684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www. LearningLeader.com/Becoming https://www. LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute. Key Learnings When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work. Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency. "Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting." (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it. Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it. Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it. Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love. But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees. The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences. If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes. The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experience. Every touchpoint is picking up what you're putting down. Culture is just a series of experiences. Either you are getting people to say "I love that," or you've failed to change their behavior. "If you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it, and I don't want to follow it." Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs, and they better be coherent with who you authentically are. Your customs are the living manifestation. The things you customarily do have got to flow from your authenticity and your beliefs. The best leaders have their ABCs line up beautifully - they are authentically who they are, you know exactly what they believe, and their customs bring those authentic beliefs to life. The biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader, not the culture of the company. The culture is like the river, but there's a lot of different eddies. You join a company, but the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. The most important decision you make is who you make the leader of that team. A, B, C: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection; we want authenticity because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable. The definition of love to Marcus: Love is an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time. Which is flourishing. Most of us go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside and express it. Love is a forward-facing emotion. We're anticipating goodness, and we have to take the armor off one plate at a time. A question for all leaders:  What are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team? The five sequential feelings of love: Control: "What's this world you've invited me into, and how does it work? " Harmony: "You have to tell people that you know what they're feeling." Significance: "Do you know my story?" Warmth of Others: "Who's with me? How can they help?" Growth: "How will this experience make me more capable?" If a leader understands the five feelings, they have a blueprint to get your team where you want them to go. Marcus's Audi story: he loved his Audi, then at the end of the lease, he got a robocall. "You are at the end of your lease. You have not turned in the car. You have one week remaining, or you will be charged $500." He wasn't planning to turn it in. He was planning to get another one. Next week, same robocall. He leaned out. It was jarring because he was excited, and Audi was pissed off. They lost him for five years. Audi didn't take harmony seriously. They don't design for experiences; they design for processes. The person at the dealership is in a different silo than the person writing the script for the robocall. No one creates a holistic experience map. We don't design for experiences; we design for processes. Go to a hospital. It's one handoff after another. The person who's supposed to hold the narrative together is you, the patient. The whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience. Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes. Disney builds a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. You can't see the Red Roof Inn next door. Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why? Because Disney is trying to create a holistic experience. These companies think holistically about a human having an experience. The best leaders, when you ask "How do you motivate people?" always say "It depends." It depends on the person. At some point, the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. Start with control, then harmony, then significance. Tell them you understand their story and what will change because of that story. The hospitalist movement in hospitals produced the best patient outcomes. They give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. Their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. As a result, you feel held. If you love anyone, you don't imagine they're ever finished. Love is a forward-facing emotion. Growth is the fifth feeling, not the first. We get this wrong when we think about designing love. We build it backwards. We start with growth and warmth. No. What's happening is feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor. If you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth. The simplest thing leaders could do: check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week. Ask them: How'd you feel about last week? What are you working on this week? How can I help? Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control, harmony, and over time significance. Marcus is creating an app with an AI design partner. He doesn't want his kids to grow into a world accepting loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. The app will have a slider: loving/unloving. Let's call it what it is. It's love or not love. It's not okay to live in a loveless world, and we should call out unloving when we see it. Reflection Questions What would happen if you asked yourself before every major decision: "How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more?" Are you designing experiences or just optimizing processes? What's one touchpoint in your customer or employee journey that feels mechanical and could be redesigned to feel more human? Which of the five feelings (control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth) are you strongest at creating for your team? Which one are you weakest at, and what's one thing you could do this week to improve it? Time stamps 00:00 Marcus Buckingham Intro 02:21 The Biggest Mistake: Selling My Company 05:55 Can You Scale Without Losing Love? 07:59 Protecting the Founder's Flame 12:03 Why CEOs Can't Say the Word "Love" 15:42 Your Job: Change Human Behavior 17:55 Experiences Drive Behaviors Drive Outcomes 21:42 Love Is Five Sequential Feelings 25:40 Jesse Cole and Josh D'Amaro: Real Love in Action 29:50 How Do You Prove ROI? 31:32 The Local Leader Drives Everything 32:09 The Scatterplot: Same Company, Different Experiences 33:43 ABCs: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs 35:41 What Love Actually Means: Flourishing 38:28 The Five Feelings Blueprint 39:00 Feeling #1: Control (What World Am I In?) 40:28 Feeling #2: Harmony (Do You Know What I'm Feeling?) 43:43 We Design for Processes, Not Experiences 47:34 Feelings #3, #4, #5: Significance, Warmth, Growth 53:04 The Simplest Practice for All Leaders: Weekly 15-Minute Check-Ins 57:37 EOPC More Learning #467: Marcus Buckingham https://learningleader.com/marcusbuckingham/ - How Love and Work Must Be Forever Linked #305: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall https://learningleader.com/buckinghamhawk305/ - A Leader's Guide to the Real World #676: Jesse Cole https://learningleader.com/bananas/ - Built for the Fans (Obsession & Excellence)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Hawk?

  Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to tonight's featured leader. Marcus Buckingham has spent 30 years studying what actually drives human performance. He co-created StrengthsFinder, wrote first Break All The Rules, and has sold tens of millions of books. He is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most cited researchers in the history of leadership and management.

• 0:44Ryan Hawk?

  His new book is called Design Love in: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. During our conversation, we discuss why Marcus sold his company in 2017, and also why he says it was the biggest mistake of his career. Then the five sequential feelings every great leader must create, and why the order is non-negotiable. Why the most important job a leader has is not setting goals or building culture, it's designing experiences. And then why love is not soft, it is structural, measurable, and the most powerful force in business.

• 1:24Ryan Hawk?

  Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Marcus Buckingham. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic.

• 2:05Ryan Hawk?

  Visit insightglobal.com/learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal.com/learningleader.

• 2:16Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, you open the book. It's 3am. You're replaying the day that you sold your company and you call yourself the fool who blew it up. Not what I was expecting. What made you say that? What made you think that?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Well, when you start a business, it's all about love. Because frankly, you know, seven out of 10 businesses fail, right? So, new businesses. So, when you start a business as an entrepreneur, which I did back in 2007, you love what you do. You love your clients. You surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all had this sort of passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important. It's gonna work. And so, there's a lot of love. And you talk about it all the time. And how do you get customers to fall in love with the company? And how do you over-serve? And there's a lot of love amongst the colleagues and we're all in this together. It's a really, if you've never started a business, it's like it's, there's just a lot of love flowing through the veins of the company.

• 3:14Ryan Hawk?

  It feels kinda like your baby, cause it is.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Totally. And it's very much like when you have a child, it's like your heart is walking around outside of your body all the time.

• 3:24Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  And you wake up at 3 in the morning and think about the business. And then you wake up at 10 at night, you're still noodling about the business. But it's not a, I don't know, it's not a stress. It's more like it's an ongoing love affair with what you're trying to put out in the world, which is amazing. It's amazing. It's, it's, love is the context in which humans flourish. And then in 2017, I, I felt like we needed more scale, frankly. And this company, this large Fortune 500 company had 3,000 salespeople. And, you know, I thought we need more reach. We'd built a cadre of products and services and people that could scale. And I, what I just didn't have was 3,000 salespeople. So, the price was right. I felt the timing was right. I felt the logic was right.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  But I started the book this way because very soon after that sale, and it's no knock really on the Fortune 500 company. They were just doing what big companies do. They were, they were maximizing the efficiency of the machine. But what that turned into was my- Little love ball got broken down into silos. And what became the subject of conversation was the efficient running of this big machine. And so it was a conversation about maximization of compliance, of efficiency, which wasn't, it's not bad. It just means, it means that the love disappears. You stop talking about it anymore. And that's why I quoted Pablo Neruda, who's arguably the best love poet of the last century,

• 4:53Speaker 01

  who simply said that love is born in savoring. It lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting. It doesn't die from being killed. It just, you stop talking about it anymore. And I found for me, up close and personal, that's why I started the book this way. It's no one's fault. But when you stop talking about love for your own work, love for your colleagues, love for your customers, when you stop talking about it, because your attention is a creative act. When you start putting your attention on other things, you destroy love. And we ought to be completely upfront with ourselves about that. You stop talking about it, you destroy it.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  And we ought to ask ourselves, do we want to live in an increasingly loveless world? Can humans flourish in an increasingly loveless world? Does it make good business sense to live in an increasingly loveless world? And I think the answer to all those questions is no.

• 5:50Ryan Hawk?

  Do you regret selling it?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I would not do it again. I would do it again in a very different way. I'm not saying scaling is a bad thing. I'm saying if you are an entrepreneur and you're listening to this and somebody offers you something, one of the most important considerations you should ask yourself, which is me speaking to me, I'm giving myself this advice, is will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company? And will this lead to more employees saying they love working there? And if the answer to that question is unattended to, or if the answer is an obvious no, then don't do it. And I didn't attend to it as preciously and as intentionally as I should have done. Because it led to more people saying, I don't love the company.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And it led to more people working there saying, I don't love working there. And that's the raw material of the value of the future of a business. And if CFOs or CEOs or general counsels or CHROs don't understand that, it doesn't make it not true. It means they don't understand that. And I'm guilty of that. So yeah, I wouldn't do it again.

• 6:56Ryan Hawk?

  Did you even know to think or to ask that question at the time, though?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  No, I think I was too inside the frame to see the picture. And you get distracted and you get like, oh, my gosh, scale.

• 7:09Ryan Hawk?

  Was it a money thing too? You're a human. I mean.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but no, because I, I mean, yes, in a sense, but I wasn't going to retire. I was going to stay there and keep growing it. So there was various incentives to stay and continue to grow. It wasn't like I was cashing out.

• 7:25Ryan Hawk?

  It was like an earn out period.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. It's called an earn out. And so I was like, I knew I had work to do, but I felt this was the fastest way to get to that work. And fortunately I had many different offers. So it was like, oh, do I want to? And I made what I thought was a rational decision. It wasn't a financially stupid decision. It's just, I'm a builder, I'm a grower, I'm an entrepreneur, as much as I'm anything else. And I didn't pursue the most intelligent growth strategy. That's where the regret comes from.

• 7:54Ryan Hawk?

  So one of the natural questions is, is it just not possible at a big company to love like this? Is this just part of the machine? And I have a feeling what you're going to, how you're going to answer that. So if it is possible, they're like, what do we do? What if someone's running the CEO of a very large company, multi billions? What do they do? What do they implement to ensure that they love their people? That they love their customers, their customers love them, their people love each other? Like, what do you do? How do you get this going?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Well, that's a sort of a two-parter. Yep. Because we do find companies that are very big that have maintained some of that deep love. And very often, those are the companies that protect the founder's flame. A lot of great companies, the founder's story, their vision, their passion there, has somehow been kindled and remains strong even yet today. So if we think of Walt Disney, I mean, you could look at its stock price the last four or five years, and you could argue about various growth strategies. But but does that company still retain the aura of Walt Disney and the craziness and the wonder and the fantasy of that? Yes. Is it materially, qualitatively different categorically than than Six Flags or Universal Studios or so? Yes, it is. It clearly is.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  If you think of Chick-fil-A, I mean, Truor Cathy has passed on, but his, the unique weird wonderfulness of Chick-fil-A and what he was trying to do with it, whatever you think of Chick-fil-A, it's clearly distinctively and very meaningfully different than Raising Canes. Apple, you think about a company like that, which has maintained its kind of crazy passion for design. Now, you could argue that is that waning or is it waxing? Those are questions we could get into. But when a company maintains a close connection to its founder's flame, I mean, you think today of like Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, for the longest, 30 years of profitability before 2023, when it was sold to a hedge fund. And now the unassigned seating has gone away, the crazy sort of games have gone away,

• 9:53Speaker 01

  the vibe of it, which some people hated, but it wasn't bland for sure. It had maintained a connection to Herb Kelleher's founder's flame. When that starts to go away, when companies lose their connection to their founding passion which began it, they start to become the machine. And the machine doesn't have a soul. And we can all feel it. We like, we humans, we like to personify things. We like to personify companies. We lean into personifications of things. We trust them more because they're not amorphous, they're a human that was trying to do a thing. And when a company can maintain that relationship historically to the thing, the person, it means more, it matters more. So there's that.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  The other part of that, I think though, Ron, is that most CEOs have lost sight of the fact that the data on love, and we can unpack what love means, but the data on love is now unequivocal. If you want to drive productive human behavior on the part of customers or on the part of employees, if you want to drive repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, a high performance, which of course CEOs want, the precursor to that is love. Experiences that people love drive behaviors, drive outcomes. Love measurably is the most powerful force in business by far. There's nothing even close. And yet, most CEOs have long forgotten that. Go to a business school, go to INSEAD, or go to HBR, or Harvard Business School,

• 11:20Speaker 01

  or go to Wharton. There's not a single class on how do you design a strategy to maximize the most powerful force in business. Love isn't a coating. It's not, oh, be nice. It's not kumbaya. It's an ingredient that you design into your products and services, or the way in which you onboard, select, train, and develop your people. You design it in. And you design it in because you get the best outcomes that way. But most CEOs actually don't believe that because they've missed the data on it. And so they think of love as a lovely little luxury, as opposed to the most powerful driving force of productive human behavior, which it is.

• 11:58Ryan Hawk?

  This feels obvious, doesn't it? I mean, what are we doing here? Does it make a CEO sound soft? I mean, we all know how it feels to love somebody, to feel the love of somebody else. It feels obvious that we would try to then bottle that up within our businesses and deploy it, both for the people that work at our companies as well as our customers. It just makes sense. So where's the misconnect here?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Well, to some extent, you know, I'm part of the problem, which is that when you actually study customers who come back more often, who advocate more, word of mouth, pay more, employees that give you that discretionary effort, who collaborate more, more creative, when you study people like that, do interviews, focus groups, the word people use is love. They use it all the time. I love that team. I love that company. I love that brand. I love that movie. Like, we hear it. But most people do what I did. When I heard it, which I heard repeatedly for the last 25 years, I kept changing it to a different word that was more palatable to the business community. So I changed it to passion, or joy, or engagement, or strengths. And those words are jolly good words, but they're not actually the words people use.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  When you hear people talking about a really extreme positive human experience at work or as a customer, the word we reach for is love. And it's not, it's not a careless exaggeration of the word like. It's a thing we reach for, but that's what actually happens. Most people do what I did. They go, well, they don't mean love. Love is for family, or it's for Love Island. We either flatten it, or totally deepen it. Like, it's either it's for my family, or it's kissing and chocolates in front of the Eiffel Tower. And we sort of do that with love, when in fact, love deserves curiosity and study because it's always present when we see extreme positive human behavior.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So I think it's that we've decided it's love isn't relevant to the practice of business. And so we're going to stop talking about it. In fact, I was with a group of 30 CHROs the other day, Ryan, and we spent two hours talking about the data that support the love drives performance, and they couldn't even say the word. In the end, they came to say the word about customers, but they never became comfortable even saying the word about their own employees. Because I think we've got to this place in the world, particularly post-COVID, where really, if you look at the chest-thumping behaviors and actions that pass for leadership

• 14:32Speaker 01

  today, and you could name some of the leaders that stand in that space, really, the job of a CHRO is to protect the company from the employees. And so, the book's called Design Love In, but you, you can see a lot of places where we're really trying to design it out. And it's because I think love is, you know, there's a chaotic sort of unpredictable element to love that's amazing because it expands the possibility and the capability space. But to some CFO somewhere or some CHRO who's trying to tighten the experience curve, as it were, and limit the number of choices that people make, whether it's leads to things like you will be back in the office, we will have surveillance software when you're back

• 15:17Speaker 01

  in the office, all of which speaks to control and structure, which is undermined or underpinned by fear, I think, basically, for what people will do if you give them too much space. What we've got today is a world in which there's no love there. Love doesn't have a place in that equation. It's become sort of irrelevant.

• 15:36Ryan Hawk?

  Let's think about a high-performance organization, which every single leader listening to this is saying, that's what I'm running, that's what I'm striving for. We have stretched goals, we got to hit the revenue targets, budget, profit, whatever, okay? Marcus, this sounds great for you to write a book about it and to say it and to talk about it. I'm here to hit our number, okay? This love stuff, sure, I'll do it when I can. I'll write a thank you note here and there. I'll go pat somebody on the back when they get a big sale, whatever. I'm being dramatic, but you get it. What do you say to that person who says, good for you that you can write this book and you made a bunch of money selling your company and then it kind of died off because the big company killed it?

• 16:20Ryan Hawk?

  What about that person who's an SVP of whatever with a very tough stretch goal, a very demanding CEO who is there to beat their goals into submission and then do it again the next year?

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Well, that's real, right? Many of us are in that situation. If you back out of it, you're going to say, well, look, what's the job of a leader, whatever level? The job of a leader is really straightforward. Your job is to change human behavior. That's all you're doing. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. The behavior might be for your customers, it might be the behavior of employees. Your job as a leader is to change people's behavior, hopefully for the better. So the question for you as a leader is how do you do that? What is the most effective, sustainable way to change humans' behavior? Well, you've really kind of got two choices. You could be directive, which is what most of us do as leaders. Directive means you set a goal and then you push for that goal and you give coaching feedback and tough coaching about how do you hit that goal?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  And with customers, you might set pricing or you'd design really coherent sort of loyalty programs to coerce people directively to change their behavior. People are coin operated and you'll change your incentive program or you'll change your loyalty program, whatever it is, and we'll change behavior that way, which works. So if your listeners are listening going, well, that works. Yeah, it works. It works for temporarily for a short period of time. If you want to sustain behavior change, you've got to follow an equation and that equation's really straightforward. It's the one that we apply to our own lives. And the equation is experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes. Experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes. If you want really great outcomes in your health, then the behavior is you've got to go to the gym. Well, you're only going to go to the gym if you design experiences at the gym that are

• 18:05Speaker 01

  positive for you in some way, so that you have the behavior that drives the outcome. So if you want sustainable behavioral change in terms of your health, experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes. If you want to create a flourishing restaurant, you can't coerce people. I mean, yes, you need the right pricing, you need good product, but what you've got to do is create the experiences of the restaurant that drive the behaviors to get people to come out their way, two, three, four miles out of their way to drive to your restaurant, not someone else's, and then you get the outcomes you want. So for a leader, the best leaders understand that their job is to maximize that equation, which basically means you're an experience maker as a leader. You could be directive all you want, but what you're trying to do there is push noodles uphill. What you want to do is pull the noodle down the hill and the best way to do that is to

• 18:48Speaker 01

  craft experiences that people lean into. You're an experience maker as a leader. Now, most people don't say it that way, but the truth of the matter is, it's not whether you are an experience maker or not. The question, and the book tries to answer this question, is are you a skilled one? Because the best leaders are skilled experience makers. They understand that every single touch point that exists in their working world is a raw material for making an experience and the people, whether it's customers or employees, are picking up what you're putting down. That email you just sent, it's not an email. It's an experience. That meeting you just called, it's not a meeting. It's an experience. That big company gathering that you're doing, that's not a big company gathering. It's an experience.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You can design it intentionally so people lean into it and get the behaviors you want, or you can be accidental about it, in which case people are going to pick up what you put down, even if you just dropped it. But they're making it experience. Culture is just a series of experiences, which is why actually it's pretty hard to change. But if you look at the best leaders, they are so unbelievably intentional and intelligent about experience making, both for customers and employees. And really, that's what the book's about. It's like, hey, listen, if you want to drive to these incredible goals and you need to beat people over the head with a big stick to get the goals, okay, fine, you're an average leader. Just look in the mirror, you're an average leader. You want to excel sustainably? You want to differentiate yourself and give yourself an unfair advantage?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Become an experience maker. Become an intelligent experience maker, because that will drive the behavior that drives the outcomes. That's really what the data would show, and it's what the book's about.

• 20:27Ryan Hawk?

  Danny Meyer, business like life is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard. Danny Meyer, one of the best restaurateurs of all time. Will Goddara, Unreasonable Hospitality. I just recorded with him, so it's very fresh, Marcus. I don't know if you guys are friends, but you should be. But that is so true. While they may have written it about restaurants, it's about life, it's about business, it's about families, it's about friends. It's all of that. It's all about thinking, how did I make that person feel? Like, I actually see some of the clients I work with in the gym. It's interesting. You know, we're in there to do it, to get a workout in.

• 21:09Ryan Hawk?

  But still, there may be a three-minute interaction in between sets or after getting off the treadmill or whatever. And that's a deliberate attempt to make that person feel better, not like in a fake, flattery way, but an honest, connecting way of, let's have a short conversation, because we're both interested in this thing about, you know, working out or something like that. Business like life is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  I completely agree with you. And Will's great, I don't know Danny, but what we see from the data is, and obviously I'm a data geek, so that's where all of this comes from for me. If you have measured experiences, and by the way, measured experiences, normally we measure them on a scale of one to five, five being strongly positive, one being strongly negative. A lot of the stuff from this book came from something from the data, actually, on this that is basically undermines a fundamental belief that many leaders have. We seem to believe, many of us, the relationship between experiences and the feeling of those experiences and outcomes is, and I'm sorry, this is gonna get a tiny bit wonky, but we think the relationship is linear.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  As in, we think if we move a two experience, which is below average, to an average experience, which is a three, to above average, which is a four. If we're moving twos to threes to fours, whether it's for our employees or our customers, or indeed ourselves, the same amount of outcomes increase. Which means if we've got a lot of customers at twos, we should move them to threes. And if we've got a lot of employees just at a three, then we should move them to fours. The problem is, and then normally, by the way, we put the fours with the fives, and we call that a top two box or percent favorable. Or we expand it to net promoter score, and we put nines with tens, you know? Okay, all of that's wrong. Because when you look at the data at scale, the relationship between experiences and outcomes isn't linear. It's what's called curvilinear, which means it's like a hockey stick.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Moving people's experience from a two experience to a three doesn't change their behavior at all. Moving their experience from a three to a four doesn't change their behavior at all. It's only when you do something with a customer or an employee that changes their experience to the point where they go five, that we can start to predict what they're gonna do next. Like, if you say that movie's a four, I can't predict if you're gonna go back and see it again, or who you're gonna tell. If you say that restaurant was a four, and I moved you from a three to a four, I can't predict if you're gonna go back or spend more, or tell anyone else to go to that restaurant. Fours are threes. Never put a four with a five again. Never top two box again. Never percent favorable again. Fours are threes, threes are twos, twos are ones. When it comes to the data, the world's binary. To your point, like, the world of business is feelings?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but actually, there's only two feelings in the world. There's love, and there's everything else that is just not love. There's love, not love. And the data on this is unequivocal, whether it's student grades, or patient outcomes, or employee productivity, or customer loyalty. You've got five, and everything else is just not a five. And when you push on fives, that's when you bump into that word love. Fours, what's the word for fours? I enjoyed it. I respected that leader. I learned a lot from that leader. Like, all of these are jolly good words. They don't predict behavior change. So for any leader listening, I'm sorry, I know the bar becomes higher. But I promise you, if you're in the business of behavior change,

• 24:30Speaker 01

  fives are the only thing that predict it. Everything else doesn't. And when you unpack the five, that's when people spontaneously use that word love. That's why we're talking about love, because it's the most powerful predictor of positive human behavior. That's why it's worth unpacking. It's not a nice to have. It's the fundamental driver of anything good. And anything below that is just, it's like boiling point of water. If you, if you want to predict when the water's going to boil, when, when will water change its state, when it hits two 12? Anything else below that is just not boiling. And we ought to, as leaders, we ought to be as binary as that in the world. Either you're getting people to say, I love that,

• 25:13Speaker 01

  or you've failed to change their behavior. Love is as hard edged, if you will, as that. And that's kind of why I started the book with data, Ron, because it's like, hey, if we're not careful, love gets really soft. Okay, it ends soft, it's a driver of behavior. If you're interested in driving behavior as a leader, take love seriously. If you're not, fine, don't read this book.

• 25:35Ryan Hawk?

  Have you ever seen the Savannah Bananas?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:37Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:38Ryan Hawk?

  So I went down to Savannah a few months ago to spend time with Jesse Cole, their owner. He actually owns six teams now, so it's a banana league. It's not just the bananas, so there are six teams. Anyway, they were all there that day. They were practicing at different times. So some of them were in the weight room, somewhere on the field, locker rooms, whatever. We did a big tour, just Jesse, me and a couple other people were walking around. And every single person that he saw, and we saw lots of them, players, staff.

• 26:06Ryan Hawk?

  All different types, hundreds. He knew everybody's name. Every, and he wasn't showing off or like trying to be, and he was genuinely curious and asking about them, their kids. Like, how is this possible? And I remember he, the way he looked at me, I think he thought like it was a stupid question. When I asked him like, how do you know everybody's name? How do you know all the details about all these people? And you could just tell like he's obsessed. He loves them. He loves what he does. He loves his business. He loves his teams. He loves his people. Yeah, it's an obsession. We talked about obsession when I recorded with him. I mean, it's not a surprise then when you see them selling out a hundred thousand seat stadiums. After inventing essentially a new sport. And so those are great, great examples of how love shows up.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a super interesting character and he takes his own loves. Delusionally seriously. And as you said, he manifests it in the way that he's designed a product and, but also the way in which he loves on the people that are making the product. I don't know him, but I've seen what he's done and it's just super intriguing. He reminds me of the person that I profiled very early in the book, Josh D'Amaro. Who, when I was following him around, he was the head of Disney Parks, Resorts, Cruise Lines, Consumer Products and Imagineering.

• 27:17Ryan Hawk?

  Jesse, that's like his number one mentor in life is Walt Disney.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:21Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And not every Disney executive, I've studied many of them over the years. They're not all like that.

• 27:28Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  But Josh, and he's, by the way, two days ago, right, took over as the CEO, he's replacing Bob Iger. Which I'm so happy about, by the way, like the board could have picked, they had a number of different possible successors to Bob Iger. It took a fair amount of courage to pick someone. Josh is the kind of person, like you were just describing, you walk the park with him and you can't get 20 yards. Not just because all the cast members are gathering around him and he's hugging them and he knows their names. And there's a chef here and there's a line order cook there and there's a cast member there and there's, and he genuinely is, is all about them. And they're cutting through 15 layers, layers of hierarchy, which you can imagine a Disney hierarchy exists.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  And they're breaking through all of that, just coming up, he's got no handlers smoothing his path. But it's not just the cast members, right? Somehow the guests all know him too, and you can't get five yards without them being, he's just a mob scene. And I think as I was writing about it that day, this was a year before he was picked, but I think what I saw that day, a bit like you were describing. What you want from the Savannah Bananas is you want it to be real. You want the whole ecosystem to be real. It's fun, it's engaging, it's sweet, it's disarming. You want the whole thing to be like that. Imagine if the CEO of that company wasn't like that. In a world of fakery, we're just reaching for real. And you could see the guests looking at Josh D'Amaro in a sense going,

• 28:54Speaker 01

  "Thank goodness the head of this company seems to be as geeked out by this whole mysterious world we've built here as we are. Thank goodness he's not a financial cynic, who's just extracting value from our own love of Disney. Thank goodness he seems to be as into it as we are." And in a world of AI, frankly, the idea that we're reaching for genuine love, opposite of AI, of course, is genuine emotion, genuine feeling. And not that AI isn't good, it's got some great things, but we want genuine feeling. And you could see that in Josh and you can see that in the Savannah Bananas. And of course, they'll be different. I mean, I'm not suggesting that everyone should be hail fellow, well met, just and glad handing.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  I am suggesting that if we take love really, really seriously, we get lots of moral and business benefits from it.

• 29:45Ryan Hawk?

  So maybe I can get some free consulting advice from me, Marcus, since you're one of the best in the world with this, okay? So we run a leadership development company. That's what I run with my teammates. And occasionally you're asked, okay, what's the ROI? Like a CFO will ask me that question. What's the return on investment we're going to get from hiring you guys to work with our leaders at our company? And it's not like the easiest question to answer because it's more subjective. It's a service oriented type of a thing that we offer, right? And one of the things I say, and I'll be curious to kind of get your take is the reason why our guys are good, why our team is good, is we authentically live every single thing that we teach.

• 30:30Ryan Hawk?

  We've done it all ourselves. We continue to do it ourselves when it comes to our purpose and values and behaviors and culture and all this stuff. Like this is what we actually do. And then we just teach the exact same stuff that we live out. And I think part of why we win and sustain and work with people for years and years in a space that people don't have engagements that long is because of that exact thing. This authenticity of living it out ourselves. Now, that comes from love, that comes from obsession, it comes from curiosity, it comes from us trying to continually raise our standards. When you hear all of that in this service oriented business, which I know you understand, what do you think?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I spent most of my time trying to figure out over the years, how do you quantify increases in engagement? And if you go back through all the Gallup data, if you were ever talking to CFO, I would bring up increases in employee engagement are drivers of, not just correlates of, causation drivers of, certain behavioral changes on the part of employees. And you can quantify that. And of course, we know that the biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader. It's not the culture of the company. The culture of the company is like the river which you're swimming, but there's a lot of different eddies. And the river feels really different according to which part of it you just climbed into. You join a company, but then the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. And I'm sure you've said this to every client you've sold to, it's the most important decision

• 31:53Speaker 01

  you make is who you make leader of that team. And so goes that team, so goes everything. So if you control over the budget of this company, if you don't understand that, again, it's not because it's not so, it's because you don't understand that. And so let me try to show you some data which shows quantifiably the effect of, and in fact, by the way, if you, in the book, I'm sure you saw this, Ryan, I show a company, it's a very large retailer in the US, they've got like 8,000 stores. And I show the, the relationship between customer and employee experiences on the X-axis and profitability of the store up the Y-axis. And in general, the line of best fit shows that there is a very strong relationship between experiences of the employees and customers in the store and the profitability

• 32:37Speaker 01

  of the store, which is great because it quantifies the importance of experience making. You make bad experiences, people don't come back more. You make good experiences, of course, people will. But the biggest takeaway from it actually is variation. It's a scatter plot. It's the same company, one stock price, supposedly one culture, but as you can see from the scatter plot, every single store seems to have created a whole variety of different sorts of experiences for customers and employees. Well, who's the main driver of the creator of those experiences? It's the leader. The leader makes a huge difference inside the same company. So I can't remember what page that's on, but if you wanted to like, what's the value of a leader?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Show that graph and basically go, what's the difference between the dot on the top right? And the dot on the bottom left, it's the leader. And so anything you're doing to not to sell for you guys, but anything you can do to build the capability of your leaders is money well spent because you're trying to move all the dots up and to the right. And the, the idea that your people, your team is, I always think of A B C. Authenticity, beliefs, customs, authenticity, beliefs, customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection. We want authenticity. Why? Because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you, you're going to be around the corner. And that means I'm more likely to follow you around the corner. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable. That's authenticity.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs. What do we genuinely believe? And they better, that better be coherent with who you authentically are. Because if you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it and I don't want to follow it. And then of course, your customs are the living manifestation. You could call them routines or rituals or, but in terms of A B C, they're the things you customarily do. I've got a flow from your A's and your B's. So if I think of the best leaders that I know, their A B Cs line up beautifully. Like Josh Demare, I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's authentically who he is. I know exactly what he believes. And then in the book, actually, we detail out some of the very specific, kind of weird

• 34:47Speaker 01

  customs that he has that brings those authentic beliefs to life.

• 34:53Ryan Hawk?

  Love it. Let's get even more practical. Okay. A very high aware leader, they have high level of awareness is listening to this like, oh, I love this. And then they're thinking, wait a second. I'm not sure I'm doing a good job of this. For whatever reason, what are some things that a high awareness level leader who's leading a team right now, how they could get better? What could they implement immediately following this podcast to say, okay, I've been kind of lax on this love thing. I again, I try to show my gratitude for my people and for our customers, but I don't know, I don't know if I'm being very honest with myself. Where do we begin? How do we get practical right now?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, obviously there's not a simple answer to that question. There's places to start. The first place to start would be what the heck do your people mean by love? If someone's going to say, I love working for that leader. What do they mean by that? Do they mean I really, really like that leader? Do they mean I really, really respect that leader? What do they mean? Although everybody's got a different definition of love. Around the world, it predicts behavior. So there must be a uniform definition of love. It must be, must all mean something similar. If you really push on it, what people mean when they say, I love. And by the way, it's weird. It could apply to, I love that cup of coffee. I love my mom. Wait, what? I love that movie. I love that mentor. How can we use the word in such different contexts? When you really push on it though, Ryan, when people use the word love,

• 36:20Speaker 01

  it's because we're reaching for a meaning, which is it's an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time, which is basically flourishing. It's a feeling of flourishing. If you think about most of us, we go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating against the harshness of the world, which is sensible because the world is pretty harsh. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside of us and express it. That feels healthy to us. We want to get to 95 and have expressed some of ourself. So any experience that gives us a chance to take one little piece of armor plating off, and it could be, I love those socks because when I wear them, I don't know, man. I just feel, I just feel a bit more me. It could be, I love that mentor because that mentor was the first person

• 37:04Speaker 01

  who pushed through my performance rating and went, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is the kind of place in which you can really flourish and I'm going to move you there. Which by the way, is why we have the word tough love. Because sometimes the mentor's got to yank you into a situation where you can be more fully yourself, even if you actually are still cowering in the corner into an area of your world that feels more familiar. So love really means the opportunity to flourish in small ways or large.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  So if that's your definition as a leader, then you should be thinking about is, what other things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team? What could I do? And in the book, and we could go through this if you want, but if you reverse engineer that, and I know this is going to sound so weird to your listeners, but if you reverse engineered that, you reverse engineer somebody going, I love that leader, or I love working on that team. You find a sequence of five feelings, and it's sequential. And if a leader knows those five feelings, that's like a blueprint. Every leader is different, but there's a blueprint there

• 38:14Speaker 01

  for what you could do as a leader to get people to the place where they go, I flipping love working for that leader.

• 38:22Ryan Hawk?

  Okay. Control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth. Is that where we're going?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yes, that's where I was headed.

• 38:28Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, let's unpack those five feelings of love, and they need to be sequential, right? Each builds on the last. So let's go through them.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And don't get the sequence wrong. And these aren't hierarchical, like Maslow's hierarchy. These are sequential. And it's one of the reasons I wrote the book. It's like, if every leader could just take away, love isn't magic. Love's built. Love's designed. And you can design it in. That's why in the end I ended up calling the book, Design Love In. It's like you can design in. The first feeling, just imagine, somebody's going to an experience, they're joining your team for the first time, and they're coming into your business for the first time, or they have an experience for the first time. The first feeling they want is a feeling of control. That doesn't mean control over you. That means they want control over their own choices and their own actions. So the question they're asking, even if they don't say it to you, is, what's this world you've invited me into? And how does it work? Which, if you're in a company,

• 39:20Speaker 01

  it's like, what's the mission of our company? What do you stand for? You know, when Chick-fil-A says, we're closed on Sundays. Is that loving or unloving? I would say that's super loving, because even if you don't agree with it, you know what it is. And you can either choose to move into that world or not. That's a loving thing to do with anybody. And then in that world, how does it work? So for you as a leader, have you been clear about what your world is like? Have you said what you stand for? Going back to the authenticity thing, the more vivid you can be, the more loving it is. And then how do the tools work? What decisions am I allowed to make in the world? Tell me what those decisions are. The opposite of control is powerlessness. And we know from everything that Martin Seligman did about learned helplessness. We humans hate that.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  We will lean way the heck out. If you're vague as a leader, vagueness as a leader is the most damaging thing you can possibly be because people keep their armadillo plating on. Why? Because they don't know what the world is you invited them into and they don't know how it works. So that's the first thing. That's control. All right, well, the next one's weird. The next one's so weird, but it's harmony. Think about this, right? You've got an armadillo coming in and you want them to keep taking off armor plating. Well, one piece of armor plating that they're going to keep on, if you're not careful, is the one that protects their emotions in that experience. And when you don't show people that you know what they're feeling and you care what they're feeling, they keep the armor plating on.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  If you have an experience on the team that feels jarring, humans lean out when an emotion that they feel, when there's nothing in the experience says, I know what you're feeling and I care what you're feeling. We studied nurses who gave painless injections, and weirdly, there are some who do. And we tried to unpack how they did that. And we looked at the technique with the needle and the swab and the this and the that. But it turns out, the reason why some nurses can almost share your pain when you're getting an injection is because they all say the same thing right before they put the needle in. They say, this is going to hurt a little bit. I'll try to make it hurt as little as I can. And somehow, in just saying what you're feeling and obviously saying that I care about it, they reduce it.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  So as leaders, what we need to remember is, no matter where you want to move your people to, you've got to meet them before you can move them. You've got to tell them that you know what they're feeling in the UK. Otherwise, you can't move them anywhere. You've missed them. Why have you missed them? Because the armor plating's still on. The example I quoted in the book was Audi. I like Audi. I had an A4 and I got to the end of my lease. And you think that a very sophisticated company like Audi would know that at the end of the lease, what most customers are feeling is excitement. Cause I'm about to look for a new model and it's like, oh man, it's great. But instead, three weeks before the end of my lease, I got a robo call from a very sophisticated company called Audi that simply said in a robo voice, you failed to schedule your termination inspection. And I'm like, what?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  I don't even know what a termination inspection is, but I've already failed it. Next week, same thing. Next week, same thing. And I just leaned out. You know why? I couldn't even put words to it initially, but it was jarring. Cause I was excited and Audi was pissed off. And so in the end, they lost me for five years. I don't hate Audi. It wasn't like it was a three or a two or a one experience. It was disharmonious. I leaned out, so they lost me. So the second feeling is harmony. You got to tell people that you know what they're feeling in the UK. Otherwise they won't keep leaning in.

• 42:49Ryan Hawk?

  I mean, that's kind of a one, that's or a zero.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't like it was a massive service failure.

• 42:56Ryan Hawk?

  It kind of is though. I mean, to have a robo call for a long-term customer who's leasing an expensive car, that's very surprising. It's very stupid.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  But we don't take harmony seriously as businesses or as leaders very much. We don't. We, you know, you.

• 43:12Ryan Hawk?

  But like, think about the meeting room for a second. Sorry, this one just is. A bunch of execs are sitting in a meeting room and say, okay, here's what we're gonna do, guys. When somebody is at the end of their lease of this very nice expensive car, instead of having any sort of human touch, they're gonna get a robo call and they're gonna tell them that they've messed something up. They failed at something. All right, ready, break, let's go. Like, how does that happen? How does that happen? That's insane, you know?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Well, here's one of the big things that leaders that are listening could change right away. We don't design for experiences. When I first was thinking about publishing this book, I thought the pushback would be on the word love.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  But actually, the pushback's on the word experience. Because we don't design for experiences, we design for processes. So I think what happened in the case of Audi was the whole notion of an experience, that somebody comes to the end of the lease, what are they going to be experiencing at the end of the lease? What are they going to be feeling? Have we shown that people come to the end of the lease that we're aware of what they're feeling? And that we care about what they're feeling? However, we want to have them end up feeling, what are they actually feeling coming into the end of their lease? I don't think that conversation ever happened. Why? The idea of experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes. As obvious as it sounds when you and I are talking about it, I don't think that conversation comes up in most companies because we design for process and efficiency, which leads to silos. So the problem for Audi was, there's a person somewhere in a dealership going,

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Marcus is coming to the end of his lease, I'm going to get to selling this new model. But that person's in a different silo than a person who's writing the email or the script for the robo-call that comes to Marcus. It's like, no one creates a holistic experience map. We talk about customer journeys or customer experience maps, but we don't actually design for a holistic human. Like, just go to a hospital and it's one handoff after another. The person that checks you in isn't the person who takes your vitals. The person who then sees how you're doing in the middle of the night isn't the person who took your vitals. Then there's another healthcare professional, there's another doctor.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  And the person who's supposed to hold the narrative of that experience coherent, one handoff to another, is you, the patient, who deep down knows, we don't actually know which details matter. But the whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience, which is probably, Ryan, why the patient outcomes are so bad compared to how much money we spend on them. We haven't designed for an experience. Go back to Savannah Bananas. He's designed a holistic experience. And as a result, we cram into stadiums to watch it because it looks... Then there's a phrase from a poet whose name I'm blanking on, what beauty it all coheres.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Because it's coherent, we're like, we lean in. Audi has designed a desiccated, disconnected, disintegrated set of processes.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  And the person who's supposed to knit it all together is me, the buyer. Well, that's daft. I mean, Disney isn't a perfect company, Ron, but I tell you what they did do. They created, the first thing you do when you build a Disney park, in case anyone's thinking you're building a Disney park, is you build a berm around the whole park. So you can't see out. Well, Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why do they build a berm? So that you don't see out. You can't see the red roof in over there on the parking lot. Because why? Because we're trying to create a holistic experience and the first thing we've got to do when we get you in is you can't see out. Okay, you start looking at these companies that have figured out, whether it's Savannah

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Bananas or it's Disney, they're thinking holistically about a human having an experience. And for those leaders that are listening, you know, like, what could you do differently? Well, you could think about a human. There's a before, there's a during, there's an after to everything. Have you thought that out? Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes. That's why that company had a scatterpot graph of all those different stores in the same company producing different outcomes. Because the experiences weren't designed. Hey, leaders, you're an experience designer. That means think about it holistically.

• 47:29Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, I cut you off. Three, significance.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so significance is the question, which comes after harmony, but at some point, somebody's going to say, do you know my story? And do you care? Or just, do you know what I'm feeling? Do you care? Do my front story, my backstory? And if you listen to the best leaders, when you ask them, how do you motivate people? The answer is always the same. They always say it depends. It depends on the person. If you ask a teacher, what's the best way to help a student learn? They'll say it depends on the student. You ask a doctor, what's the best way to help that person get better? Depends on the person. There is a point at which the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. So many leaders get this wrong. No, no, start with control. Give me the rules. Give me the world. Help me know the world, that how it works. At some point, though. I'm going to want you to individualize.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Tell me you understand my story and what will change because of that story. That's significance. Opposite, of course, is insignificance. And everyone leans out when you start to realize that the leader doesn't really see you. That's a problem. The fourth one is warmth of others. And it's the fourth one because at some point you pop your head above the parapet, Ryan, and you go, am I going through this alone? And so the question that people are asking in a loving experience is who's with me? How can they help? Who's with me? How can they help? So many companies have designed onboarding experiences for customers or onboarding experiences for employees where you're going through it by yourself. There's no deliberate linking of you, not just to others in the social media sense, but the warmth of others.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  It's super interesting to me that the best patient outcomes in hospitals have come from a group called the hospitalist movement where they looked at that siloed series, Ryan, of like experiences for patients. And they went, well, we're not going to change the entire structure of our hospital. But what we could do is we could give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process and we'll call them a hospitalist, which they do. And they'll be a physician, like they're a healthcare professional, but their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. And as a result of that, you feel held. There's one person in this case who's with you on your little journey. They're going to help you.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  We humans love that when we can see intentionally that we're not going through this in a way that's isolated. Well, there's so much that a leader could do for customers or for employees to maximize the warmth of others. We could get into the whole Jeep thing with Jeep ducking and how wonderful it feels when you drive a Wrangler that people give you these plastic ducks. But no one, no one in Jeep tells you how to play. It's like they've got the natural organic warmth of others when you buy a Wrangler, but Jeep's not doing anything with it. It's crazy to me that they wouldn't maximize that in some way.

• 50:19Ryan Hawk?

  What would you do for them? What advice do you give them?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Well.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  So you've got to be careful, going back to your point about authenticity. You can't blow it by having a big corporate machine come in and go, "Here are the three rules for using a Jeep duck. Here's, we put it on the left side of the hood, not the right. The green ducks mean this and the white ducks." I wouldn't do anything like that at all. I would instead tell stories about Jeep owners. I would have stories about what people love about their Jeep. And I would share it as an ongoing narrative, a web of love. For when you buy a Jeep, you're a certain kind of person. And we've got lots and lots and lots of stories about that. And the way in which you recognize somebody else in the world that has that is you give them a duck. Why a duck? And I would tell the story of Caroline, the Canadian person who came up with Jeep ducking.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  And her whole thing was just pay a little love forward. And that's what Jeep Wrangler is all about. Pay a little love forward. And hey, here in this dealership, you can buy some ducks. We don't care how you use them. It's just about being connected to one another in this crazy world. But that's how I would do it. And I would make it feel kind of human and messy and idiosyncratic. And like, it just came from Caroline, wasn't us. But we love it and we support it. Like, there's so many ways you could do it in a nurturing way, rather than a mechanistic way. But actually, at the moment, they don't want it. Like, no one tells you how to play. I just came back one day and there was a duck on my thing. I'm like, what's that? It's weird.

• 51:47Ryan Hawk?

  All right, the fifth one's growth.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  The fifth one's growth. The fifth, because love is a forward-facing emotion. If you love anyone, then you don't imagine they're ever finished. You always imagine they're going to wake up the next day and have to face the world again. So what everyone in any experience is asking themselves on some level is, "How will this experience make me more capable? How will it make me more capable tomorrow?" And so there's so many lovely little ways in which you, as a leader, can help people feel more capable. A tip, a trick, an idea, a thought, anything. Could be big, could be small. But that is actually the last feeling on the sequence. Don't start there, because people won't give you the right to. And this is what we get wrong when we think about designing love. And we think it's just, well, we'll throw a bit of growth and we'll throw a bit of warmth

• 52:33Speaker 01

  and we'll build it backwards. We'll start with growth and then warmth. It's like, no. What's happening is, feeling by feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  And if you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth. It's like banks who try to teach you about financial fluency, but they haven't done any of the first four. So you're not available emotionally or psychologically for that learning. So as a leader, every leader should know like this is a sequence. There's a lot of stuff you could do to give people a feeling of control. Okay, figure that out. Then, ongoingly, there's a lot of stuff you could do to give people the feeling that you know what they're feeling and you care. I mean, by the way, simplest thing that leaders could do would be ignore growth, ignore warmth of others, even ignore significant. Just start with the first two. And I would suggest you just check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week and just ask them,

• 53:30Speaker 01

  how'd you feel about last week? What are you working on this week? How can I help? Last week, how'd you feel? What are you working on this week? How can I help? Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control and hit harmony, hit control and hit. I'd argue you'll hit significance too. Because over time, people will feel like you see them. But if you wanted to operationalize love, which does sound a little weird, but if you wanted to operationalize it, you could do a lot worse than put in place that simple check-in rhythm, because it will hit those first two feelings so well.

• 54:02Ryan Hawk?

  Marcus, we opened talking about you and being the fool who blew it up. I want to close by talking about you. Let's fast forward exactly one year from today. And you are surrounded by the people you love and that love you. And you guys are popping bottles, right? You're celebrating like crazy. What are you celebrating?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Well, gosh, I am doing this because I have kids and I don't want them to continue to grow into a world that is accepting of the pragmatic sense of lovelessness. Loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. I don't think that's okay. We know from data that humans don't thrive in loveless environments at all. We can get by, things function, but on some level, they're broken. And one of the things I'm going to do, Ryan, is create a free app. Which is gonna sound silly as I say this now, but I'm just gonna have a free app that's got like a Staples easy button on it. And it'll actually just be a slider, loving, unloving, loving, unloving. And I'm gonna give it away.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  And just say, listen, add your light to the sum of light. I've made an AI that's all they're doing. They know everything that's in the book, everything from the last thirty years of research, and all it really is is a design partner. And behind the paywall, if you like, is gonna be this AI will sit there as your design partner. Loving, unloving, whatever experience it is, it could be at the bank, it could be the car rental counter, it could be at your work, loving, unloving. And if it's unloving or loving, then you can just tell the AI what you did. And it will come up with ways in which you can build more love or design more love into that. And then you can send that to whoever. So all of us. And this is like a beautiful use of AI, I think, is that sometimes it's tricky for us to figure out, how do I make it more loving? I don't know. I've never, my muscles atrophied. I don't know what to do.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  But what you can do is notice, you can notice what's loving and what's not. Let's call it what it is. There's a whole bunch of stuff in our world right now. It's unloving. Let's not have complicated Yelp reviews or complicated Amazon. We don't need to scale a one. It's five or nothing. So it's love or not love. Let's have everyone use that. And then we can have a really smart, tightly, precisely defined AI help you think about ways in which you can make it more loving. And if we all add our voices to that, right? We get a world where from the bottom up, we've got a whole group of people going, it's not okay to live in a loveless world. A loveless world doesn't mean, like, for us, we want more love in the world because humans flourish in that way.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean soft. It doesn't mean warm and gooey. It doesn't mean kumbaya. It does mean that we should call out unloving when we see it, and it shouldn't be okay to leave it that way. So if I was popping champagne, I would have ten billion downloads, let's go with ten million, ten million downloads of that free app. And people would be able to use it in their life to add a little bit of their own light to the sum of light.

• 56:57Ryan Hawk?

  So good. The book's called Design Love and How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. Thanks again, Marcus, for writing it, just like your past work. So good and so useful, so practical, so important, honestly, just so important. And I love this topic and I love that we got a chance to talk about it and we use the word love more in this conversation than maybe any I've ever had. So thank you. I loved it and I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Well, me too, mate. Thank you so much for having me on.

• 57:32Ryan Hawk?

  It is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Marcus Buckingham. A few takeaways from my notes. Name your non-negotiables. Marcus is clear, the opposite of design is drift. Decide what loving leadership looks like in your world and then commit to it. Write it down. Make it real. Make it visible. Remember, we got to start with control. The first feeling of love is giving people orientation. Before your next new hire, onboarding or team meeting, ask yourself, does this person know what world they're walking into

• 58:16Ryan Hawk?

  and how to navigate it? They need to start with control. How about checking in weekly, one-on-one? Not a performance review, not a status update, a real conversation with another real human being. Marcus says, "The single most powerful, loving practice a leader can do." Most leaders skip it. They get busy, got other things going on. Do not be most leaders. Check in weekly, one-on-one. Make sure everybody is good and progressing. Then ask two questions about every major decision. How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more?

• 58:56Ryan Hawk?

  Not every choice will satisfy them both, but leaders who ask these consistently will be more effective. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling our friend or two, spreading the love. Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Marcus Buckingham. I think it'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and you love on the Learning Leader Show. Write a review, rate it hopefully five stars. Do all of that. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talking soon, can't wait.