Leadership & Culture Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Bob, welcome!

Bob Chapman
It’s good to here. It’s good to have this exchange.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited for this truly human exchange we’re about to have and to hear about your truly human leadership. What on earth is that?

Bob Chapman
It captures kind of the transformation we’ve been going through for the last 20 years. It’s kind of contrary to my education and my experience in the business world, which is about using people to achieve results.

Truly human leadership flips the lens through which we see those people we have the privilege of leading, to seeing them as somebody’s precious child and treating them with respect and dignity, which is truly human leadership, understanding the impact we make on people’s life, their health, and the way they go home and treat their families. So, truly human leadership is a totally different way of looking at the people you have the privilege of leading.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds good and wholesome and the way it “should be” in terms of the human experience. Tell me, what is the alternative? What is the norm?

Bob Chapman
Well, you know, I look back on my business education, I took management classes, got a management degree and got a job in management so I thought my job was to manage people, to achieve results. And if we needed to lay them off, fire them, you know, it’s just business, you know? And so, I saw people in my education and my experience, they were functions for my success.

I was a nice guy. We had a nice company, but the way you see people impacts the way you treat people. And so, you know, our education system doesn’t prepare us to care for people. It prepares us to use people to achieve results, and people don’t get promoted for caring for people. They get promoted for achieving results.

So, it’s a totally different way of looking at leadership as a profound responsibility to the people you have the privilege to have in your span of care.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that’s interesting. You mentioned layoffs is one place where the rubber meets the road. So, in your world, layoffs don’t happen or under what circumstances would they happen?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think the best way to look at it is, again, we’re taught it’s about achieving financial results. And as you know, I think in 2025, layoffs are at an all-time high. Only 2020 had so many layoffs. So, you’re seeing major corporations using layoffs, announcing layoffs to send a message to the shareholders that they’re going to make more money. And we use people to achieve that signal.

Because why would a company announce they’re going to lay off 10,000 people? Why would they announce that when they’re going to, we know psychologically the damage done to the people who get laid off is horrible? And we know the impact on the people that don’t get laid off that are still there, they don’t feel safe because they could be next.

So, again, we never discussed layoff in my education, in my experience. It was just things we do. And so, the transformation was, when we saw people not as functions for my success, but we saw them as somebody’s precious child, a revelation I had, you can’t lay off your kids.

And so, I would say to you that it’s, you know, having been in business leadership for 50 years, the first half of my career was pretty much, “That’s just things you do. It’s not pleasant. You don’t really want to do that, but it’s the way you make numbers work and the market rewards you.”

So, layoffs hang over most people’s heads. They don’t feel safe, “How can I decide to raise a family, buy a home, get married, if one day they’re going to walk in and say, ‘You know what, to improve our earnings, we’re going to have to let you go. I know we recruited you, but right now we’re going to have to let you go.’”

So, a lot of people in our country feel a lack of dignity because they don’t feel safe. They feel they’re being used. I think Tom Friedman said it beautifully to your audience and they’ll like this. He said, “More than a poverty of money, we have a poverty of dignity.” And when people feel used, not cared for, they feel a sense of humiliation. And when you feel a sense of humiliation, you’ll see anger and unrest like you’ve never seen before.

So, what are we seeing right now? We’re seeing anger and unrest that confuses us. Why? We have a very prosperous economy but we don’t know how to care for each other. And that is the foundation of truly human leadership. And layoffs are just one of those tools that we are taught in business school and rewarded for by the public to achieve financial results. And that, it’s sad.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, let’s talk about, perhaps, that tension there. I think that there may be a subset of folks who say, “Well, Bob, I mean, that sounds really nice and pleasant and enjoyable, and, yeah, I’d like to work in such a place, but in reality, we have a duty to maximize the shareholder value and, accordingly, costs need to be kept at their minimum relative to the revenue that is attached to them, etc.” So, when folks push back, what’s your response?

Bob Chapman
Yeah, well, then I’d say to if you want to optimize your profitability, which is our responsibility, because the business model, it’s interesting, and I think I want to get this message across to your audience. When Harvard wrote the case study on our company about 10 years ago, they invited me up to be in the class and then the professor asked something I never thought of. He said, “Is Barry-Wehmiller’s success its business model or its culture?” And they voted. Seventy-five percent voted our culture was the key to our success. And then Jan Rivkin, the professor, looked at me and said, “Bob, do you want to comment?”

And I got up and I said, “I understand why you think our culture is the foundation of our success, but let me tell you how I would answer it. The foundation of our stewardship of our people is the business model. It’s not about getting the right people on the bus. It’s about building a safe bus, which is your business model. And then having drivers who are your leaders who know where they’re going and how to drive that bus safely. And anybody that gets on this bus is going to be safe.”

So, it is the responsibility of leaders to design a business model and to keep that business model efficient and to not use this brutal tactic of layoffs and rightsizing and downsizing and justifying that we failed to do that. We failed to keep this company efficient and we had to hurt people to achieve the efficiency.

You know, I was on a panel with a CEO of a major bank, a very impressive gentleman, and he said they went from, and I think this case, from 300,000 people to 200,000 people without a layoff by using natural attrition. When somebody retires, they brainstorm how they can redesign the work to not have to replace that person.

And if you do that every day, which is a matter of, you know, “I don’t want to gain weight so I don’t have to lose weight.” So, it is a way of viewing your responsibility. If you think your responsibility is only to the shareholders and you don’t care about the people that you impact, that’s sad. Your responsibility is to all the people who put their trust in you – shareholders and all other stakeholders.

But again, it’s not just about being nice. It’s making sure you have a good business model, and that a business model stays efficient, not has to be hammered once in a while with 20,000, 30,000 layoffs. Layoffs are a tool that the market likes, and it rewards you because you’re going to be more profitable. But if that is all you’re in, that’s sad.

We are absolutely destroying our country for economic gain and not human gain. So, we’ve got the most prosperous economy in our history and have the highest level of depression, anxiety, and suicide we’ve ever had. Why? Because people don’t feel they matter. They’re just tools for somebody else’s success.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you, perhaps, unpack for us what an efficient business model that has no need to ever do layoffs looks like, as compared to a more typical business model that has layoffs just in part of the cycle?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think the story that most people tell about Barry-Wehmiller, in our book and a lot of people talk about is ‘08, ‘09, which hit all of us. And we had developed what we call the Guiding Principle of Leadership, kind of the constitution of our culture. These are things that define and guide us in our culture.

And I was flying around the world, talking to our team members about this. And the more you talked about it, the more it was implanted in my heart and soul. And ‘08, ‘09 hits, I walked in to our board meeting in January of ’09, and my board looks at me and said, “Bob, don’t you need to lay off people?” And I said, “Why do you say that?” They said, “Well, everybody’s laying off people, Bob.” And I said, “No, I think with our backlog, we’re going to be okay.”

About a month later, I was in Italy, visiting our operations in Italy, I get an email from the United States, our largest customer, major customer, put on hold a major order we had that was giving us significant work. It’s one thing not to get a new order. It’s another thing for the orders you’ve got to disappear. And I sat in my hotel room.

Prior to us having these Guiding Principles of Leadership, I would have done what everybody else did. I would have said, “Well, we need to let people go. We need to let 20-30% of our people go because we don’t have work for them.” But because I talked about, “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people,” which is our guiding, our North Star, I sat there in my room, and said, “What would a caring family do if a member of the family was in stress?”

We would all take a little pain so that family member would not have to take that pain. That stimulated an idea I had never heard of before, never considered, and it was, “What if everybody took a month without pay, whenever they wanted, so they could be with their family, their friends, time of year? We’ll give you a month without pay, and we’ll get through this without letting anybody go.”

I emailed back to the United States, flew back to the United States a few days later, they were ready to implement it. The reaction of our team members was unbelievably positive. They were more than willing to take a month without pay. A, they got the time with their family, but, B, they felt they were helping their fellow team members keep their job. This cloud over their head disappeared because, all of a sudden, they felt safe.

We even had people volunteer to take somebody else’s time off because they knew the other person wasn’t in as good a financial position than they were. It was unbelievable the environment we created. And it was only because we had this North Star that said, “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.”

And after that, we learned what’s called Business Excellence Staffing Model. As much as you want to design your products to be efficient, cost-effective, you need to design your organization to be cost-effective. And that’s a powerful tool. And so, we constantly are monitoring, when somebody retires or moves away or whatever reason somebody leaves, that natural attrition, we brainstorm, “Is there a way to redesign that work, not to dump it on somebody else, but to redesign it, to eliminate it?”

So, it’s a constant process of being efficient so there’s no need to let people go because you didn’t gain any weight. You are trim and fit to fight. So, again, that’s what a major financial institution did that I was incredibly impressed with. We learned about it through a Lean event up in Canada, but it is profound.

So, it’s a failure of leadership when we lay people off, but the market rewards us and the boards see the share price go up. So, it’s a hard struggle because they weren’t taught to care. They were taught to use people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a very beautiful story. And I love, one, you asked a novel question as opposed to, “Hey, we lost an order. I guess we got to shrink the staff. Badda bing. Badda boom.” Wait, stop, pause, think, ask a fresh question, “If in a family, what would we do? Okay.” And that gives rise to a novel solution.

And, boy, I can sure imagine that, yeah, when you are thinking about that decision-making and your own autonomy is preserved, “Okay, do I want to take a month off and which month? Okay, and maybe multiple. Got it,” that feels a lot better. And it’s, in a way, a win-win when you don’t have the money, but it’s like, “Okay, I’m helping my colleagues out and I’m getting to be with family or do a cool thing with this time.”

And I could really see how that can dramatically improve the connectedness among teammates. So that’s very cool, Bob. Lay it on me, what are some additional principles and practices, specifically, that folks in all kinds of organizations can implement?

Bob Chapman
Well, seriously, again, I had never heard of this practice until our team came up with it. But every organization should look at, “Are the people I invite into our organization, with the expectation of being with our company, are they safe? Is our business model designed such that there is a job for them and they can trust us?” That is a foundational responsibility when we invite people into our company.

And so, we work extremely hard to stay financially, absolutely, rock solid, which we are, okay? And I’ll just add, our share price has gone up 12% compounded for 25 years, okay? And so, you’d say, “Well, gee, we outperformed some of the legendary investors in this country because we are good stewards of our business model.”

So, you know, business needs to be more human. And again, we originally called it People-Centric Leadership, leadership focused on the people we have the privilege of leading. But Simon Sinek came along and said, “No, no, Bob, this is truly human leadership. This is the way we are called to treat others.”

Again, when you see the issues that we face in our country and the people who, you know, 65% of all people would give up a salary because if they could fire their boss. We have TGIF, “Thank God it’s Friday,” get the hell out of this place and have a beer and kill the pain. I imagine a day, as you will understand, where we have TGIM, “Thank goodness it’s Monday. Get away from the kids, the spouse and be with a group of people who I really enjoy being with, okay?” That is my goal, TGIM.

And again, this is not an American issue. This is a global issue. People don’t feel they matter. And when people don’t feel they matter, you get this poverty of dignity. And I’m sure your audience will understand that because leaders weren’t taught to care for people. They were taught and rewarded to use people.

So, it’s just a totally different mindset and takes extra responsibility to make sure your business model, when you invite somebody in there, you can look them in the eye and say, “You are safe in my care.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. I also learned that one of the top things you teach throughout the organization, in order to have the great powerful culture, is empathetic listening. Can you speak to this?

Bob Chapman
Yes. Through these series of revelations, I had three revelations that converted me from management to leadership, and we realized that we had been blessed with a vision of the way that would heal the brokenness in the world. And a young man, about 20 years ago, said to me, “You know, Bob, what is your greatest fear?” Now I’m an eternal optimist, so I had to think a minute and I said, “My greatest fear is we were blessed with a message that could heal the world and it would die with me.”

So, we got up the next morning after that dinner, and said, “Okay, what do great religions do to survive over centuries?” They articulate their beliefs and they have disciples that carry those beliefs forward. So, I said, “We need to create some disciples. We can’t send them back to universities because universities don’t teach people to care. They teach people to use people and reward them.”

And so, we decided we had to create our own university. I mean, this was just a breakfast conversation. And the good news is we had a whiteboard, no preconceived notion. And so, when we decided, “Well, how are we going to create disciples?” This incredibly talented team came up with three things, and the foundation, the one you mentioned, a gentleman named David Vandermolen said, “We’re going to teach empathetic, which is the greatest of all human skills, okay, to listen without judgment.

When you listen without judgment. You don’t listen to debate. You listen to validate the worth of others. I thought when you cared for somebody, you went over and talked to them. It turns out, when you listen to somebody instead of talk to them, it profoundly changes the person you care about. So, it’s just the opposite of everything I was taught and learned.

So that is the foundation of truly human leadership. That, plus recognition and celebration. We spend a lot of time teaching people how to let them know they matter in thoughtful, appropriate, timely ways all over the world, and then a culture of service. Bill Ury uses the word, “We need to move from a me-centric world to a we-centric world, where people genuinely care about others, not just themselves.” So those three classes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got the three lessons. So, within these three revelations – empathetic listing for validation, recognition and celebration, and culture of service – could you give us the rapid-fire, quick do’s and don’ts within each, just a couple powerful bullets?

Bob Chapman
In empathetic listening, the rapid-fire is don’t listen to the words because 80% of all communication is nonverbal. Don’t listen to the words, listen to what the people are really saying. That is the key, to look behind the words with the combination of their face and how they express it because a lot of times people will tell you what they think they mean, but there’s much deeper. And that’s one of the skills we learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example for what that looks, sounds, and feels like in practice?

Bob Chapman
I’ll give you a personal example that I think makes it really simple. When our son was young and about to move in his own bedroom, I walked into the house after work, and my wife, Cynthia, said, “I want to show you this wallpaper I picked out for Kyle’s room.” So, we walked up to the bedroom where he’s going to stay, and she holds this wallpaper, and said, “What do you think?”

And I’m trying to be a good husband, trying to be very thoughtful, and how do you misinterpret, “What do you think about this wallpaper?” You can’t really misinterpret, “What do you think?” So, being very thoughtful, I said, “You know, it’s really an interesting wallpaper, but don’t you think it would look better in the family room because I couldn’t imagine it being in my son’s room?”

She took the wallpaper and threw it to me, and said, “If you’re so smart, you pick out the wallpaper.” And what I realized is what Cynthia asked me, she didn’t even know it, what Cynthia asked me is, “As your wife, am I capable to pick out wallpaper for our son?” And what did I tell her? “No.” So, she didn’t even know what she was asking. I see this all the time.

There’s a lot of deeper meaning what people are asking than when we superficially think. So, taking some time to listen and think and flex to the personality type of the person are keys. Again, we’ve taught this to 20,000 people around the world, and the most common statement is, “It changed my life just to learn to listen without judgment.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing because, yeah, there’s words, but, in that example, I think it points to a common reality, which is there are deep-seated emotions, values, stakes, that feel rather personal in many, many things that we’re talking about all the time.

Bob Chapman
And I will tell you, it is the most powerful thing we have ever learned in our 22 years journey.

Because when we look at the world we have today, we teach people how to speak, articulate your beliefs. We teach people how to debate, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” But guess what we don’t teach people? We don’t teach people how to listen without judgment.

So, again, the key to me was, I am astounded 22 years later, we have taught over 20,000 people around the world to listen without judgment. And what’s equally amazing to me is that we did this in a business context. We were trying to convert managers into leaders, people who manipulate people to people who care for people. And 95% of the feedback when we began teaching these classes, was how it affected their marriage and their relationship with their children.

It never occurred to me that the way I would run Barry-Wehmiller would affect your marriage and your relationship with your children. So one of the expressions of our book is “The way we lead impacts the way people live.”

So this message of truly human leadership, given all the issues we’re facing in this country right now, is the way we could heal all of the brokenness we’re feeling in our families, in our communities, between our countries, because we would learn to listen without judgment, to learn to listen, to understand, as opposed to, “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so let’s hear it. So this empathetic listening for validation, we’re listening without judgment, and that’s super transformational. Can you share with us some tips on how that’s done?

Bob Chapman
Well, what we do is we do a DISC profile, which is basically an X-ray of your personality, okay? And then we begin, start the class with everybody kind of looking at their DISC profile, and we find you’re uniquely different.

I knew that, in life, that people are born with different hair color, different eye color, different skin color, but it never occurred to me you were born with a different personality. And that personality, you didn’t choose anymore than you chose your eye color, it creates a lens through which you experience the world, okay? A lens through which you process data.

That is why two people, two perfectly find people, can see the same exact facts and see them entirely differently. But we don’t teach people to understand how you see it. We teach people to say, “The way I saw it is right.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Now, within the listening class, could you share a transformational takeaway or exercise or thing that they do that is so valuable?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think it starts with that, what I said to you earlier, when you do the DISC profile, and you look at it, and you say, “Is this me?” And we say, “Why don’t you go home and ask your spouse?” And they come back the next day and say, “Oh, my God, this is me.”

So I think the revelation, the biggest revelation is when you see an X-ray of your personality, and you had no idea that you had these traits. And we call it style flexing.

You can’t deal with everybody the same. The golden rule is, “Treat others as you’d like to be treated.” What we realize is you need to treat others as they need to be treated, not you need to be treated because you are uniquely different.

You know, I thought, you could have a positive attitude or a negative, but when you do the DISC profile and you see the personality of people, and they then understand why they behave the way they do because of their personality, it is revealing. I mean, it gets emotional.

So that is probably the most revealing aspect of it, and also effective confrontation. It’s called Bend the Knee. How do you tell somebody what they could do to help you deal with them in a better way. It’s called effective confrontation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us some best practices for great recognition and celebration?

Bob Chapman
That’s a great question because what we found is, in business, the expression is, “I got 10 things right and I never heard a word. I got one thing wrong and I got my ass chewed out.”

And so what we developed was this cadence of looking for the goodness in other people, holding it up and saying, “Thank you,” in thoughtful, meaningful, timely ways. And it is profound because people said, “I had no idea that you thought that of me.”

It’s not about, “Okay, your five-year anniversary, top salesperson.” It’s about looking for the goodness in others, and in thoughtful, timely ways, holding that up for everybody and saying thank you. And it becomes part of your DNA to constantly be looking for the goodness in people, not the brokenness in people, the goodness in people. So that is a key to recognition and celebration.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you see it, how do you celebrate it?

Bob Chapman
It’s called FBI – Feelings, Behaviors, and Impact. We pause and we let somebody, an individual know that they have been very significant to your life. And if you just watch the body language, I mean, people say, “It’s the most meaningful event I’ve ever had because I never knew people thought this of me. It meant so much to me.”

So, it’s a skill. Again, it’s not about five years anniversary with the company. It’s not about top sales. It’s about being a good person and people wanting to say to you, “You know, you’re a good person. Let me tell you why.” And you stand there in front of a group of people gathered, And it just creates this cadence of goodness.

This cadence of always looking for the goodness in people, because we leave this world and we’re inundated through the media with the brokenness of the world. And so when we send people home, constantly being involved in recognition events, where we pause and say, “Thank you for who you are. It’s meant a lot to me.” It just gets part of your DNA and it makes a huge impact on the organization.

Again, not some big badge once a year. The cadence of this is spontaneous and it’s called Shine the Light. Shine the light in the organization, look for the goodness and hold it up and say thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that structure in terms of the feelings, like, “I feel this way because of your behaviors, and it just made this impact.” And then it is quite potent, I imagine, to be on the receiving end of that. It’s like, “Oh, this guy is totally authentically sincere about this. And these are facts, at the same time, I did do those things, and I didn’t know it made that big of an impact. Wow, that’s really cool. That just sounds like a fantastic thing to hear.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now let’s hear about your revelation about culture of service. Any best practices or do’s, don’ts you’d like to share there?

Bob Chapman
Yeah, that really came from probably 20 years ago. It occurred to me that we work with our customers to try to convince them to buy our product. We’d take them to dinner, we’d give them the information they need, and finally the customer says, “Okay, we’re going to buy your product.” And we’d say, “That’s great.” And we move on to try and get the next customer to buy it.

And, all of a sudden, it occurred to me, “What if we actually treated our customer better after they made the decision to buy it, rather than to get them to?” So I challenged this young lady, a very talented young lady, “How can we treat people better after they make the decision rather than to get them to make the decision?” And she ended up, probably spending six months, studying the idea of service.

And she ended up with an expression, “Seizing the opportunity to serve others.” Moving from, “It’s all about me,” to, “It’s all about I care for others.” And I’ll give you a trite example from my specific experience.

Cynthia and I were playing golf, and we were on a particular hole and on the green, and I said, “Cynthia, don’t forget your iron that you left on the side as we walked off the 18.” And thinking of culture of service, seizing the opportunity to serve others, instead of telling her, “Don’t forget to pick up that iron,” I went over and picked it up and handed it to her.

And, to me, business, these organizations could be the source of healing in the world if we didn’t just use people to achieve our goals but we actually became stewards, and we actually gave these people the skills to care for others as we achieve these goals.

So, again, all I can say to you, 22 plus years into this, nobody has ever debated what I just shared with you. People feel it is the key to the world the way it was intended to be, and it could heal this poverty of dignity we have in the world, where we have economic prosperity, but we don’t have human prosperity.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now could you share with us a favorite book?

Bob Chapman
My favorite book was a book called The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. And it made leadership seem so simple about caring for people. It was probably 30 years ago I read it.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite habit?

Bob Chapman
Pause and think. Too much to me of people’s lives is reacting to how to impact as opposed to creating their future.

One of things I would leave your listeners with is, in the context of these questions, is write your eulogy. What do you want people to say about your life someday when that comes that you’re going to leave this world, 100 years from now? But think about, what do you want people to say about your life? And then go make it true. Live life with kind of a North Star about who you want to be.

Because I find that most people, 95% of people, simply react to what happens, as opposed to putting it in some context of where you’re going. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know how to deal with things? So writing your eulogy is a critical aspect, to me, of living life with intention and purpose so that someday, when your day comes, you look back and say, “I did my best and used my skills fully in the service of others.”

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

Bob Chapman
Well, we have the Chapman and Co. Leadership Institute where we are sharing with companies around the country about how to embrace this. We have the Chapman Foundation for Caring Communities, and we have Barry-Wehmiller Outreach.

So there’s a massive amount of information on the internet about this journey. And, obviously, the book is a story of my journey from management to leadership and then how to do it. And then the latest edition came out with what is the impact.

And, again, the way we lead impacts the way people live. And we can begin to heal this brokenness we’re all feeling if we embrace our profound impact we have on other people’s lives, moving from a me-centric world to a we-centric world where we care for others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Bob, thank you.

Bob Chapman
Thank you for your interest in the message. And my hope is that your listeners will wake up tomorrow with a better hope for the future that we can heal this brokenness in the world if we learn to care for each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome!

Michael Norton
Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book and rituals. Could you kick us off by sharing one of the most important or meaningful or fun rituals for you personally and what makes it special for you?

Michael Norton
One of the weird or most specific idiosyncratic ones in my family is that we do, we started this during COVID, during the pandemic when joy was in short supply, I guess I would say. And so, we decided that we would start sticking candles in foods other than cakes. And so, we have a tradition now of happy meatloaf to you where we sing, we put candles in meatloaf and sing the happy birthday song to the meatloaf, and then blow out the candles and then have the meatloaf.

And it’s, on the one hand, completely ridiculous. On the other hand, it’s completely ridiculous we put candles in cakes also, it’s just that we’re used to it. So, for me, it’s just an example of how random rituals really are. Even the ones we’re used to, when you unpack them, turn out to be often pretty strange in their own right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what I love about that is, yes, it’s weird and it’s idiosyncratic and all that, but it does, I think there’s more joy, there’s more connection, there’s more family fun in the food experience by doing that. So why the heck not? Just go ahead and do that.

Michael Norton
This is one of these things that many, many rituals can bring much more emotion to things than, otherwise, we can get out of them. And I think that’s kind of a gift, actually, of rituals is that they can elevate things from boring to something more meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s fun, now you got me thinking about family food times and whenever I make something and the kids ask, “Oh, what’s in it?” I think they know what’s going to come. I’ll mention a few of the ingredients, but then I’ll take on sort of a super sweet tone of voice, I’ll say, “But you know what the most important ingredient of all is?” And they’re very much onto those, they’ll say, “Love.” And I don’t know, it’s just fun. It’s just fun, so we do it.

Michael Norton
The other day I made a “joke” that I thought was funny, and my 9-year-old daughter, she didn’t react, she was silent. And so, I said, “You know, that was supposed to be a joke.” And she said, here’s how she did it. She paused and said, “Sadly, I know.” That was the biggest burn maybe of my life from that. So, I feel your pain on they know what’s coming and they’re not always super impressed, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, Michael, rituals are kind of fun. They’re kind of nifty, but could you share with us, what makes them a potentially valuable, important things for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Norton
Yeah, I think that when you look at people’s work lives, what we found was, so one of the things we did with rituals is we started in a couple of domains like grief. And then we would talk to people and they would say, “Oh, but have you looked at it in this domain, like marriages? Have you looked at it in families? Have you looked at it?” And, eventually, of course, “Have you looked at these at work?”

And one of the things we found was that rituals really pattern our entire workday because, starting at home, actually, because we have our morning ritual that we do with our coffee and the things we read and the people. Many people have stuff they do on their commute. That’s kind of a ritual that they do every single time.

Then you have something when you get to your desk. Often people have a thing that they do every morning. Then there’s lunch, they have a thing that they do. Then there’s team meetings and different teams have different rituals. Then at the end of the day, you close stuff down to leave. Then when you get home, you’ve got something to kind of leave work behind and get back into your life mode.

And so, you just have, I’m speaking quickly because all of these we’ve looked at, but you can just see how they, we think of rituals as these weddings or something, kind of they happen very rarely, but we see, really, that they’re embedded in our lives at home and at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so they happen, sure. They are ever-present. And you make a distinction between a ritual and a habit. What is that distinction?

Michael Norton
Can I ask you a ridiculous question?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m listening.

Michael Norton
Do you, in the morning, brush your teeth first and then shower, or do you shower and then brush your teeth?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I shower and brush my teeth.

Michael Norton
You’re saying that as though it’s obvious.

Pete Mockaitis
More specifically, I dip into cold water and then brush my teeth while warming up with hot water simultaneously because it was cold in that cold water.

Michael Norton
Interesting. And how would you feel if tomorrow I said, “Change that up. Change the order”? Can you do the toothbrush first?

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, we could. It just feels disappointing.

Michael Norton
So, the first question, oddly enough, about half of people brush first and then shower, and the other half shower and then brush, this is true like all over the world, so humans haven’t decided what the right order is. But the more important question to your question about habits versus rituals is about half of people, if I say, “Do you mind switching the order tomorrow?” they say, “Sure, absolutely. No problem.”

And about half of people say something like, “I don’t want to. It would feel weird,” you said disappointing, “I have some negative emotion around changing the order.” And for me, I mean, those are the simplest behaviors we engage in, but you can see, for some people, brushing their teeth and showering, it’s like a habit, “You know, I have to do these six things in the morning and I can check them off in any order. It doesn’t matter to me.”

And for other people, even these silly innocuous behaviors, have something in them, some emotion in them that makes them quite different from just a boring habit because we care about what order they’re done in. And when we do it in the right order, people say, “I feel ready to face the day.” And when they do it in the wrong order, they say, “I’ll feel weird all day.”

So, rituals, you know, people in robes with candles is further out on the continuum. But even with tooth brushing and showering, you can see how the same behaviors, for some people, they’re kind of black and white, “Let’s get them done.” And for other people, they get imbued with something more, like putting candles on meatloaf imbues it with something more.

And one thing that I like about the shower and toothbrush thing is you can see it’s not just that rituals are good. Rituals provoke emotion in us, which can be very positive, but sometimes very negative as well. So, it’s almost like a risk-reward. If you have a morning ritual, if you do it the way you like, you feel great, but you run the risk of, you know, your kid comes in and interrupts you, and now you can’t do it the way you like, and now you feel worse than you would have if you never had the ritual to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a helpful distinction. There are some emotional stakes in the world of ritual. Okay. And tell me, any other surprises you’ve learned as you were studying this in depth?

Michael Norton
I asked people, so if something bad happens and you have a superstition and you say, “Knock on wood,” how many times do you knock?”

Pete Mockaitis
About two-ish?

Michael Norton
Two-ish. So, about half of people knock twice and half knock three times, and they don’t know why. They don’t know when it started. They get very upset with each other. I can do it in a classroom and see half of them do it one way, half do the other way. They look disgusted at the other people, like, “What is wrong? What kind of a person would only knock twice instead of three times?”

And if you’re a three-knock person, and someone knocks twice, you have this potential energy of you’ve got to have the third knock or everything’s going to go really wrongly. And this is, again, this idea that, first off, it’s just knocking on a thing. We knock on things all the time and we don’t worry about how many times we knock, but it gets imbued with a crazy amount of emotion and meaning that I actually feel like I’m warding off bad things happening to me and my loved ones if I knock the right number of times.

And that’s what’s, to me, really so surprising about it is that, again, like brushing your teeth, knocking on a table, they’re so mundane. They’re so, in a sense, unimportant. Well, dentists would say brushing your teeth is very important, but in the grand scheme. But they provoke this insane amount of emotion, feeling good, feeling bad, with knocking on wood, feeling angry at other people for doing it “wrong” so that it constantly surprised, honestly, in all the work that we did, and how it’s often the small things that provoke an enormous amount of emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is surprising. And I’m intrigued, when it comes to rituals and work, you opened the book sharing tales of writers Flannery O’Connor and Maya Angelou with their rituals. How might we get some of the reward side of these rituals and more of it?

Michael Norton
You can spend, basically, a day of your life, if you want, Googling a celebrity’s name and the word ritual. Any athlete, any musician, any politician, just type their name and then type ritual, and it is astonishing how many of these people have some kind of ritual that they do at some point during their day or during their life. And they’re very elaborate and they’re very idiosyncratic.

And so, one of my favorites is Rafael Nadal, who has, if you are a tennis fan, you already know where I’m going. Before every serve, he has a very elaborate thing that he does with his forehead and his wristbands and everything. And he even, it’s been described as he picks his wedgie before every single serve. So, he’s got very elaborate sort of thing.

And when you ask him, “Why do you do that? Would you be okay without it?” he will say, “Yeah, no, of course, I could still serve without it. But when I do it, I feel ready.” And I think that’s really, really key because it’s not that…well, there’s two things. One is, if he doesn’t do it, he’s still Rafael Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players ever.

The other thing is, if I copy his ritual, I still stink. Unfortunately, rituals aren’t magical, where somehow if I turn around three times, I get to be amazing. That’s not how they work. But what they can do, again, is change how we’re feeling. And he’s telling us that he’s feeling nervous about the next serve. And this ritual that he’s come up with makes him feel like he’s in the zone and ready to go.

And we see people using those kinds of rituals, even every famous person, as I said, but also people just in their everyday lives. And one of the most common ones that people will say, if I say, “Have you ever done anything before a meeting or before a big talk or you had to present to the whole team?” and people say, “You know what, I do actually do something.”

And I say, “Well, what do you do?” And they kind of lean in kind of like they’re conspiratorially, and they say, “Well, I go into the bathroom and I check under the stalls to make sure nobody else is there. And then I stand in front of the sink and look at myself in the mirror and tell myself, ‘You can do this.’”

And I say, “You’re like the ninth person today to tell me that you do that.” So, people think it’s very weird to do that. And yet it’s incredibly common in our, again, everyday lives that people do something when they’re feeling nervous to help them feel subjectively like, “I’m ready to go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. But that specific ritual of going to the bathroom, making sure it’s empty, and then checking, looking at yourself in the mirror and the pep talk is something you’re hearing again and again.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And what I love is it’s not like it’s in some ancient text, and it’s been happening for thousands of years. For example, there weren’t mirrors at one time, so you couldn’t do it even if you wanted to.

But people often develop independently the same kinds of rituals. Because if you think what they’re doing, you need privacy in order to do this, to psych yourself up, because you’re going to talk to yourself sometimes. And the place to do it is in the bathroom rather than in the lunch room or something like that.

So, we’re pretty creative when we come up with rituals, like picking your wedgie also is not in ancient text as far as I know. But then once we have them in place, they’re our go-to. And we really try to do the same thing every time when we’re feeling nervous before something big.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, does it work? Will we give a better speech if we give ourselves the pep talk or we pick a better serve if we pick the wedgie?

Michael Norton
This is, mean, the sad thing is, so when we started studying rituals, we did have the hope that, somehow, we would discover some magical sequence that humans could engage in that actually would make them different people. You know, that somehow if you clapped 19 times, you had the strength of, something like that. And, unfortunately, again, that’s not what we see there. They’re not magical.

But what I teach undergraduates, many of them are really gifted athletes who, by the way, all have their own pre-performance rituals as well. And one of the things that they say is that when they do their ritual, they’ll often use the phrase, “It kind of helps me get out of my own way, that my thoughts and nervousness are getting in my way of performing the way I know I can perform, and making me actually mess up in a sense. Like, I’m not in the zone, I’m not ready to go.”

And so, I see these rituals, it’s not so much that they make us magically better, although I wish they did. It’s that sometimes they’re actually just allowing us to perform at the best level that we’re capable of. And that, in and of itself, is a useful tool to have. For me, even if rituals didn’t affect performance at all, one reason they’re so ubiquitous is because they’re still working in the sense that they’re helping us psychologically deal with something that’s very difficult to deal with.

And we often see that with rituals, is that they work not so much that they change something dramatic in the world, it’s that they change something dramatic within ourselves. And that’s very, very useful for humans in all sorts of different situations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, if I can go from, I don’t know, average level of Pete Mockaitis, sharpness, creativity, enthusiasm, empathy, whatever, whatever I’m trying to drum up to, you know, near peak levels relatively quickly with a ritual, that sounds super handy. So, let’s go for it.

Well, now you got me thinking about Tony Robbins and Power Moves, and some of that “Rah! Rah!” I guess that’s just one of many flavors of ritual that some folks may engage in to shift their internal state to something that’s helpful for what’s ahead of them.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And we do see, we’ve looked both at the level of the individual, “What do I do when I need some emotion that I’m not having?” And we’ve also looked at the level of the team or the group and see whether those are the same or different.

So, for example, I will sometimes have, like an audience will stand up and I’ll show some things on the board, like clap twice, stomp three times, clap six times, stomp six times, etc. And I just kind of show it to them and see what they do. And what audiences do is they start clapping and stomping and they very quickly sync up with each other.

So, they’re all stomping, I didn’t tell them to sync up, but they all sync up. So, by the end, they’re really, really in unison, everybody doing the same thing. And when we asked afterward, “How close do you feel to these people?” they say, “I feel closer than I did before.” So, we can a little bit engineer via group rituals, something that changes how we feel about the group.

But the other thing that’s important, again, it’s the risk-reward thing with rituals, that’s true that it can make us feel connected to people like us. But if I have people who do the ritual on purpose wrong, so everyone else is stomping and I’m still clapping really loudly, people are enraged at the person because they say, “You’re doing it wrong.”

And so, at the same time that they’re helping us sometimes bond together with people, they’re also making us dislike people who are doing it differently from us. And it’s this fine line between, if I’m doing a ritual or we’re doing a ritual and we think it’s good, that’s terrific. But if we start to think that our ritual is right, is correct, that’s where we start to see, “Well, now if we’re correct, anybody else doing anything different is incorrect.” So, we’re not just good. It’s that they’re bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fascinating. It reminds me of some of Bob Cialdini’s work with regard to troops marching in unison and formation, it has an impact, or siblings or friends doing a song dance piece that’s coordinated, it has a similar uniting impact.

And you used the word enraged. It’s so funny because I have had the experience of like I’m in church, right? And someone is praying the prayers way slower or way faster than the collective, and I find that irritating. And then I’m like, “Hey, Pete, we’re in church. We’re doing a good thing. Maybe, like, just try to be patient with it,” you know.

But so, I find that encouraging. It’s like, “Okay, that is a common human phenomenon. When the vast majority of people are doing a thing in unison and someone is deviating, it’s irksome.”

Michael Norton
George Carlin had this line where he was talking about driving a car, and he said, “Anyone going slower than you is a moron. And anyone going faster than you is a maniac.” And I think, unfortunately, it’s still true that we feel that way about people doing things differently than we’re doing them.

But when you add this ritual element, you’re talking about religious rituals, but even with clapping and stomping in a classroom, we do see that people start to say, “We’re doing it right, you’re doing it wrong. And I don’t like you. I don’t like what you’re doing over there.”

Even though I’m aware, it’s fine. As you said, they’re praying. It’s not that they’re disrupting everybody on purpose or something like that, but we have it in us to say, “No, no, this is the way that we do this. Everybody should agree on this is exactly how we’re going to get this done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s eye-opening in and of itself in terms of human nature and what’s inside us. I’d love to hear, since you’ve talked to so many people about their rituals, we’ve heard a common ritual associated with doing a speech or presentation. What are some useful rituals for we’re about to hunker down and enter into some productive deep work focus mode?

Michael Norton
So, again, there’s the individual level, and then there’s the if we have to do it on a team. We’ve done lots of research on the team dynamics on how to think about rituals and how they affect teams. And one of the things, so if I go to a company and I’m supposed to be some ritual guru or whatever I’m supposed to be, even though I’m not, what often companies want is, “Can I give them kind of an out-of-the-box ritual that they can have all their employees do that will somehow make the employees really happy and everybody likes it?”

And if you’ve ever been in a company where they tried to do that, your number one reaction is not, “I love this.” It’s, “Why do I have to do this stupid thing?” It’s like everyone’s had a manager who watches TED Talks over the weekend, and then comes in and demands that you do whatever the TED Talk told them to do.

So, there’s this sense that what organizations want is, it’s a pejorative word, but like a cookie cutter ritual, and that can lead to real reactance from folks and from teams. And so, what I do instead is I encourage people and their teams to think about what they’re already doing, “So, what are things that your team does that other teams don’t do that are kind of idiosyncratic to you that are meaningful to you?”

And teams will have all kinds of different things. Once they start to think about it, inside jokes are a good example, actually, that we have this little ritual where, you know, we always say this one thing. Those are the kinds of rituals that are already having an emotional impact on us. We see that.

We see that teams at work that report having these rituals actually report having more meaning in their work, that there’s some transfer between this meaning of this ritual that we’re sharing and the meaning of the work that we’re all doing together. And so, lots and lots of examples.

One of my favorite examples of a team ritual actually happened again during the pandemic when people were working from home. This team that had daily meetings and had had them for years had to go remote. So now, of course, they’re all on Zoom with little faces on the screen. And what they started to do was, at the beginning of every meeting, everyone would click the emoji that reflected how they were feeling.

And so, you would look at this screen with 20 faces and you could quickly see kind of the average, sort of extracted from emojis, but also see who’s doing well and who’s not doing that well, “Maybe I should follow up with them later.” And it became a ritual at the beginning of every meeting.

And what was fascinating to me is they had never done anything like that when they used to meet in person. So, there was no going around the table and saying how you’re feeling, because you can see how different that is. It’d be weird to make everyone at the table, one by one, go around and say, “I’m struggling today.” That’s not typically something we do at work.

So, even though remote work distances us from people, this team used it actually as a way to use the technology to bring them closer together via something silly, like clicking emojis. And so, the randomness again of the things that people come up with on their teams, that very quickly become very meaningful to them, where if someone starts to start the meeting without the emojis, people will stop them and say, “No, no, no, wait, we have to do the emojis first and then we can start the meeting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, it’s interesting, you say going around and saying how you’re feeling is not typical of meeting behavior, but I have been in some workplaces where they do that. They call it check-in and that’s come up a couple of times with the podcast.

And so, in a way, that’s kind of intriguing how a ritual that emerges in one context can really serve as an inspiration for, like, when they do go back to the office, like, “Hey, you know what, it’s like, it feels like we’re missing something. Well, this is, maybe feels out there to us, but let’s give it a shot in person,” and away you go.

Michael Norton
And my guess is, I don’t have the data just to be clear, but my guess is that the average report when you’re doing it in person one by one is more positive than the average report if you’re clicking emojis. Because it’s much harder as a person in a meeting to say, “I’m really struggling today.”

People do, of course, but it’s a bigger barrier. So, it is this question of, “How do we do a check-in in a way where people feel that they’ve been heard and also that they’re able to really share how they’re really feeling?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Okay. Well, lay some more on us, favorite rituals that seem to really be impactful for folks at work.

Michael Norton
Very, very simple one, and this will be no surprise, is how teams deal with lunch. Lunch at work is a funny thing because we have to eat lunch. We usually eat it, in the US anyway, we usually eat around noon.

And other than that, what we do and how we do lunch is really up to us. So, you can go and get something and eat it in your cubicle by yourself and never talk to anybody. Or you can, you know, go out to a 300-person restaurant. You can do whatever you feel like doing.

But what we see teams doing, and they report it when we survey them, is they often have something they do at lunch that makes lunch just a little bit, back to our earlier conversation, a little bit more emotional, a little bit more meaningful, not just putting food in our faces because we need caloric intake.

And just as an example, one team, it’s a five-person team, they would, every day of the week, was one person brought lunch for everybody else. So, you do it on Monday and then I do it on Tuesday. And in the end, what they’re doing is everybody’s eating lunch every day. That’s not that interesting.

But if you think of what they’re signaling with that ritual, it’s that on one day a week, I’m taking care of everybody else on the team. And every other day of the week, the team is taking care of me. It’s a very strong signal.

And this team felt it was very important to be not just like automatons at work, but human beings. And you can see how their ritual that they came up with really, actually, tries to reinforce this idea that we care about each other. It’s not just that we’re here to punch the clock.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Well, tell me, Michael, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Norton
I guess I would say, if you think of how to kind of incorporate rituals, I think people often are thinking, you know, “Should I add something to my life to make it more ritualistic?” And the idea, of course, is not that the more rituals you add, the better your life is. I can get messy very quickly.

But what I do encourage people to do is kind of take almost an audit of your current rituals and see when you’re doing them and how you’re doing them. You can think of family dinner, what do you do? You can think of you and your spouse, do you have little things that you’ve been doing for years? Your teams at work, even what you do in the morning.

And just notice, actually, all the places that you have these little behaviors that you’ve been doing for a long time that are meaningful to you. And even if you don’t add new ones, appreciate those ones a little bit more so the next time you do it, you’re really owning it as, “Oh, we’re doing our silly thing we do when we have dinner every night. We’re doing it again. This is our family thing that we do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I like that a lot, and I think you can bring savoring to so many things and enhance them.

Michael Norton
Love that.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember, I was at a class and someone talked, we were talking about rituals or things they really appreciate. This man talked about how he savors the candy, if I’m saying it right, Ferrero Rocher, you know, those little balls with the crunch.

Michael Norton
My daughter loves them.

Pete Mockaitis
And he described it with such detail and sensory language, it’s like, “Is this person a poet?” And it really struck me, it’s like, “You could do that to anything, savoring the warm water or scent of soap on your hands you wash them.” And I think it speaks to what you brought up at the beginning, the difference between a habit and a ritual, “Yeah, I wash my hands,” or it’s like, “Ooh, I savor the multi-sensory experience of hand washing.”

Michael Norton
One of my favorite examples on savoring is Oreos. So, Oreos are just a cookie like any other cookie and, yet, there’s an entire culture around eating Oreos, which is, “Do you twist them apart or not? Do you lick the filling out first?” And people have very strong preferences about this. If you go online, you’ll see, actually, there are serious debates about the correct way to eat an Oreo.

From my standpoint, it’s not that there’s a correct way. It’s that you’re taking a cookie, which is a nice thing to eat, and you’re turning it into something a little more interesting. It’s got a little, to your point, a little more in there because, “You know what, I’ve been dunking it this way for 20 years. And, by the way, my mom used to dunk it this way as well.” So, you get these really strong emotional reactions on, as you said, things like eating something or washing your hands.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Thank you. All right. Well, let’s hear now about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Michael Norton
I heard a quote a few years ago, “Fame is a mask that eats at the soul.” And I think of it, not that I’m a famous person, but all of us in life, we move forward in our job and we start to feel like we’re important. And so, it’s fame, it’s going to give us, it’s like importance is a mask that eats at the soul.

And I think, and I should say, and also my tendency to, as I move forward in my career, start to think that people are treating me a certain way because I’m amazing, instead of because I’m their boss is a very common mistake that people make. And it does change who you are.

So, I think a lot about, and I can see people the world where fame or importance kind of changes their soul a little bit. And I’m always on the lookout in myself and in the people I love, we check each other to make sure that we’re still staying true to ourselves even if we got a big promotion or we get famous or whatever it might be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, after this conversation, you’re slightly more famous in the world. So, I hope your soul doesn’t get any nibbles from this conversation.

Michael Norton
Well, I was at zero, so anything is going to bump me up past my current level.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael Norton
I completely love this study. Chris Hsee, who’s at the University of Chicago, the paper is called “Overworking.” And he sets up this thing in the lab where you can do two things. You can watch funny videos, or you can do a really boring task and get a Hershey’s Kiss. And you can do this for a while.

So, you can always choose to watch a video or you can choose to work in order to get paid with a Hershey’s Kiss. So, he’s basically setting up life, which is you can work for future rewards or you can goof around right now.

And the thing that he finds is what people do is they overwork, meaning, he’ll say, “The only Hershey’s Kisses you can eat are the ones that you eat. You can’t take any with you,” which, again, is a metaphor for life, like you can’t take it with you. But what he finds is people can’t stop working. They just keep accumulating Hershey’s Kisses, and there’s this giant stack of them.

And then when the thing is over, they try to eat as many as they can. They don’t feel good about it because they’re eating too many, and they leave them behind. And I love, obviously, the metaphor that he has in that thing, which is we really get stuck sometimes in there’s some currency that we’re earning, often it’s money, but it could be respect or fame or anything like that.

And we become so consumed with getting more of it that we forget everything else about life that might be an enjoyable kind of thing, like our families and our hobbies and things like that. So, I think of that very, very frequently. One, I just love the elegance of the design and also the funniness that it’s Hershey’s Kisses. And it really relates to this fundamental human question about how we’re managing our well-being and our time here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Norton
My favorite book is The Gift by Lewis Hyde. And it’s a book about gift giving across kind of the human lifespan, meaning as long as humans have been around, we’ve been giving gifts to each other. And so, he really looks to see what’s the role of gifts in human life. And they play an incredible amount of roles in everything, in our relationships, at work, at home, all of these little gifts that we’re giving.

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

Michael Norton
That would be, I guess the tool, not quite a tool, but my lab group. So, we have some faculty, some PhD students, some postdocs, some undergraduates, we meet and we brainstorm. And social science really is about trying to notice things in the world that nobody has noticed, and then trying to study them. And the only way to do that is to use a bunch of brains.

Yes, you could sit in your office by yourself and try to come up with all the ideas, but, really, when you’re thinking about social life, social brainstorming is the way to get it done. So, I couldn’t do any of the things that I do without the luxury of using all these other smart brains that are around me.

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

Michael Norton
I think one thing that people have told me is that when someone says something like they’re struggling with something in their life, having a problem at work. And then they say something like, “I know it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, you know, there’s wars happening and things like that.” We have a very common instinct to do that, to downplay our own problems.

And I think one of the things that I always say to people is, “Whether that’s true or not doesn’t help you with your own problem. It’s still your problem and it’s still very important to you or we wouldn’t be talking about it.” So, let’s not judge our problems against other people’s problems to determine how important they are. Let’s deal with them together because they’re problems that are affecting you and we’d like to do something about it.

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

Michael Norton
It’s very difficult to remember. It’s MichaelNorton.com. It’s a very boring website, I’ll say, but there’s one part on it that is a quiz. It’s a rituals quiz. And it doesn’t take that long, but we ask you questions about rituals in different parts of your life. And then we give you a little feedback on how you’re doing and where you might think differently about it. And it’s fun to do with your spouse or partner as well.

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

Michael Norton
I would think about being intentional in meetings, actually, like thinking about what the beginning of a meeting is supposed to do and what the end of a meeting is supposed to do instead of just starting and just trailing off at the end. Really think, it could be a ritual, obviously, that you do at the beginning and end.

But even more, I think, just kind of making the meeting about something, and then at the end summarizing what the meeting was about so we don’t just feel like we’re sleepwalking through everything all day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, thank you.

Michael Norton
Thank you so much.