Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Marcus Buckingham: Harness Your Strengths | Leadership | E104

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

FINALLY understand your strengths!   In today’s episode, we are chatting with Marcus Buckingham, a best-selling author, motivational speaker and business consultant. He spent two decades at Gallup helping co-create the StrengthsFinder tool and is now CEO of his own coaching firm, The Marcus Buckingham Company as well as currently leading the ADP Research Institute. Marcus has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, The Today Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.   In this episode, we chat about the differences between strengths and weaknesses, how to build up your strengths, and understand how to take feedback. We’ll then talk more about the uniqueness of every person on a team, how teams can work to build on their strengths, the best qualities of managers, and Marcus’ vision of the future of work.   Sponsored by Podcast Republic: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/1368888880   Social Media:   Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Follow Hala on ClubHouse: @halataha Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com   Timestamps:   00:43 - Difference Between Strengths and Weaknesses 02:37 - How to Understand Your Strengths and Weaknesses 06:06 - How to Build Up Your Strengths 12:22 - Are Weaknesses Related to Strengths? 18:57 - Understanding Feedback and Reactions 25:29 - Facts About 360 Feedback 32:15 - The Uniqueness of Each Person 35:52 - How a Team Can Work on Their Strengths 42:58 - Best Qualities of Managers 51:56 - How to Identify Leaders 55:45 - COVID Engagement Research 1:03:05 - The Future of Work 1:11:14 - Marcus’ Secret to Profiting in Life   Mentioned In The Episode:   Marcus’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-buckingham/ Marcus’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcusbuckingham Marcus’ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mwbuckingham Marcus’ Website: https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/ Marcus’ Research Organization: https://www.adpri.org/

You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halitaha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast. And that's on purpose.

I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of ex-FBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and best-selling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, how to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young and, profiting podcast. This week on Yap, I'm chatting with business consultant, motivational speaker, and New York Times bestseller Marcus Buckingham. Marcus authored several books, some of his most popular being Nine Lives About Work, and Stand Out, Assess Your Strengths, Find Your Edge, and Win at Work. Marcus is also a very established researcher. He spent two decades at Gallup helping

co-create the Uber Popular Strengths Finder Tool and is now CEO, of his own coaching firm. And on top of all of this, he is currently leading the ADP Research Institute. Marcus has been featured on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,

The Today Show, the Oprah Winfrey show, and dozens of other media outlets. In this episode, we chat about the differences between strengths and weaknesses, how to build up your strengths, and how to best process feedback.

We'll then talk more about the uniqueness of every person on a team, how teams can work to build on their strengths, the impact on COVID and company culture and his vision of the future of work. Hey, Marcus, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Hi, how are I am? Good. I'm really excited to chat with you today. You are an expert on all things, careers, thriving in the workplace,

improving your productivity and things like that. You're a best-selling author. You're a motivational speaker. You're also a researcher, which is very interesting. So I can't wait to dig into all of that. So to set some context for our listeners, I want to understand the difference between strengths and weaknesses, because this is something that you talk very often about. And I want to ask some follow-up questions about that. So with that said, could you just lay some foundation for our

listeners about strengths versus weaknesses? Yeah, sure. I actually joined the Gallup organization when I first came to the U.S. about 25 years ago. And Gallup's known for polling, but I did decide what wasn't polling. It was focused on how do you measure things. about a human that are really important, but you can't count, things like strengths, things like weaknesses. And when you start to research strengths, obviously at the time I was building something called Strength Finder with my mentor, who was the chairman of Gallup, Don Clifton. And when you really dive into strengths where you discover and weaknesses, you discover that a strength isn't what you're good at and a weakness isn't what you're bad at. Because we've all

got some things that we're really, really, really good at that we hate. So what would you call that? What would you call something where you are really effective at it, but doing it drains you or bores you or drags you down? A burnout. Burnout. Burnout scale or something like that. And it's funny. That happens in school, doesn't it?

Where you can continually get A's in a class. But you're not there. I mean, emotionally you're not there. Psychologically, you're not there. You sort of procrastinate that class. Somehow you end up with an A because you're smart or you're diligent or something. But when you really push in it, what you find is that all of us respond to situations in life, activities, people, contexts, in a way that's either positively or emotionally, it's either a little

jolt up or a little pull down. Nothing is really emotionally zero. And so weaknesses any activity that weakens you, even if you're good at it, a strength is any activity that strengthens you even if you're not good at it yet. So a strength is far more appetite than it is pure ability. And so that pushes you towards, you realize that the person who knows what your strengths and weaknesses are better than anyone else in the world is you. So then how do you start to understand like what's a strength for you and what's a weakness? Like how do you measure that and evaluate that? Well, probably the simplest thing. And we've done this with 10, 11, 12 year olds.

By the way, for your listeners, just know, unfortunately, no one at school or in college or a work. No one is interested in finding out you on that. I know it sounds weird to say, but no one. I don't mean this to sound cynical, but no one is really interested in what is inside you as a human and what your natural strengths are. Because the whole approach to education and work is basically that each one of us is an empty vessel. And we can fill it with whatever education we wanted to fill it with, test you occasionally to see how full your vessel is through exams or tests. And the best student or the best worker is he or she, who's the fullest. So the idea that each one of us is beautifully unique with unique strengths and weaknesses is sort of lost on school or on work.

But for you, if you wanted to figure out what your particular natural strengths are, and weaknesses, the simplest thing to do is to use a regular week of your life. Just take a blank, maybe it's a blank pad, maybe it's a page on your phone or whatever, draw a line down the middle of the pad and put, I loved it at the top of one column and loathed it at the top of the other column, and then take it around with you for a week. Anytime you find yourself looking forward to a particular activity before you're doing it, scribble it down in the moment, in the loved it. column. Anytime you find yourself with time just flying by and what felt like five minutes,

you look up and it's an hour, scribble it down. Anytime when you're done with it, it felt like it just clicked. It just clicked. It was almost like you knew how to do it without having to learn how to do it. So rapid learning, scribble it down in the Lovedic column. Anytime you see the inverse how that, before you're doing it, you're pushing it off to the side of your desk with something. You're trying to shove it under the filing cabinet. When you're doing it, time starts it drags on it. You get to the but you're an empty husk. Anytime anything like that, scribble it down in the low thick column.

Just spend a week using the raw material of your life to show you where is the positive valence at the level of the activity and where is the negative. And you'll get to the end of the week and you'll have a list. You'll have a list not of like theoretical terms like strategic thinking or executive presence or growth orientation or entrepreneurship. Not that.

You'll have a list of actual activities. some of which super draw you in, and some of which bore you or drain you, as you said, burn you out. That is a beautiful starting point to begin to identify for yourself where you get strength from life. And because strength and appetite and practice and performance and practice are this beautiful, ongoing loop, the more detailed you can be about which particular activities draw you back, those are your strengths. You may not be good at them yet. you may not be. You may just be drawn to them repeatedly. But the beautiful thing is you've used your life, not someone's theoretical models, but your life to help you know what are the particular

aspects, activities, situations, context, moments that strengthen you. Those are your strengths, and you can do it at 11 years old. I love that. I love tactical advice. So I think everybody who's listening should take heed and do that activity to find out their strengths and weaknesses. Now, I know that you have a very strong belief that you should not really focus on your weaknesses. A lot of people have it backwards. They focus a lot on improving their weaknesses, but you say focus on your strengths. Why is that? And how can we start to build up our strengths even better? And how did you come up with the fact that you feel that weaknesses really aren't where you should focus? Well, to begin with, just to sort of clarify, I don't feel it. I don't think it. I'm a,

I'm a researcher. So I sort of go into any situation with a black canvas. we went in, this was about 25 years ago now, but we went and basically studied highly performing managers or team leaders and lower performing team leaders. And companies would give us their top 100 managers and their bottom 100 managers. And we'd do this again and again and again and again. So you're constantly looking in the world of research. It's called a study group and a contrast group. So you just keep talking to the world's best managers and team leaders and you ask them a whole bunch of questions about what do you do? What do you do to get the best out of your people? And although every single one of the members, and by the way, it got to be about 80,000. So 80,000 interviews like the one

that you're doing with me now, but we transcribe everything that was said and then pour over the transcripts looking for, well, looking for similarities, basically. And of course, what you find, the first thing you find is that all of these really great team leaders are really different from one another. And I don't mean just difference in terms of race or age or nationality or but just different in terms of their style. Some of the best team leaders are very future focused. Some of them are very now focused. Some of them are very conceptual.

Some of the very tactics. They're all different in terms of their style. But one of the things that they all shared was a deep realization that each person on their team, A, was enduringly unique. Even if you have 10 salespeople. You don't have 10 sales people. You have 10 individuals who happen to be in selling. And each one of those people sells in a slightly.

different way. And what you as a leader have to do is not try to make them all the same. You as a leader have to figure out a bit like playing chess versus checkers, right? Chess, all the pieces move differently. The best team leaders realize that each of these pieces move differently. First of all, you've got to figure out as a chess playing team leader, who's the knight, who's the rook, who's the queen, who's the bishop, who's that, like you try to figure out the uniqueness of each person. And then they said, if you've got a rook, don't try and turn it into a bishop. It's like if you've got somebody who naturally sells by building relationships with people and getting to trust you, what you do is you help them to maximize that intelligently.

And if you've got someone who really sells simply because of the force of their personality, they close quickly. They're just a closer. That's what they do. That's what I love to do. You help them to cultivate that intelligently. You don't try and turn them into someone who you go, well, jolly well done for being a good closer. But now we need to work on fixing your relationship building. They don't do that. And they don't do it not because they're trying to be nice, I mean, maybe some of them are, but they're doing it because they realize you've always got as a team leader, now for you as a CEO, you'll know this more and more and more over time. You're always thinking about return on investment. You're always thinking about where's the ROI? And I don't mean of the

business. I mean of a human. Where will you get the most growth? And the best team leaders seem to understand what neuroscientists have only just begun to measure, namely that you will get the most growth, the most development, the most performance improvement by figuring out where somebody already has some kind of comparative advantage, and then you maximize it. Now, we can talk about how to maximize it in a minute, but it's like that is a mind-blowingly important thing for you to understand in your career because everywhere you go in school, obviously if you get, in fact, we ask this question every year for the last 25 years. Your child comes home, so we asked it of parents. Your child comes home the following grades, English A, social studies A, biology C, algebra F. Which grade deserves the

most attention from you? And there isn't a single year, Hala, where less than 70% of American parents focus on the F. If you give them the choice of those grades, every parent, by the way, every teacher goes straight to the F because we're frightened of the F. And then you get to work. When you start your career, you'll find that we turn the word F into something called an area of opportunity or an area for development. So in the world of work, we have strengths, jolly well done having those, and then areas of development. The best managers in the world go, wait a minute, that is completely bass-acwards. You have strengths, which are your areas for development? and then you have weaknesses that we need to manage around.

Every single effective sports coach, if you look at the, like look at Tom Brady. Tom Brady has very specific strengths as a player and a whole shedload of weaknesses. If you want to get the best out of Tom Brady, you do not say to Tom, okay, let's just ignore your strengths for a while. Let's really focus on turning your weaknesses. And he has so many.

I mean, mobility being the most obvious one of them. And let's try and turn you into Patrick Mahom. I mean, when we say it like that, we know that sounds stupid. And yet the really sad thing is that for most of you who are listening in your careers, that is exactly the advice you're going to get. Find out where your lack of mobility is. We'll call that an area for development, and we'll put together an individual development plan for you

so that you can emerge this well-rounded, perfect human. Well, I'm sorry, the most successful people in the world, the most successful team leaders in the world, realize that each one of us is enduringly, unique. And over the course of our life, we don't turn into someone else. We get more and more and more and more of who we already are. And the real challenge for us is, can you get to become an incredibly intelligent version of who you are? Best team leaders figured that out so fast. I'm not going to turn my knight into a rook. I got to figure out how to maximize these really beautifully unique people.

That's so interesting. And I know that I had a guest, her name is Dory Clark. You might be familiar with her. She was on my episode number one a long time ago. She's a career expert, a reinvention coach. And she said that sometimes your weaknesses can be your biggest strengths. So do you have an opinion about that? Have you seen that where your weaknesses are actually somewhat related to your biggest strengths as well? Well, that's an interesting question because normally the way that it's positioned is the other way around. You'll hear an awful lot of people say, yeah, but that strength, better watch out for it. That strength of you. yours can also become a weakness.

Yeah, exactly. Right? You'll hear it twisted around. So some people will say, well, look, you're naturally very good at confrontation. Your mind doesn't go blank. Somehow the words come really smoothly. And you are just, whenever there's a confrontation moment, you're really good in the middle of it.

But watch out. Don't use it too much because then it'll turn into people who think you're rude or aggressive. So you need to try that down a little bit. Or they'll say the same with empathy. You know, well, you're really empathetic. but you know what you're you're too soft you're too so you can't always be empathetic you know in fact most people's coach are not saying this was true of hers but because she actually framed

it really interestingly the other way around most of what you'll hear most of what your listeners will hear is is the other way around where people will spend really well-intended people like your mother will tell you because they want to help you tone that down a little bit your best boss that you first meet when you first meet a boss that you really like they'll spend a lot of time going well, this is great, but you need to turn it down a little bit. The first thing that all of us should remember is no good advice, basically when you peel it back, sounds like be less of who you are. That is never good coaching advice or career, be less of who you are. Now, that doesn't mean that somebody can't help you go, wait a minute, Marcus, sometimes when you're confronting people,

which you're great at, sometimes you seem to actually be pushing them further away from where you want them to get to. How can you be more, now, I mean, what's great? great markers with you is your words come really quickly when you're angry. I don't know. Some people they shut down. You don't. You get angrier and you just get cold and crests when you're, wow, crazy town. That's so good. How can you use it in a way that actually gets the outcome you want? You know, sometimes with kids, I'm sure you've seen this with other kids that you have or relatives that you've got, whatever. Kids, it's almost like their strengths are too big for their little bodies. So when they have natural strength, sometimes it's like they haven't grown into them yet. In fact,

what a career is really is kind of growing into your natural strengths so that you can use them really intelligently. Your strength, you can never have too much of a strength. If anyone ever tells you you've got too much of that strength, block that comment out because what they're really saying, they might be saying is you're not using that strength quite effectively enough. Okay, that's a legitimate piece of coaching advice. And that might make you pause and think, huh, I wonder how I can, and tweak or fine tune or adjust that so I can use my natural proclivities to actually get done what I want to get done. The other way around is kind of an interesting framing that your weaknesses are also

part of your strengths. I would say this, what weakens you can't also strengthen you. So if you define a strength and a weakness the way I did up front, which frankly most people don't, they normally say a strength is what you're good at and a weakness is what you're bad that. But if a strength is what strengthens you and a weakness is what weakens you, then what weakens you can't also strengthen you. It's a logical non-sequitur, right? But some of the things that strengthen you in some situations can prove effective for you, and in other situations, they won't prove effective for you. For example, you might be somebody who is strengthened by persuading

someone to do something they didn't intend to do. You love selling, and you love the clothes. and then because you love selling and because no one really helped you understand which bit of it you really loved and when you were selling for that medical device company you got closes all the time. It was so great because you got the little signature on the thing and you were like, yeah.

And then you got promoted, I don't know why, but you got promoted to work for a pharmaceutical company like Amgen or something or Genentec and you went in and you're quote unquote good at selling but you go in there and you suddenly realize that in pharmaceutical sales you never close. There's no clothes. There's no signature.

You're just influencing doctors to write prescriptions. And so you go in there thinking, I'm really strong at selling, but actually you're not. What strengthened you was the clothes, and you went and joined a pharmaceutical sales company where there's no clothes. So in that sense, your weakness and your strength stayed the same. What strengthened you stayed the same? What weakened you stayed the same? It's just that in one context, it was super useful to help you be effective in the job.

and in the pharmaceutical sales, that very same thing, that very same part of you actually proved to be diminishing for you, super frustrating for you. And if any of your listeners have ever found that in their career where you go, wait a minute, what happened to me? Because I was doing, I was killing it over here. And I moved over here and suddenly I'm like, I may actually still be able to quote unquote do the job. But I'm like, every day I wake up in a really bad mood. Why? So often it's because there's some part of your previous job that was strengthening to you, some activity or situation or personal context, in that case, the clothes was strengthening to you and you moved into a job where there's none of it. And obviously that would have been so helpful

if you want to learn at 11 or 12 or 13. But unfortunately, for most of us, we have to sort of figure this out as we go along during the course of our career. Wow, I loved everything that you just said. You're giving so many value bombs away. The two big takeaways that I have is, again, going back to writing down what you love and what you loathe and really taking the time to think about that and to figure that out so that when you are in situations where you feel burnt out, you know exactly why. And so that you can make the right career decisions and kind of evaluate your future experiences based on what you're actually good at. And so that you don't, you know, make a big career change and then you end up hating your job.

That's when you were doing really great. So I definitely agree there. I also love your feedback about feedback that you shouldn't just listen to everyone, even if they have good intentions like your mom or a boss that might really want you to succeed, but they just don't know how to give proper advice and they give you bad advice. So that's super important. Yeah. And on that point, by the way, if you look at many of your listeners are going to bump into this,

so much of this, but somebody will say, you need to learn how to take feedback. Or, hey, come and sit out. I want to give you some feedback. And of course, in today's high-tech world, there are so many tools and functions and features that allow you to get feedback all the time from people. And if you're in the corporate world, you work for Disney. You'll know this.

You actually have formal ways of getting feedback. Sometimes it's called a performance review or a performance appraisal. And it used to happen once a year. Now it seems to happen with little apps and stuff. Now you're getting feedback all the time. What I would strongly suggest to your listeners is block all of it. out, all of it. Feedback never, ever helps you excel, ever. The reason why that is, well, there's one small exception, sorry, there's one small exception. When success in a job requires

you to know a certain fact or a certain prescribed sequence of steps and you're getting the steps wrong, let's say you're a nurse and you there's a step sequence to give a safe and painless injection and you miss one of the steps, it is entirely appropriate for someone to come in and go, hey, you missed a step. Or if you've got a fact wrong, like, you know, the American independence war was this date and you say that date, then somebody can say, you got that date wrong. So when it comes to predetermined facts or steps, then feedback is fine because someone might tell you that you've missed one. But excellence in any job, you're a CEO right now, right? You go 40 people. You're charging around like a mad prune, and no part of your dog is a prescribed sequence of steps.

I mean, yes, you need to know how to turn this particular technology on that you and I you need to know how to do that. You need to know how to save the file and then cut it up into bits and like, you need to know how to do that. And if someone can teach you how to do that, great. But other than that, everything that you're doing, everything that you're learning, every moment that you're kind of doing your very best work is a function of inside out. it's you taking your natural patterns of loves and lows, your natural synaptic connection patterns, and turning them into behavior.

Stimily of life is hitting you all the time, and you're just choosing, making a choice here, doing this, not that, thousands of these every day. When somebody tries to give you advice, when somebody tries to give you feedback, when you really look at what they're saying, even with the very best of intentions, what they're really saying to you is you would do this job better, Hala,

if you did it more like me. Because all I've got is my own experience, I'm telling you, hey, you need to do a bit more of that, you need to do a little less of that, you should do this, you should do that. And it's basically someone taking their own experience and even with the best of intentions, smothering you with them. And so instead, you shouldn't ask for feedback. And if you are a manager of other people or a colleague, never give feedback. Instead, what you can do and what's so legit to do is say what your reaction.

action is. Just be way more humble. Don't cross the feedback bridge and start giving advice their front of the end. Just stay on your side of the bridge and say, look, my reaction was this. So, Hala, if you said to me, hey, Marcus, you know, I just really didn't understand what you just said. That's your reaction. That is so legit. I can't say, yes, you did, Hala. You totally did. I can't say that. Your reaction is your reaction. You're the owner of your reaction. You can say, I didn't understand what you didn't say. Or you could say, I was really, bored by what you just said. I can't then go, no, you weren't bored. You were bored. So that's your reaction. Tell me your reaction. If you go through your career and you're blind or deaf to

other people's reactions to you, okay, that's a miss. You need to listen for their reactions. Just smile and close your ears when they start giving you feedback on what you should do differently. the only way that actually they can help you know what to do differently or better is not only if they react when something didn't go well, but actually the best thing to listen for is for their reaction when something really, really, really worked well that you did. And this again, it's one of those mind-blowingly obvious things when you say of it. No one teaches you this. The raw material for your future greatness is your current goodness.

your raw material for your future greatness is not your current failure. It's your current areas where you're already doing something where people went, that was cool. That presentation you gave, you know what? Not everything about it was great, frankly, but this part, I lent in like crazy.

If you built a whole presentation where you did more of that, that moment there, I don't know, I just lent in, I couldn't stop myself from leaning in. It was so you nailed it. Your energy was fantastic. That rumor, if someone's telling you their reaction about what,

worked. That's not them being nice to you. That is them giving you raw material to help you know. What should I tack towards? What should I do more of? What should I fine tune or refine? Because frankly, most of us, we charge through life and we're trying our best. We do a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of this. Other people's reaction to what worked, whether it's an email you wrote, whether it's a campaign you started, whether it was a relationship you built, whether it was a presentation you gave, if someone is reacting to what bits of it worked, oh my word,

that is the best, best coaching advice you can ever get from someone. So different, by the way, than when someone's telling you what you should do differently, which as I said normally turns out to be, you would do better if only you did it more like me. So whenever you hear feedback, just your alarm bells should go off.

Oh my gosh, this is excellent. I love that when you said, smile and close your ears when you hear feedback. That's such a good tip for people. And, you know, a lot of people think that they're supposed to get feedback and they don't realize that most feedback is actually negative. Like when somebody asks you for feedback, you're thinking, well, what's the one negative thing I can think about this person and give them some constructive criticism? You're not thinking about good feedback, right? And I know that you actually have this opinion about 360 reviews. You call them gossip. So tell us about your opinion on 360 reviews because

we did that at, I don't work at Disney anymore, but we did that at Disney. And I have a great story about how, you know, somebody who was just kind of out to get me gave really bad feedback, which had not, like, if you asked any of my past managers of the past 10 years or any of my past co-workers, everybody would be like, that doesn't sound anything like Hala. But it's just one person who was out to get me. So talk to us about 360 feedback. Well, again, as of everything else, I don't have an opinion about anything. You go. Sorry, but tell us about the facts. Right. I mean, and I only say that because, as you know in this day and age, sort of everyone's a thought leader. I think this. I think that.

I think this. I was a chef, but now I'm a life coach. It's like, how does all, everyone's a thought leader. So it's important if you have data to sort of start with, well, the data show because then you're not really just putting your opinion out. You're going, this is what we can see in the world. When it comes to 360s, first of all, you're right. In many, many cases, they're an opportunity for someone anonymously to lob little hand grenades at other people. So there's that whole part of it, which is just dangerous and politically damaging and psychologically hurtful. But even if you de-anonymize it, the basic, there's two basic huge flaws with any 360, for

any of you listening that are forced to go through a 360, just keep your mind and focused on these two floors. Again, you may have to smile and just kind of pretend, but know that these two floors, are right there at the heart of all 360s. The first is that you can learn about success from studying failure. If somebody's using a 360 to point out where your gaps are, you can learn a lot from studying your gaps. Remember, you learn nothing about success from studying failure. Let's just all be really clear. There's so much stuff, ah, failure is such a great teacher. No, it isn't. Failure teaches you about failure. If you wanted to learn about failure, study it up the wazoo. It teaches you

nothing about success. In fact, some aspects of failure are really similar to success. So if you study failure and then say, don't do that, you won't succeed. It's like saying if you studied really unhappy marriages, and this is true, you find out that people argue a lot. You count the arguments. There are a lot of arguments. So what you would then say is, well, to have a happy marriage, you shouldn't argue. But you actually study really happy marriages. You count the number of arguments. There are exactly the same number of arguments. Or rather, there's no statistically significant difference between the number of arguments in a happy marriage and the number of arguments in a rotten one. It turns out that the difference between a happy marriage and a rotten one is the

number of arguments. It's what goes on in the space between the arguments. And in the unhappy marriages, somehow you lean away from one another and each argument is proof of the need to kind of be armored against the other person's attacks. And somehow in a happy marriage, the arguments are assigned for more reaching toward one another, more intimacy, more curiosity. So if you just studied really unhappy marriages, found out that they argued a lot, you'd go, well, well, then if you want a good one, don't argue, which is completely wrong. It's like saying health is the absence of disease. In order to learn about health, we should study disease. No, if you want to learn about disease, you study disease, which is fine, do that, but don't imagine that's health. Health is a totally different thing. So that's the first thing with 360s. They're predicated on the idea that to get better, you should out where you're kind of failing, according to your 360 colleagues, and then fix it. Okay, completely wrong. You will learn more about how you're going to excel from those places where you excel.

But very quickly, the second thing that's problematic, hugely problematic with 360s, is they're based on the idea that I am a reliable rater of you on anything. And it turns out, after 50 years of research on this, it turns out that the only thing I'm a reliable rater of is my own feelings and experiences. I'm a pretty good relator, or rater rather, of whether I'm bored by a presentation. I'm a good raider of a restaurant that I just went to. Will I go there again? I can rate that. I can rate whether I will advocate that restaurant of friends and family. I can do all of that because it's all about me rating me. Turns out, I'm a terrible rater of your strategic thinking or your empathy or anything in you. I'm a terrible rater of it.

And it turns out there's a thing called, and this is going to sound long and kind of convoluted, but it's called the idiosyncratic rater effect. And it basically means when I rate you, my rating of you is idiosyncratic. And it reflects me more than it does you. And we know that because when I rate 10 people on something like empathy, presumably if I was really seeing them through a window, if you like, the ratings would change because I'm looking at 10 different people. But we know, measurably, the ratings don't change. My ratings move with me.

I am in a sense revealing myself as I'm rating these 10 people. 360s are supposed to be a window into other people. They're not. They're a mirror. They're just me bouncing me back at me. And for those of you who are listening, who are stat heads, you'll know that if your measurement system has systematic error in it, which this is systematic error, the more data you add doesn't get rid of the error. It adds to the error. It's like if you've got one broken thermometer, you've got one bad measurement. If you have 15 broken thermometers, you've now got 15 bad measurements and you're no closer to knowing how hot it is outside. So that's what a 360 is. It's a systematically error-filled, badly designed focus on failure. And unfortunately, for many of your listeners, you're going to bump into this.

Some well-intended team leader is going to go, hey, here's this new nifty 360. It's part of our human capital management system and it's going to help you get better. Okay. Whenever you see that, again, you may have to smile to be politically savvy. But just please don't let your career be determined. determined by other people's faulty thermometers. It's so crazy because I know that so many corporations do this and so many of us are going through these feedback reviews.

And there's so many messed up outcomes as a result of this. There's so many managers who are focusing on the wrong things and team members who are just drowning because they're worried about their weaknesses, not focusing on their strengths. It sounds so broken, you know? And that's just really sad to me that it's so broken right now. No, it is. And the, well, it is broken and it will stay broken until we realize and take seriously the idea that each one of us isn't permanently malleable, that you are Hala and you are, the least interesting thing about you is that you're Palestinian, you're a woman. Why? Because there are hundreds of thousands of others. There's only one you. And the full extent of how unique you are is if we actually count the number of synaptic connections in your

brain, we find out two things. One, you have as many synaptic connections in your brain as there are stars in 5,000 Milky Ways. And that isn't a silly exaggeration. That is the full, massive, overwhelming, beautiful, filigreed truth of the fact that you will shine the way that you shine. there'll be only one person ever in the world, ever in human history, that will be as unique as you are. So that's the very first thing is that your crazily beautiful, unique pattern of synaptic connections is yours alone, and it will be extinguished when you die,

and it will never shine that way again. It's like you are so bloody precious. Second, we know that you will grow more synaptic connections in the areas of your brain where you have the most pre-existing synaptic connections. So it's not as though we have a fixed mindset. There's only one howl, and she can't change or grow. She can change and grow.

Just every one of your listeners can. But you will change and grow in those areas where you've already got lots of thickets of synaptic connections. Your brain doesn't rewire itself. So anybody that's taking a quote unquote growth mindset to their career, please remember, unfortunately, Carol Dweck and her book about this doesn't talk about any of this at all. But this doesn't mean that you can rewire your brain and holler, you could become me. Not in terms of all of my incredibly crazy synaptic connections in my head.

Those are mine. And all of the natural behaviors and loves and loaths and strengths and weaknesses that they create are mine. And all the weird inconsistencies and irregularities and opakness of that, the complexity of that, is all mine. Yours are all yours. And when you grow, you become your thick synaptic connections, become thicker. And actually, your weaker ones, they atrophied, they wither away. So over the course of your life, you can grow and change, but you don't grow and change into someone else. Yeah. Anyway, sorry to bang on about that. No, it's so interesting. No, I love this conversation.

I feel like everyone's going to find so much value in it, very entertaining and interesting. So I have a team like we talked about. I have over 40 employees and we have a very happy company culture. And I think that it's because naturally I do this. I really compliment everybody on their strengths. And since we are a startup, everyone kind of can land grab where they feel most productive and happy. And so it's not like I'm like, here, you're a graphic designer and you have to do this exact job.

It's kind of like you're on the graphic design team. Go do what you're going to be best at. Like that's kind of my attitude. So I actually think I'm going to do this love and loathe thing for my team, have them do that for two weeks, track all their activities so that I can just see. that and know to kind of put people on the projects that they're best at and just have that information to help me make decisions going forward. I think it's so useful. Is there anything else leaders can do to kind of make sure that their team is working on their strengths?

Well, first of all, just remember, and I did the same as you. And I built a company of a hundred engineers and it's a whole software company and you, it's fascinating, isn't it? I'm sure you're finding this as a leader that actually, the bigger the company gets, the more you realize, that every single part of your life really is a people equation. It might be people as it relates to customers or people as it relates to the folks that you're hiring and working with. But suddenly you have to become a really deep expert in humans, which is why all of the stuff that we're talking about here

is super relevant to anybody who's a leader because you have to try to figure out how to get the best out of humans or how to sell to humans and all the strategic thinking in the world or all the financing in the world. I'm going to help you if you can't find customers. and you can't find good people. In terms of how you can help people capitalize on their strengths, by the way, if you do that love and load it thing,

what you're trying to get them to do in the end is sort of right, I know this is going to sound weird, you're going to try to get them to write down a couple of love notes for themselves. As in, I love it when, and then you get, because remember, if they did this for two weeks, they'd have a whole bunch of activities written down in the Lovet column, and a whole bunch of activities written down and the load they come.

And you sort of want to turn to them at the end of two weeks and go, okay, write three love notes to yourself. Not I'm amazing at. No, no, no. You're not bragging. You're just going, I'm at my best when,

or I love it when, or I get a kick out of it when. Just write three for yourself. If you don't want to show them to me, don't show them to me. But for you, team member, take ownership for the love that you draw from your life. You know, we said there's five love languages.

No, there aren't. There are nine billion love languages. Learn to speak yours. So write yourself a love note, which basically is, I'm at my best when note and use the raw material of that loved it loaded activity as your raw material. Don't pull it out of the air. Pull it out of last week. Pull it out of last week. And write down, I'm at my best when. And then perhaps, and this is so fun to do it, you get your team together. I'm not 40 because it's too big. So you'll have to break it down into smaller teams. But you can spend two hours and it's a great two hours where everyone just shares their love notes. I'm at my best when then. Now, you're not saying I'm the best at. That is a totally different claim. You sort of don't want that. I'm the best of this. Okay, shut up. Okay. Who knows who you

the best at? But if you say I'm at my best when, huh, well now no one can come in and say, no, you're not because this came out of your life. So it's a very good thing. If you're running a team, If you do that love it, load that activity, the next thing to do, each person writes a love note, I would suggest, three. And then the next thing, if you really want to accelerate your team's collaboration, share it. Because it's weird. We don't know one another. We make these stupid generalizations about one another.

Not stupid, but we see someone's superficiality. They're a white man or they're a black woman or they're a Palestinian. And we sort of make her, he's a New York page. New York Jets supporter and he's an idiot Patriots. And we make these generalizations. And of course, they hide the beautiful uniqueness of each team member. So that's a good thing to do is to go sit, to go around and go, listen, we're not going to say what all of our skills and certifications are,

because who the heck knows what all those are? Or we can go on LinkedIn and see what those are. But when are you at your best? Boy, I mean, seriously, we did this with, we had 100 people, so we had like about eight or nine different teams. And we did this every three months. It's a great two hours because you're like, oh, I didn't. And of course you can, if you wanted to do it the next time you meet.

You can do the inverse. I'm drained when. I really find it difficult when. I'm at my worst when. And that doesn't mean that you can sluff it off. Oh, therefore I'm not going to do it. No, no, no. But it's a wonderful thing, Hala, in your company,

to be the kind of company where it's okay to say, I am super geeked by this and this and this and this and this and this. And this over here, you're going to get a B minus version of me. I know that sometimes I have to do it. I totally get it. I totally get it. But don't ask me to crush it. If you keep bringing me, it's like I remember when I was working for a boss one time.

I spent all weekend putting together 27 different options of what we could do. Because I kind of like processing everything and pulling it apart. And I put together this kind of PowerPoint presentation that we, would have made the NASA moon landing look simple. You know, I had all these different things. If we did this, then we would do this. And I brought it into her, and she liked me. And about 10 minutes there,

I could see she was doing that, you know, the telltale signs that she was bored or frustrated, checking the watch, looking up. And I stopped them, like, look, what, I spent a week, I spent a weekend on this. And she's like, Marcus, I'm really busy. I expect, I trust you, dude. Come in with two things.

Tell me why you'd pick the one. And I'm almost 99. of time, going to pick the one that you pick. And for her, she didn't take information in in the way that I did. She took it in in a way that I presume you've thought this through. Come to me with two options. Make a decision. Now, she's not right. I'm not wrong. But what you do when you do that kind of activity, when you share with one another, I take information in this way. Oh, I take it in this way. Or I'm not my best with this. I'm on my best with that. What you're doing is simply building awareness. Now, sometimes I'm going to have to do something a little outside my comfort zone because she wants me to just snap a decision off.

Okay, but at least I now know that's how she's taking information in and she knows that's how I'm taking information. And awareness is this beautifully powerful part of a building a great career, but also building a great team. The opposite of awareness is assumption. And so everything that we're talking about here is getting past assumptions about, oh, I know graph, graphic designers, all graphic designers are like this. Okay, no, they're not. Each graphic designer is weird and cool and different. And you've got to put in place inside your teams, and I hope you do do this, some ways to cut through assumptions and let people use the specificity of their own daily life to share a few really cool love notes about how you could get the best out of them.

I love this. We're definitely going to do this at Yap Media. So thank you so much for that activity. do it with my team. At Yop, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world.

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Hiring, Indeed, is all you need. I know that you have like 20 years of research experience and so you've researched a lot of different topics. You have many different books. We're on the topics of managers. So over the years, you've done lots of research studies on this. what makes the best qualities in a manager while we're on this topic? Well, that's hard to say, right?

Because every manager is different. What we do know is that every really, really great manager has the ability to individualize. If you can't individualize, you can't build a great team because the great team isn't built up a bunch of the same people, the team, if you will. People always say there's no I-N team. As though the point of a team is to remind you that you're not that special. It's like, no, no, that's a complete misunderstanding. and what teams are for.

You bring teams together because a team is the place in which lots of different people, lots of unique eyes, actually make a contribution together and they achieve something together they couldn't do by themselves. The point of a team are the eyes.

So individualization, if you want to be a really good team leader, cultivate, and some part of this is a skill. It's not just a natural strength. Some part of managing is learning how to see the clues. Can you see where somebody has rapid learning. Can you see where one of your team members just gets in the zone and they just

seem to be in flow? Can you see where people are naturally volunteering? And not in a, not in a misinstinct kind of way. Some people's instincts are, they're instinctively raising their hand for a job because the job comes with certain benefits, money, prize, prestige, American Idol, all those people like volunteering, are they really volunteering for learning 100 words or songs to 100, words to 100 songs, practicing all those times by yourself? Are they really volunteering for the actual activities of what it takes to be an American Idol? Or are they volunteering because they want the praise and the money or the attention? We've got a lot of misinstincts in our lives because no one's ever really taught us to inventory while our own natural strengths are. So as a manager,

individualization is a really important thing. But the second thing I would say, and this is less an attribute and more just a behavior. By the way, in Yat Media, you should do this too, because this is free, and it's just everything.

The best team leaders check in with each person on their team for 15 minutes each week individually. And the conversation in that 15 minutes, and you could call it a check-in or a touch base or a conversation or a one-on-one, the word doesn't matter. But that 15 minutes

isn't about feedback on this week. Here, let me tell you how you did. Let me tell you. No, it's a short-term future-focused conversation about next week in which the manager is just asking two questions. What are your priorities this week and how can I help you? What are your priorities? How can I help you?

And the best managers realize you don't do that as a group. I mean, you can get your team together as a group if you want. But every week, each individual on that team is basically invisibly raising their hand and going, can you pay attention to me? Can you pay attention to me? Can you pay attention to me? Every human being's got like an attention bucket, but the bucket has a hole in it. And so you fill my bucket in the course of a week by going, okay, what are your priorities next week? What are you working on? How can I help? And then you think, well, I've done that. So I don't have to do that now for another five months with that person. No,

no. Next Friday, you kind of got to do it again. And then you kind of got to do it again. And you've got to do it again. And if any of your listeners are thinking, well, I can't do that because I've got too many people. Then you've got too many people. It's like, what's the perfect span of control in a young business like yours? It's not span of control. It's span of attention. And the perfect span of attention is how many people can you as a team leader legitimately check in with every week for 52 weeks? And also, if you are a team leader or you're aspiring to be one in your career and you're listening to this and you're thinking to yourself, well, that sounds boring.

I don't want to check in with each of my people every week. I want to be strategizing. I want to be, you know, I want to be doing the cool, sexy leadershipy stuff. Then don't lead people. Because if you don't want to check in with each person and find out what's going on in their head and how can I help every single week because things change their group. If that doesn't interest you, don't lead people.

Because this thing, this check-in thing isn't like in addition to leading. It is leading. And if that doesn't interest you, then go be smart by yourself, or maybe you and one other person. But if you want to try to get the most out of a team of people, you've got to check in with them each week about near-term future. With your strengths lens on, so you're looking for where they've shown some sort of signs of real achievement, rapid learning in the zone. And you're trying always, in the face of a changing world, right, the goals that you put together for your company back in June were irrelevant by July. That's how quickly the world, and it's not just COVID. That's just every year is like that.

We have a whole other conversation about goals, by the way, but if you're a team leader, yes, you need to individualize, but then this frequent light touch check-in, no one will tell you this, by the way. I don't know why, but no one will tell you this. And yet, I promise you, if you're leading a team right now and you get in this habit, it's like brushing your teeth. You don't need to have a perfect coaching moment every check-in.

Some check-ins you'll just go, oh, and okay, and I'll do my best. and that's all you've got that week for that person. But that's okay, because next week, you're going to ask them again and again, and again, and again. It's like your year is 52 little sprints as you pay attention to each person. Last quick point on the data, the data show that the modality doesn't matter.

Whether you're doing it in person, whether you're doing it on the phone, in app, on a text, on an email, it actually doesn't matter. What matters is that it happens, not the way in which it happens. So weirdly, crazily, the most powerful team ritual you can put in place as a manager is not a team ritual.

It's a one-on-one check-in with each person. Super light touch. If they go beyond 20 minutes, well, maybe you decide that three of them in the year will go beyond 20 minutes because you just want a full of debrief. But most of them are just 10 to 20 minutes of like, what are you working on? How can I help? And so do you recommend, like, I have a sense. I'm a CEO of a company and I have subteams. So do you recommend that each leader does this with

their subteam or do you recommend that I do that for every single person? No, no, absolutely not. Your role as a CEO is totally different, which we can get to in a minute if you want to. But no, your role right now as a CEO, you're building teams of teams. You're building teams of teams. In fact, your most important job right now as a CEO is how do I ensure that I'm putting in place the right ways to build lots of teams like my best teams? It's like we found out, obviously, you ask people this question around the world. 84% of people say they do most of their work on teams. 84%.

There's a few people in the shed at the bottom of the garden all by themselves, permanently doing just work. There are a few people like that. Most of us, though, even the smartest of us, we're doing work on teams. 65% of us say we do most of our work on more than one team and that that team isn't reflected on the org chart. It's a dynamic, ephemeral team that came together for six weeks over here, or it came together for four months over here. So most of us have a formal team, and then a couple of other kind of coming together teams. But teams are work, and I don't mean teamwork, you know, and that kind of cliches. Oh, you've got to be more teamy.

No, no, no. Work is teamwork. So what you should be doing as a CEO is you should be going, am I building more teams like my best teams, which begins, of course, with anybody. the most important decision you make, by the way, in your growing company is who you make team leader. So goes your team leaders. So goes everything. You could be the smartest person in the world. And if you're putting in place people that don't get a kick out of individualization, that really actually want to tell people what to do because they're into control. They don't want to check them with everybody each week individually because it bores them to tears and they're way more

interested in themselves. If you keep doing that, I don't care how smart you are, Hala. Your company's going nowhere because no one who want to work there or if they do come work for you, they want to stay. You join a company. People may join your company because of you because you're cool, because you're out there because you're exciting, because of your innovative. But how long they stay and how productive they are while they're with you doesn't depend on you. It depends massively on that little local team. So yeah, the short answer to the question is each one of your team leaders should be doing this. And if they don't want to do it, that is a red flag for you. I think this is such a great point.

You made me think about something that I've said before on this podcast that you can be a great employee and you can be great at what you do and doesn't mean that you have to eventually lead people. There's lots of people who aren't great at leading and they can lead in their own way as an individual contributor and not have a team and that's how they perform well. Just because somebody performs well doesn't mean you just promote them to lead a team because it's a very different skills. And so I think that's a brilliant point that you make.

and it just like really drives that point home. And to put specificity to it, it really sort of means you're not going to be a great leader rather than saying it that way. You can always say to people, look, let me tell you what leading is. Leading is figuring out the uniqueness of each person and then paying attention to that person in the work,

that person in the work, that person in the work for 52 weeks of the year. Are you interested in that? Because if you're not, then in terms of the day, going all the way back to the definition of a strength kind of weakness. If that doesn't strengthen you, and by the way, we could try it out. We could try it out. Why don't we try it out? And the thing we're trying out isn't some elusive concept called leadership. We're actually just trying out an activity. We're going to maybe we'll put you in a dynamic or a femoral team. We'll give you a little project. We'll give you a project for about six months. I don't know, six weeks, whatever it is, you can try it out and see whether or not, checking in with each person about near term future work. When you can't tell them what to do, you have to managed by remote control, not more control, you have less control. Let's see whether or not you

get any sort of kick out of that, because if you don't, that's the job of leading. And if that, right now, for whatever reason, doesn't thrill you or doesn't give you any jolt or anything, then the money, if it comes with more money, or the bigger title, if it comes with a bigger title, that's not going to carry the day. It's like in the end, if you want to build a really great career, the what always trumps the why or the who-wit. even if you super believe in the why. By the way, I'm a huge fan of Simon Sinek stuff. So find your why.

Okay, that's cool. And obviously the people you work with, the who, that's important. But if what you're doing every day at 10.30 in the morning on a Tuesday, what you're doing at 3pm on a Friday, if the activities themselves don't strengthen you, then that will always in the end burn you up. Burnout comes not from losing your why. It comes from doing the wrong what in service of the why.

So in that sense, if you want to know if you want to be a team leader in your life, having an activity that we can go, oh, leading that, all right, well, let's try that. And let's see whether or not you get any kind of thrill out of that. And if you don't, as you said, that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It doesn't mean you couldn't be incredibly successful in your career. It means you're probably going to be successful mostly because of your own efforts, your own insights, and less about your ability to build teams or teams of teams. Everyone shouldn't aspire to be you.

I mean, if I looked at your job, your life, there's going to be a whole lot of activities that a lot of us would go, I don't want to do that. I don't want to. I don't want to lie. So all of us have got different thrills that we get from life. And of course, that doesn't mean we're wrong or right. It just means, it just means for us. Young and profiters.

I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their way. workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing.

Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working. The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lensione and he is a business influencer and author. And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement,

which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one. I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like handholding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have K on my team. So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team,

helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel, And it's also helped me in hiring. Working genius is absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the working genius assessment and get 20% off, you can use code profiting.

Go to working genius.com. Again, that's working genius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. So I also know, in addition to all of this management research, you've recently done some research on COVID, or you've had data since COVID happened. And you did this on engagement and resilience. and you did a lot of studies around that.

So can you explain what that study was, why you did it and some key takeaways that you found? Yeah. We did a thousand people. So I run this research institute called the ADP Research Institute, and it's focused. I'm not really focused on the unemployment levels. I have a really good colleague who does all of that.

I'm focused on all the stuff that relates to people and performance at work. So the things that we're talking about here. And the fact that we have this institute affords me a chance, if I have a question, I can go out and ask the world, which is great. So we did 25 countries, a stratified random sample, which means you stratify your sample to reflect the working population of each country.

And we did it for 25 countries around the world. And we actually oversampled, so it's about 26,000 people total. And we were asking questions about resilience and engagement, and those are two slightly different things which we could get into, maybe some of that time,

but particularly as it relates to COVID. And the theory going in that I had was that the countries that have responded best to COVID would be the most resilient countries. So like New Zealand, that it had fewer deaths, fewer cases, fewer drops in employment would be more resilient. And like Brazil, with higher cases, higher rates, higher deaths, and higher rises than unemployment, that would be less resilient. So 25 countries, you split it into high impact from COVID medium low.

And annoyingly, we have this kind of beautiful, reliable way of measuring resilience, which again, we could talk about. But there was no difference. Turns out there was no difference. So from a researcher standpoint, it was super annoying. Because you go into the theory and the theory doesn't hold true. But we did find this, which is fascinating. Well, I thought it was fascinating. We asked people, did you have COVID?

Did your family have COVID? Friends have COVID. Team have COVID. At the time, 34% of people in the world said yes to one of those. If you said yes to one of those, if you had it, friends had it, family had it, if you're one of the 34%, you're three times more likely to be highly resilient. We then asked people a list of change. in the workplace? Did you have PPE in the workplace?

Changed hours, more virtual, changes in vacation time. Did you have more technology? All sorts of changes. If you said that you had five or more of these changes, you were 13 times more likely to be highly resilient. So what that means is each one of us will be more resilient. The more intimate our experience of this disease has been, and the more changes we encountered at work, the more resilient we are. Humans, it turns out, don't fear change.

We don't fear changes at work. We don't even fear changes associated with this pandemic. What we fear is the unknown. If that disease is, if we've never encountered it, nobody we know is encountered it. Now it's just some scary boogeyman. We don't know what it is even. That's really scary.

When company leaders tell us, we're going to get back to normal. We're going to read Hastings, saying at Netflix, We're going to get back into Netflix. 12 hours after the first vaccine, everyone's back at Netflix so that we can bump into one another and collaborate and be amazing.

When leaders say that, by the way, no knock on Reed Hastings. Netflix is a great company. He's super smart. But that's the wrong thing to say. We don't want to rush back to normal. If normal, normal has more ambiguity and uncertainty in it,

we don't want to go there. We like change. We like specificity. We like vividness. We can deal with that, even if the vividness is a scary disease. Tell us what it looks like. Show us what it looks like. We're good that way. We're not good when something remains in the dark, unknown. So all these leaders, particularly

company leaders that were sort of trying to mollify us or sugarcoat things, everything's fine. Everything's going to be fine. Or our corporate leaders, we'll get back to work. It'll be great. If they were doing that to try to up our levels of resilience, they got it completely wrong. We like it. Humans like it when we can see the challenge ahead of us. We know you're there with us, but we can see the challenge ahead of us and we can figure out for ourselves how we accommodate that challenge, take it in, figure out our way around it or through it or over it and move on. There was a famous Austrian psychologist in the 30s, not Mark Freud and not Adler or not young. His name was Victor Frankel, and he wrote an amazing book called Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote while he was in a

concentration camp for five years. And he came out and he said there's three sources of meaning. But the third one was your response to unavoidable suffering. We get meaning from our response to unavoidable suffering. Not avoidable. You don't go seek it out. But if something hits you, one of the ways in which we find meaning in life is the way in which we respond to that. So this COVID research basically showed, and this was true around the world, how it. It wasn't like, oh, Brazil is like this. Iceland is like that. No, these patterns were true across the world, when you show us the unavoidable challenges, we get stronger when we can see them and move through them, which now that I'm saying it that way, I realize it sort of sounds

obvious, I suppose, but it was kind of unbelievable to me that we could see so clearly, you know, if you'd have five or more, the more changes you have at work, the more resilient you are. It was like, wow, that's a lesson for leaders, isn't it? trans-stallico, be specific, be vivid, we'll be fine, we'll be more than fine, we'll be resilient, we'll bounce up, not just back. That is incredible, incredible information. And you said that it sounds obvious, but I don't think it sounds obvious at all because I would have figured that if you were impacted, you would be less resilient.

But then I think of my own story. I mean, I got, my whole family got COVID back in April. My dad passed away from it. And my whole career and everything skyrocketed for me. after that. So I guess personally, it definitely resonates and it's true for me. So that's very interesting. In terms of the future. I'm sorry to your loss. I am not suggesting, of course, that it's good to have. It's like simply when suffering is unavoidable, when it comes upon us, we realize that we can manage things in ways that almost enable us, give us self-efficacy. Yeah, your dad

situation and your own relationship to it is a really interesting and in so many ways terrible and horrible. In other ways, it manifests you and is a thing that you'll draw strength from as you move through life. Yeah, because it's like so many bad things happened. And unless, you know, want to just dwell in the negativity or I'm not that type of person where I would just kind of shut down. It made me motivate me because I realized life is short. and we only have this amount of time and, you know, you want to make people proud who supported you and loved you. And just, it actually motivated me to just keep working harder, honestly, and I turned everything up. So it definitely resonates with me. How about the future of work?

Knowing all this information, knowing that, I mean, we don't exactly know when COVID is going to be over. But once COVID is over, what do you think the future of work will be like? Oh, gosh. Well, there's so many different ways to angle around that. We could talk about technology. We could talk about, you know, work from anywhere. Undoubtedly, there will be a need for all of us to figure out how to impose our own rituals in our own life. We do know that human beings are more resilient. We are more engaged. When we have oscillation in our lives, stress recover, stress recover, stress recover, stress recover, and in the past, when we all just got up and went to the office and went to work and then came home, that oscillation was forced on us. And now, of course,

with many of us, and this will be true, I think for a long time, we'll be working remotely, We will have to create those oscillation rituals ourselves. You know, in your life right now, you've got to impose on yourself a stress recovery ritual so that you don't just stress all the time or recover all the time. So there's that. We do know, by the way, when we did this global research on engagement,

the most engaged people, and we did this before COVID as well. So the year before COVID we did this, the most engaged people were people that worked from home four days a week and worked in the office one day a week because we gave people more. chance to set their own schedule and more chance to do what they loved. So this whole thing about COVID has made us remote and remote is horrible and dangerous, difficult and lonely. Some parts of that

have aspects of truth, but that actually the most engaged workers in the world were people that worked at home four days a week, and then you came in for one day a week. That isn't to say that everybody should do that and isn't even to say that everyone can do that. But moving forward, the future of work is going to look a lot like that and it's not bad because you ask people whether they feel like they're part of a team. And whether they worked in an office or didn't, didn't correlate with whether they felt they were part of a team. Some team leaders are clearly able to build a sense of team

as a state of mind, not a state of place. And so the fact that the future works going to have more remote in it doesn't mean that we can't all flourish. And it doesn't mean that we can't all be part of a team. We can. And of course, with your company, it'll mean that you'll need to keep telling your team leaders, how do you make people feel part of a team?

small team. That's an ongoing challenge. We can come back another time maybe and talk about how to do that. One of the things obviously is that ritual of a check-in. You can do that remotely. The only other thing I would say, I think, is that this has reminded us of more and more. And your own example here is a jolly good one.

We haven't taken love seriously. The Mayo Clinic did a bunch of research. This is pre-pandemic. Did a bunch of research on burnout in doctors and nurses. And one of the things they thought, mostly because doctors and nurses seem to be burning out at unprecedented levels.

Before the pandemic, you had levels of PTSD higher in emergency room nurses, twice as high in emergency room nurses, as you did in veterans returning from war zones. So it's like the Mayo Clinic was like, something is going wrong. So they did a bunch of investigating, and they found that if you'd have 20% of activities in your job that you love, just 20%, in a sense, not do what you love, because that would be 100%. But find love in what you do, 20%. If you can even have 20% of your job as a doctor or as a nurse,

be some activities that you love, then you are much less likely to burn out. And in fact, they found this beautiful linear relationship between going down on amount of love and up in burnout risk. So 19, 18, 17, 16% of your job that you loved, there was a commensure at one percentage point increase in burnout risk. So what that, oh, and by the way, if you had 50% of what you love or 100%,

you didn't get much increase in resilience at all. It was almost like 20% was like a threshold. You got above 20% and that was cool for you. You could thrive. So what that tells me anyway is that you don't, to make people in the future of work thrive, we don't need to build yoga studios next to operating rooms or meditation rooms next to ERs

as a way to escape work. Work itself, if you can find what you love in the work itself, which bits of it for you are one of those 20%? I've called them red threads. The fabric of your work life has many, many threads. Many people, situations, context. Some of them are black, white, grey, brown,

emotionally a little up or emotionally a little down, but sort of neutral. But some are red threads. Some activities really are what we called earlier your strengths. Some activities you love. You lean into them. You learn fast. You're like, you're magnificent. You're super attractive when you're doing them because people can sort of get it. You don't need a red quilt. You need 20% of your quilt is red. What are your red threads? If we can have a serious conversation about love and take people's loves, their red threads seriously, then we can start to weave love into contribution, which of course you running a company of 40 people. You're really going from love to contribute. How do you help someone go, use those threads to weave something bloody cool that our customers want? That should be like an infinite loop.

And I don't think, you know, you look around the world, 17% of us are highly resilient, 16% of us are fully engaged. That is terrible. Pre-pandemic, it was only ever so slightly higher. So for most companies, and I hope this isn't true for yourself, but work is not a place in which you get to manifest the best of yourself. work is a place and those 360 surveys you mentioned before, feedback, all this sort of stuff, actually smothers you. And the future of work is going to be a place where at some point we go, we're jacked up on Adderall, we're medicating ourselves with Xanax,

and these are the kids doing that, not the 50-year-olds. It's like we've got an epidemic here where work makes us strangers to ourselves with the pursuit of money. It's like, no, no, love and work are super linked. And I don't mean do what you love, but can we intelligently find love in what we do so that we don't languish down at 15 or 16% of us fully engaged at work when we're at work 50, 60 hours a week?

It's like I think the future of work is going to ask a lot of questions about whether we've built loveless workplaces and can we do better? Can we take people's love seriously, not to pat them on the head, or even to compliment them, but can we take their love seriously because loveless excellence,

loveless excellence is an oxymoron. Loveless service, loveless creativity, loveless innovation, they're all oxymoronic. If you want excellence, innovation, creativity, you've got to have love in it.

So I think work, the future works, and I know this is going to sound weird, but love in work is a really important and interesting conversation for a CEO like you to engage with. If you want excellence, if you want to just burn people up and spit them out, well then that's a whole other ballgame and some businesses do that. But that's not good for the future of us and it's not really good for the future of work. Oh my gosh.

I love this conversation. I feel like my listeners are going to really love it too. I feel like I learned so much and it was just so eye-opened. so actionable, like I feel like I know exactly what to do to kind of build my team in the right way. And I feel like a lot of people are going to find value in this, whether they're leaders or employees or students. So I think this was an excellent conversation. So the last question I ask all my guests is what is your secret to profiting in life?

You know, the Western philosophy says, I think therefore I am, right? Cogito ergosum. I think therefore I am. But there is an African philosophy called Ubuntu, which basically says, no, we only exist in relation to other people. You're not out there by yourself thinking. Everything isn't cognitive. It's not I think that where I am. It's I am because you are.

We all exist in beautiful relationship to one another. So my secret to profiting in life for me, but for you too and for your listeners would be look to your left and look to your right. because you are because of who they are. Who are you moving through life with? That includes your life partner, the person you choose to do life with, includes your colleagues. Your beautiful uniqueness is manifested not by itself.

It is manifested through the attention, the challenge, the curiosity of someone else helping you to demystify yourself so that you can contribute. So look to your left, look to your right, and remember that the goal of any great relationship that you have in life is to make each one of you bigger. And you should only surround yourself with people

whose goal is to help you be bigger, the biggest version of you, not threatened by you, not blind to you, not controlling of you, not trying to be you. The goal of any relationship is that that other person, and sees you and wants you to be bigger. And I think the thing that I've learned in my life anywhere, and I've done, my career was a little bit like yours over the years,

writing books, speaking, being individually productive, starting a company, having a company grow like crazy, having another bigger company coming and buy my, like, now I'm here doing this with you. It's been an interesting scavenger hunt for love. But the biggest lesson I'm going to take from my life is that I am because you are. And so who's the you in that sense? Who am I surrounding myself with?

For every one of your listeners, they aren't an island. They're not by themselves. They're super connected. And so think very carefully about who you're choosing to walk through life with. And if they're wanting you to be bigger, hold on tight. Because that's the way in which you live in full of life. That is so powerful. I would love to talk to you more about this, but I know we're running up on time,

but that is amazing, great advice. where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? Well, probably Instagram. My Instagram is good. What is it? M.D.com Put it in the show notes. There you go. Marcus Buckingham. I should know what that is. And then my website is Marcus Buckingham.com, which is my name. The other place to go, though, is because I run this institute, if any of your listeners are into the data stuff, if they want the data, the real reports themselves, and then they like that, some of them might. go to ADPRI, ADPRI Research Institute, so ADPRI.org. And you can find like a five-minute version of these studies, a 20-minute version,

PowerPoints, sort of whatever your appetite is. So Marcusborkin.com or ADPRI.org at the places that I go. Awesome. Thank you so much, Marcus. This was an amazing conversation. Cheers. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. I hope you gained some valuable insights. on how to leverage your strengths instead of focusing on your weaknesses.

Remember, when it comes to strengths and weaknesses, it's not about good or bad. A strength is not what you're good at and a weakness is not what you're bad at. A strength is an activity that strengthens you. It draws you in. It makes time by by while you're doing it and it makes you feel strong. So I highly recommend to listen to Marcus's advice in terms of how to find out what your strengths are and then lean into them. If you want more content around career and leadership, I recommend that you go check out number 63,

find your dream job with Kristen Sherry. Here's a clip from that episode. I know that a lot of the reasons that people don't like their work is because of their managers, right? One of my first jobs, I worked at a water company. And I'll say that actually, I won't say the name of the company. I'll be classy. But it was a water company. And I hated that job.

I was an entrepreneur previous to that. I had a blog site. I used to do freelance work on the side, but I basically could make my own hours before that. I was still in my mid-20s. I was pretty young. It was one of my first nine to five office jobs. And it was right after I had shut down my website due to reasons we won't get into right now. So I worked for this lady. She was the CEO. And she was like the meanest lady in the world. And everybody who worked there was miserable. She worked us to the bone. I made like 30 grand a year working in New York City. And so I was like working my tail off for barely any money. and she was like never gave any recognition and was like the nastiest lady in the world.

So tell us about managers and what people find the hardest when dealing with a poor manager and what the strategies are when you have a really bad manager. Like what are your options? So those are really great questions and was the basis of my research for my most recent book. So the number one reason that people leave a job, 54% of people leave a job because of of a quote unquote bad manager. So that only leaves 46% for all of the other reasons, which makes it the number one reason.

Now, the number one thing that people say is trust, lack of trust. That's why their manager is a bad manager. They don't know how to build trust. And the most heinous thing that people say is managers are threatened by the talent of their team members. So those are the number one and number two things that I don't trust my manager and they're threatened by my talent.

I think a lot of people realize that strong individual contributors are promoted into management. During my research, I found the number one reason people became a manager is they were just put into the role. Someone just promoted them into the role based on their performance as an individual contributor. Well, it's a completely different skill set. There's a lot of research that shows. what the traits are that make managers effective. They are good at creating motivation. You have to come to the table motivated, of course, as an employee, but they sustain the motivation of their team

members through a variety of different means. They are able to assert themselves, but be respectful of other people. So Chris McIarola, who's a friend of mine who I interviewed for my recent book, she calls it direct with respect. You're able to be direct with respect. So there's a lot of different qualities that make someone a good manager. But the problem is that people aren't given any training. Two-thirds of people are thrown into a manager role without being prepared or equipped. And I don't mean sitting in a one-day manager class. They don't have a mentor assigned to them who does job shadowing and feedback. They don't have this ongoing mentorship relationship. They're not put in high-potential leader programs that walk them through with a coach or something along those lines.

They go on an e-learning if they're lucky and take a two-hour course, and then you're done. Go manage all the messiness of people. And oh, by the way, our culture is going to drive you for individual results to make you ignore your team and not recognize that really putting people in roles where they can live out their potential and mentoring those people to be successful, is the number one thing that you're responsible for. Again, check out number 63 with Kristen Sherry for more career advice. Man, people love that episode.

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