Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Marcus Buckingham: Harness Your Strengths | 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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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stores. Taxes and other fee still apply. 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, Halla Taha, 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

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hit the subscribe button, because you'll love it here at Young & 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 Lies 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, Hannah, how are you? 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 bestselling 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 am actually joined the Gallup organization when I was going to the US about 25 years ago and Gallup's going 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 GALABSNM, 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 pours you or drags you down? Burn out. Burn out of a gale or something like that.

And it's funny, that happens in school, doesn't it? Where you can get 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, 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 work, no one is interested in finding out your nut.

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, the simple 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, and 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. Any time you find yourself looking forward to it, but particular activity before you're doing it, scribble it down in the moment in the loathed column.

Any time you find yourself with time just flying by and what felt like five minutes you look up and it's an hour scrimmage 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, scrimmage it down in the love of the column. Anytime you see the inverse, 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 saw it drags on it. You get to the end, but you're an empty husk.

Anytime anything like that, scrimming it down in the load. 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're good there end of the week and you 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 Superdraw you in and some of which for your 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 appetite and practice and performance and practice of 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 use your life, not someone's theoretical models, but your life to help you know what are the particular aspects, activities, situations, context, moments, that strength in 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 researches. So I sort of go into any situation with a blank 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 do this again and again and again and again. So you're constantly looking in the world of researchers called a stunning 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 when 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 different in terms of race or age or nationality, 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 them are very tactful. So 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 salespeople, 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 the 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, like 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. It'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, Johnny, we're all done for being a good closer. But now we need to work on fixing your, you know, relationship building. They don't do that. And they don't do it not because they're trying Well, Johnny will 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 it 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'm in the business. I'm in 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 that is a mind-blowingly important thing if you do 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 with 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 howler 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 have 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, Johnny will have done and those, and then air is a development. The best management world go, wait a minute, that is completely bass-aquets. You have strengths which are your areas of 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 shed load of weaknesses. If you wanna 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 Maham. When we say it like that, we know that sounds stupid. And let's try and turn you into Patrick Mahal. 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 ingurantly 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 night 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 yours can also become a weakness. Yeah, exactly.

Right. You'll hear it twisted around. So some people 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 think you're rude or aggressive. So you need to kind of download it, or they'll say the same way of empathy. Well, you're really empathetic, but you know what, you're too soft, you're too soft, you can't always be empathetic, you're really empathetic, but you know what, you're too soft.

You're too soft. You can't always be empathetic. 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 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 lesser for you are. That is never good coaching advice sounds like, be lesser for you are.

That is never good coaching advice or curb, be lesser for you are. Now, that doesn't mean that somebody can't help you go, wait a minute, Marcus. Sometimes when you're confronting people with your grades 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 what's great Marcus with you is your words come really quickly when you're angry. I don't know. Some people shut down. You don't. You get angry at that and you just get cold and really quickly when you're angry. I don't know. Some people shut down.

You don't. You get angry at it 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 with relatives that you've got or whatever. Kids, it's always like a strength. So too big for their little bodies.

So when they have natural strengths, 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 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, but 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 at. But if a strength is what strengthens you and a weakness is what we consume, then what weakens you can't also strengthen you. It's a logical monsecretar, 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 to close. 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 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 Genentech. And you went in and you, you know, you're quote unquote, good at selling, but you go in there and you suddenly realize that in pharmaceutical sales, you've never closed. There's no close, there's no signature.

You're just influencing doctors to write prescriptions. And so you go in pharmaceutical sales, you've never closed. There's no close. 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 know what strengthened you was to close and you went and joined a pharmaceutical sales company where there's no close. So in that sense, your weakness and your strength is stayed the same. What strengthened you stayed the same? What weakened you stayed the same. What strengthens you stayed the same,

what weakens 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,

I, what happened to me? Cause I was doing, I was killing away. 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 and I'm in a really bad mood. What, 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 close, was strengthening to you and you're moving to a job where there's none of it. And I would think 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 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 loads 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 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 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 who are going to bump into this, so much of this with somebody somebody will say, you need to know how to take feedback. Or, hey, come and sit down. 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 notice, you actually have formal ways of getting feedback. Sometimes it's called a performance review or a performance appraisal or an at least to happen once a year now, it seems to happen with little apps and stuff. Now it's 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're there's a step sequence to give a safe and painless injection and you're getting the steps wrong. Let's say you're a nurse, and 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 got a back wrong, like, you know, the American Independence War was this date, and you say that date, then somebody could 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 missed one. But excellence in any job, you're a seat guy right now, right? You go 40 people, you're charging around like a mad prune, and no part of your job is a prescribed sequence of steps. I mean, yes, you need to know how to turn this particular technology on that you need to know how to do that. You need to know how to save your 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 loads, your natural synaptic connection patterns and turning them into behavior. Stimulially 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, Huller, 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 is. Just be way more humble. Don't cross the feedback bridge and start giving advice to that. 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. That is so legit. I can't say yes, you did how that 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 just said. Or you could say, I was really bored by what you just said. I can't then go, no, you won't, but you will. 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 they 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 their reaction when something really really really worked well that you did. Your and this again is one of those mind-blowingly obvious things when you say it but 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, not everything about it was great, frankly, but this part I went in like crazy. If you built a whole presentation where you did more of that, that moment there, I don't know, I just landed, I couldn't stop myself from leaning in, it was so you nailed it, your energy was fantastic. That room, if someone's telling you their reaction about what worked, that's not going

to be 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 charged 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's a relationship you built, whether it was a presentation you gave. If someone is reacting to what bits of it worked, all my words, 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 wouldn't do better if only you did it more like me. So when any of your 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 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 coworkers, 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 there are things else, I don't have an opinion about anything. You go, Sorry, but I'm worried 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 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, there are an opportunity for someone anonymously to log 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-anonymise it, there's two basic huge floors 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 me let us just all be really clear. There's so much stuff our 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 where zoo. 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 study really unhappy marriages, you actually, 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 and 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 marriage, it's somehow you lean away from one another and each argument is proof of the need to kind of be armoured against the other person's attacks. And somehow in a happy marriage, the arguments are assigned for more reaching to a ward 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 isn't totally different thing. So that's the first thing with 360s. They're predicated on the idea that to get better, you should figure 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 writerater 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 rater or rater, rather of whether I'm bored by a presentation.

I'm a good rater 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 to friends and family. I can do all of that because it 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 rate 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, presumablyumably, 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 and some rating these 10 people. Three sixties 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, it 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, focused on failure. And unfortunately, for many of you 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 that up. 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

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 like 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, so broken, you know, and that's just really sad to me that it's, it's so broken

right now. No, it is. And the, 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 hallowed 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 you, Paula, 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, filigrid truth of the fact that you will shine the way that you shine. Only one person ever in the world, ever in human history, there 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 howala and she can't change or grow. She can change and grow. Just everyone 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, just talk about any of this at all. But this doesn't mean that you can rewire your brain and Hala, 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 loads and strengths and weaknesses

that they create are mine and all the weed inconsistencies and irregularities and opaceness of that, the complexity of that, is all mine, yours or yours. And when you grow, you become your fixin' active connections, become thicker. And actually your weaker ones, they, they, atrophy, they're 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, so I'm just bang on about that. No, it's so interesting. Now 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, 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. That's kind of my attitude. So I actually think I'm going to do this love and love 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 with you, and I built a company of a hundred engineers and your, 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 a relative to customers or people as a relative to the folks that you are 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 listening to this 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. It isn't going to help you if you can't find customers and you can't find really good people. In terms of how you can help people capitalize on their strengths, the, by the way, if you do that love and love a thing,

what you were 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 out in the love that column, and a whole bunch of activities

written down in the load that come, and you sort of want to turn to them at the end of two weeks and go, OK, 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 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. 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 love that 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, 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 could spend two hours, and it's a great two hours, where everyone just shares their love notes.

I'm not my best going there. Now, you're not saying, I'm the best at. That is a totally different claim. You sort of don't want that on you. I'm the best at this. OK, shut up. OK, bro, good. Who knows who you are 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 would be 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, right? 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, that's not stupid, but we see someone's superficiality. There are a white man or there are black women or there are Palestinian, you know, and we sort of make a, he's a New York Patriot, New York Jets supporter and he's an idiot patriot. 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 gonna say what all of our skills and certifications are, because who the heck knows what all those are. 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 a hundred 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 the next time you meet, you can do the inverse. I've 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, yeah, for 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 OK to say, I am super geeked by this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this over here I'm you're gonna get a be a be-minus version of me I know that sometimes I have to

do it I totally get I totally get but don't ask me to crush it if you keep bringing me it's like I remember when I was working with a Barcelona bag 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 power presentation that would have made the NASA moon landing look simple.

You know, I had all these different, if we did this, then we would do this. And I brought it into her, and she liked me. And about 10 minutes later, I could see she was doing that into the telltale signs that she was bored or frustrated, checking the watch, looking up. And I saw them and I looked, what, I spent all week, I spent all week getting on this.

And she was like, Marcus, I'm really busy. I expect, I trust you, dude. Come in with two things, tell me why you picked the one. And I'm almost 99% of time going to pick the one that you picked. And for her, she didn't take information 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 that isn't, 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 information in this way. Oh, I take it in this way. Well, I'm not my best with this. I'm not my best with that. What you're doing is simply building awareness. Now, sometimes I'm gonna have to do something

a little outside of 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 taken information in and she knows that's how I'm 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 ol' I know graphic designers, ol' graphic designers are like this. Okay, no, they're not. Each grad of the liner is weird and cool and different. And you've got to put in place inside your team, so I hope you 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.

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this podcast has it all. So don't wait, now is the time to turn your business idea into a reality by listening to the Millionaire University podcast. New episodes drop Mondays and Thursdays. Find the Millionaire University podcast on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 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? Well, we're on this topic. Well 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 a great team isn't

built up a bunch of the same people as the team, if you will. People always say there's no IM 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 completely misunderstanding of 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 misinstinct kind of way. When 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 a hundred words, or songs to a hundred words to a hundred 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 misunderstandings in our lives because no one's ever really taught

us to inventory what 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, I'll have an attribute and more just a behavior. And by the way, in your opinion, 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, but word doesn't matter. But that 15 minutes and you could call it a check-in or a touch base or a conversation or one-on-one The word doesn't matter But that 15 minutes isn't about feedback on this week Hey, let me tell you how you did. Let me tell it now. 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 an attention bucket, but the bucket has a hole in it.

And so you fill my bucket in the course 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? When 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 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 a span of control. It's a span of attention. The perfect span of attention

is how many people can you as a team leader legitimately check in with every week for 52 weeks. Also, if you are a team leader or you are 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 a strategizer. I want to be, you know, I want to be doing the cool sexy leadershipy stuff, then don't leave people. Because if you don't want to check in with each person and find out, what's going on

on their head and how can I help? Every single weed, because things change so quickly. If that doesn't interest you, don't lead people. Because this thing, this checking 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. You have a whole other conversation about goals, by the way, but with your 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 will just go, oh, and okay, and I'll do my best. And that's all you got that week for that person.

But that would be great. Because next week, you're gonna ask them again, and again, and 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 date of the date to 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 the text, on an email, it actually does not 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 to full a 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 CEO of a company and I have subteam.

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 an event if you want to, but no. Your role right now is 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 asked people this question around the world, 84

percent of people say they do most of their work on teams. 84 percent. There's a few people in the shed at the bottom of the garden, all by themselves, permanently doing just well. 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 that are 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, they really actually want to tell people what to do because they're into control. They don't want to check in with everybody each week individually because it pours 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 will want to work there or if they do come work for you, they won't 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 show answer 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 could be great at what you do and it 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 are not, then in terms of going all the way back to the definition of a strength and a 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, 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 manage by remote control, not all 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-with. 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, 13 in the morning on a Tuesday, what you're doing at 3 p.m. 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, leadings 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, unless about your ability to build teams or teams of teams. Everyone shouldn't aspire to be you. When I look to your job, your life, there's going to be a whole

of activities that a lot of us would go, I don't want to do that. I don't want to live. So all of us have got different thrills that we get from life, and of course that doesn't mean my wrong or right. It just means it just means for us. Your dog is an important part of your family. Don't settle when it comes to their health. Make the switch to fresh food made with real ingredients that are backed by science with nom nom nom delivers fresh dog food that is personalized to your dog's individual needs. Each portion is tailored to ensure your dog gets the nutrition they need, so you can watch them thrive. Nom-nom's ingredients are cooked individually and then mixed together, because science tells us that every protein, carb, and veggie has different cooking times and methods. This packs in all the vitamins and minerals your dog needs, so they truly

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they'll refund your first order. No fillers, no nonsense, just nom nom. Go right now for 50% off your no risk two week trial at trinom.com.shap. That's trinom.nom.com.shap for 50% off trinom.com.shap. So I also know in addition to all of this management research, you've recently done some research on COVID, or you've have 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 that, unemployment levels, I have a really good colleague it has 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 afforded 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 at some of the 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 in unemployment, that would be less resilient. So in 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 research standpoint, it was super annoying because you go to the mirror and the theory doesn't hold true. But we did find this, which is fascinating. Well, I thought it was fascinating. We ask 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, are list of changes 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 of 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 go back to normal. We're going to read Hastings saying at Netflix. We're going to go 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 read 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 has more ambiguity and uncertainty in it. 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 gonna 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 challenger head of us. We know you're there with us, but we can see

the challenger head of us, and we can figure out for ourselves how we accommodate that challenge, take it in, figure out our way around 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 Jung. His name was Victor Frankl 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. We get meaning from our response to unavoidable suffering. Not avoidable, I 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 there wasn't like a Brazilian like this, Iceland is like that. No, these patents 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. 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? Don't try and show your coat. 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, uh, definitely, I'm sorry for your loss. I, oh, that's okay.

I'm kind of right too. My, we've all, 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. I mean, yeah, your dad's 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, unless you 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 want to make people proud who supported you and loved you and just it actually motivated me to just keep working

hard or honestly and I turned everything up. So 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 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,

stress recover, and in the past we will just go up and went to the office and went to work and then came home, that 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. 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 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, 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 chances at their own schedule and more chances 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 Humphwood as 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 able 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 correlate with whether they felt they're part of a team, and whether they worked in an office or 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 of work's

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 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 rich older but checking. You can do that remotely. The only other thing I would say, I think, is that this has reminded us of more and more. Your own example here is a jolly good one. We haven't taken love seriously. The male 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 found, 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. And 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 risks. So, 1918, 17, 16% of your job that you loved, there

was a commensurate, 1%-age point increase in burnout risk. So, what that, oh, and by the way, if you have 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, gray, brown, emotionally a little love or emotionally a little down, but sort of neutral. But some are red threats. Some activities really are what we called earlier. Your strengths, some activities you love, you lean into them, you learn fast, you're

like theory or 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 Compensation about love and take people's loves their red threads seriously Then we can start to weave love into contribution, which of course you're running a company of 40 people you're really going from love to contribution. 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 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 your style, 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 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 we've I think the future world 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, they can be taken 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 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, then that's a whole other ball game 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 gonna really love it to you. I feel like I learned so much and it was just so eye-opening, 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 gonna 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, oh, my guess is what is your secret to profiting in life? You know, the Western philosophy says, I think, therefore, I am, right? Cogato, El Gosam, I think, therefore, I am.

But there is an African philosophy called Ubuntu, which basically says, now, 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, there 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, with me, but for too and for your listeners would be looked to your left and looked 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 sees you and wants you to be bigger. And I think the thing that I've learned in my life anyway, and I've done my career is a little bit like yours over the years. Writing books, speaking, being individually productive, starting a

company, having a company grow like crazy, having a bigger company, and by 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 in Ireland, 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 I'm reaching the 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's good. What is it? What did it in the show notes? Mark is talking. I just didn't know what that is. And then my website is markisbuckkingim.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, PowerPoint, sort of whatever your appetite is. So markisworkings.com or ADPRI.org at the places that I go. Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. Yes, 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 fly by while you're doing it, and it makes you feel strong.

So I highly recommend to listen to Marcus' 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 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, a 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 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 a CEO and she was 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 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 McEarola, 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. Shout out to Kristen Sherry for doing such a great job. And if you haven't subscribed to Young & Profiting Podcast, please do so. So you can be alerted every time we drop a new episode. And if you love YAP, the best way to thank us for all of our hard work is to leave us an Apple Podcast review. These are so important for us.

They act as social proof and they largely impact our podcast rankings. As usual, I'm going to shout out a listener who has left us a recent Apple Podcast review. This week is from Fickledo5, I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman, here she says, really happy I found this podcast. Just recently discovered Yapp and I'm really loving it. I like how Hala is so well researched every time even her guests acknowledge how good her questions are. Definitely looking forward to all the episodes. Thank you so much Fickickledo5, for tuning into the show and for all your kind words.

I do so much research, but I can't take all the credit. I have an amazing team. Shout out to Peter, Ava, Kara, Anisha, Fahad, Brian, Michael, and the whole team. You guys are crushing it for me and our clients when it comes to research. I appreciate you guys so much. It's one of our biggest differentiators at YAP Media. And don't forget to share a young profiting podcast with your friends and family on social media. We love when people enjoy our podcast. I love seeing those stories screen-chatted of you guys listening to us in the app. You can find me on Instagram at YappwithHalla or LinkedIn just search for

my name, it's Halla Taha. And now on Clubhouse, you can find me there too at Halla Taha. Thanks so much to the Yapp team, you guys are amazing. This is Halla, signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive and more creative? I'm Gretchen Rubin, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben podcast.

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