1083: How Tiny Actions Inspire Others through Mattering with Zach Mercurio

Pete Mockaitis
Zach, welcome!

Zach Mercurio
Thanks, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your work on a very important topic, and I’ll kick it off by just getting some of the goods. Can you share with us a particularly surprising and fascinating thing you’ve learned about us humans as you’ve done your research and put together your book, The Power of Mattering.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, there’s this notion that we, as people, should be valued once we add value. So, it shows up everywhere, right? Like, we get a good grade, we get rewarded, or we add value at work and we get recognized. And so, we wait for people to add value for them to be valued and to value them.

But what we’ve discovered is that the opposite is actually psychologically true. People need to be valued in order to add value. We need to feel valued, feel seen, heard, needed so we can develop the self-confidence we need to add value.

And what’s interesting is that, when you think about what’s invested in, we tend to invest in the lagging indicators of valuing someone once they add value, and tend to leave the leading indicator which is making sure someone feels seen, heard, valued, making sure they feel worthy and capable so they can add value up to chance.

So that’s been very interesting reframe is that we tend to think that we need to add value to be valued, but we actually need to be valued to add value consistently and sustainably.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, in a way, this topic is as real and as deep as it gets. And I’m having flashbacks to episode 500 with Victor Cheng, when he talked about how to have unshakable confidence. And so, we went into some deep topics about, like, value.

We might not feel it, but, in a way, some of like our fundamental societal beliefs, law, religion, philosophies, wisdom, traditions are like the sort of the ground truth foundational thing is, whether I think about the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights or some, you know, biblical stuff, humans being made in the image and likeness of God, is that the fundamental like human beings have value just cause fundamentally, intrinsically.

And that’s why it’s like just very basic. That’s why you can’t kill people, like, “But why? Like, you can kill a cockroach, there’s no laws against it. No one gets upset about it. You can’t kill a person.” Like, well, fundamentally that’s because people have value in and of themselves. And yet, we cannot feel that way internally, and that can create a cascade of not-so-great implications.

Zach Mercurio
There’s a lot there. Can we go back? Well, I want to share a quote from Dr. Paul Farmer, who was a doctor that revolutionized the treatment of tuberculosis worldwide. And he said that the idea that some lives matter less is the root of what’s wrong with everything in the world, is the root of all that’s evil in the world.

And so, when you’re talking about worth, independent of what you do, don’t do, who you are, where you live, you’re talking about dignity. Dignity is that inherent worth that a human being has independent of what they do, don’t do, where they live, who they are. You also mentioned confidence. We don’t develop confidence by sitting in our offices, or wherever we are, chanting self-affirmations to ourself.

We develop confidence because we can go out, try, fail, and experiment. Why? Because someone has our back. This goes back to our rooted need for secure attachment as children. One of the things I like seeing is when I go to a house, a family, a friend, and they have kids, if their kids are loud in front of them, I know that there’s secure attachment there because I know, seriously, I know that their sense of mattering to an adult is not threatened by what they do or don’t do.

They can be corrected, but it’s not threatened. So, they can go out, experiment, take risks, learn, build relationships, play, and know that they have a secure base to come back to because they already matter to someone else. This is how mattering plays out instinctually. And as we age and as we develop, as we go to work, you may have heard of the term psychological safety.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Amy Edmondson on show.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah. Now, I haven’t talked with Amy about this, but I don’t think many books would have been sold if it was called adult attachment at work. But that’s essentially what it is.

Psychological safety is adult attachment, because when someone feels that they have a leader who has their back, that they matter to enough, that they can go out, experiment, take risks, learn, speak up, and they know that that sense of mattering to another person will not be threatened, then they’re more likely to thrive and innovate in all of those things because they have that secure base. I mean, that’s what psychological safety is.

And all of this goes back to what you mentioned as our primal human drive to be significant to other people. The first thing you did as a baby when you were born, scientists find, is you grasped your arms out in a hugging motion. It’s called the grasp reflex. And you actually searched to grab onto somebody before you searched for food, because your survival depended on you mattering enough to someone else to keep you alive.

So that drive to be significant to another person for our very survival motivates and animates almost all human behavior. And when that’s satisfied, we experience what psychologists call mattering.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s talk about the definition of mattering. So, we’ve got that psychological definition there. Can you run that by us again?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah. Mattering is the experience of feeling significant to the people around you. And psychologist, Isaac Prilleltensky has theorized that it comes from two areas that’s well supported in the research – feeling valued by others and knowing how we add value to their lives. And, again, that feeling valued and adding value dimension, they have a reciprocal relationship. The more we feel valued, the more we’re likely to add value. The more we see the evidence of our significance and how we’re adding value, the more we feel valued.

Motivation, resilience, productivity, performance, all the things we say we want comes from that virtuous cycle of mattering. It’s different, and I think distinctions are important because it’s different than belonging or inclusion. I had a friend, recently, who moved abroad, and I asked her, I said, “How is it going?” And she said, “Oh, you know, it’s great. Like, I get invited to all of these conversations, dinner parties. I’m doing a soccer club after work, but I’m around all these people, but I feel completely unknown. I feel completely invisible.”

So mattering is different than things like belonging or inclusion. She felt like she belonged. That’s feeling welcomed and accepted in a group. She felt like she was included. She was able to take an equal active role in that group, but she didn’t feel that she mattered. She didn’t feel significant to individuals in that group. She didn’t feel seen, heard, valued, and needed. That’s why I can belong on a team.

Well, let’s use this conversation. I can belong in this conversation, but you might not notice that I’m a caretaker for a parent who’s in the hospital. You might not be able to name my unique strengths or my unique gifts that I bring. I can feel included here. I can speak. I can take an active role. But I may not feel that my voice is truly heard by you when it’s given. So mattering is the interpersonally generated experience of feeling significant to those around us.

And something we get to reinforce that inherent dignity that we mentioned earlier, strengthens that dignity, and it’s also something we give to others. And, actually, the more we show others how they matter, the more we see the evidence of our significance and the more we feel that we matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like these fine distinctions that you’re drawing here because, in a way, I think this might be sort of like the missing factor for a reasonable segment of folks and work or their home lives or wherever, is they say, “Okay, yeah, I’m included. Yeah, okay, I’m doing the stuff. Okay, I share what I think and I am part of the team and I do the things and it’s kind of interesting, but something’s kind of missing in terms of I’m not vibing with this team and feeling awesome in my experience here.” This may be the thing.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, it’s that feeling of being in a room of a bunch of people, even your friends, and feeling completely invisible and unknown. We’ve all had that feeling where we’ve been around people, but felt like people don’t really know or see that our inner experience, that inner voice that we bring and that we have. And that’s that feeling of not mattering. And the data indicates that what we’re really facing is a mattering deficit, not necessarily an engagement crisis or loneliness epidemic.

For example, more people than ever report that they’re disengaged in their work, as an example. We’ve heard that from Gallup for 20 years, how disengaged we are. It’s about seven out of 10 of us are emotionally uninvested in our work. This is despite DEI programs, wellbeing programs, perks, wages increasing even with inflation 42% in the last eight years, a collective $1 billion investment in services to improve engagement, 100 validated surveys, right? We’ve programmed the heck out of this. Yet people are still disengaged.

And there’s a couple data points that weren’t well publicized in Gallup’s latest report. One of those was that this is the lowest it’s ever been. Just 40% of people strongly agreed that someone at work, where they spend one third of their one waking life, cares for them as a person. That’s the lowest that’s ever been.

Pete Mockaitis
That just feels very sad.

Zach Mercurio
Just 30% of people said someone could see, name, invest in their unique potential. Workhuman did a study in 2024, found that 30% of people self-reported, they felt “invisible in work.” When it comes to loneliness, we’re more lonely than ever, but, ironically, we’re more connected than ever. We send about 30 to 40 text-based messages to peers and colleagues every day. We’re on more platforms than ever. There’s 38 million people probably right now exchanging messages on Slack.

We are on Teams chats. We’re sending messages. We’re sending short texts to each other. We’re more connected. We’re more lonely than ever. And the conventional wisdom on how to address loneliness has been to connect more, put yourself out there, join clubs. The organizational response has been more meetings. So, Americans’ time spent in meetings has tripled since 2021 because of this loneliness epidemic, but we’re more lonely than ever.

And one of the reasons why is that, psychologists find, it’s not the quantity of connections that matters. It’s the quality of connections. And we are having lower quality connections than ever. And what makes a quality connection? Psychologists call it experiencing companionate love. It’s not passionate love. Companionate love is experiencing the behaviors of attention, of care, of affirmation, of compassion from another person. That’s mattering. That’s experiencing that we matter.

So, the opposite of loneliness isn’t having more people around you. It’s feeling that you matter to the people around you. And what’s going on now is that we’re having lower-quality interactions. And one reason why is because we’ve lost, over the last 25 years of using technology obsessively, we’ve lost a lot of the skills that allow us to truly see, hear, value, and show the person across from us how they’re needed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s so much there. And, well, the notion of feeling invisible, I mean, I imagine this can be a whole spectrum, you know, in some ways, feeling invisible versus visible feels very binary, black and white, one you can see, one you cannot. And yet, there is a whole continuum in terms of care and attention. I was just a little bit versus ample.

And I’m thinking, I remember one time I was with my podcast mastermind group, and they’re awesome, and we really do care about each other and attend to each other. And they were having some sort of weird technical glitch because I said something and no one acknowledged it. And I said something else, and I said it like a third time. They’re like, “Oh, what was the name of that software tool?” I don’t know. And I was like, “Oh, it’s called Claude.”

And then it was like, see them talking, “It was Claude was the name of it.” Then he was like, “No, it’s called Claude.” And then it’s like, “You know, I’ll Google it.” And so, it was about as invisible as you can be, because like I’m literally saying the thing and there is like zero acknowledgement of it. And even though I figured, “Okay, this is probably something with a microphone or an AirPods switch over something somewhere,” it felt terrible. It’s like, really did.

I even had the thought, it’s like, “Am I invisible to you?” And then I sorted out and we had a little laugh, but I think that’s very striking that even a brief moment of technical difficulty-induced invisibility was severely distressing. And to have some folks have that be their daily existence in work and/or home day after day, I got to imagine that results in some pretty spooky health implications. Can you tell us, Zach, what’s at stake here?

Zach Mercurio
So, what we know is that what you experience is a brief moment of what psychologist Gordon Flett calls anti-mattering. And anti-mattering is the opposite of experiencing mattering. It’s feeling insignificant, feeling unseen, feeling unheard. And there’s two consequences to feelings of not mattering.

One is withdrawal. So, leaving, it’s pressing leave. Like you try, you try, you try, nobody sees you, you leave. You isolate, you stay silent, you withhold. That whole quiet quitting trend was totally misdiagnosed as a lazy generation choosing not to work when, really, it was a generation who was responding to perpetual experiences of feeling insignificant to the systems and organizations around them. That’s the inevitable.

Quiet quitting is the inevitable withdrawal response to feeling insignificant in perpetuity. Or, let’s say that your microphone incident kept going. You could have lashed out and slammed something down, right? So, acts of withdrawal, or it can be much louder. And this is actually dangerous, societally. It can result in acts of desperation, “Hey, I matter more than you think.”

Acts of acting out. Destruction, protesting, complaining, blaming, gossiping. When we look at the research on childhood bullying, for example, what nobody wants to talk about with childhood bullies is that bullies, that bullying behavior is actually the last-ditch effort to get attention and control that one is not getting in their family life and in their personal life. It’s actually a consequence of not mattering. We see that in the workplace, like workplace gossip, for example.

Negative workplace gossip, a lot of people think is because of toxic narcissistic employees. But, really, the number one predictor of negative workplace gossip is called psychological contract violation. It’s a fancy word that just means that, “My expectations of fair treatment from my leader were violated. So, because I can’t speak up to them, I’m going to go speak out to someone else. I will do anything, even if it’s talking negatively about someone else, to feel that I matter.”

Societally, when people don’t feel that they matter, this results into division, and it results into clinging to small groups or people that help me feel that I matter because I’m not experiencing it in my everyday interactions. And you talked about the health implications. There was a researcher, John Taylor, he’s a sociologist. He studied thousands of people for six months, and he actually took blood and urine samples, and he was measuring hormones, cortisol, fight or flight hormones, objectively in the blood.

And then he rated them, had them rate the number of relationships they had in their life in which they felt they mattered to, using this general mattering scale. And the people who experienced more relationships, in which they felt seen, heard, valued and needed, actually had objectively lower cortisol levels in their blood after controlling for the same life circumstances than those who did not experience mattering.

So, literally, the experience of mattering, because it’s a survival instinct, can serve as a protective resource for a lot that life throws on us. But when that protective resource is absent, we tend to succumb to life rather than surmount when it comes to resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is powerful stuff. It’s a big deal. Well, could we maybe zoom in and get a picture and some hope in terms of perhaps a team or an organization that wasn’t doing a great job of having folks feeling like they mattered, that they had any significance, and then what did they do to turn it around and what kind of results came out on the other side?

Zach Mercurio
I’m actually going to zoom in on the power of the individual manager and supervisor. Because I live in Colorado, and we try to grow gardens every year, but I live on the front range. It’s super dry, and you have to, like, obsessively create micro climates for these plants to grow. And what I’ve been finding through looking at organizations who do this well, there’s a lot of leaders who are in systems that are really difficult that create micro climates where people feel that they matter and feel significant.

One of the things that we find, and if I were to ask everybody listening, “When is the time in your life or your work when you most felt that you mattered?” Most likely you are going to think about a small moment, a small interaction, not a big initiative, not a big program, not getting your direct deposit, getting a promotion, getting an award. You’re probably going to think about a small instant in which you felt seen, heard, valued and needed by other people.

And I’m going to take this back to my first study that we did on the experience of meaningful work. And we embedded ourselves with a group of custodians, so university janitors, for a year and a half. And we were trying to understand what made work meaningful in a very difficult and overlooked occupation.

So, if you want to think about experiences of anti-mattering, I remember sitting in a break room with this group of custodians, and a building user walked by, crumpled a piece of trash. He threw it and it hit the trash can, bounced off and just kept walking by. And the custodians were sitting right there.

That experience of everyday anti-mattering could rake on a group. But this team, this group was profoundly joyful and connected to this bigger purpose. And we wanted to know why. And we found out that it was their supervisor who did very small things to regularly remind them of their significance. For example, one of the custodians said that she was miserable in her first couple of months on the job.

She just took the job so she could put food on the table for her two young sons. She got rejected from 14 jobs before she applied for this one. And she said she kept saying to herself, like, “Why couldn’t you have done something more with your life? Why are you just a janitor?” And during that first month, she would clock in, clock out, that’s it.

And her supervisor brought her into this break room, and said, “Hey, I just noticed that you’ve been struggling. I want you to read this.” And he put in front of her a dictionary and he had her read the definition of the word custodian out loud to him. And the definition was a person responsible for a building and everyone in it. And he goes, “I want you to read that again. Now I want you to look outside.” It was a glass conference room.

“I want you to look outside of all of these students walking by. These are someone’s precious child that’s trusting you to keep this place clean. Look at them. I mean, that’s why you’re here.” And she said that it was that moment, that was the first moment in her life that someone showed her she was worthy. And it went on to change her belief systems about herself and her job. She was actually at the university for over 30 years. She just had a retirement party.

When I asked her what’s the most meaningful part of her job, she said to me that it’s cleaning the bathrooms in the university dormitories after the weekends. And I said, “That sounds gross, you know. Why?” And she goes, “Because after that moment with my supervisor, every time I go into that bathroom, I say to myself, ‘I’m cleaning this bathroom so that these kids don’t get sick.’”

And what happened was, is that over time, this group had developed a collective so-that mentality, because this supervisor was creating repeatable moments, interactions where he was showing them the evidence of their significance. And that’s how we develop these three major practices, right? He was noticing them. He noticed that she was struggling in that moment. He affirmed her. He showed her the difference that she made. And then he reminded her how she was needed.

And so, organizations that are doing this well tend to scale the skills, those skills that that supervisor had, to create repeatable moments where people feel noticed, affirmed, and needed. But I think that what’s an important distinction, it doesn’t come from big projects, big initiatives. It comes from small interactions.

Like, I mentioned the engagement data from before. You can’t tackle employee engagement problems with a program. You can only tackle it through optimizing daily interactions. And that’s where we’ve missed the mark. But that’s why there’s hope. I mean, I think that you asked, “Where’s the hope?” The hope is, is that your next leadership act, your next great leadership act is in your next interaction.

I mean, we can do something about this loneliness epidemic, disengagement crisis in our next interaction, because mattering happens in moments. Mattering happens in moments, not through programs.

Pete Mockaitis
Zach, this is so good. You’re bringing me back to my second job. And I was placed as a temp, a temp worker, at the Danville Area Community College in my hometown in Illinois. And I had this wonderful woman, Anne Weigel, and she was creating some documents associated with the nursing curriculum at the Community College.

And so, I was just sort of helping out with a bunch of these things. And so, I’m cruising along, cruising along, cruising along. And at one point, we got a bunch of them done, and so it was sort of bound and all done. And she said, “Pete, look at this.” And so, I looked at it, I was like, “Yeah, that’s cool. That looks nice.” And so, I went like right back to like, you know, just kind of cranking through my things. And she’s like, “No. Stop.” She’s like, “You did this.” And I was like, “Huh! Well, yeah, I guess I did.”

And it was awesome because my nature was, “Oh, I got a list of tasks. I’m going to continue checking them through.” And then she, like, somewhat forcefully, like redirected me, paused, and I was like, “Well, yeah, I did.” And I don’t remember what more she said after that in terms of like how the nursing students will be using this and what, dah, dah, dah. But it really stuck with me such that, “Yeah, I’m doing a bunch of documents, you know, copy-paste format, dah, dah, dah, dah,” but, really, it stuck with me that people who are learning to become nurses will be referencing these documents.

And so, to the extent to which they are clear and visually engaging and helpful and accurate will, in some small way, improve their ability to, ultimately, care for people in hospitals and healthcare settings. And so, she really transformed it. And it was a lovely experience.

Zach Mercurio
What she did is a practice that we can all do, right? She showed you how you made a difference. I worked with the National Park Service, and there was one park in the West that had a really high morale, low turnover with their maintenance staff.

Maintenance in the National Parks is incredibly grueling work because many of these locations are in rural areas, the weather’s not always great. It’s sort of harsh conditions. It’s tough to get employees. But this manager had, again, created this microclimate where it was this outlier, high morale, low turnover.

And I asked him what he did, and he said, “I go around the park and I take pictures of projects my team worked on. I’ll take pictures of visitors walking over a bridge they repaired. I’ll take pictures of a shorter line for a bathroom because they opened up a bathroom that was needed repairs. I’ll take a picture of people working on a trail, and I send them an email every Friday, and the subject line is just ‘Look what you did.’ And then I just attach the pictures.”

And he said that, “They can’t argue that their job matters or doesn’t matter. I give them photographic evidence.” And I loved that because leaders and people who show others they matter, don’t just tell them that they matter. They show them exactly how they matter. I mean, one way to do this is to simply start giving better gratitude for one another and expressing that gratitude.

Like, for everybody listening, think of someone you’re grateful for. Now, think about the last time you explicitly told them. For most of us, there’s a gap between our feelings of gratitude for someone and our actions of showing that. When we ask people, “What does meaningful gratitude look like?” they mention four things, right? One is describing the setting, like when and where, what you’re thankful for someone doing, when and where did it happen.

Two, describe the behaviors, “What did they actually do when they did this thing that you’re grateful for?” What gifts did they use? So what perspective, what strengths, what wisdom did they use?” And then, finally, impact. Show them, and this is most important, show them the impact that it made on you, that, “If you didn’t do this, this wouldn’t have been possible for me,” and showing them very vividly.

So, in your daily routine today, go beyond saying thank you or good job and show someone vividly the difference they make and how they make it. And you will see someone come alive. You’ll see some go, “Oh, well, wait, wait.” Like you did, “I was just doing some tasks, but wait, I did do this.” It jolts people out of this routine, out of this sort of inertia of the routine. It reminds them that they matter and shows them how.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Could you share with us, let’s just do two example demonstrations of how that is articulated?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, sure. So, Pete, at the beginning of this podcast interview, before we got on, we had a really good conversation, and you mentioned your interest in this topic of mattering. That it was deep and philosophically important for you. And, for me, that demonstrated your interest, your wisdom, your intentionality, your preparation.

And as someone who’s trying to create a world where every single person feels valued so they can add value, I felt really comfortable coming on this platform, and I’ve been on a lot of podcasts, but that made me feel really comfortable.

And so, the way I’ve been able to explain things today, and if one person just is able to name that they may not be experiencing mattering or someone in their life or work might not be able to experience mattering, and they can do something about it, well, that’s because of you and the prep that you put into this and how you welcomed me on. So, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I wasn’t expecting it to be about me, but…

Zach Mercurio
But that’s the difference. The difference between the, just saying…

Pete Mockaitis
“Thanks. Good job.”

Zach Mercurio
You know, “Hey, you know, thanks for being here.” Or, I’ll give another example of me, personally. Like, I travel a lot. I’m in airports a lot. And I was in an airport bathroom, and there was a cleaner or a maintenance worker, he was in the bathroom and he was fixing the paper towel dispenser, and I was washing my hand next to him.

Now, I saw about 10 people just walk right by him, brushed by him. And I stopped and I just said, “Hey, thanks for getting this working again. By the way, it looks great in here.” And he was like, “What did you say?” Like, that’s what he said. He was almost defensive. He was like, “What?” I was like, “Oh, I’m just saying thanks. Like, thanks for fixing this. It looks great in here.” And he goes, “Well, thank you.” And I said, “Okay.” But he was shocked, right? And all it took me was 30 seconds, but that may have been the only time he saw the difference that he made that day for someone else.

And this is what’s so maddeningly simple about the work that I do, is that I’m teaching people how to optimize moments with people in everyday interactions, whether you’re leading a team, an organization, or using the bathroom at an airport, that can introduce somebody back to them the evidence that they are significant so that they can go home and have that evidence to reinforce the belief that they are significant and that they matter.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect, yes. And I honestly, mostly what you’re doing in airports is waiting anyway. So, let’s make it count.

Zach Mercurio
But just notice how often there’s so many, you know, another example that I have that we can extend to all areas of our life is, you know, my kid is seven and he likes watching the trash truck come. And there was this guy, I mean, he was like, he did not look happy this day to be there. And he was like throwing the bins down and all this. And my seven-year-old’s out there just waving at him.

And when that guy caught the eye, I mean, this is powerful, that guy was seen by this seven-year-old, his demeanor completely changed. He got the biggest smile on his face, jumped off the truck, said, “Hey,” right? And I wonder what it would be like if we were more astonished at other people’s presence in our lives like that on a daily basis. You know, like honestly, not that, but really just when you go through the grocery store line, say, “I know life is hard, I’m really glad you’re here.”

Your team members saying these five words that we hear often in our interviews that are so powerful, “Hey, I just want to remind you, if it wasn’t for you, this wouldn’t be possible. If you weren’t here, this meeting wouldn’t have been like this. This week wouldn’t have been like this.” But I think that there’s so many people around us that make our lives possible, that make what we do possible, and they don’t know it because we don’t tell them.

I mean, that’s why we go back to the beginning of the conversation. You can believe that you matter on your own. You can develop a sense of self-worth on your own, but others can either strengthen or shatter it through the evidence that they’re feeding back to you. And just that act of being acknowledged by my kid completely altered this person’s entire demeanor. That’s the power of mattering.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, I love that example when you talk about kids. It reminds me, one time I was at church and I just caught some woman’s look, and she was like beaming with a huge smile and bright eyes. And I was like, “Wow!” And I was like, “Well, hi.” I waved and was like, “Well, that feels amazing. All of us should, like, greet each other in this way all the time.” And then it’s like, “Oh, you’re looking at my kid.” It’s funny. It’s like we do that for little kids, but we big kids still need it.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, I mean, next time you’re in line for the construction person, you’re at a one lane road and they have that annoying stop sign, we have to stop and wait, and you’re driving, roll down the window and say, “Hey, I know this is a tough job, I just want to thank you for making sure I get through here safely,” and do it authentically. And you will be shocked at what happens. I bet that person will go home and tell their kids, their parents, their siblings about that.

And you know what’s interesting, is that we were talking about these moments and they seem just very simple and mundane, and someone may be listening and be like, “Well, what does this have to do with work or my job or being a leader?” This is precisely what we find creates mattering in work, motivation in work, and engagement at work. It’s these small moments where someone sees us, they hear us, they remind us of a gift they had, they remind us of a difference we made.

For example, one of my favorite studies is researchers had freelance editors who were contract workers go on and they would edit this fake document. And on one document, there was edits from someone who had worked on it before, and then there was nothing else there. But the other document there was edits that someone else did, and then the lead editor, the head publisher wrote thank you notes on the comments on someone else’s edits before that editor found it.

And the editors that saw those comments actually ended up catching almost double the amounts of mistakes and spent more time on their edits than the group that didn’t even see a hypothetical thank you to someone else. So just even the anticipation that someone might notice our work, that someone might notice us, can actually compel our performance and commitment and engagement and motivation to do something.

So, while we’re talking about like saying hi to a trash truck operator, which is powerful, this also translates to these everyday moments of seeing, hearing, and valuing people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and this is such a master key that unlocks so many things and has so many implications in so many little ways. I think it’s well worth just reflecting on it for a while and how it intersects your world. I’m thinking about, one time, I went to Midas and I got some car work done, you know, and they were, super helpful and I really appreciated it, and they were honest.

And they said, “Hey, actually,” point at the records, “It looks like you got this issue and it’s still covered in your warranty, so you should really just have the dealer do this for free.” It was, like, that’s awesome. And I thought that was really cool. So, I thanked them. I appreciated them. It was all good. And then it was also interesting, these Midas guys, they’re crushing it, I got a phone call from someone asking me how my experience was with Midas.

And it’s so funny how that struck me as extraordinary, even though, in some ways it’s not, like, we hear, “How likely is it that you’d recommend us to a friend or a colleague?” like everywhere. And, hey, I worked at Bain, the net promoter score stuff, but, like, we see that everywhere. But when it’s a push button on a screen, or they email you, “Hey, take this survey,” part of me, part of us always wonders, like, “Does anyone care at all? Will they read it? Will they think about it? Will this have any impact? Does it matter?”

But when I had a human being spending time in her life, inquiring about my experience, well, one, I just thought, “Man, Midas is even more awesome now.” I had good vibes, and appreciation, goodwill toward them. And, secondly, it was like, “Well, I will tell you precisely how my Midas experience was in some detail and how cool I thought it was,” because it was just transformational in terms of a human being called me, and you might say, “Oh, they interrupted me. Argh!” I was in a good mood, whatever, I had some time.

A human being called me and I was like, “Oh, you actually want to hear what I have to say about my experience. So, I’m actually going to tell you, as opposed to ignoring all of the emails that ask me to take a survey.”

Zach Mercurio
Let me mine out two practices there, actually, in the customer service example with Midas. That’s an act of compassion, right, of knowing that you could spend this money, that’s the struggle, taking an action to alleviate that struggle. I mean, one of the things that people who help other people feel that they matter do is they move from empathy to compassion relatively quickly.

Empathy is coming to understand what someone’s going through, like feeling your pain. But compassion is taking an action to alleviate that pain using what’s in your power in the moment, even if it’s small, in a customer interaction, to alleviate a potential future pain is something that you’re biologically wired to respond to. So that’s why you felt that commitment of, “Wow!”

That’s what helps us feel noticed, helps us feel seen when somebody actually sees our struggle and offers an action to help. The second though is that someone called and took an interest. Asked you a question, a deeper question. A lot of people in a lot of organizations, they do the net promoter or they measure satisfaction, “How satisfied were you with this?” And they don’t measure impact, “What impact did this have on your life?”

And the questions we ask can also demonstrate whether we see somebody. One thing that people can do right now is start asking better questions. Take an interest in people, instead of, “How are you? How’s it going? How was your day?” Those are all greetings, right? Again, I have a 10 and a seven-year-old, I travel a lot. When someone asks me, “How are you?” my brain can’t compute the last, like, eight hours of living a complex human life, so I just say, “Good. You?”

It doesn’t help them. They don’t learn anything about me. It doesn’t help me share my experience, help me feel seen. But if someone asks me, “Hey, what is your attention today?” Or the question I ask everybody, like I asked you at the beginning is, “What have you been working on before today?” And I learned that a carpenter is helping you work on your studio. I would have never known that if I didn’t ask that question.

Or, “What’s been most meaningful to you today? What’s been important to you today? What are you struggling with? How can I help?” If you’re a leader, “What logjams are you coming up against on your projects today? Anything I can do to remove them?” Those clear, open, and exploratory questions, the art of asking the question, the art of having a human being call you and check in authentically, helps us feel seen.

So, those are two practices that you can mine out of the Midas example, the Midas touch, whatever it is, is the compassion, seeing a potential struggle, anticipating a potential struggle, offering an action to alleviate that, but also taking a genuine interest.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Zach, in many ways, this is just super simple, but could you give us some top dos and don’ts as we think, “This is awesome. I want to spread more good mattering vibes around me”?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, the top do is to simply go out and ask the people in your life, or in your work, or the people that you serve, this question, “When you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing?” and listen and write it down, and do more of that. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization or where you are in life, you have a relationship with somebody.

And asking that question can really, as you said, be the key that unlocks what actually cultivates healthy relationships, which is feeling seen, heard, valued. But everybody experiences feeling noticed, affirmed, and needed in different ways. So, when you ask that question, it’s very powerful. So do that.

The second is to make sure that you’re taking captive the interactions you have on a daily basis. Don’t underestimate. So, this is a do and a don’t. The do is overestimate your impact. The don’t is don’t underestimate your impact.

There’s a psychologist named Nick Epley, and he did studies where he had people write thank you notes out of the blue to certain recipients, and he rated the giver of the note what impact they thought that it would have on the person, what emotional impact it would have and then he rated the actual emotional impact it had.

And almost every single time, the giver of the thank you note underestimated the emotional impact that they would have. This has been replicated time and time and time again. So, overestimate the value of small gestures of seeing people, of affirming them, of showing them how they’re needed. And that will get you out of this gap between your good intentions and your good practices.

The final do I have is to schedule your good intentions. Like, I don’t think anybody wakes up and it’s like, “I’m going to be an uncaring person today.” I just think we get caught up in all the things we have to do, and we lose that. Like, I’m the kindest person in the world when I’m out walking my dog. I think about all the people I should thank, all the letters I should write, and then I get back to my office and I have a big to-do list and I put it off.

Schedule your good intentions. If you have that thought to reach out to someone, put it on your calendar. Put a reminder in your phone. Don’t leave acts of kindness and compassion up to chance. The don’t I have is don’t do this to get more out of people. That’s manipulation. Don’t do this as a tactic. Don’t do this if you don’t believe that this is how you want to show up in the world.

Because the moment we start treating someone as a means to our end is the moment we actually stop seeing them as human, and we start seeing them as “a cog” or a piece of my puzzle. But do this because you see a person as a worthy end to themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful stuff. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Zach Mercurio
I’m going to go back to my favorite book, which is Man’s Search for Meaning. And in it, Victor Frankl quotes Nietzsche, a philosopher, but he says, “He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how.” When we know that we matter, when we know that someone else relies on us, it can pull us through even the most difficult times.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And can you share with us a favorite study or a piece of research?

Zach Mercurio
One of my favorite studies is actually by the organizational psychologist Adam Grant. And he did a study, when his daughter was born, he was in a hospital that was struggling to get clinicians to comply with handwashing procedures, which sounds gross, but it’s very common in healthcare systems. And what he did was he took all of the handwashing stations in one side of the hospital, and he looked at the signs.

The sign said, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases,” and he replaced them all with “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases,” focused on others. And he left the other side of the hospital signs the same of the handwashing stations. And what he did was he measured, he had covert raters go in and rate frequency of handwashing behaviors per clinician, and then he had people going in and actually measure the amount of soap that was used in the dispensers.

And the sign that just changed that one word to focus us on our why, that other, had 33% more soap gone on average at the end of every day than the signs that had the focus on you. And there were 10% more handwashing behaviors per clinician per hour in the signs that just changed you to patients.

And I think it gets to our natural human desire to feel that we matter because when we know that we matter, we act like we matter as human beings. And that’s why when we know how what we’re doing is significant, we act like we’re significant. And I love that study because it’s just one word that reorients our mind to focus on our contribution.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite tool, something you use to be able to make your job?

Zach Mercurio
This tablet here, it’s remarkable, because I used to have piles of Moleskine notebooks. And now it’s all organized into one piece.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Zach Mercurio
Every day, I play with my kids in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, a Zach original?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, “It’s hard for anything to matter to someone who doesn’t feel that they matter.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Zach Mercurio
You go to ZachMercurio.com, or I’m on LinkedIn at Zach Mercurio. I’ve a small group of engaged people there doing all sorts of different types of jobs that really engage in this work and are trying things out, so it’s a cool community.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Zach Mercurio
Don’t be a passive recipient of culture in your organization or wherever you are. Be an active constructor of the culture you say you want.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Zach, this is fabulous. Thank you.

Zach Mercurio
Thanks, Pete.