babies. And I also love my kids and my wife and things like that. This is a good feeling. Jim Collins put in his book, Good to Great, he had a list of items that were necessary to have in the workplace. And one of those was, do you have a best friend at work? This is belonging. Are you part of a club at work? This is belonging as well. At Remax, I was the CEO of Remax for quite some time. And at Remax, we had like Toastmasters where you would get together and give speeches in this club. We also had yoga. We did some workouts on the rooftop. I mean, it was really cool. We had a lot of different types of clubs that you could be part of. And what it did was it built that community within the business. Do you have a

community within your business? Do your employees hang out together and treat each other like friends? Because if they don't, there's a disconnect. You have to look for this. We'll never make it beyond this point, as Abraham Maslow says, until we make this point official, that it is complete, we can check the box. It doesn't have to be 100%, but it has to be substantially there. It has to be mostly there where you don't have all these people who refuse to be friends with each other. They're colleagues. They're getting along well. They go to lunch, things like that. There you go. That's this love and belonging. So these are the bottom three. And then we get into the top two.

And these are really, really important because this is where leadership really shines. This is where you activate your leadership more than anything else in order to activate your business. If you don't have these things, I would suffice to say your business is not going to be all that successful. So what's the next one up? It's esteem. Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others. This is a really cool piece because when you think about this, this is where we provide that recognition to people. The two things in Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, it's like 1936, 1937, written during the Great Depression. He said, and don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things in this book. There are a few things that are not so wonderful. But the reality is he said a couple things that were off the charts fantastic.

Off the charts fantastic. Way to go, Dale Carnegie. He said the two things we can't give ourself. And I remember this. I was taught this by my mentor. If you start using these things in your business, you will see major changes. And that's personal attention and appreciation. Personal attention and appreciation. Let me give you an example of this. So at Remax, we had our core values. They spelled out the word more, M-O-R-E.

The M stood for deliver to the max. That was the M is max. The O is be customer obsessed. You know what the O is there. The R is do the right thing. And the E is everybody wins. Those are pretty cool values. They demonstrated what our expectations were of our employees, deliver to the max and be customer obsessed and do the right thing. And what the outcomes are that we wanted to happen, which is everybody wins. Customers, company, employees, everybody wins. So we talked about that a lot. But how do you get people to live those values? You praise and recognize them, esteem on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. you praise and recognize them for doing a great job. So every month, once a month, I would have an all-hands meeting where we had all 800 to 900

employees together. I mean, this is a lot of people on the Zoom call. It was interesting watching that number just tick away as people went into the Zoom room. And we talked about how we do these things. I always talked about the values of the company. So everybody was on track with here's how we're doing it, what we're doing. And, you know, there's no question about our values and how we're executing in the business. And then the other thing I did was I recognized people who were peer submitted. So their friends, their peers in the business would submit them for a more award. So more was our values and they would submit them for award on that. This is gold. Folks, this is gold

in your business. You should have a monthly recognition of your employees. Monthly. Not everybody gets recognized, but people can submit the names of each other in order to say, hey, Mike did a great job. Jennifer did an awesome job on this. And I would read their names as their names, and their faces were put up in front of all of their peers. And they got a little gift card for going overboard, going extra mile, whatever you want to say about this. They really built up the business because they did a great job

of building up themselves through each other. There was a lot of esteem going on. Fascinating, isn't it, how esteem works? This is a major leadership lever. Esteem, personal attention and appreciation. What have you done, bosses, to appreciate and show attention to the people that you know? I used to get in the elevator. I'd ride the elevator every now and then at the office just to meet people in the elevator and smile at them and see their name on their name tag and call them by name.

I would call them by name several times. It was great. Call people by name. Self-esteem. That's huge. So that's the fourth level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Pretty fascinating, isn't it? When you start to get to this point. So this is ultimately where a lot of people get to, but we've got one more. We have one more here. It's number five. Before I get to the secret one, number five is self-actualization. This is the peak of Maslow's Pyramid. And it talks about morality and creativity and having spontaneity, problem solving. It's acceptance of facts. You're comfortable in your skin and you're happy doing what you're doing. But at the same time, you're trying to get better. Self-actualization. It's going from success to significance and helping other people and help yourself in the same process. A key to this. Here's the key to this, leaders, is have people have the ability to train to get better. So when you look at the culture survey that LinkedIn did in 2022,

they said, well, what's the most important part of your business? And by far, everybody said the culture. I think we would all agree that it's the culture. If you don't have a culture and if you can't define your culture, we need to have a different conversation. But it's the culture. Now, what part of the culture. Now, what part of the culture is the question here? The part of the culture that everybody loved the most,

and this is where self-actualization comes from, is my business wanted me to continue to be better than I am. And they helped me do it. People want to improve. They want to get better because when they get better, they help others get better. It's like this cycle of reciprocity of building leaders. There's a saying, A players create A players. Those are up here at the self-actualization. B players create C players. So those struggling between like safety and an 11 belonging are B players. And the C players are down at the bottom who are just fighting to keep their head above water. So here's my question for you. Where are your employees on this chart?

Where are your employees on this chart? Now, there's one more I want to talk about. And in 1954, Maslow came up with the sixth level of hierarchy of needs. And this is self-transcendence. Self-transcendence. This is that zone that people get in, that flow state. It's, you know, it's one of those pieces described by Buddhist monks. It's one of those areas where people find in deep meditation or when life is so euphoric. In fact, it's been described that

you can find a similar euphoria through, you know, through drugs, illegal drugs, hallucinogenics and psychedelics and things like that, like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, things like that. And I'm not encouraging that. I don't believe you should be doing that. However, I will say that you could find that level without using an artificial means. You can find that level by working your way up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You know, when you look at the intrinsic happiness is a great way of describing this. And every now and then you find it. You don't live in this state.

But every now and then you find it. I was just in Italy not long ago. We were cycling across Tuscany, across the Chianti region. And we'd stop every now and then and take a deep breath of the air and look at the beautiful vineyards of grapes and olives and wheat fields and just the rolling hills of the Chianti region of Italy. And it's so hard to describe. But when you just close your eyes and you think about that, you find self-transcendence. It's like that feeling after you've done an incredibly hard workout

and you sit down and your body just tingles all over and gives you this high five inside and it just says, wow, that was amazing. We've all been there every now and then. That's what we're seeking in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Now, we don't need people walking around the office going, ah, that was amazing. But what we need is people in such a happy state that they're super productive and they're gaining this satisfaction out of being productive like that. So let me take and summarize this whole thing for you.

The reality is your employees live somewhere on this triangle. You live somewhere on this triangle. You live somewhere on this triangle. And it's a combination of your personal life and your professional life and what you do in those things. So it could have something to do with what you eat, your exercise, your activity level, those you spend time with, the things you put in your body, how you feel about the results you're getting, what are you doing in order to create a greater future for yourself and your family and enjoying that time with your kids as they grow up or with your pets or something like that, or your partner, or just by yourself

maybe with a good book. But think about where are people at? And if you recognize where your employees are, you can find those that are highly disengaged. I can guarantee this. You are not finding the highly disengaged people at the top of the pyramid. You're finding them at the bottom of the pyramid, the bottom of the pyramid. So Gallup did a study called the Q12, and they talk about employee engagement. And employee engagement has to do with people at the bottom are highly disengaged, people at the top are highly engaged. So take a look at where your people are in your business and understand. And then wonder, okay, what needs need to be fulfilled in that area in order for them to rise up? You can't skip steps, but at the same time, you can pull them up from the top

and help them understand those other things. That's the podcast for today. Start with a win. I mean, this tells you how to make a win. It really does. So I encourage you to take a look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's simple to find on Google. Read it, learn it, understand where your customers are, where your employees are, and where you are on this. And let's find that self-transcendence together. Thanks a lot. It's Adam Kantos here. Thanks for starting with a win. Thanks for joining us on Start With A Win. Be sure to like and subscribe to this episode and share it with your friends. Also, be sure to check out Adam on YouTube at Adam Contos CEO, as well as on all the social media platforms. And don't forget, start with a win.