894: The Three Keys to Retaining Your Best People with Joe Mull

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Joe Mull
I am so excited to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book, Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work, whether listeners are managing, executivizing, keeping their talent, or they are the talent, and they’re thinking about looking elsewhere. You’ve got some great perspectives we’re excited to hear. But, first, I need to hear about you singing at Carnegie Hall. Joe, tell me, how did you get to Carnegie Hall?

Joe Mull
Well, I was one of those show choir kids in high school. I was really involved in theater and performing arts. And one year, one of our groups, our high school group, was invited to a choral that was being made up of kids from a whole bunch of other states, and we got to go to New York City and practice with a maestro for two days. And then we performed parts of Mozart’s “Requiem” on stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It was pretty amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool. That’s cool. I thought, when I asked, you would say practice, practice, practice but that was a very valid…

Joe Mull
That’s in there.

Pete Mockaitis
I was in the show choir combo for one year as well, and that was a good time. It’s a whole world there, man. Kudos. And it sounds like it’s a fond memory.

Joe Mull
Thank you. It is. And my jazz hands are still strong, I got to tell you.

Pete Mockaitis
Your rapid costume-changing abilities?

Joe Mull
No doubt.

Pete Mockaitis
That comes in handy sometimes, I bet. Cool.

Joe Mull
Absolutely, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can you tell us a little bit about Employalty. First of all, what do you mean by this word?

Joe Mull
Employalty is actually a franken word of the words ‘employer,’ ‘loyalty,’ and ‘humanity.’ What we know is that if you want to find and keep devoted employees, it’s employers that actually have to be loyal to employees, and actually create a work experience that prioritizes quality of life. When you do that, people would join an organization, they will stay long term, and they will do great work. So, employalty is the commitment that employers make to a more humane employee experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, Joe, that premise sounds sensible, reasonable, logical. Do you have any interesting facts or research tidbits that suggest just how essential this concept is for folks?

Joe Mull
Oh, man, did you just open a Pandora’s box because I completely nerd out on a lot of the social science research on what leads people at work to be committed, to activate their emotional and psychological commitment. And for this book, we analyzed more than 200 research studies and articles on why people decide to quit a job, or what attracts them to a new organization, or what leads people to stay. And I can tell you with conviction that there are three areas of the employee experience that matter the most. We call them ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss.

So, ideal job is made up of compensation, workload, and flexibility. You get those three things right, and my job fits into my life like a puzzle piece snapping into place. For meaningful work, it’s purpose, strengths, and belonging. If I believe my work matters, if it aligns with some things that I’m good at, and I feel like an accepted and celebrated member of the team, my work is meaningful and I want to do it well.

And then great boss, there’s a lot of stuff you got to get right for someone to point to you, and say, “Man, I’ve got a great boss.” But we think the three most important are trust, coaching, and advocacy. If my boss grants me trust and earns my trust, if they advocate for me, and they coach me, then that job is something I want to be a part of.

So, all of the research that we see in what leads people to want to be part of an organization, and want to do great work for that great organization, comes down to ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss.

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, well said, I think that that really cuts through the clutter and simplifies things, and feels true to me in terms of, “Yup, if you’ve got those things going, it’s hard to see how your job is not amazing.” It’s conceivably possible there’s an even more amazing job out there for you somewhere, but that’s pretty hard. You’re quite the competitive situation when these things are true.

Joe Mull
Right. And we think of this as a kind of internal psychological scorecard. Everybody is walking around with a kind of internal scorecard of ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss. And if you’re checking most or all of the boxes around the employee experience for that person, it’s very unlikely that they’re unhappy, that they’re looking around for something else. It’s very unlikely that they can be poached from your organization.

But if things change, or you’re not checking those boxes consistently, then people’s commitment starts to wane, they start to look around, or, worse, they’re mentally checked out and they stay. What’s interesting about this though is that there is not equal importance across all of those dimensions of that scorecard for every person.

And what I mean is that people’s priorities are different. I’m 46 years old, I’ve got three kids under the age of 13. When I was first entering the workforce, what was most important to me was compensation because I had a car held together by, like, duct tape and prayer, and so I wanted to earn some money and be able to get a decent car and pay my bills.

Nowadays, I make a nice living. What’s more important to me beyond finances is, “Do I have some flexibility because I need to be home two days a week to get my kids off the bus because of my wife’s work schedule?” And so, the priorities within that scorecard can ebb and flow and change from person to person, and even within the same person over the course of our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, that checks out. So, tell me, Joe, it seems like you’ve got a real nice synthesis of what matters and how we can think about that in an organized fashion, and that in and of itself is valuable. At the same time, I guess it’s not particularly surprising. I think once you say it, it makes me say, “Yeah, it sounds about right,” which is valuable in and of itself because you could say a dozen things that, hmm, feel like a stretch and know these skills right on the money.

So, tell us, have you discovered anything particularly surprising in your journey of research and digging into this employalty stuff?

Joe Mull
Probably the most surprising piece is the degree to which these old beliefs and myths and misinformation about work and why people choose to stay with an organization long term or why they choose to do great work, that continue to persist. So, we write in the book about what we call the myth of lazy. And I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about that the real problem is work ethic, “No one wants to work anymore. These kids today are just entitled. They don’t care as much about their work.”

And one of my favorite things that we found in the research for book was we found a professor out of Canada who has been studying generational theory. And this idea, this “No one wants to work” is actually the most persistent generational trope in human history. This man found examples of this exact sentiment “No one wants to work” showing up in North American newspapers every year going back 120 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that’s funny. Well, I was thinking, is there a quote from, like, is it Socrates or Plato or Aristotle or one of them talking about, “Oh, this generation”? So, maybe thousands of years, but at least 120, every year in the newspapers in the US that that’s an eyeopener. Okay, so.

Joe Mull
And we really want this to be the problem, don’t we? I have a local small business owner in my community who owns several restaurants in retail locations, and, for the past two years, he has regularly posted on social media when he has openings, and he always does it the same way. He says, “Help me find good people. No one wants to work,” and then he lists the pay and the hours.

And it’s been a really interesting thing to watch people in the community come back, and say, “Hold on. Time out. It’s not that no one wants to work, it’s that no one wants to work for you.” And that’s really what this conversation is about. When we have trouble filling positions or keeping people in an organization, we want to blame people, we want to say that they left for greed, we want to say “No one wants to work anymore,” when the real problem has been the work.

All of the research that we did to kind of capture what’s happening at this moment around what we’ve heard called The Great Resignation and quiet quitting and all of these ideas is that we are living in an era where people are looking for upgrades to their quality of life. So, think about it this way, Pete. When did we start hearing about The Great Resignation?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, now it feels like it’s been a long time. Is it three-ish years?

Joe Mull
Three-is years, right. So, we first started hearing this language in late 2020 or early 2021 when a professor out of Texas labeled this as something that he predicted was going to happen in the labor market. Would it surprise you to learn that what we know as The Great Resignation actually started in 2009? It’s actually been going on for 13 years. And here’s what I mean.

So, if you remember The Great Recession in 2008, we get our economic feet under us a little bit in 2009. And then in 2010, something interesting happened in the labor market. Two million more people voluntarily quit their job than the year before. And then in 2011, it happened again. And in 2012, it happened again. And every year since 2010, more and more people than the year before have voluntarily left their job. But during that same time period, we had had 50% more hiring in every industry category in the United States.

So, if you nerd out around this stuff like I do, and you look at this on, like, a graph chart, you see that for every year since 2010, quitting has gone up but hiring has been above it and has gone up. So, what’s happening is not the people are quitting, it’s that they’re switching because they can, because we don’t have enough people to do all of the jobs that are available to us that we continue to add to our economy.

And so, people are upgrading. And if you ask people, “Do you know someone who switched jobs in the last year or two?” Nearly everybody raises their hand. And you ask them, “Why are people switching?” and you get a whole bunch of answers, “I need more money,” “I’m leaving a toxic work environment,” “I want more of work-life balance,” “I want a shorter commute,” “I want to work from home,” “I want more time with my kids,” “I want a better boss,” “I want more fulfilling work,” but all of those answers role up to a bigger idea, which is “I want a better quality of life.”

And so, when we talk about employalty, we’re talking about a more humane employee experience that prioritizes quality in life because we’re living in an era where that’s what matters most.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s so much good stuff here, Joe. So, it’s like, “I want a better quality of life, and because of the supply-demand market dynamics for labor at the moment, I can get away with it.” It’s like, “Things aren’t so tight and me so desperate that I’m going to hold on to something lame because I don’t have to.” So, there we are.

Well, now I’m curious. I’m thinking about my buddy, Steve. Shoutout to Steve.

Joe Mull
What’s up, Steve?

Pete Mockaitis
He listened to one of my guests mentioned that he put himself through grad school via juggling, and Steve said, “Oh, boy, this guy’s a boomer. You can’t do that now.” And I thought that that was interesting in terms of so we have, “The next generation is lazy, nobody wants to work,” sort of that idea is a myth that’s been sort of believed in or shared for 120 plus years in the US.

Although, I think it does also seem true that from a, I don’t know, I don’t exactly how we measure this precisely in terms of economist and quality of life, etc. but it also seems that the minimum wage could take you a lot farther 50, 80 years ago, like paying for grad school with juggling, like that kind of a thing was more possible then.

So, I don’t know what’s the best way to measure quality of life because I guess we’ve got bigger houses and iPhones now, but also more sort of dual-income households in order to make ends meet. So, it’s sort of like, “Are we better off? Are we worse off?” I guess it depends on how you look at it. But, nonetheless, it would seem that your minimum-wage restaurant job offer today is just way lamer than it was 60 years ago.

Joe Mull
And it’s not sustainable. So, since compensation is one of those nine dimensions of employalty that we talk about in the book, we devoted an entire chapter to talking about wages because it’s a complex issue right now. But one of the things that we know that is not up for debate is that we’ve endured nearly 40 years of wage stagnation here in the US. The average salary for the median US worker rose 10% between 2021 and 1979. It’s absurd.

Pete Mockaitis
In real terms?

Joe Mull
In real terms, and while the cost of living has gone up 400%. And so, we know, we write about it in the book that the number companies need to look at around compensation nowadays isn’t minimum wage and it isn’t market wage. It actually needs to start with what’s called a living wage, which is an economic calculation of what somebody needs to earn to avoid a substandard of living.

And what we know is that, in nearly every state in the US, a living wage is $17 an hour. But here’s the rub, that’s for a household of one. If you add a child, the living wage in the United States for a household with one parent and one adult is above $30 an hour. If that adult earns less than $30 an hour, they will struggle to afford adequate food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medicine, all of it.

And so, when we see folks who are changing jobs, for many of them, it is not about the money except for those for whom it is entirely about the money, and their choices around money aren’t being driven by greed, they’re not being driven by entitlement. They’re being driven by survival.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Yes, living wage is near and dear to my heart when I’m hiring out of developing countries, and, sure enough, it lets me get fantastic quality talent because most people aren’t, “Oh, can I get away with giving you three bucks an hour? Then I will.” It’s like, “Okay. Well, good luck getting the finest talent from these nations.” That’s a whole other conversation.

Joe Mull
And that’s part of the reason we saw, finally after so much availability in the labor market over the last two, three years, especially since COVID, is organizations, employers have been forced to push wages up. They’re sort of reckoning with the sins of those 40 years and recognizing that, in that supply and demand model, we actually need to stand out more.

But here’s the crazy thing. There’s just been a bunch of news coverage over the past three or four weeks here in the US about how wage growth has actually slid back just a little bit this year. It’s not keeping pace with what it had been before. And what’s that old quote about “History is doomed to repeat itself”? We have these employers who are looking around, and going, “Oh, well, if the labor market is cooling just a bit, I’m going to try to get away with paying people less than I was coming through the door than I did a year or two ago.”

And in the aftermath of so many years of people being underpaid, you’re immediately creating a flight risk when that person walks through the door and knows that they’re not getting all that they could have, or they find out that somebody else in the company came in at a higher wage, or there’s an organization across the street that has decided not to slide back onto those lower wages and recognizes there’s an economic challenge for most people across their organization and they continue to pay at that level.

Pete Mockaitis
So much good stuff. This is good real talk about compensation that I appreciate. So, let’s say, okay, we check that box. You, as an employer, you are providing solidly above living wage, so that’s cool. So, then tell us, what are the highest leverage points, I guess, in terms of facilitating loyalty, in terms of what is something, a dimension here, that’s really broken really frequently, and is actually not that hard to fix? Joe, where shall we start?

Joe Mull
Well, one of the things that comes to mind for me is workload. So, we know that workloads in the last 20 years in the United States have continued to explode, and it was driven through the ‘90s and into the early 2000s by what we refer to as rightsizing or efficiency. In organizations, you would see the work of three people became the work of two people, and then, suddenly, that amount of work was foisted onto one person as organizations look to maximize shareholder value and revenue.

And so, we live in this world now where organizations of every shape and size are operating with minimum staffing thresholds. And we think and we connect all of the labor struggles that we’re having right now, and turnover, and The Great Resignation with COVID. But if you remember 2019, burnout was at an all-time high in the US workforce before anybody ever heard of COVID.

We took fewer vacation days as Americans than every other developed nation on earth prior to COVID. And the number one reason people don’t take vacation time in the US is fear of falling behind at work. And so, we know that our expectations of what one person can reasonably accomplish have slowly moved. In fact, we know managers here in the US, we know that their workloads have increased by more than 30% in just the last seven years.

And so, if we want to create a workplace where people join, and they stay, and they care and try, we want to create a workplace that doesn’t disrupt people’s quality of life. We have to look at workloads, and we have to look at staffing levels, and we have to disperse that workload across a greater number of people so that people aren’t running at 100% capacity all the time.

There was actually just some research that came out over the summer that pointed to, “What’s the sweet spot?” And forgive me for not knowing the exact source of that research right off the top of my head right now but I can certainly send it to you.

Pete Mockaitis
You are forgiven, Joe.

Joe Mull
But it said that about the sweet spot for effort and capacity around workload was right about 85%. That if you asked people to work to about 85% of their effort and capacity most of the time, you’ve actually hit a sort of Goldilocks kind of just right sweet spot because what happens is, that leaves enough time for people to build camaraderie, to engage in professional development, to have a little bit more creativity around their work, to invest time and effort into, if you’re a manager, building more relationships and trust with your employees.

And if something happens, and you need to ask your employees to ramp up, they have space to give. It’s the difference between putting the pedal to the metal in the car and driving with the accelerator pressed to the floor the whole time versus leaving a little something behind so that if you need to go up a hill, you have a little bit more there to push on, and so, I think workload is a big part of this.

In terms of how you fix it, we got to increase the staffing levels in a lot of organizations, we have to get involved and invested in evaluating the individual workloads that people have, or we got to figure out where we can minimize those a little bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, you must be really popular amongst the executives when you’re saying these things, like, “Joe, I’m hearing that we need to spend a lot more money. Joe, I need to pay people more per hour and get fewer hours out of them. How am I supposed to survive in my business, competitive forces, blah, blah, blah, blah?”

Joe Mull
Well, you know what I like, I like gin and tonics. So, here’s what I would tell an executive, I’d say, “Let’s sit down at the bar, and if you are so inclined to order a grownup beverage, what my wife and I call a drink-y drink, I’ll order a gin and tonic, you order what you want to order. And on the back of a napkin, we’re going to do some math. I’m going to ask you, what’s your turnover in the positions that you’re struggling to keep? How many did you lose last quarter? How many do you have open right now?”

“Because we know it costs between half to two times a position’s salary to replace that position in an organization. I’m going to ask, how much time your managers are spending on recruitment? How much time are they spending on performance management issues? I’m going to ask you on the back of that napkin, can we find a way to calculate the impact on your customer experience if you’re understaffed, or if your customers encounter someone who is not fully emotionally and psychologically engaged in their work.”

“And we’ve very quickly going to come up with probably millions of dollars of invisible costs that don’t always show up on the balance sheet that we know are offset if we can invest just a little bit more in the employee experience.” I was just telling an executive the other day, “You’ve got to choose your hard. You can run an organization on a minimum staffing threshold. You can run an organization paying people as little as possible. And you’re going to have some hard challenges as a result of that in terms of quality of product and service delivery, retention, churn, turnover, etc.”

“Or, you can invest more in the employee experience. You can pay people a little bit more. Ask them to work a little bit less. You can invest in quality-of-life initiatives. And is that hard? It is absolutely hard but only one of those hard sets of problems comes with a higher quality of product and service and a better customer experience, which is going to lead to improvement in every metric you care about in your organization as an executive.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve made the case. And speaking of numbers, 85% of effort and capacity, am I measuring that in hours?

Joe Mull
Oh, that’s a good question.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, on the numerator and hours on the denominator, and they cancel out, yielding a percentage?

Joe Mull
There’s a couple of different instruments that are being used popularly right now to measure workload. One of them is a Task Index that was actually built and founded by NASA, and so it does evaluate time but it also evaluates perception of effort. So, think about a one-on-one conversation that you might have with a direct report that asks them, “What are the parts of your job that demand the most time and attention and energy? What are the parts of your job that energize you versus what are the parts of your job that actually leave you feeling defeated or exhausted?”

And this isn’t a conversation about what someone can or can’t “handle” because that frames it in all the wrong way, and we know that workers will lie because they don’t want to give their perception that they can’t handle certain things in their job because that just works against them. But if we evaluate both time and perception and effort, it starts to give us a more complete picture of how workload is actually impacting someone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I guess I’m just thinking if a manager or a team is looking to get a sense of this, like, “All right, 85% is the number I’m shooting for. I do the NASA inventory to see what’s up.” I guess what I’m thinking is that it can really vary person by person in terms of physical fitness and vitality, or even season by season of a person’s life, it’s like, “Hey, my parents are aging and there’s a whole lot I’m dealing with there which sucks my energy outside of…”

Joe Mull
Or, season by season in the organization because there are some months of the year where a particular kind of work might be more demanding than in other slow times.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess I’m wondering, it seems like it’s not as straightforward saying, “Hey, 40 hours is the whole size of the pie, so 85% equals 34.” It sounds like it’s not quite that straightforward here, Joe.

Joe Mull
Yeah. And you also have to factor in, “How do people like to work?” So, I have one employee on my team who loves to be busy, like borderline overwhelmed. She thrives in it. She asks for it. She says, “Give me more,” whereas, I thought other people who really want to take on a little bit less so that they can go deeper and perform at a level that they think is a bit of a higher quality.

So, this is where the relationships that you build with your direct reports, one on one, truly matter, and it’s where just using an instrument like the one we talked about, like the Task Index alone, isn’t going to give you a complete snapshot of what people need to be at their best every day. And so, if you’re familiar with the concept of stay interviews, the idea is the opposite of exit interviews.

If someone’s decided to leave an organization, we ask them, “What could we have done differently?” or, “How can we improve?” And if you think about it, exit interviews are absurd. I’m a recovering HR professional, and I tell organizations all the time, “Exit interviews are stupid. Let’s stop doing them.” Because, if you think about how absurd they are, Pete, it’s, “Okay, we’ve got somebody who’s got one foot out the door, they’re leaving, they have no stakes here whatsoever, ‘Hey, now would be a great time for you to give us some feedback.’”

Well, why don’t we have that conversation with the people who actually stay, where we actually make time, and maybe it’s just once or twice a year, maybe it’s once a quarter? And we sit down with folks, and we say, “Tell me about what’s working for you here. Tell me about something you’d love to see changed around here. If you ran this place, what’s something you would do differently? What do you love about your work? What keeps you here? If you were to leave, what would the reason be? What energizes you about your work? What would you like to learn more about in the year ahead? Or, what would you like to do more of or less of in the year ahead?”

It’s really about getting inside that person’s head and their heart to understand what’s important to them, how this job fits into their life, and how you can turn their job at this place into their ideal job and a destination workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super. And let’s say someone listening here is the employee, and they would love for their organization, their team, their manager to deliver all the better on their internal scorecard, how can we nudge things in that positive direction when we don’t hold all the cards and power?

Joe Mull
Yeah, there are certainly power dynamics at play in terms of how risky is that conversation? But it really does come down to a conversation with your, first, your direct supervisor. If something is missing, then can we ask for it? And I think that’s one of my favorite parts of this framework that we’ve written about in this book, of ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss is it’s giving people both at the organization and leadership level and at the individual contributor level, it’s given them a vocabulary that we can use to talk about what I’m getting.

Because for years, what we’ve advised leaders to do is, “Hey, if you want to know what employees want from their workplace or from their bosses, you should ask them,” and that’s true. It’s 100% true. But employees don’t always know exactly what they want, or they don’t necessarily have the language or the vocabulary to put their finger on it. And so, we wrote this in such a way that it created some language around it.

And so, I can go to my supervisor, and I can say, “Hey, this job is working well for me in terms of flexibility, and in terms of benefits, and in terms of workload. But in terms of compensation, it’s falling short, and that feels to be like the one missing piece for me that would make this my ideal job, and it’s the one thing that makes me consider maybe looking around someplace else. Can we have a conversation about opportunity to grow my compensation, what the timeline might be for that? What would be your openness to that conversation and see where it goes?”

We know, for example, that right now, the shortest path to a significant pay increase is to change employers. But employers are also recognizing that as well, and they’re stepping up in some big ways to actually increase salaries to prevent people from leaving. And if you’re in an industry that’s really struggling with filling positions, if you’re in healthcare, if you’re in education, if you’re a laborer, if you’re in management, if you’re in corrections, if you’re in law enforcement, these are industries right now that have been decimated with turnover.

So, there’s more opportunity than ever before to say, “You know what, I would consider staying but we need to move the needle on this a little bit.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. So, Joe, I think each of these things make sense in terms of if they’re in place, folks are more likely to stay, and they’re also more likely to be motivated. Can you share with us, is there a distinction between the psychological forces that keep people staying versus the psychological forces that keep people fired up and hungry to make stuff happen?

Joe Mull
Great question. So, when I am invited to be a keynote speaker at conferences or for corporate meetings, one of the first things I will do is I put a question on the board that says, “What motivates employees to care and try at work?” And I’ve got some of this cool software where everybody could take out their cellphone and they can type in, like, one-word answers, and we create this word cloud, and it sort of morphs and shifts on the screen.

And every single time I do this, the words that are the biggest, because the words that get entered the most across the group appear larger in the word cloud, the words that appear most as answers to this question, “What motivates employees to care and try at work?” are all related to money. You’ll see pay, you’ll see compensation, you’ll see raises.

And what’s interesting is that pay and benefits have very little to do with effort at work. They have everything to do with that join and stay. They have everything to do with hiring and retention. Money is about hiring and retentions, “Come through the door. Stay here with us.” That has a lot to do with money. Once we get them through the door and the money is right, it no longer has an impact on people’s effort.

The other things that we’ve been talking about here – belonging, purpose, a great boss who trusts and coaches and advocates, getting to do work that aligns with my strengths – these are the things that activate people’s commitment. Because if I come to work every day, and I’m getting my ideal job, compensation, workload, flexibility, that job fits into my life in a great way. But then I’m also getting to do work that gives me purpose, with a team I love being a part of, that aligns with my gifts, for a boss that I like working for, all of a sudden, we look around, and we say, “Wow, I hit the lottery. I want to be a part of this. I want to do great work.”

And so, those first three pieces of ideal job, they have a lot more to do with retention. The rest of that employalty model has everything to do with effort.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Joe, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Joe Mull
I appreciated what you said at the top about how it really does seem like common sense. One of my favorite things that I mentioned about the book is that, quite simply, we know people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job. Do we understand what a great job is nowadays though? And it really does come back to quality of life. So, thank you for noticing, and I think that is absolute truth.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m flattered. Absolute truth. That’s what we’re going for. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joe Mull
I am known for repeating the quote that, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I say this to my kids a lot. I tell it to myself as a lot as an entrepreneur, as a speaker, as an author to remind myself not to benchmark myself against someone else’s perceptions or successes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Joe Mull
I am a big fan of a lot of the research that appeared in Gallup’s book a few years ago called “It’s the Manager.” And my favorite little nugget from that is that they found that in organizations with some of the highest scores around employee engagement, that the managers in that organization had two things in common.

First, they were a part of a peer group of managers. Second, they had an ongoing commitment to professional development. And if you think about it, isn’t that the most simple, beautiful structure for getting better bosses in the world, is, “Hey, let’s make sure that these leaders have other leaders to talk to about being a leader. And, hey, let’s see if we can nurture within them an ongoing commitment to growing as a leader. Do they read books? Do they go to conferences? Do they listen to podcasts?”

It would seem that those two things alone actually not only move the needle on leadership but on engagement.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share a favorite book?

Joe Mull
My favorite book is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Joe Mull
I use Siri a lot. I’m not going to say her name because she’s going to light up on my watch or my phone. But I ask her to remind me of things all the time. I’ll park my car at the airport, and as I’m leaving, I’ll say, “Hey, Siri, remind me on Friday at 10:00 p.m. that I am parked in 10-B.” And then when I’m landing Friday at 10:00 p.m., my phone goes “You’re parked in 10-B.” So, that’s probably my favorite tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Joe Mull
Vacation. I am a big believer in taking time away to be with my people, my kids, my wife, my dog. And I’m a big believer that a once-a-year vacation is not nearly enough. I believe that everybody should get away multiple times a year. I know there’s a lot of privilege in that statement, socioeconomic privilege, and entrepreneurial privilege and whatnot, but the truth is we are better for others when we take better care of ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Joe Mull
“Pull the weeds.” So, my first book was called Cure for the Common Leader, and when I did a lot of keynoting on that, and still around this topic, I talk about how we tend to tolerate toxic employees for far too long, in that they are weeds in the garden. They masquerade as flowers but they truly are weeds in a garden. And if you allow a weed to go too long and grow too strong, it suffocates the garden. And that once you know a weed is a weed, the only way to save the garden is to pull the weed.

And so, when I talk about “pull the weeds,” man, the number of people who have written to me, called me, come up to me after conferences, and said, “Hey, we pulled a weed, and it was the best thing we ever did.”

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

Joe Mull
JoeMull.com is probably the best way to go.

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

Joe Mull
Commit to creating a more humane employee experience at work. Never forget that people aren’t a commodity. People are people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Joe, this has been a treat. Thank you and I wish you much luck and fun in your employalty life.

Joe Mull
My pleasure, Pete. Thanks for having me.