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1057: How to Improve Your Next Conversation with Jefferson Fisher

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Jefferson Fisher shares his three-part communication system for handling difficult conversations with ease.

You’ll Learn

  1. The best first word to use
  2. How to set boundaries people will respect
  3. Two tricks for handling disagreements

About Jefferson

Jefferson Fisher is a trial lawyer, writer, and speaker whose work to help people communicate during life’s everyday arguments and conversations, with his practical videos and authentic presence, has gained millions of followers around the world, including celebrities and global leaders. He is a sought-after speaker on communication at Fortune 500 companies and governmental agencies, and hundreds of thousands of people subscribe to his actionable email newsletter and podcast. 

Fisher is a Texas board-certified personal injury attorney and the founder of Fisher Firm, where he helps people all over the United States connect to trusted legal services. He lives with his wife and two children near Beaumont, Texas.

Resources Mentioned

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Jefferson Fisher Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jefferson, welcome!

Jefferson Fisher
What’s going on, Pete? Great to meet you, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you too. I’m excited to be chatting. And I want to kick it off with just a little softball opener question. Jefferson, tell me, what’s the most surprising and fascinating thing you’ve ever discovered about humans and communication in the course of your career?

Jefferson Fisher
Oh, just a nice little softball. Thank you. That was great. Like, how much we struggle at it and, at the same time, how much we need it. One of my comfort shows is a show called “Alone” on Netflix.

And have these survivalists that are all amazing, and they go out maybe in somewhere in the Alaska wilderness. And it’s a very slow-paced show, and they’re supposed to survive, really, for however long that they can or sometimes they put a deadline on it.

But a lot of the times, I’ve seen that the number one reason they tap out, in other words, they call and say, “Take me home,” is just because they miss people. They miss the sound of their loved one’s voice, or we’re just not meant to be alone. And that’s what I find so interesting. It’s not that they couldn’t keep up with the skill. It’s not that they couldn’t survive. It’s that they miss other humans.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we need it, it’s in us, it’s part of our very human design. So, when we’re not out in the remote Alaskan wilderness, are there ways that our communication needs are regularly being unmet?

Jefferson Fisher
Every day, our interactions are littered with miscommunication, where what we say does not match what was heard. And you can take that from the living room to the boardroom to wherever you are. And so, we find that the communication struggles are not uncommon, really, with anybody in any situation that we’re in.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, misheard intentions not translating into what’s received. Understood. You’ve got some wisdom for us in your book, “The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More.” Tell us, what’s sort of the big idea of this book?

Jefferson Fisher
The big idea of the book is that some people teach you how to play an instrument. I teach you what chords to play. I give you the sheet music in terms of communication. And so, I am telling you how to use phrases that are going to improve your next conversation, from how to say things with control, meaning, instead of controlling them, you’re going to learn to control yourself and regulate yourself to where you stay calm and composed.

Two, we’re going to say it with confidence, meaning you’re going to use your assertive voice. You’re going to say things that don’t sound like you’re hesitant, or you’re unwavering, and you’re going to say things that are direct, but at the same time kind and respectful. And three, we’re going to say it to connect, meaning you’re going to have that difficult conversation go much better than it ever would if you had not read the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds handy. Could you share with us an inspiring story of someone who started doing some of this stuff, a little bit of the before and what they did, and what happened afterwards?

Jefferson Fisher
We have tons of examples. Really, in our membership is a wonderful example of that. So, have an online membership where people are able to practice a lot of the tools that we teach. One of the persons who comes to mind, her name is Michelle. Michelle’s a single mother of two kids, and she was going through a really bad divorce.

And when she picked up the book, this is really what she was looking for, and they’re kind of on the tail end of all their legal proceedings. And she was really trying to find ways to not only speak to her new ex-husband, but also how to speak to her children about it. And the biggest takeaway that she said was that she really took control of her emotions by regulating her breath.

So, rule number one in the book is let your breath be the first word that you say. And so, by really leaning into that principle to regulate yourself and not get so wrapped up into the emotion, she says she’s been a much better communicator with her entire family. She’s feeling like it’s a much better impact in a positive way for her.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jefferson, that’s very Tweetable, “Let your breath be the first word that you say.” And so, zooming way in, practically speaking, that means, in most conversations, I will, literally, before uttering a word, have a breath?

Jefferson Fisher
No, I wouldn’t take it that extreme. So, mostly in your difficult conversations, your heated conversations, they’re going to have some friction in it. When somebody is saying something to you, we get into the habit of getting wrapped up and having to have an immediate response.

Somebody sends you a text you don’t like, somebody says something to you and you kind of get caught off guard and your whole body wants to fight or flight. You either want to say a hurtful word to eliminate the threat or you want to run from it. You want to hang up the phone. You want to slam the door.

And so, what I encourage people to do is to simply take a breath before you say anything. And often that is exactly, it’s all that you need to make sure that you keep your emotions in check, and your logical and analytical side of your brain at the forefront, so not every conversation, no. But you take it, for example, like in the business context.

If you’re getting interviewed, the person who, if you’re asking me a question and I take a breath and I’m thinking about it, and then I respond, it sends a different message that I really listened, I acknowledged, I thought about it. I’m not being flippant about it. So, what I’m about to say is going to mean more.

Pete Mockaitis
And it also, just on the receiving end of that, just comes across better than, if we were to replace the breath with, “Oh, well, you know, I would say…” that whole phrase, that it also is more powerful and polished and makes you seem more knowledgeable and authoritative.

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, even if you were to say, “Hey, Jefferson, how are you? How was your day?” and I immediately said, “Oh, it was good. I mean, yeah, it was fine. It was good,” versus you asking me and I just took a breath, “You know, Pete, it was good. It was a good day.” Like, you can tell which one you’re going to believe more, the one who sounds a little bit more intentional, the one who sounds a little bit more in control.

And so, that’s what the pause, the breath does, is it gives you time to choose. Time to choose whether or not you want to say that, whether or not this person is worth your time, whether or not this person is worth your response, and to be able to make sure that what you’re going to say is intentional.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s just, that question right there, “How are you doing? How’s your day?” is often among the very first of questions when meeting somebody or starting a conversation. It’s real nice to kick it off with a tone of trust and believability, like, “Right from the get go, I think Jefferson is being honest with me about his day,” as opposed to the flippant automatic robot response, “Fine.”

Jefferson Fisher
Exactly, yeah. And it helps release the tension in your body. When somebody is saying something that catches you off guard in particular or something that might be a little bit more offensive, our body tenses up and we tend to hold our breath because we’re readying to either say something hurtful or leave.

And when you use your breath, it’s telling your body, “What’s happening to me is not threatening. This person is not a threat. Their words are not a threat.” And so, that’s what the whole part of saying it with control is about. It’s not looking for what’s going to control them. You’re, first, looking at the conversation of what’s going to control you, and your breath is what’s going to help regulate and calm your body down.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, in your section on “Say It with Control,” we’ve got a chapter, control yourself, control the moment, control the pace. Can you speak a bit more on controlling the moment and controlling the pace?

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, both of those kind of hint at the same concept. And that is the person who’s able to slow down their words is the person who’s always going to be more in control. People who speak very fast, it’s like listening to music that’s very fast. You kind of get, in some sense, it is very low-grade anxiety trying to make sure you can really listen to this person. You don’t want to miss anything and it rushes you.

Sometimes you’re around somebody and just their mere presence makes you anxious because they need to go, “We got this. I got this.” And they just can’t slow down. You compare that with somebody who is, let’s say, your grandfather or your grandmother.

And you go to their house and I’d say, mine is I have a papal. I’d say, “Papal, do you have a screwdriver?” And he’d go, “Yeah.” I mean, like just that right there. There’s something about the calm energy that we’re drawn towards like a moth to a flame, that we really, really want that secure presence.

And so, when you can be around the people who have calm energy and, in fact, if you can be the person who radiates that calm energy, controlling the moment means, instead of just spurting out words or putting your foot in your mouth, you’re taking time, you’re thinking, and you’re slowing it down. There’s a difference, Pete, between me saying, “I already told you. I’m not going to say that,” versus, “I already told you. I’m not going to say that.”

Now it’s the same exact words. All I did was I lowered my tone and I slowed down my words. Now which one of those sounds like someone who’s more grounded, more centered, more in control of themselves to say, “No, I’m not being moved by what you say. Your raised voice, your yelling, that doesn’t threaten me”?

So, you use just simply what’s already in your body to help control yourself, and you do that by controlling the pace and the moment by slowing it down.

Pete Mockaitis
That really rings true. And I’m curious, I suppose as you’re saying this, this strikes me as a great way to be most of the time. Occasionally, are we better off picking up the pace if our other party would prefer quicker responses? Or is it still more often the winning move to keep it slow?

Jefferson Fisher
I think, on average, people speak much faster than we need to. You think you’re talking slow, you’re really not. Most of the time we’re still rushing our words. We live in a very fast-paced life here in the United States of America. We rush everything. We can’t even watch a TikTok or a video for more than two seconds. And that’s maximum time.

So, I find that, yes, there are times when not rushing your words, but picking up the pace is not a bad thing. There’s such thing in music of just having dynamics, meaning your highs are going to be high and your lows are going to be low. So, if I were going to talk to you, and maybe I’m trying to be persuasive, maybe I’m trying to make my point and maybe you don’t believe it and I believe it and sometimes nobody believes it.

You hear that kind of dynamic in my voice that sometimes I’m going to rush little bit on the points that I’m really wanting to draw attention to, and I’m going to slow down on the parts I really want people to listen to every detail, because when you slow it down people will listen to a pin drop. So, that’s the power of just using that pause to hang on to every word. It makes a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
It does. Folks tend to lean in and wonder, “Well, what’s coming next?” It works on me.

Jefferson Fisher
It works on everybody. I mean, we love stories. Humans love stories. We love to hear what’s going to happen around the corner. That curiosity is always in us.

Pete Mockaitis
So, rule one, say it with control. We talked about that. Before we move on, I’d love to hear, in addition to breath, are there any winning moves for regaining control of ourselves?

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, it’s funny you used the word winning. So then in the book, probably the most quotable line that I have is “Never win an argument.” And it is very counterculture, I suppose, in a world where all we want to do is win, particularly arguments. You see it in so many books and blogs.

And what I teach is that when you set out to win an argument, you often will lose the relationship. Meaning, all you’ve won is really their contempt. You’ve won to be the first to apologize when you set out to try and win an argument, because you’ll say things that you don’t mean, and they’ll trust you less, they’ll respect you less, and, really, you’ve lost that connection.

And so, I teach that, instead of seeing arguments as something to win, see them as something to unravel, where there’s knots in the conversation, knots in the communication. And when you can have the discipline to try and see where the other person is coming from, but not in just the metaphorical sense, but meaning you’re actually asking, “Help me understand. Help me see the knot. What am I missing?”

Things that you, instead of just tugging and pulling to say, “No, you have to see it my way. No, you have to get my point,” and you just ask the question of what they see from their end instead of, “That’s not what I said,” you’re asking the question, “What did you hear?” You’re always going to find a much better conversation at the end of that.

Pete Mockaitis
And the visual of knots is, I think, very useful, because when we encounter knots in life, like literally in a rope, in a shoelace, etc., our reaction is not – N-O-T – so much to slice through it with a sword or a knife, but rather it’s like, “Okay, we’re going to have to take a closer look at this, maybe literally have a breath and see. Okay, how did this knot come to be? What’s stuck in what? And what needs to be backed up a little bit in order to get this smoothed out here?”

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, it’s a mindset. A mindset that says, instead of “How dare they talk to me like this? How dare they, I mean, challenge me. They don’t believe me?” instead of having this, “I need to remind them who they’re talking to” kind of aggressive mentality, a much more winning mindset is asking yourself, “Huh, I wonder where this is coming from? I wonder what’s driving them to say that? I wonder what’s happening in their day? I wonder what they’re dealing with?

You start to look at it from the flip side and that often leads to a much better conversation at the end of the day. The knot is something that the harder you pull on it, the harder it is to loosen, the harder it is to undo. And you know people and I know people that have pulled on the knot for so long that they can’t undo it. Not for a long time.

We have people that haven’t spoken to their adult children in years, or they’ve lost that best friend because of one issue, then they never want to bring it up because they know that the knot is just too tight. It would be too painful. It’s like getting a backlash when you’re fishing. I mean, sometimes you just have to cut the whole thing out. It can become a very, very draining process if you don’t address it early.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess, to that point, I would love your perspective on, if we think that a knot is just too big, how often is that an accurate assessment versus just us rationalizing an internal fear situation?

Jefferson Fisher
Problems happen when you think one conversation is going to be the cure-all for everything. Like, one conversation is going to, all of sudden go, “You know what, you’re so right. I was so wrong all these years.” I mean, that never is going to happen. So, let’s say, you and I have had bad beef over time, and we have a knot.

Pete Mockaitis
“Yeah, you pulled some stuff, Jefferson.”

Jefferson Fisher
“Right. Of course I did.” And we have a conversation. You see how it would be much harder if I say, “Okay, let’s get one thing straight, Pete. You’re the one…” and, all of a sudden, you’re back to ground zero as soon as you utter that kind of stuff.

Instead, if you have the mentality of, “I’d like to talk with you, and this is a conversation that can last as many days and many months as it needs to about healing our relationship because I want a friendship with you again, Pete.” You hear how that is saying, “Look, I don’t know the rules. I don’t know how this is going to go, but I’m willing to tell you what my goal is.”

“And my goal is for us to have a new friendship. And what I’m saying is this is not a conversation that’s finished in a day. This is not a conversation that’s happening tomorrow.” So, if I’m telling you my conversation is over several days or weeks or a month or whatever, it’s very helpful to the other person to almost have a release of, “Okay, we can actually work through these things,” and not squish it all within this timeframe.

It happens very well, too, in the business context, that if you need to tell someone, “All right, I need to have a conversation with you over the next few days. And this is a conversation that’s going to last about a week,” you hear how all of a sudden there’s not pressure to solve it right then and there. You’re letting it organically involve in the way that it needs to happen, that people pulling out each little thread at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really good. And I think it’s telling. I’m thinking about it, if I read news articles about diplomatic relations between countries, it’s interesting because sometimes your secretary of state or the equivalents of other nations will say that they had very productive conversations. You’re like, “Well, what does that mean? Is the war over?” Well, no, it’s not. And yet they viewed it as very productive conversations.

And it’s just a little reminder, whenever you read such news articles, that some issues very, very much require numerous conversations, bit by bit, thread by thread to be smoothed out.

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, it’s part of acknowledging to the other person that the issue they raised is a true issue. It is real issue. It helps to not keep people getting defensive. When you can tell them, “I agree,” and not in the sense that you agree with them. What you’re saying is you can’t think micro, you have to go macro. It’s this idea of, “I agree that’s worth talking about. I agree that’s an issue. I agree this is a topic that we should discuss.”

Simple as that, all of a sudden, their defenses are going to be lowered. Or you tell them that you’ve learned something or what’s been helpful, “That’s helpful for me to know. Thank you.” Or, “You know what, after listening, I can tell this is a really important issue to you.” All of a sudden, their defenses just go down, and now you can actually start addressing the knot that’s right in front of you.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Thank you. Well, let’s talk a little bit about saying it with confidence. Tell us a bit about establishing boundaries.

Jefferson Fisher
Boundaries are something that a lot of people struggle with, and for good reason. They’re hard to raise around people that, I’d say, take advantage of you not having the boundary. Like, the person who always gets to cut in line in front of everybody and, all of a sudden, they realize they’re not able to do that. That’s the person who’s most upset because they’ve taken advantage of you not having that boundary for so long.

I teach that just, because someone doesn’t agree with your boundary, doesn’t make it wrong. It means that it’s working. And we find in our culture today boundaries are a whole big thing. Everybody seems to be talking about boundaries and they’re not hard to say. They’re much harder to enforce. You could say a lot of platitudes or things of, “No is a complete sentence. You don’t need to justify yourself.”

Boundaries are really, to me, three simple components. That is, one, you’re telling them what the boundary is and it’s beginning with the I, “I am not going to be treated that way.” Two, you’re adding in the condition, “If you continue to treat me this way, if you continue to speak to me this way…”

Three is the consequence, and that’s the biggest part because you have to be able to actually own it and be willing to do what you say you’re going to do. So, the consequence could be, “If you continue to talk to me this way, then this is the end of the conversation.” That’s probably the most common one that I use in communication.

Let’s say I have an opposing counsel that’s just gone off the rails talking about their case. I might say, “Look, I’m not going to be spoken to like that. If you continue to speak to me like that, this is going to be end of the conversation.” I have a really quick way of being able to redirect their energy because you have two sides of the coin.

It’s either I can give you a remote control, Pete, and you can press my buttons, and for me to say, “You can’t talk to me like that. Don’t yell at me,” and you’re just pressing my buttons and you’re have complete control over my emotions. Or, what I teach in my membership is how to have your manual.

So, in other words, if somebody speaks to you in a way that they should not, or that you don’t like, it’s this mindset of, “Hey, if you turn to page 82, you’ll see on paragraph D, line A, yeah, I don’t respond to that volume. So, it’s this set of parameters, say, “If you want to communicate with me, this is how we’re going to do it. And if you don’t like it, then it’s the breaks. That’s how we’re going to have a conversation or not.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, I’m curious, Jefferson, we’ve covered some good pieces here, any top tips, do’s or don’ts you really want to make sure that come across?

Jefferson Fisher
Probably one of the most common ones I get, particularly with somebody like in your audience in the workplace, is how to effectively disagree, how to disagree with someone you don’t want to sound disagreeable. So, instead of saying, “I disagree. No, I don’t like that,” which they’re going to take that personally.

They’re going to start defending their position against yours. So, meaning, as soon as you say, “No, I don’t like that,” or, “I disagree,” what I think is whatever you’re about to come out, they’re not going to accept it. Why? Because you just shut down theirs and it just becomes a battle of ideas.

Instead, what I want you to say is, “I see things differently. I see things differently.” And because it works, and not getting them defensive because you’re not arguing their point. You’re talking about their perspective. So, when I say, “I see things differently,” the key phrase is I see, “I see things differently,” or, “I view it differently,” or, “I take another approach,” or, “I tend to lean the opposite.”

I’m not saying anything they’re saying is wrong. I’m just saying, “I see it from a different side. That’s all.” And people don’t get defensive over that. Another tip that I like to give, particularly in the workplace, is if you find that your ideas are getting shut down in the board meeting, in front of other people, instead of getting frustrated that they didn’t accept your idea, because, really, all it is, is just an idea contest of people aren’t going to like your idea. Why? Because it’s not theirs.

Use percentages to your advantage. So, I would encourage you to say, “All right, I have about 20% of an idea here. I need your help with the other 80%.” And now, all of a sudden, they don’t see it as a competition. They don’t see you as a threat. They see it now as a collaboration to help get you to the 100%. Now they want to join in on it. Now they want to help. So, percentages is a quick little trick to help get conversation moving in the right direction.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. In your book, you’ve got a section called “The 47-Second Version.” Can you lay it on us?

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, rule number one, any time that you begin to try to control the other person in the conversation, you’ve lost. Instead of focusing on them, look for what’s going to control you. And you do that by regulating your emotions. The key to that is your breath. Let your breath be the first word that you say.

Two, the rule is how to say things with confidence, meaning you’re going to use your assertive voice. If you want to be more confident, then you have to sound more assertive. Confidence is as assertive does. So, you’re going to say things that’s not littered with adverbs, like literally, obviously, basically. You’re going to not over apologize or undercut your words. You’re going to sound more assertive and, therefore, feel more confident.

Three, when it comes to saying things to connect, it’s all about making sure that, when you have that difficult conversation, you’re upfront instead of going, “Hey, so how are you and your kids? You good? Okay. Hey, listen…” Instead of that typical horrible beginning to difficult conversation, just tell it to them.

It’s going to sound like, “This is going to be hard to hear,” or, “This is going to be tough for us to talk about,” or simply, “This is going to be a hard conversation.” Anytime you can lead with the honesty and directness, it’s going to always end in a much better outcome.

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

Jefferson Fisher
My grandfather has this line that he laid on me when I was a teenager. I was telling him about something I had done, and I was kind of frustrated about it and I didn’t feel good about it. And as soon as I told him, he looked at me, and he said, “Well, son, you can’t look back and hoe a straight row.” That was his line.

Meaning, anybody who gardens, if you’re hoeing the ground, if you look back, it’s going to be zigzag. You can’t be able to do a straight line. You always have to look forward. And that’s been a philosophy that stuck with me.

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

Jefferson Fisher
One of my very good friends is Vanessa Van Edwards. She also does a lot of communication. She does like body cues and stuff. And her, I forget the exact number on it, but how quickly we can make our opinions about someone in a first impression.

And so, that to me is just you treasure the time that you first meet someone because you never get that chance again. After you met them, you’ve already met them. And so, I just love the idea of you have a chance to really cultivate something cool with the first person that you meet for the first time.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Jefferson Fisher
Right now, well, it has been for a long time, “Team of Rivals.” It’s a book on Abraham Lincoln. And Doris Goodwin, she’s just fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m an Illinois boy, so we love our Lincoln. And a favorite tool?

Jefferson Fisher
I have this thing called Tonal. I’m not sponsored by them in any way, but it’s a workout machine.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, a workout thing.

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, it’s a workout machine. It’s fantastic. Fantastic. I use it every day, and I’m in better shape than I was when I played in college, so it’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was about to ask about a favorite habit. Is it using the Tonal or something else?

Jefferson Fisher
Yeah, I do really like Tonal. My favorite hobby is finding new music. I love finding new music. In a different life, I would have loved to have been the person who goes to, like, little dive bar concerts and finds this, you know, new talent. I love new music. I love music festivals. I play several instruments. So, I love that world. So, I’m always looking for new artists on Spotify.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that gets quoted back to you often and retweeted and Kindle book highlighted?

Jefferson Fisher
It’d probably be that “Never win an argument” line. Here’s one that I would leave with for anybody who finds themselves to be a people pleaser, and it would be this. It’s okay to be a people pleaser as long as you’re one of them. That’s what I like.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m going to chew you on that already. So, you can please other people, but you got to make sure you are also one of the people being pleased, as opposed to a sacrificial martyr who becomes bitter.

Jefferson Fisher
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It’s okay to be a people pleaser. Just make sure you’re one of them.

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

Jefferson Fisher
So, they can go anywhere on social media. My Instagram is my favorite on Jefferson Fisher. You can find my accounts there at JeffersonFisher.com. You can get “The Next Conversation” wherever you like to get books – Amazon, they’re in stores now, airports. It’s been a whole lot of fun, so, yeah.

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

Jefferson Fisher
Believe in the power of your next conversation. It doesn’t matter if you and another person haven’t always hit it off. You can change everything with simply what you decide to say next. It really does make a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jefferson, thank you.

Jefferson Fisher
Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.

1054: Maximizing Your Pipelines and Funnels of Opportunity with Kara Smith Brown

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Kara Smith Brown shares principles from her storied B2B sales career that help every professional make the most of their opportunities.

You’ll Learn

  1. How and why to think of your career like a funnel
  2. Why “maybes” are more dangerous than “no’s”
  3. How to develop and share a unique point of view that gets you noticed

About Kara

Kara Smith Brown, LeadCoverage CEO and Founder, is a recognized supply chain, logistics, and technology thought leader. Her book, The Revenue Engine: Fueling a B2B High Octane Pipeline, is an Amazon Bestseller and offers readers effective revenue-generating strategies. Kara is a thought leader in the supply chain and go to market industries. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two daughters.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Kara Smith Brown Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kara, welcome!

Kara Brown
Thank you so much for having me. I have been looking forward to this for weeks. Weeks!

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. I’m super excited. Well, this is rare that I knew you in college, and then just discovered you wrote a book that needs to be on the podcast. So that’s kind of a new one. Thank you.

Kara Brown
Yeah, my pleasure. You are clearly not one of my 14,000 or so logistics and supply chain followers on LinkedIn because I feel like everyone in supply chain and logistics knows about this book, which was the idea, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, good work.

Kara Brown
Yeah, mission accomplished.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m not great at logistics, but it was so funny. I’m trying to buy a big, like, heavy studio door for recording stuff. And I was talking to this mill, and they said, “Oh, we don’t even know how to get a door to you.”

It’s like, “All right, you got to call a 3PL, it’s a third-party logistics company. You got to tell them you want an LTL, less than truckload.” And so, I was like, “Why am I figuring out how you can send me a door?” It was like, “Because I’ve been talking to Kara. I know some things.”

Kara Brown
I will happily help you get that door, by the way. I know people.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I appreciate that.

Kara Brown
I definitely know people that can help with that for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, you’ve got so much fun stuff in your book, The Revenue Engine. And so, even though most of our listeners are not in go-to market, or GTM teams, which you’ve defined as sales, marketing, and customer success-ish type roles, those who go to the market and get their money, if you will, but some are.

But I think you’ve got some universal wisdom about goal-setting, points of view, meeting your audience, and so much more. So, can you tell us the story of a disastrous meeting that changed the way you think?

Kara Brown
This is really funny. Yes, so I will tell you the story of probably one of the worst meetings of my career. So, I was early to a very sexy company there in Chicagoland, called Echo Global Logistics, and I was one of the first employees there. And we walked into a leadership meeting because, I, Kara, decided that I was going to share my expertise on branding with a team of men that were running the company I was working for.

And my sheer naivete and confidence at setting this meeting to begin with, today just shocks me. But you and I knew each other in college, so maybe it doesn’t shock you that I was, like, this confident in my early 20s. And so, I brought them all into this meeting room and I said, “Look at my PowerPoint with how we’re going to use the brand colors, and the taglines, and all of these cool things” that I thought was important.

So, I’m mid-sentence, and one of them stands up, and he says, “What the heck are we doing here? Why are you wasting everyone’s time? Don’t ever call a meeting like this ever again,” and just walks out the door. And the guy that I actually reported to was a little more apologetic, and he’s like, “Hey, sorry, like this isn’t really what we’re looking for. We should probably have these conversations before you called the entire leadership team of the business into one of these meetings.”

But I took away from that super uncomfortable conversation, “Okay, these guys that are running a free brokerage, for all intents and purposes, and we’re a startup and we’re trying to make money, all they wanted me to do was participate in generating revenue. And what I had brought them was a color palette.”

And it, just, was so misaligned to what they really wanted me to do. And thankfully, for me, fast forward three years, they did appreciate what I brought to the table by the time that I exited. And it was a wonderful experience. But I took away from that sort of horrible, horrible moment where you’re like, your gut sinks down and you’re like, “I’m going to get fired, right? This is a horrible experience for me.”

Turn it into kind of what would drive me for the next 15 or 20 years around “What does matter?” and “How do I never get kicked out of another meeting like that?” and “How do I actually get asked to be at the table?” So, full cycle, which is really funny, is I’m now on boards and I got my first paid board seat a few weeks ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Kara Brown
Thank you, yeah. So, I’ve come full circle from, like, “Hey, get the heck out of here,” to, “No, we really want you in the room because you bring value.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that story for many reasons. One, because it’s so emotional. And, two, it’s because that sucks to hear. That must have just been a total gut punch, very unpleasant in the moment. And yet, what a gift. What a gift to have that clear, unambiguous feedback, like, “What you are saying is not at all what we want.”

Kara Brown
Yeah, “And don’t ever say it again.”

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, at the same time, it’s totally understandable. Like, in the book, you said, “I was the marketing girl.” And marketing is a big word that can mean a lot of things. And for some people may want exactly a color palette, exactly a brand voice, guidelines, fonts, perspectives, consistency.

Some people that’s exactly what they need at a certain point. For them, it was not at all, and they let you know it. And so, they wanted to hear, when it comes to marketing, how you do stuff and that turns into customers and revenue.

Kara Brown
Yeah, they did not want to hear about the color palette. And no deference to folks that do design and branding, it’s super, super important. It’s just not something that I do. And so, as a professional today, we, as a company, today, I’m the CEO of a company called Lead Coverage, and we do zero graphic design.

So, we lead to the customers, and we say, “Listen, we will do all of the math for you. We are very, very into how you measure what’s happening in your marketing group, how you measure your go-to-market, but we are not the team that’s going to give you a new logo or a new website or a new look and feel. There are incredible branding shops out there that’ll do that for you. It’s just not what we do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So then, what is the big idea behind your book, The Revenue Engine?

Kara Brown
Yeah, so the big idea is go-to-market needs to be measured, and it needs to be measured three ways – through volume, velocity, and value inside of three funnels. We think about it as the prospect funnel, those are strangers, people who do not know who you are today. The nurture funnel, who are folks that do know you but aren’t quite customers yet. And then the customer funnel, which is cross-sell, up-sell opportunities. And we execute all of this in a three-step motion we call share good news, track interest, follow up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Very succinctly. You’ve practiced this.

Kara Brown
I have practiced, yes, many stages, many coaches, all the things.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, so now some of our listeners find themselves in a go-to-market role. Many do not, but I think this is pretty handy in terms of any time you’re trying to move anything through a pipeline in terms of, let’s say you’re looking for a job. And so, there’s prospects, you know, and there’s folks you want to get their attention. You want to get some meetings with them and sell yourself.

You’ve also applied some of this in your own romantic life, Kara. Can we hear the tale about how this hunky, fitness model, nuclear physicist, shout out to Eric, became your husband?

Kara Brown
Yeah, you met him long before we got married.

Pete Mockaitis
I did, yeah.

Kara Brown
We hung out many times before this actual event happened. So, I was training for Iron Man Wisconsin, which was a big deal. And he told me that we would get engaged after the Iron Man, which, Kara, in her 26- or 27-year-old brain heard at the finish line of the Iron Man. So, when I accomplished this Ironman goal, and there was no ring at the finish line, I was immediately disappointed, right?

And then I did an IPO. So, my name was on the IPO press release for the company I worked for, Eco Global Logistics. It was a big damn deal. It was awesome. It was like the coolest thing ever. I owned my own house. I was a 10 out of 10, Pete. Like, Chicago dating scene, 2009, I was, like, I was top shelf, right? And I was saying to this guy, “Listen, if it’s not you, that’s fine, but I need to get this back on the market if it’s not you, so let’s do this or let’s not.”

And so, he said, “Yes, yes, we’ll do it. We’ll do it.” And I said, “Okay, great.” So, I did what any normal girl would do, and I booked the church. So, I called my parents’ church in Schaumburg, Illinois, and I said, “Hey, I need to book a wedding.” And Father George, who, rest in peace, said, “Hey, great, congrats on your engagement.” And I said, “Father George, I’m not engaged, but if this doesn’t do it, you can keep the 100 bucks, so let’s just book it,” so we did.

And he sent me the receipt in the mail, and I put the receipt on my refrigerator and I took off all the other magnets on the fridge in my little house in Chicago. And Eric came over one night and leaned closely into this document on the refrigerator, and stopped, and said, “Hey, what is this?” I said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I booked the church for my wedding.”

And he was like, “What wedding?” And I was like, “Well, honey, this is a 10 out of 10. And so, if you don’t want this, in 265 days, someone else is going to be at the end of the aisle, and I’m kind of tired of waiting for you. So, someone will be there. And if it’s not you, it’ll be someone else.” And so, two weeks later, I had a ring, and it was the best hard close of my entire life.

And in the book, I use this to talk about funnels and how, you know, the top of the funnel, you end up dating a bunch of folks. Like, you and I met in college, right? And in college there’s a whole bunch of ideal customer profiles all shoved into one place, and so you’re pretty lucky if you find one there. And then you date some and some get away from you, etc. And this is moving down the funnel.

And then finally, you have to kind of, like, sometimes put it on the line and do that hard close before one gets across the finish line. So, it’s my silly story to talk about funnels and dating in Chicago and how they’re kind of the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s talk a bit about funnels and pipelines, and we’ll take it maybe one level away from abstraction. Not only in business-to-business sales, but in anything in which there are people and we want them to take an action. How do we think about doing this well?

Kara Brown
Well, I think it’s whether you’re looking for a job or for us looking for candidates, right? Like, looking for candidates is exactly the same thing. We have LinkedIn now where we can see basically every candidate in our geography. We can narrow it down by region, and where they went to school, and how much experience they have, etc. Everything we do in life is a pipeline.

Every time you shop, right? I am a Nordstrom aficionado, which will not surprise you as my friend from many years ago. And I am constantly on their website looking, on there, like narrowing down my filters to get just the right pair of pants or just the right jacket for whatever outfit I’m wearing. So, every decision we make, whether it’s buying groceries or major life decisions, like jobs, we are sending everything we do through a funnel.

And so, we put three funnels in place, and here’s the really interesting piece about a funnel. You can’t go up a funnel, ever. You can’t ever move up a funnel. And so, what I really like about the way that we laid out these three funnels is, to go from one to the other, there is a true flexion point. There is a moment where you have to exit one funnel to enter the next. And the flexion point is where the measurement happens. This is where the magic happens.

And so, we talk a lot about deltas and ratios and conversion ratios, and it’s all kind of boring. But I think what’s really, really important is at the bottom of the first funnel, there’s a flexion point before you get to enter the top of the next funnel. So, whether you’re looking for a spouse, or looking for a job, or doing demand gen, and go to market and B2B, it’s the flexion point that matters.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, for example, we might just be thinking of ideas as at one level, and then the next level might be proposals or agenda items at the meeting. So, we’ve exited one funnel which is just by head. It’s like, “Okay, I got 20 ideas, 14 of them are kind of dumb. So, I’ve worked through that funnel, and now there’s six of them I’m going to go ahead and bring to my teammates. And then we’re going to discuss those and some will get ejected and then some will move forward on further.”

But to your point, is they don’t go backwards in terms of, it’s like, “Hey forget we ever spoke of that.” Like a judge, “Strike this from the record. I never brought that up. It’s going back in my head idea stage.”

Kara Brown
Yeah. And I think that the key is opportunity cost. Every idea that is not struck from the board that you move through, even though you know it’s the wrong idea, represents opportunity cost. And it’s the same with dating, and it’s the same with candidates, and it’s the same with jobs, and it’s the same with a pipeline in a B2B environment.

Every prospect that you leave in the funnel, that you know will not convert for whatever reason, “Timing is bad,” “It’s not the right idea,” “It was really dumb to begin with,” “We don’t like Pete to begin with. We’re just going to cross him off the list, right?”

Whatever the reason, if you are keeping something in the funnel that doesn’t belong there, you are creating opportunity cost inside your organization, inside your thought process, inside your brainstorm activity, anytime you are not honest, and scratching out things that you should be disqualifying, you are creating opportunity cost.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it’s funny, as sort of being steeped in your book and other learnings about sales and marketing, being on both sides of the sales table, instead of just the buyer/consumer, I’m starting to appreciate how useful a clear no is. Whereas, before I was like, “I don’t want to be rude. I don’t want to hurt their feelings. They spent a lot of time.”

But just today, talk about the doors again, somebody, apparently it was kind of hard for him to get this estimate for the doors. And I said, “Okay, so what is this? Pine? Okay. Does it have an STC, sound blocking rating, or a weight on it? Okay. No? All right. Well, I’ll pass on those. Do you have any others?” And so, it’s just like, the poor guy is like eight minutes after his estimate got to me, I was like, “Those are out. Got anything else?” He’s like, “Ah, not really.”

And so, I used to think, “Oh, I don’t know. Is that rude? Is that…? Oh, should I be kind of nicer?” But, no, being on other side, we appreciate knowing clearly, it’s like, “Okay, I don’t need to follow up with that person at all. I can free the mental space, free the time and energy, and put that to someone else.”

Kara Brown
Amen. There’s a book that I think you might like, by Blair Enns. It’s called The Four Conversations, and it’s the art of selling, the idea of expertise, so the art of selling expertise. And he says this very clearly in the book. The exact wording will escape me, but to paraphrase, “I would prefer a no than a maybe.” And so, he recommends that you ask for the no, that you say to someone, “If this is not going to move forward, that is okay. Please tell me now.”

So, we have this new mantra, because it’s actually Blair Enns’ mantra, and it is, “I am the expert. I am the prize. I am here to help. All will not follow. That’s okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Kara Brown
That’s okay. And I think, sometimes, as entrepreneurs, like, I’m an entrepreneur and I’m a salesperson, I want everyone to like me. I want everyone to be a part of the ecosystem. I want to help everyone. Like, what we have can help everyone in my super, super tiny niche, which is actually a $2 trillion market. But if you are in my niche, I know that what I can do can help you.

And so, when they say no, I’m almost like, “Oh, I wish you said yes, because I know I can help.” But a hard no means that I can go spend that time finding the next customer who will see me as the expert. And so, I think the same is in dating, right? Like, date a lot of people, but if they don’t see you as the one, like it’s time to move on, right? I dated a lot of guys for a long time that we’re going to be it, right, and we’re not going to be the one.

And so, this is exactly the same thing as the opportunity cost of that time. Maybe because I’m a woman and, like, I did have to date in Chicago in my 20s. I have like this real affinity for dating analogies. But it does, oftentimes, feel like you’re being dumped or you’re being rejected when someone says no. And it took me a long time to get over it.

And now I ask for the no, “Please be honest with me and tell me no because I’d rather spend my time on someone else who’s going to give me the strongest possible yes, and they’re out there.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And, well, I mean, I was a Chicago single for a while as well. I went on first dates with approximately 100 women, before my dear bride and I found each other. And so, I think that’s a great frame, and it’s bringing me back, too.

I used to say, when they told me no, I thought of it almost like a marketing funnel myself. I was like, “Oh, actually, this person is disqualified due to inadequate Pete interest. Because that’s one of my criteria and she’s not measuring up on it. So, she’s disqualified.” As opposed to, “I was rejected and I’m very sad about it.”

Kara Brown
I love that so much. I love that in business, too. Like, I am rejecting them because they don’t want me as much as I need to be wanted to close this deal. I love it. Yeah, I think I might be reframing everything we do from now on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, one of our first episodes, 14-ish, Andrea had a book called Go for No, which is really fun about pursuing the no’s and making it more fun and less rejection-y. So, very cool. And then also when it comes to a pipeline, you say that in many sales contexts, there’s hidden gold that tends to be often found in a similar place. There’s a pattern. Where is that hidden gold often found?

Kara Brown
Yes, so one of the campaign strategies that we run, we call Signs of Life, which, generally, comes from sales teams, or people like me, disqualifying too early, or kind of wrong timing. So, you can still help this prospect or help this person, but maybe your timing was off the first time.

And so, we literally call it signs of life. And we just send an email to anyone who could potentially be a prospect. And we see about a 10% lift overall. And this is very specifically in freight, but it can be applied to any B2B business. But it’s kind of like sending out like a group WhatsApp to all the women that you dated being like, “Hey, anybody thinking again? Anybody want a second shot?”

Pete Mockaitis
The group part is what’s most terrifyingly interesting. Like, I’ll have a weird dream about this tonight, Kara. But, no, I think that Signs of Life is a good way to say it. I think I was listening to the “I Love Marketing” podcast, and they talk about the nine-word email that revives dead leads, which is just kind of like, “Hey, are you still interested in launching a podcast, or getting some freight brokerage, go to market strategy advice?” Like, whatever your thing is.

And I’ve used that myself and it’s kind of amazing, they say, “Oh, yeah, well, that was like actually seven months ago that I filled out the form, but you know what? Yeah, it would be a good time to pick up the conversation.”

So, I think that’s interesting in terms of anything, or like job hunting, any company where the conversation got a little bit interesting, or, “Ooh, it wasn’t quite the right time or the right fit or they went with someone else but it was close.” There’s a lot of power and opportunity often hiding there, but we discount them all the way to zero. We’ve written them off and moved on.

Kara Brown
Yeah, so I think there’s a delicate balance between writing someone off and moving on forever and the Signs of Life campaign. Professor John Dawes, who is in Australia, came up with the rule of 95. So he says 95% of your buying market, this is B2B specific, 95% of your buying market are not in market at any given time, which means that you’re looking, really like a needle in a haystack, for the 5% that are in market at any given day, which means that if you hit them, and they’re not in market on Monday, and three Mondays from now, they might be in market and you just have no idea, right? There’s no way to know.

Now, there are ways to know whether someone’s actually interested, and we can get into intent data on another time. But the point is that 95% of the individuals who could buy from you aren’t buying the exact thing that you’re trying to sell at that exact moment, which is kind of the joy of marketing, right? It’s part of why we even exist because if everyone was buying everything at the exact same time, we wouldn’t need marketers to begin with.

And so, finding that 5%, that needle in the haystack, and uncovering exactly how you can help them at the exact right time is the joy of what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s beautiful to hear your fondness and passion for this because some folks could very well be like, “Oh, that sounds so brutal, 95% of the time, they’re like, ‘Get lost. I don’t want this now.’” But that actually brings up another important conversation. In your book, you go into some detail about how sales goals are often generated in practice versus what is the best practice. There is a wide chasm between the two. Could you paint these two pictures for us?

Kara Brown
I think most of the time, we see, specifically in SMB and sometimes in mid-market, we see leadership teams making goals that are just not aligned with reality.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they just made it up, or, “It’d sure be nice to have this. The investors would like this. This would let me buy a boat.”  It’s like there’s some kind of thing driving it other than the underlying market realities.

Kara Brown
Yes. There is a reason. There’s always a reason. There’s always a reason. There’s a board member who decides that McDonald’s is going to be your customer. There’s a VC partner who’s decided that he has to get a 12X return on this or it’s all for naught, right? Like, there’s always a reason why these totally irrational goals happen that become available.

Very rarely is it the marketing team saying, “Hey, let’s build ourselves a super irrational goal that we don’t think we can hit.” Normally, it is being imposed upon them. And so, in the book, I talk a lot about having a point of view so that you don’t end up getting in that position, so you have something to come back to the team that’s giving you this kind of wild and outlandish goal that you know is totally impossible.

And instead of just saying no, you’re saying, “Okay, but can we look at it this way?” or, “Can we measure it from a different perspective?” or, “Do we really think that’s possible?” or, do the backwards math, right, like, “How do you expect us to get there? Today we’re closing two deals a quarter and the expectation is we’re going to start closing 10 deals a month. That is an outrageous multiple. How much money are you giving us to execute that goal?”

So, there’s lots of ways to go about having that conversation, but I think what’s more important is the go-to-market leadership on the marketing side, so the marketing piece of the go-to-market team has to have a point of view. And the number of times that I interview junior marketers in B2B orgs, and I ask them very basic questions about the sales team’s goals, and they cannot answer, gives me all the information that I need.

They are operating in a vacuum, they are not aligned with the sales team, and no one is sharing goals between these two organizations. And that happens more often than I’d like it to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah. So, you’ve shared how goals often just fall downward upon us. Like, someone has a number that they would like for some reason. Share with us how it’s really done in terms of like best practice, this is what a robust revenue goal-setting process looks like, step one to six, or whatever. And I think we can extract a little bit about that in terms of what great goal-setting can look like for any number of things.

Kara Brown
Sure. So, shameless plug, it’s in the book. So, we literally walk through this and then we just finished the workbook, the companion workbook for The Revenue Engine. It’ll be available on Amazon in a couple of weeks. And, basically, we take you through this process in these exercises. And it’s really what we call backwards math.

There are a couple of components that you absolutely must have in order to understand your backwards math. And one is either ARR or LTV. ARR is annual run rate. So, this is how much each of your deals, or clients, or boyfriends, or ideas, whatever it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Twenty-five thousand a year.

Kara Brown
Yeah, right? Like, where’s the better check? But I have no judgment, no judgment on exactly what you’re charging for. And so, the how much they’re worth. ARR is the annual run rate or how much they’re worth to you over the next 12 months. Lifetime value, or LTV, is how much are they worth to you if they stay a customer for as long as your customers normally stay a customer.

LTV is a much more complicated math equation. So, 99% of the time, we use ARR. The other option is just the average value of a deal, which is where we normally start. So, start with the value of each deal. That’s all you need to start with. So, value, volume, and velocity. So, then we’re going to go up and backwards, and we’re going to look at “How many of those deals at that value do I need every single month to hit this goal?”

And then lastly is velocity, “How fast do I need to hit those goals? How fast do I need to hit those volumes in my funnel to hit my goals to close those deals?” You will also need a couple of what we call delta or conversion percentages. Oftentimes, we make them up because most of our clients don’t have them today. The only place to get your velocity metric is from inside your CRM.

So, your CRM is your customer relationship management tool. We like HubSpot, it’s our favorite, it’s easy, it’s DIY, etc. And we can see how fast opportunities are moving through your funnel into closed deals if we can track the time-stamping of activities inside the CRM. This all gets really complicated and kind of, you know, mathematical.

But really, what you’re asking me is, “How do I do this backwards math to then walk into the room with my leadership team and say, ‘Here is my point of view as the marketer on what is achievable at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel in order to hand these potential customers over to the sales team to close’”?

And if you can walk in the room with that point of view, and you can show the math behind that point of view, that marketer will have a seat at the table and the sales team will welcome them into sort of their goal-setting exercise. But if you are showing up without a point of view and without understanding the key components of the backwards math, then you’re just going to be handed a goal, either top down or from the sales team over to the marketing group.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think there’s so much goodness there in terms of so that the math is just translates reality into goal and vice versa in terms of, like, “You want five million dollars? Well, here’s what that means in terms of deals.” And then you’ve also got a piece in there about having every record in your CRM software tool. What do mean by this?

Kara Brown
So, this is a little different philosophy, and I’m really glad you asked this question because I’ve been having this question asked of me in my life lately. So, our philosophy is very specific to B2B but we believe that if you have a TAM, or a total addressable market, that is encapsulated, right, there is a finite end to the TAM.

So, I’m going to use something pretty specific from my marketplace, which is there are 19,677 shippers in America that matter. So, the TAM, or the total addressable market, on shippers in America that really, like, matter to freight brokers is about 20,000.

Pete Mockaitis
So, not me sending out T-shirts, but perhaps a shop that has thousands of packages going out.

Kara Brown
Right. So, we believe that because you know the TAM of exactly who can buy from you, you should procure or buy the email addresses attached to every human who could become a customer. What I did not say is that you should spam them. That’s not what I said. I said you should own their email address. If your TAM is finite, there are absolutely ways to find these email addresses and they should be in your CRM, preferably HubSpot, and here’s why.

When that human comes to your ecosystem because of your great marketing…

Pete Mockaitis
Like your website.

Kara Brown
Like your website, or your LinkedIn profile, or someone who’s connected to you, or the G2 Crowd page, whatever it is, when they enter your ecosystem, because you own their email address inside your CRM, you can see that activity. If you don’t own their email address in your CRM, they show up as an anonymous visitor. And anonymous visitors are not able to be monetized.

So, if you’re going to try to monetize an audience, then you have to, first, build the audience and understand who the audience is. And the only way to do that is to literally buy the email addresses of the humans who could become your customer.

Pete Mockaitis
Or have a crew mercilessly crawling all over LinkedIn for days, one way or the other. But I think that also makes the goal-setting all the more real to that notion about perhaps only 5% of folks could be in market during a given timeframe. Well, if you’ve got your 20,000-ish shippers, then 5% of them, 1/20th, only 1,000 could even possibly buy from us. So, like, if your revenue goal is equal to 2,000 customers times the deal size, then it’s just, it’s already impossible.

Kara Brown
That’s right, it’s already irrelevant. And you have to really be able to have that conversation with leadership because it is pretty common that leadership doesn’t actually know these numbers. All the time, we deal with this all the time. What is the actual TAM? How many shippers are there? How many brokers are there? How many T-shirt vendors are there? How many book vendors are there, right?

Like, these total addressable markets are findable. You can find them. And then you can build an audience just directed only to them, and then find who is actually interested in what you’re selling because they will show up. They will show up on your website. But if you don’t own them, if you don’t know who they are, and you haven’t owned their email address, they will show up as an anonymous visitor and you’ll never know that they were there.

Pete Mockaitis
So that’s just handy to know, that, “Hey, world, there’s creepy software available that knows you by name if you’re at certain websites.”

Kara Brown
It is so creepy, but it’s called intent data and it’s real and it’s super creepy.

Pete Mockaitis
But in some ways, I think we’ve almost gotten over that, it’s like, “Okay, yeah.” Once I first saw my first re-targeted ad, like, “Hey, wait a minute, I was just on that website,” you know, over a decade ago, I was like, “Okay, I guess this is just what’s happening now.”

And I guess what I’m getting at for all this is, if you have a job that has nothing to do with sales, these same principles apply in terms of, if you really know the numbers inside and out the bounds of what’s possible, if you’re in manufacturing, it’s like, “Okay, hey, time out a second. We’re going to spend how much on this robot? Well, here’s what that would really have to do for us in order to give us a reasonable return,” or, “We’re going to hire how many people?” or, “Is that…?”

Like, any goal, you can just sort of check the bounds of the rationality or sanity of it. And then if you’re the person who is bringing these data to light and presenting it clearly with some mathematical linkages, and nobody else in their world is doing that, well, there’s your seat at the table right there.

Kara Brown
Amen. That is exactly where your seat at the table is. And, oftentimes, you know the person that gets the most excited about this, that we don’t see very often in these marketing and sales books? The person who gets the most excited about you bringing a point of view to the table is the CFO. And, oftentimes, in marketing situations, in B2B, mid-market and SMB specifically, the CFO is the biggest deal breaker.

They are the ones that are saying, “No way. I want to see real ROI, right? I’ve never seen marketing produce any real revenue, etc.” This is just in my experience, right? And if you can get the CFO on your side, if you can show them that you have a point of view, and that you understand what a payoff looks like, or what ROI looks like, or what good looks like in your world, you can have a champion on the leadership team that you didn’t expect.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, hey, the CFO’s not a bad friend to have, certainly, as you’re doing a career. Thank you. Well, so you’ve talked about having a point of view a few times, and you mentioned that having a point of view is better than advice. How are we defining point of view? And what’s the distinction? And can we have some examples?

Kara Brown
Yeah, that’s a good question. So, I am a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, EO, and we talk a lot about experience shares versus giving advice. And so, I really like this, it’s called the Gestalt method.  It’s a way to share information with people that isn’t demeaning. And I really like this even in business. I like the idea of sharing an experience or sharing a point of view.

And most of the time, if we share, “This is what good looks like in our space.” This is much easier to do if you’re in a niche environment like we are. So, “This is what good looks like at your competitor. This is what good looks like at your compatriot, at someone who looks and feels like you. This is what good looks like,” that’s a solid point of view.

And I think the other thing that has come up in my life lately, Pete, is that my point of view about buying the TAM is actually new to a lot of marketers. And I was pretty surprised. I was pretty surprised when I’m talking to people of my age or older who are considered, you know, veteran experts in marketing and sales and go-to market, and I’m sharing this position, and our point of view on owning and buying the TAM, and they’re telling me, “I disagree.”

And I appreciate that because I love a good sparring, right, back and forth on, you know, the philosophies of go-to market. But I think, if we didn’t have a point of view as a team, as a company, or as an author, then there wouldn’t be anything interesting to read. And it wouldn’t be very interesting to work with us. And we wouldn’t be able to prove the ROI back to our customers because so much of what we do actually has to do with our point of view.

And so many young marketers that I meet spend a lot of time worrying about the what, “What are we sending? How are we sounding? What are the words that we’re using? The messaging is super important.” And my point of view is the who, the who you’re putting it in front of is actually more important than the what. You’re still with me?

Pete Mockaitis
All day.

Kara Brown
Thank you. I think, sometimes, just having a contrary point of view is also something that’s interesting to people. And they want to have a conversation with you because you have a point of view. So, I think having a point of view in general, in life, etc., you’re always someone that had a very specific and unique point of view. I remember that very specifically.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me? And do you have one come to mind, Kara?

Kara Brown
Yeah, so many things about you in college. You knew exactly when you were getting married. You knew exactly what your life was going to look like. You knew exactly where you were going to work. I think some of that’s changed for you. But you knew exactly what you were going to do and how you were going to get it done. And I always respected your point of view on how you were going to live your life.

And I think it’s very similar in some aspects to having a point of view on your professional, exactly whatever your profession is. So, whether you’re a dentist, or you make clothes for a living, have a point of view on what good looks like in your industry, and people will take you seriously.

Pete Mockaitis
And in contrast to advice, which I think sounds more like something that the top page of Google or generic, we could dunk on AI a little bit because it has a lot of goodness to it. But with a broad prompt, like, let’s just say, “How should I start a podcast?” So, I mean, sure, you could find plenty of search results on that. You’ll get a bunch of steps associated with your microphone and your hosting, whatever. And that really does feel cheap and commoditized because it’s just there.

And I can get sort of like the standard issue truth of the matter in seconds effortlessly, but it takes an insider to tell you, like, “Here’s why the Blue Yeti is a terrible microphone choice for the vast majority of contexts, even though you read some people said it’s good. Here’s why it’s probably the wrong choice for you.”

So, that’s very minor or macro, but it really does, I think, highlight the core distinction between expertise you share that earns you street cred and gets folks to think, “Okay, this person knows something,” as opposed to, “Ah, yes, I, too, am capable of Googling things.”

Kara Brown
Yes, and I think there’s a word, a key word that we do not use when we experience share or when we share a point of view, and that is the word should. We don’t should on people. So, the word should is demeaning. It’s almost like the word no, right? Like, “Pete, you really should get a haircut before you come onto these podcasts.” Your hair looks great. Your hair looks great.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been a while.

Kara Brown
But this should-ing someone, right? And so, I think it’s really important to keep the word should out of any conversation that you’re having if you want to be taken seriously as an expert with a point of view that people are going to hear. Because the minute they hear the word should, they’re going to shut down. Nobody wants to be should-ed.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Oh, I guess I’m just wrong. I’m just an idiot. I’ve been doing it all wrong my whole time. And at last, this genius visionary, Kara, is going to set us straight.”

Kara Brown
Yes. So, we try really hard not to use the word should because I definitely don’t want anyone to think that about me.

Pete Mockaitis
So, then in terms of actual linguistic word choice, you might say, “Our point of view is…” or, “We believe…” or, “We’ve seen great results by…”

Kara Brown
Or, “May I share an experience?” or, “May I tell you a story about when this worked for us?” And I use that a lot. And we share three core strategies that work in supply chain, which I will not bore your audience with. But there are three core strategies that work in supply chain, go-to-market. And I usually ask the question before I share them, “May I share with you our three key strategies that work in supply chain and the ROI that they’ve delivered?”

And people are usually like, “Yes, please, that’s why we’re on the call.” And so, I think I am then asking permission to share my point of view. And never once do I say, “You should do these things.” I’m just saying, “Here is our point of view on what is working with your compatriots and your competitors.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, you’re also articulating something, like one of my pet peeves when I’m reading the news, and like, I’m just a weirdo, but I really bristle when I see a news headline say, “Something: What You Need to Know.” Like, “Pope Francis’s Death: What You Need to Know.” Because that’s sort of, like, the hubris, the presumption.

Kara Brown
Like you don’t know already.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “You don’t know me, my relationship to the Catholic faith and Pope Francis.” Because context matters a lot in terms of what you need to know about anything varies quite a bit in terms of it might just be nothing. Like, “This is a thing that happened. Some people might be talking about it. So now you know just by reading the headline.” Or, it might be, “You are a Cardinal who is going to elect the next Pope. Like, there may be a whole lot more things you need to know.”

Kara Brown
Yeah, you should probably know more than what the headline is going to give you from the Daily Mail. Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, like politics of all sorts is like, “What you need to know is…” Like, well, maybe nothing until Election Day. I’m probably not going to do anything at all with this information.

Kara Brown
And I think where the information comes is also super important, right? Like, I do not belong giving advice on business to consumer at all. Like ever. I had someone ask me today, “What do you know about B2C?” And I said, “Absolutely nothing. I hope you hire someone else. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I’m going to do that,” right?

So, I think the credibility of the “what you should know” question is also really important is, “What is the source of this information?” Very different with the source of the information on Pope Francis from the Daily Mail than from, you know, the Vatican blog.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Well, Kara, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Kara Brown
I am just so glad that I was here. Thank you so much for this. I’m so proud of you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Well, you, too. Well, now let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Kara Brown
My favorite quote is, “The enemy of progress is perfection.” And so, we need to make sure that… I give this advice to clients, and this is sometimes actually straight advice, not an experience share, that everything digital can be changed. And so, if you’re not going to physically print it in a book, it’s okay to send it and we can change it.

And then I wrote a book. And it was the scariest moment of, like, saying yes and hitting the send button on it because it’s in print, and there are mistakes in it, and I’ve found them, and it’s so embarrassing. And even still, perfection is still the enemy of progress, and I wouldn’t take it back.

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

Kara Brown
You know, we do our own studies and research internally. And I think one of the things I’m most proud of is our new experimentation around answer engine optimization. So, we’re doing as much research as we can around how are our clients found on large language models versus how are they found in traditional SEO.

Hyper-hyper technical, and we won’t go into the results yet, but I’m really proud of the work that my team is doing in helping our customers understand how they’re going to be found on large language models.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Kara Brown
So, besides my own, I think my favorite right now is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I think it’s one I come back to all the time as an entrepreneur.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Kara Brown
So, there’s a super creepy tool that I like a lot that you might find kind of gross, but it’s called Crystal Knows. So, Crystal Knows is a psychographic profiling tool that tells you the DISC profile of any human on LinkedIn based on their LinkedIn and Google activity. And it is the creepiest, coolest thing that I’ve ever had an opportunity to be a part of.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Kara Brown
My favorite habit is I go to bed at trade shows. So, when I go to trade shows, which is all the time, I go to bed at nine o’clock.

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?

Kara Brown
Share good news, track interest, follow up. I feel like any good marketer has a nice solid, you know, one, two, three in their back pocket. And I’ve been saying it long enough that people are now saying it back to me.

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

Kara Brown
I would point them to KaraSmithBrown.com or LeadCoverage.com. And you can always find me on LinkedIn because I am very active.

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

Kara Brown
So, my final call to action for someone looking to be awesome at their job is to say yes. Take the opportunity, whatever it is in front of you, it may be really hard, it may be super easy, but if you are the person that always says yes and gets it done, you will go very, very far.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kara, thank you.

Kara Brown
That was so fun.

1053: How to Create Win-Win Workplaces with Dr. Angela Jackson

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Dr. Angela Jackson reveals how practices that help employees thrive translate into enhanced business results.

You’ll Learn

  1. What’s really driving disengagement at work
  2. How the social contract of work has changed
  3. The best way to get your boss’ support 

About Angela

Dr. Angela Jackson, a Workplace Futurist and ESG expert, is at the forefront of reshaping the future of work. As a lecturer at Harvard University on leadership and organizational change and as the founder of Future Forward Strategies, a labor market intelligence and strategy firm, she collaborates with Fortune 500 companies, growth-stage startups, and policymakers, offering valuable research and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of work.

As a subject matter expert in the future of work and learning, Dr. Jackson is widely published in leading journals, including Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and Stanford Social Innovation Review, and has spoken at numerous conferences, including the Economist, Wall Street Journal, and TED conferences. Her forthcoming book, The Win-Win Workplace: How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom-Line Success, releases on March 11, 2025. 

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Angela Jackson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Angela, welcome.

Angela Jackson
Hey, Pete, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom, talking about “The Win-Win Workplace.” And I’d like for you to kick us off by sharing any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans at work during the course of you putting this together.

Angela Jackson
So, the research that I do at Harvard University that really undergirds this book is really around what helps people thrive in the workplace. And just a simple one-liner that came out for me that was really surprising, that won’t be surprising to others, that at its base, people just want to know that they matter.

And that can be realized and seen in many different ways. And what we tried to do in “The Win-Win Workplace” book was to identify nine ways that, when people experience these strategies, these behaviors, that they feel like they matter at work.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel like we could talk for 40-ish minutes about that sentence alone, “We just want to feel like we matter.” So, can you maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of what are some work experiences that just say, “Wow, I feel like I matter a whole lot” versus some work experiences that are like, “Wow, I feel like I absolutely do not matter”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and I just want to be clear. A lot of my work, and I’ve looked at over 1700 companies, I’ve never met a CEO or a leadership team who said they don’t care about their employees. But what’s so fascinating is that when you go and ask rank-and-file employees, does the company care about them, you have upwards of 60% saying that they don’t. So, there’s this huge disconnect in between what employers, management teams, leaders, executive leaders think that they’re doing and what’s being actually felt.

And so, when we talk to like actual everyday workers, things that they said mattered to them was that, one, that there’s a recognition from their manager or from the company that they have a life outside of work, and that their life outside of work, their lived realities, really impacts their ability to show up engaged in work.

So, being very specific, if you think about, like, we’re all in this sandwich generation today where we have kids of our own, we have parents who are elderly, and we know the numbers of boomers who are retiring. And so, because of that, what we’re seeing more and more are that workers are asking for flexibility, not because they want to sit at home and twiddle their thumbs. It’s because they’re playing defense at all levels.

You know, how are you there for your parents, how are you there for your kids and showing up. And so, a bit of flexibility in saying to people, “Can I adjust your hours by coming in maybe a little bit late? Is there a one or two days that you can work from home?” To them, to employees, they told me that means that their employer actually sees them as a full human.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. What’s intriguing is, with regard to the senior folks, you said they don’t say, “Our people don’t matter.” And yet, it is felt at 60% perhaps that it feels that way, that as though, “We don’t matter,” or, “They don’t care.” And it’s intriguing in terms of just like the mental processes at work. What’s behind that? Is it perhaps that the senior folks are just so fixated on the results and the pressure and bottom line and delivering, delivering, delivering, or what do you think is at the root of this?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, Pete, I think about this a lot and I talk about, in the book, we’ve got these win-win workplaces and we have this other phenomenon that I call zero-sum workplaces. And how I describe a zero-sum workplace are these are very traditional workplaces. They’re the ones that say, “You have to come into the office because I came in the office. And when I came in the office, this is the way I was mentored.”

So, it’s really anchoring what that leadership’s experience was. It doesn’t matter that they’ve been 20 or 30 years out of the rank and file. And so, it’s what we’re asking for is like a re-questioning and a re-imagining of the workplaces for this moment. And so, one is a lot of leaders are tied to nostalgia. They’ll tell you the great ways that they’ve been mentored and invested in and how they rose through the ranks. And so, it’s hard for them to reimagine how mentoring could happen, how development could happen at distance.

I was very fortunate early in my career. I worked for Nokia and we were a global firm, and I led teams that were based in Singapore, I had colleagues that were in the UK. I worked remotely 50% of the time and, because of the distance, because of the time zones, you really had to put trust in your people. And what I found as a manager is that if people weren’t doing their job, it became evident really quickly. But we shouldn’t penalize everyone because there are some people that might take advantage of a policy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what you said there really resonated in terms of, “Well, when I did this, it worked like this. Like, I had to hustle, to stay till midnight, to be abused verbally by higher-ups.” And it reminds me, we had a conversation with Rahaf Harfoush, who used the turn of phrase, performative suffering, which I thought was just perfect in terms of, like, “Whoa, well, we did it, and so look how much we suffered and we experienced the hardship and so, too, you must. And if not, something is going wrong, or it’s unfair, or I was cheated, or there’s something that ain’t right here.”

Angela Jackson
And people today have a different type of social contract with work. I’m Gen X, and I would think about what I was taught to do is you go into work, you put your head down, you get in before your boss, you leave later. And what you get in exchange for that is a good paycheck, right? Hopefully, a good paycheck.

What we’re seeing now when we’re looking at this next generation of workforce, many of them report, 42% said that they would take a pay cut if they could maybe work remotely, if they could have more flexibility. And what we’re seeing with all of the research is that people want purpose in their work. They’re willing to take less. Some of people want to go away from the big cities and want to be closer to home.

What I’m saying is there’s a very different calculation today than it was in previous generations. Gen X, the Boomers, you know, if we were born and raised like I was in Chicago, I was willing to go out to LA and go out to New York. Like, we’re willing to run and go wherever for that next milestone. And what we’re seeing with today’s generation, they’re not doing that.

The second thing is, I think about my grandfather who worked at a Chrysler factory, he was there for 40 years, he was part of a union, I was able to go to college because of that. That’s not the same social contract we have today.

So, you have everyday workers who are watching, mass layoffs, when we see that with government jobs that are typically the safest, people immediately think, “What’s in it for me? What’s in it for me to work at a job that could lay me off and I haven’t seen my kids in seven days because I’ve been traveling, because I’ve been going in late?”

And so, really, today when we think about employers and CEOs, they’re really thinking about, “What’s the value proposition that’s going to resonate most to employees today? That is how we’re going to keep people. That’s how we’re going to attract people.” And they’re actually putting a number on that.

So, by meeting their needs, reimagining their benefits, reimagining how people are trained and placed in their positions, they’re seeing lift on the financial side by implementing these practices. And I just think they’re going to be ever needed when we think about the climate now where no one’s hiring, right? Everyone is trying to do more with their incumbent workforce. Well, it becomes, “How do we keep them and keep them engaged, they’re not quiet-quitting?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, there’s so much to dig into here. Let’s talk about the social contract in terms of just really articulating that in terms of the old world versus the new world.

You highlighted that job security is no longer a thing, that’s just kind of not around, and so that changes the calculus. Could you elaborate on your articulation of the social contract between executives and lower-level employees in the olden times versus the now times?

Angela Jackson
So, one, you would have, and I think about my parents, your parents, people would stay at their job 20 or 30 years, right? There was loyalty. There were pensions at the time. There was sharing in the success of the company. It was beneficial for people to stay. They were getting bonuses at that time. They had factories and unions that were looking out and making sure that people had benefits and that they could pay for the latest hospital bill or emergency bill.

And what we’re seeing today is that people still expect those things, when I say people, everyday workers. For example, there was this Edelman Trust Barometer that came out, and it said that when people think about where they should be up-skilled for the future or learn these new future work skills, generative AI, they’re looking to their employer for that.

Typically, in the past, employers did invest in training their people. What we’re seeing now is the shift that people are left on their own. And so, what does that mean when you are thinking that you’re a cog in the wheel, at any time your job could be eliminated? And maybe that’s not because sales are down, maybe sales are great. And we’ve seen that with a lot of the tech companies, but they want their share price to rise. So, they’ll just, again, let people go as a signal to the market that they’re being more efficient.

Those are things we didn’t hear about in the past when we talk about that social contract. You were let go because typically you were underperforming. Someone had, whether you disagreed or disagreed, they had a real rationale. It wasn’t because we’re trying to manipulate the stock market, for example. And also thinking about that social contract, the other thing was the stability that you had raises. And you know, there was more employee ownership. There were more pensions.

Right now, when you negotiate your wage, that’s the best that you’re going to do when you’re going in the door. Most people know that. And so, to get that next raise, right, even if you are awesome at your job, you have to go somewhere else. And what we’re seeing now are companies who are letting their best people go because of small things.

This return to office is becoming a big thing. We have A-players, and there was research by colleagues out of MIT, where companies are losing their A-players because there’s inflexibility. And what I always say to CEOs are, “A-players always have optionality. So, it may not be just in this moment, but they’ll have one foot out the door.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, as you sort of lay out the social contract before versus now, it seems kind of like the employee’s contract is just worse now than it was then, and the “compensation” to keep it fair-ish, is that it’s like, “Well, loyalty is no longer something employees bring to the table.” And it just seems like, “Why would they? That’s normal.” So, is that a fair characterization? If the social contract is worse, what are the employees…are they just kind of out of luck or is there a counterbalance on their side?

Angela Jackson
I absolutely think it’s a counterbalance. There’s a set of employers who are still interested in that contract, and they’re interested in centering what employees want. I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, Spotify put a billboard in Times Square, and it said in substance, “We let our people work remote because we hire adults.” And some would say, “Okay, that’s cheeky and it’s cute, but why did they do that in Times Square?”

Well, if you look down the street from Times Square, you have JP Morgan Chase that is requiring people to come back in the office. And they know some of those people will leave. And what Spotify is trying to do is say, “We’re different.” And they’re using that to actually attract talent, get A-talent. And they’re seeing a tangible benefit.

When I connected with their CEO, he was saying, “We attribute our flexibility and our policies and our people policies with keeping our teams. We let them work from wherever they want in the world. We want them to pursue their passions. Why? Because we know that if they’re excited in their lives, that they’ll bring that excitement to work, if we can sustain that.”

And so, while it’s broken with certain companies, there are a set of these companies that I write about in that I call win-win workplaces are actually using this as their competitive advantage, this moment and this differentiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, so in this new contract, Spotify is bringing some things to the table with regard to flexibility, etc. They will still fire you readily because they’ve had rounds of layoffs and such, but they’re bringing some other goodies, such as the flexibility. And any other key things you’d highlight there?

Angela Jackson
I think it’s flexibility. I think it’s passion. When you talk to their employees, they’re passionate about what they do. And what gets exciting about that piece, is when you’ve got employees who are passionate about the mission, that they feel supported, what you’re building towards is what I call an ownership mindset.

And those are the employees, my research shows, are the stickiest, the most loyal. Like, they feel bought into what the company is doing and they want to go the extra mile. And it’s not just about the paycheck. It’s because that company matches up with their values, the way that they live their life. There’s not that gap, that air in between the two.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. It seems like there’s got to be something going on in terms of bought into the mission or purpose, or we’re having fun solving problems, or there are colleagues that were just a blast to be around who inspire and are fun. Are there any other key bits of value on the employee side that are really getting accentuated these days?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, the big one is around agency. And so, we have a number of companies, the most famous one is we think about Google and their 20% time off to pursue an interest or an innovation. We’re seeing more and more companies actually give their people time to tinker. And by that, I mean some of them are doing it in different ways.

They may bring a problem of practice to an ERG group or a group of employees, and say, “If you can come up with the ideas, all ideas are welcome.” And giving people funding and budget to actually work on some of these ideas. Coca-Cola bottlers, in North Carolina, is doing something very similar. They had a challenge around frontline workers and how we retain them. And so, they challenged a group of rank-and-file employees to come together and solve that problem.

And that was an acknowledgment that these people are closest to the problem. So, of course, they might have some loose solutions to solve it. And so, it’s innovations like that where people are bringing rank and file into the thinking of the company, into the challenges, and also giving them the agency to begin solving some of these problems.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that a lot in terms of, like, the Coca-Cola bottling example, with the solving of the problems, because when I think about purpose, and maybe I just have too high a standard, but I don’t imagine, I guess it depends on how you define purpose, and I’d love for you to expand on this, that folks are saying, “I am deeply inspired at my core by the mission of getting sugar water into the hands of more and more people and growing the market share,” right?

Like, I don’t think that purpose sense in the Coca-Cola context specifically is resonating. So, when you say purpose, are you thinking about something with more, broader, with additional facets, or maybe it’s like, “Hey, know what, purpose isn’t going to be so much of a motivator in certain organizations. So instead, hopefully, we’ve got some of that autonomous problem-solving goodness to offer”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I love that. And I love your push on this too, Pete. Purpose means different things to different people. And so, say you’re at a Coca-Cola bottlers, for example. For them, the purpose is, “At my job, can I be really good at it? And do I have a company that’s investing in me? And do I feel like my work matters?”

So, that’s having purpose versus being at the front line and you’re feeling, you’re just a number. No one knows your name and what you do. You don’t know what you do, how that connects to the overall vision of the company. And that’s hard sometimes when you’re at the front lines. How do you connect that to the overall strategy and show that through line? So that’s one set of purpose.

Then you have the other set of purpose where, you use a Spotify, or I even use my job at Harvard. I love the research I do. It gives me a sense of purpose that I can work on research around workplaces that help connect people to better companies that are willing to invest in them. And so, really thinking about, like, this is something I’d probably do for free, that I would talk about. And you have a set of people who are just really connected to what the business is delivering, and they find deep value in that.

And I believe if you go to some of those employees, they’ll tell you why they’re excited to get up every day and go to work, what they’re learning, how they’re growing, being an international company. They’re doing a lot of exciting things within the company to keep their people engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it if you could share perhaps a favorite story of an organization you’ve seen really make a transformation or an about-face in terms of getting with the program to creating more of a win-win workplace?

Angela Jackson
One that just came to mind was a CEO of a fast casual restaurant. He brought in me and my research team because, again, with their frontline workers, they were having a challenge around getting them to take advantage of the benefits that the company offered.

And the CEO, he was so excited and proud of himself because he offered rank-and-file employees, access to the 401k plans, but he was perplexed because no one took advantage of it. And so, he called me in, and he’s like, “Dr. Angela, tell me, what does your research say about this? Like, I would have killed for a benefit like that.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” “Have you asked them?” And he hadn’t asked them.

And to his credit, fast forward, he did end up asking them. And what he learned from his rank-and-file kind of employees is that the 401k was great, people appreciated it, but they had more present-day issues that they needed help with.

Pete Mockaitis
That was my guess, it’s like, “I’m paycheck to paycheck. Saving for retirement would be nice, but that feels more like a luxury at the moment.”

Angela Jackson
“Will I be able to retire,” right? And that was it. And so, to his credit, he acknowledged that. We did the listening, and what he did was the money they had allocated for that, they put into a flexible fund so that employees would have choice about how they wanted to spend those dollars. So, they could spend it on caregiving. They could spend it on transportation. They could spend it on a massage for themselves in the area.

But what he was able to acknowledge, and when we went back and talked to employees, one thing that they told us when we asked that same question, “Do you think your employer cares about or give us some examples?” they start citing that they had some agency over how these funds were spent. And everyone spent them differently.

And what was so interesting that we found after we tracked where they spent the dollars, many of them spent them in their local community, with local small- and medium-sized businesses. So, not only was it great for these employees and giving a sense that this company was actually shoulder to shoulder with them in what they need today, they also felt good that this was money being driven in the community where the business does business.

And I’d say one thing is, when we talk to actual employees, they would say, “We’re appreciative for the 401k, but I’m so happy that I actually get choice. I feel like they really see me and understand me.” And again, all of this is around perception, when we talk about how we feel at work.

So, there’s intentions, and then there’s like how those intentions are received. And what I’m seeing with these win-win companies are they’re really keen on tracking how it’s being felt and experienced by the rank-and-file employees so that they actually get it right and not assuming that they know what’s best and what they want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, that is, in my entrepreneurial journey, I have made that mistake numerous times, like, “People should want this because it’s cool,” as opposed to, “Well, do they actually?” and “You must ask.” So that’s handy. So, you lay out, in your book, “The Win-Win Workplace,” nine strategies for creating better workplaces. Could you share with us a favorite in terms of it just being tremendously transformational and high ROI? Like, “This is not that hard and yet it makes a world of a difference. So, come on, workplaces, everyone should just go ahead and do this.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah. And I have to say, a lot of this book, and what pleased me about it, is these are common sense things. And what we noticed with our conversations with leadership is that it’s harder to put them into place because what it really takes is, one, intention; two, and what we write about this in the book is a commitment to measuring this.

We do lots of things for people. We don’t ask their feedback on them. The second thing is we don’t measure if it’s effective. And this is a problem with a lot of the plans and trainings that we do in the world and, again, billions of dollars spent, but the outcomes, we’re not really seeing any of them. And so, what we’re asking companies to do in this moment is to reevaluate how you’re training people, how you’re developing people, and really think about what’s adding value for them and making sure that it’s actually adding value for the bottom line.

And these nine practices, in particular, they show a correlation to output, a lift on the financial side, and that’s really important because what we’re trying to do is move conversations around investing in people just as an expense or the charitable thing to do to, one, actually seeing it as a revenue driver.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I totally buy it in terms of, maybe if you could just specify the mechanism of action here, because it kind of seems like the extent to which people, human beings, are feeling good things, and able to take care of themselves, their lives, that which is important to them, their health, they are able to show up and be smart and creative and engaged and rocking and rolling. And so, that just seems intuitively commonsensically true, but it is kind of a trickier thing to measure.

Angela Jackson
It is and it isn’t. So, the one way that we’ve mapped out, and for this case study, we talk about the private equity firm Blackstone. They have hundreds of portfolio companies, and one thing that they did is they did their research across their portfolio companies. They saw that, investments in talent, they were able to map out an ROI.

And so, what we found were, and what they found were, investing in actually training people to manage people had an ROI. And how they mapped that was amongst retention. They did pulse surveys about frontline, “How did they feel about their managers? Would they recommend their managers?” And then what they were able to do in terms of some of the financial institutions that they looked at, they had measures, for example, on like cash on hand and assets under management.

They noticed that people, when the employees were happier and that they felt great about their manager, that some of their businesses had more assets under management and they had higher sales. And so, they were able to disaggregate that. And so, we tell employers, “Find two to three metrics that you think are key, that you think would show you the health of your employees.”

“Have those metrics on the same dashboard that you’re thinking about, ‘What’s our sales over this quarter? How many products have we produced? What services have we put out?’ And have those same three metrics? So, you should be looking at them. So, one, get a baseline. Two, think about the problem of practice or opportunity you see with your talent. Is it around training? Is it around training managers? Is it about reimagining benefits? Is it about like building your deep pipeline? And just think about what those two to three measurements are, and begin to measure them quarter over quarter.”

And again, it’s going to vary from company to company, but just once you have those three metrics, you’re going to have two measurements that you’d say, “If this is going right, this is how we know. This is the effect that it will have on the bottom line.”

So, it’s an art and a science, but it’s absolutely doable and it doesn’t have to be cumbersome. We’re not saying measure 20 different things. We’re saying, “What are the two to three people metrics that are most important to your business and the business model and the bottom line?”

Pete Mockaitis
This brings me back to one of my favorite consulting projects in which we were trying to reduce attrition at some call centers. And so, as a lowly analyst, my job was to create an actual tool that actually measured real attrition.

And so, I was creating this spreadsheet, and it was so fun because, like, every day or a couple days, more people said, “Oh, hey, can you add me to that daily list?” And so, it’s like I was the keeper of the real attrition numbers. And I had, I guess, my first professional audience, the email list was growing and growing and growing. And, sure enough, once they got engaged, there was real numbers, the excuses disappeared, and we got real about the interventions.

And we could see, in terms of more experienced representatives have a lower average handle time on the phone, resulting in more cost-effective solutions and answers to customers. And so, we could sort of see that line very clearly and it’s cool. Can you share with us, in terms of you mentioned higher sales or assets under management, can you connect the dots a little bit between “We did a thing and it made people happier, and somehow dollars came out the other side”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, absolutely. So, there was a healthcare system, and what they were having issues with, with all healthcare systems across the country, is retaining talent. You have nursing shortage. You have frontline kind of worker shortage in healthcare. And so, what they did was implement two things that they did were great. One was a flexibility around scheduling.

So, many people who are listening and know healthcare, it’s one of those tenured issues. Like, if you’re the new nurse in, you get the worst shift. If you’re tenured, you get the better shift. They tried to, one, is just reimagine that, and be more equitable, and fair in their scheduling so that new nurses don’t always get the most terrible shifts, because what they found out through measuring it, that was actually burning them out.

They were able to reduce turnover with nurses by 10%. That was really significant because the average turnover they said of a nurse cost them $180,000. So, when you think about that across 3,000 nurses, that’s real dollars and cents that they were able just, by tweaking the schedule and understanding they started with listening, trying to understand “What were the barriers? Why were people leaving? And what would make them stay?”

Two, they knew what their baseline is. And then, three, they got real about what you said, the cost of attrition. I was surprised with my number of companies that how many of them didn’t have a real grasp on the cost of attrition. So, most people might think attrition is just the person leaving their job. Attrition is also the time that you spent finding that person, the time that you spent training them over the years, the value that they had.

And now it’s the cost you need to find someone else and to train them, and they’re not going to be as good as the person who’s been there for four or five years because it takes that onboarding time and getting up to productive speed.

The second thing this healthcare center did, and we found, they found that one thing in common is that people wanted training. And so, what they begin doing is offering training benefits. If it was anything related to a person’s job that they wanted to learn, or if they wanted to go back to get their degree, they were giving them a pool of funds. And they watched, of the people who took advantage of this training, how longer they stayed versus others.

The people who took advantage of training stayed 30% longer. And, again, in a healthcare field where tenure actually really matters, people get better at their jobs and costs are going up when you’re trying to replace talent, like 30% longer became very substantial to their bottom line. And so, they reinvested those dollars into more training, more internship, and just doubling down on what the nurses and other healthcare providers said they needed.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Angela, I’d love your take, if we could shift gears for a moment away from the executive strategic level, to, let’s say you are an individual contributor listening to this and saying, “Okay, that sounds really cool. I’d like some of these goodies,” do you have any pro tips on how we can make the case for whatever it is that we think would help us to flourish?

It sounds like we’ve got a clear situation along the lines of getting some numbers and a financial ROI case to be made? What are some of your other pro tips for folks who find themselves in that position?

Angela Jackson
I think the biggest thing you can do to be awesome at your job is to know your value. You need to understand how you add value in ways that line up with the business and the business strategy.

So, for one, every company that I’m out talking to now, they’re thinking about their generative AI strategy. This is new for everyone. And what a rank-and-file person who’s working, you know your job intimately, you’re an expert at your job, you should be thinking about how do you add value with the new technology? How are you saving money? How are you saving time? How are you being more productive? And have an analysis on that.

When you go in and you’re talking to your manager, the second thing you need to do is speak their language. And so, going in and knowing how you’ve been more productive, what you’ve added in your value, and talking about that in terms, starting with that, and then telling your manager or leadership who you’re in front of, what they can do to help you be even more efficient.

So, you’re really couching it in it’s in their best interest to do this. You’re saying, “I’m an A player. This is what I’ve delivered. And from my job, I’ve noticed if I could get XYZ support, I could be even more productive.”

So, for example, I’m in Boston. We have the worst traffic in the country. And so, what I saw one employee do, she went in and instead of saying, “I want more flexibility to work,” she’d say, “You know, this is what I produced last year, but I did notice that I spent four hours,” her commute was two hours back and forth, “in traffic.”

“I think that if I could leave and show up to work either flexible 6:00 a.m. and get off earlier, come in late, that I could be more productive. I could also be more productive if I could have one day of non-commute time.” Laying it out like that, she got a great response because you’re leading on with curiosity, you’re coming in with data, and again, you’re centering what matters most to them and helping you, you’re helping them help you help them.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that a movie, “Help me help you help them”? That’s good. Well, Angela, tell me any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and I just want to just double down on the point I just made, in this time and in this moment, particularly, we have to advocate for ourselves. I think about people who are in jobs today who have ideas on how to improve the company, how they can be more productive. Make sure you’re communicating those to your direct manager. Make sure that you’re getting face time with a more senior management. Make it your business to do that. People need to know you exist.

I’ll give you an example. I have a very dear friend that was in DC and she was part of the latest rounds and cuts at the IRS, and she’s a tax attorney. And she goes, “You know, for a time I didn’t even have a manager for months.” And I told her, “I wish I would have known, because if you can’t find the person who manages you, or if they’re not paying attention, you need to find the next person up the rung to do that.”

And then, two, these strategies give you that economic case and argument. And so, once you make it to your employer, they may respond favorably, they may not. I always say that’s data. If they’re not giving you what you need, there’s a host of employers who are looking for people like you, who are adding value, and who are thinking differently. So, I’d say be on the lookout for those employers and also bring the ways that you’ve been adding. Lead with the ways that you’re adding value when you speak to them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Angela Jackson
“Whatever you can, do, and whatever you do, do it to the best.” And that’s one of the Goethe quotes. And then I love this other one by Howard Thurman, and I actually just write it in my book.

It says, “Whatever you want to do in the world, do something that lights you up because the world needs more people who are lit up.”

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

Angela Jackson
Oh, gosh, my favorite one was putting up a worker advisory board. We had 200 workers from across the U.S., red states, blue states, across different sectors, and really worked with them to help place them in jobs that were impacted by the pandemic, and we’re able to study what happened to them once they were placed in the jobs.

And that actually became the research that undergirds the book. You know, we found somewhere in these, what we now call win-win workplaces, and the others were in what we call a zero-sum where people didn’t want to work there. They were quitting. They weren’t staying. They had regular turnover. And just really understood that the difference between the workplaces were these nine strategies, how they were investing in their people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, as we contrast a win-win workplace versus a zero-sum workplace, could you give us a couple telltale signs, maybe it’s a number or a metric, or maybe it’s a vibe that’s like, “Okay, yeah, this sounds like what a win-win workplace is versus this sounds like what a zero-sum workplace is”?

Angela Jackson
So, I’ll give you an example of one and it just popped in my mind. So, a few weeks ago, some of your listeners may have seen Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase. They had a town hall meeting. They invited all of their employees to ask questions.

One brave soul, he stood up, and he asked this question around the return-to-work policy to Jamie Diamond. I think Jamie would say it wasn’t his best day. He totally went off. And then the person went back to their desk, and their direct manager said, “I can’t believe you asked that question. You’re fired.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really?

Angela Jackson
Oh, really.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t know that part of the story. Okay.

Angela Jackson
Yeah, let me tell you more about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Keep going.

Angela Jackson
So, Jamie Dimon didn’t, I’m sure, and I’m certain that Jamie didn’t say to that manager, “Fire him for asking that question,” but what that manager was operating on is that zero-sum workplace. That zero-sum workplace means if you say anything that ticks off the big boss, you are gone. No questions asked. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, right?

And what that did in that moment, you know, they subsequently told him he could keep his job. And so, the person stayed there, but you have to think about all of the thousands of people who were watching that moment. We say centering worker voice and these town halls are important, but as leaders, how we show up in those spaces really matter and it builds or decreases psychological safety. Like, who’s going to ask the next question that they think, might think, might tick off Jamie? Probably it’s not coming anytime soon.

The second is, “How do we train our managers differently,” right? This manager had an old-school frame, and if he had been actually trained, knew the policies and procedures, had talked to someone and got advice, that person wouldn’t have lost their job, and I wouldn’t be able to tell this story today, which is not the best shining example of JP Morgan Chase.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just…I am shocked at that notion. It’s about as antithetical to psychological safety as you can get, “You said a thing we didn’t like, so you’re fired.” It’s like, “Okay, well, good luck getting any kind of creativity or quality constructive friction in conversation that leads to goodness if that’s the vibe that we’re all keenly aware of here.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and you’re being invited into a town hall, right? And so, this is why we talked about that disconnect. Companies spend billions of dollars on saying that they listen to their people, but it’s not felt. Those are just one of those moments, “You invite me in to listen. You ask for my advice and then you blow up.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Angela Jackson
And so, that’s a classic. There’s many more samples and flavors of that zero-sum workplace. I’m sure what your listeners can listen and lean in on how that looks like. Like, we’ve all had the bad bosses, but it becomes the norm, right? And that’s really unfortunate because instead of operating out of creativity, there’s a lot of fear. And in general, there’s a lot of anxiety in the world today. When you’re bringing that in the world of work, it just becomes closer to home.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Angela Jackson
I think my biggest one is “Outrageous Openness” And it’s just around being open to what’s happening in the world, being curious and outreaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Angela Jackson
Right now, my favorite tool, honestly, is ChatGPT. And can I tell you why?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Angela Jackson
When we talk about being productive, some people have zero inbox, I’ve not gotten there yet. But it helps me be more productive with my responses and doing it in a more timely fashion.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a huge fan of the Superhuman email app, and they’ve incorporated some AI features that I’m genuinely impressed. It can now clearly label podcast pitch in all of my incoming emails. And so, I can just very quickly go, “Hmm, forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, so my producers get those fast.” It’s like, “Okay, well, that’s 90 emails out of my inbox in about three minutes. That felt pretty productive. What else?”

Angela Jackson
And don’t you feel good at the end of the day? You’re like, “I’ve done my job. I’m not the bottleneck.” It’s like playing tennis, you know, get the ball over the net.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite habit?

Angela Jackson
My favorite habit is meditating. Every morning, I don’t do it for long, I’m not one of those gurus. I do about five minutes. I get clear on the day. I say what I’m grateful for from the day before and it actually centers me to have a better day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks that you’re known for?

Angela Jackson
The time to make friends is before you need them.

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

Angela Jackson
So, they can go more in the book, they can go to ReadWinWinWorkplace.com. Also, I’d love to share with your listeners. We’re doing our first summit on “The Win-Win Workplace.” We’ve got 80 employers who are actually practicing these principles and using these strategies to see their ROI. We’re doing that in Chicago on May 5th and 6th, and it’s open to everyone. I say employers, managers come, but even people who are looking for their next opportunity, these are the employers you want to be in front of. They’ll be in that room. And you can go to WinWinSummit.org for that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Angela, this is fun. Thank you.

Angela Jackson
Pete, thank you again for having me. I appreciate it.

1052: Building Better Relationships through Radical Listening with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener shares powerful insights on how to listen well and deepen your connections.

You’ll Learn

  1. The hidden barriers to listening
  2. Why we should interrupt more
  3. The secret to handling disagreements better

About Robert

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener is a researcher, author, and consultant with 75 peer-reviewed academic articles and has over 27,000 citations. His previous books include The Upside of Your Dark Side (New York Times Bestseller, 2014), and the 2007 PROSE Award winner, Happiness. He has presented keynotes to Lululemon, Deloitte, Humana, AARP, The World Bank, and others. In 2024, Thinkers50 named Robert one of the “50 Most Influential Executive Coaches in the World.” He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he enjoys drawing and rock climbing.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Robert, welcome.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Thank you, Pete, so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear about your wisdom. And you’ve got the coolest nickname ever, one I think I would like for myself. You’re known as the Indiana Jones of positive psychology. So, I’m imagining rolling boulders, whips, all kinds of adventures. Tell me, what’s the source of this nickname? And can you give us an amazing adventure and discovery to back it up?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Like all nicknames, I did not give it to myself. That is important for everyone.

Pete Mockaitis
“They call me T-Bone.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Everyone should know that right up front. One of my colleagues said this about me because, unlike other psychologists, I wasn’t just running studies in the laboratory with college students. I was going out in the field, and pretty far field. I was studying happiness, among other things, with the Amish, for example, with Maasai tribal people. I stayed in the very Northern tip of Greenland where I was working with Inuit hunters. So, I spent several years, almost five years sort of traveling the world and studying happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Thank you. So, we’re talking about your book, Radical Listening, and I’d love to get to kick us off with an inspiring story of someone who upgraded their listening game and saw phenomenal results coming from that.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, absolutely. There is a woman I interviewed, in fact, for this book, she’s a very senior leader, works in an international organization. In fact, they own a bunch of subsidiaries, which means their footprint is across industry, across linguistic groups, across cultures, across national boundaries.

And she always thought of herself as a fantastic listener, but then she realized, “I really can’t even understand the language of some of these people. I don’t understand the cultural fabric or context of many of the people I’m trying to listen to. And perhaps most importantly, my role suggests that I’m not even interested in what they’re interested in.”

So, she’s thinking big strategic ideas, and they’re often looking at just sort of day-to-day operations. And she realized that she kind of just fundamentally can’t understand them, that her role is an obstacle to listening. And one of the things she did was recruited listening ambassadors to listen on her behalf and become sort of like Rosetta Stones or translators of the line worker up to the senior leadership.

And so, the thing I think is so remarkable about that is not just that she recruited these ambassadors, which is kind of a cool idea, but that she recognized the limits in her own listening and moved to correct it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a fun thought, a listening ambassador, and, in some ways, it feels a lot more wholesome and upright than, I guess, the non-consensual listening ambassadors called a spy. It’s like, “Spy on people and gather the information,” as opposed to a listening ambassador is like, “Oh, we all know what’s going on here. And I feel appreciated because you have made an investment to have someone gather my perspective when it may be difficult because of a language barrier or geographic barrier or something to see what’s going on.”

So, that’s a fun idea in and of itself in its specificity, but also, in terms of a general concept of, “Let’s take listening seriously. Let’s invest in it. Let’s build some infrastructure and acknowledge how valuable this is and get after it.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Let me just say that I’m very tickled that you used spy as an example. My co-author and I on Radical Listening used loads of examples of professional listeners, psychotherapists, managers, all sorts of people who listen for a living. And we did not include espionage as an industry among it, but only through oversight. As soon as you said it, I wish that we would have included that in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe the sequel, we’ll see. But I’m sure you’ve got boatloads of insights for us and we want to dig into it. Tell us, is there a key message or big idea that you capture in your book, Radical Listening, that folks who want to be awesome at their jobs should know?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. It is time for listening to have a refresh. Let’s start there. All of us grew up with or have been trained in so-called active listening. And active listening is a good start, you know, make eye contact, summarize what the person says, check for clarification, “Am I reading you right?” It really emphasizes comprehension and it positions listening as if it’s just about understanding.

And what we do to extend that is suggest that there are many intentions for listening, that you might listen in order to entertain a group, you might listen to just appreciate someone, you might listen to influence, you might listen to learn something, you might listen to argue or rebut. And whatever your intention is, that’s going to direct your attention. And it’s a very, very efficient form of listening. So, a courtroom litigator, for example, is not listening to validate opposing counsel. They don’t care how…

Pete Mockaitis
“It must be really hard for you, plaintiff. It must be really difficult.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
That’s exactly right. Just like, “Ah, I can really see that this must be difficult,” or, “Wow, even trying this case must be such a burden. I’m sure you had to stay up late,” all those types of things. That’s out the window. And you don’t even have to worry about what’s the emotional state of the opposition. Instead, you’re just focused on the things that are goal-oriented for you. So, weak evidence, spurious arguments, logical fallacies, inconsistencies, and that’s what you’re listening for.

And it turns out that whatever your intention, if you want to listen to validate someone, you are going to listen for their emotions. If you want to listen to learn, you’re going to listen, pay attention to key words, to connections between what they’re saying and your own web of knowledge. So, just the idea that there are multiple intentions, you should know your intention, and your intention guides your attention.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Robert, is it fair to say that our limited human brain capacity can’t have it all, we can’t get all the logic and all the learning and all the education and all the emotion at once?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. I’m glad that you’re bringing that up because I do think it’s a common belief, and I certainly have held this belief in the past, that, “Oh, I’m a great listener, and I can just sort of sponge all of it up. I’m getting everything. I’m getting the motive behind what you’re saying. I’m noticing what you’re not saying. I’m noticing your tone of voice. I’m noticing everything.” And it’s just not the way that attention works. So, being a bit more judicious with this limited resource can be, I think, very productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s lay out the flavors of intention, just make sure we have the full menu documented here.

Robert Biswas-Diener
So, broadly speaking, you might think of there are sort of three umbrellas that we could put these intentions under. One is sort of pro-social motives for listening, so, “I’m listening to appreciate you. I’m listening to connect with you. I’m listening to partner with you to solve a problem.” Those would be three pro-social motives.

Three anti-social motives, “I’m listening to find fault. I’m listening to undermine you.” Those are kind of related. And, thirdly, “I’m listening to defend myself against you.” And then we also have three, kind of, we call them self-focused, although I’m not sure, to be honest, that’s the best way to look at it. But these are just three things that sort of help me. And that is, “I’m just listening to learn something new. I’m listening for comprehension,” that’s sort of the classic act of listening. And those are kind of the two big motives that are helpful to me as the listener.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a distinction between listening to learn something new and listening for comprehension?

Robert Biswas-Diener
So, listening for comprehension is, “Do I understand what I’m hearing?” Learning is, “Now that I understand it, can I integrate it? Can I find use for it? Can I synthesize it with my own existing body of knowledge and skill in usable ways?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then I suppose the implication of this is to thoughtfully choose your intention upfront in advance of the conversation, as opposed to just showing up in whatever brain state you happen to be wearing at the moment.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And where you see this go wrong, imagine a team meeting, for example, where you’ve got a pretty funny person on the team and they just keep cracking jokes. And it’s nice when it works because it cuts through tension, it lightens the mood, but maybe they default to it too often. And it’s because that’s just sort of a default listening mode for them, like, “I’m just listening to entertain people.”

So, those kinds of people listen for pauses because pauses are where you insert jokes. They’re listening for themes because themes are what you’re going to riff on. But it might not be helpful because that might not be what is needed. So, you also need some alignment with sort of what is contextually or situationally appropriate.

If someone wants feedback on a presentation, you should be directing your attention towards that, “I want to listen with a critical ear and see what works, what doesn’t. What do I know about you in terms of your ability to take feedback? How much do I need to sugarcoat it?” those types of things. So, a little bit of matching your listening intention with what’s being asked for.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s interesting how we may very well have that default mode. You mentioned entertainment, which I guess wasn’t on the menu. So, I guess there’s many flavors beyond the eight you’ve suggested is my takeaway there, is that we may very well have a default state all the time in terms of– I remember I had a sweet friend and mentor, Marilyn, and she just knew this guy who was a billionaire, and she just thought that was cool.

And she was working with some students and she just thought, “Hey, these students have an entrepreneurial interest. They might just have fun, you know, dinner with this guy. I know him, I know the students, let’s just do this.” And so, she’s talking to with the person, and he just says immediately, “Okay, so what do you want?” because that’s what he’s accustomed to. It’s like, “People tap on me to make requests of my resources.”

And she said, “Well, I’m sorry that this is just how life goes for you. We just think it’d be fun to hang out and get to know you and learn a little bit about your world.” And he’s like, “Oh, well, that sounds really nice. Let’s set it up.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And one of the things I like about that story is that what they’re trying to do in a very explicit way is just make sure that they’re aligned, “What is it you’re asking for? What is it I want?” We all know times that someone sort of complains to you and really all they want is a bit of validation.

They just want you to say, “I get it. You’re a victim. You’ve been done wrong here. I’m so sorry. You’ve put on a brave face. You’re doing great.” And instead, what we give them is a bunch of advice and try and solve their problem. And when that misalignment happens, it actually is a bit destructive to the relationship. It feels off and disconnecting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds like a key benefit just right there. It’s like when you’re matching the intention appropriately, relationships are enriched because this folk, is like, “Oh, this is beautiful. This person is giving me just what I need in this moment, and it just feels good. And I like them more and I am less annoyed and frustrated with them.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And, look, I want to be cautious and honest. I’m not one of these people that writes a book, like, “Oh, I wrote a book on listening. And guess what? I happen to think that listening is the thing that’s going to cure the world and all the problems.” I don’t think that. I think listening is sort of like opening the door, but then you still have to walk through it and do some exploration. I think listening is a good start.

I think listening, in the way that you just mentioned, where you kind of listen with positive intent, you have respect, you both feel aligned, that’s a great place then to build a relationship, then to cooperate, then to engage in teamwork or change or whatever it is you’re going to do. So, I think it starts with listening, but I don’t think listening by itself is the whole picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s say we’re all in, Robert. That sounds great. I would like to do that and I would like to do that well and I could see the benefits. And yet, you also highlight a few internal barriers to listening. Can you lay these out for us?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. In all honesty, this is one of my favorite parts of everything my co-author and I have put down on the page. Some of the barriers, everyone’s going to already have an intuition about, “Oh, let me guess, distraction, technology, your phone.” Sure. All of those are barriers. But the ones that I think are really kind of almost the insidious ones are the ones that you may be less aware of.

So, for example, feeling that you’re right about something is a barrier to learn, “I mean, why listen, because I already know? I already have made up my mind and foreclosed on my own rightness about this.” Politeness can be a barrier to listening. Like, instead of really paying attention to you, I’ve just sort of dismissed in my mind what you’re saying and I’m just nodding along and saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” even though I don’t mean it, and I’ve just checked out, but politeness is sort of this cloth that I’m swaddled in that protects me from real listening.

One that I find really interesting, I call it walk with me. In the book, we call it time urgency. And it’s this idea that you go to someone and you’re like, “Hey, I’ve got something I need to speak with you about,” and they say something along the lines of, “Walk with me. I’ve got a meeting here, it’s going to start in eight minutes, but come with me, walk with me.”

And it’s so well-intentioned. To the listener, the person saying “Walk with me,” it’s this idea that, “Oh, look at me, how gracious I am. I’m making time for you.” But it can really feel awful to the person who has this urgent request. They’re sort of saying, “There’s something very important.”

And you’re saying, “My mind is already to the next thing. At best, I’m wedging you in. I am already a bit distracted. I’m giving you a limited amount of time and we’re catering to my needs rather than your needs. In fact, you’re going somewhere you hadn’t even intended to go.”
And so, although it’s well-intentioned, I think it runs the risk. And there’s a whole bunch of these that are well-intentioned, but run the risk of just standing in the way of great listening.

Pete Mockaitis
More of those, please. Lay them on us.

Robert Biswas-Diener
These are cousins, conceptually speaking. One is comparing. And we’ve all done this. Comparing is when someone mentions an experience and then you’re like, “Hey, I’ve also had that experience.” And so, you share that with them. They say, “Oh, yeah, I went to Hong Kong last summer.” You’re like, “Oh, wow, you know what? I went to Hong Kong last summer, too.”

And again, it’s well intentioned because what you’re trying to communicate is, “Look, we have this common ground. We have a shared experience. Like, we’re cut from the same cloth.” And yet, what it does is it sort of shifts the spotlight away from them. It often does work, which is why we do it. But when it doesn’t work, it’s sort of like saying, “Enough about you and your Hong Kong stories. Let’s talk about me and my Hong Kong stories.”

And the cousin to it is competing. And this happens when, often in a complaint scenario, when someone will say something like, “I was up till 2:00 working on that report last night. I only got six hours of sleep, so I’m a little tired today.” And as a rejoinder, you say, “Six hours of sleep? I only got three hours of sleep.”

Again, it’s well-intentioned. You’re not trying to put them down or invalidate them. You’re trying to say, “We’re cut from the same cloth. We’re both people who are sleep-deprived,” but it comes across, oftentimes, as being dismissive.

So, there’s many of these things that are intuitively appealing to us as conversationalists that I think serve as these kinds of murky barriers that we might not even be aware of that, that often sort of burst the bubble of connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what seems the underlying theme of all of these is, “To what extent are we allowing our conversational counterpart, our interlocutor…” I’m thinking Plato, “…to take center stage?” versus, “Does it need to be about me?”

Robert Biswas-Diener
One hundred percent. And I think that is the core of Radical Listening is the idea that, “When I interact with you, I want you to feel like you do have a spotlight on you, that I do have genuine concern for what you’re talking about, that you do have the space to articulate your thoughts, agenda, ideas, opinions, whatever it is that you want to share.” And whenever we sort of grab the podium away, that’s where things get problematic.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m reminded of, I had just a fun conversation with a midwife who said that she used to work in hospice, and she was amazed when the family arrived in the final days before someone was about to pass away. And she said, “I was astounded at everyone’s ability to make the dying person about them. It’s like, ‘You know, I just got the call. I had to change my flight.” Like all these things, like, as the hustle and bustle, as they get into the hospital room, like in the final days, because they’re like, “Hey, you better get here because they don’t have much time left.”

And she said, “I was amazed at how this happened again and again and again.” And I think it’s really telling because it’s an extreme situation and it highlights that, for many of us, I mean, it sounds bad, but I guess it’s maybe accurate language. We have such a self-centered preoccupation running in our brains, we don’t even realize how off-putting it can be. And that happens maybe, I don’t know, for some of us all the time and for some of us, you know, occasionally. But it’s sort of spooky how common this blind spot is.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And it’s all of us. It’s me. It’s probably you to some extent. We are the protagonists in the plays of our own lives, right? And if someone said, “Oh, by the way, do you know you’re actually just a supporting character?” That’s kind of an unsettling way of thinking. One of the things I noticed about you, Pete, I mean, as a professional listener, right, you’re listening to guests all the time, but you’re sort of doing this balance of it’s not only about the guest.

I mean, if you were just silent and then the guest spoke the entire time, that wouldn’t be very gratifying either. So, there is this sort of dance between you inserting key moments, but giving sort of the lion’s share to the guests. And, in general, I think that’s kind of how conversations go, that if you listen with respect, you really make the person feel valued in what they’re saying, then it will come back around to you and you will get to be the main character for a time. But then you also have to be ready to relinquish that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, Robert, it’s an interesting situation here because, I mean you no disrespect, but the most important stakeholder in this conversation isn’t here and it’s the listener and it’s all in service of them. And so, it just happens to work out nicely that we’re both fascinated by this topic that we’re in, because I get tons of pitches and we reject the vast majority of them.

So, the fact that we’re here means I’m into it, you’re into it, and that’s just good, and that’s good content for a listener. But, yeah, it’s interesting because that’s the game, is if you have the coolest story, but it’s not in service of the listener, I’m going to try to move us on and then the audio editors will remove it later. And that’s kind of the game we’re playing right now.

Robert Biswas-Diener
It’s so interesting. I never, in a million years, would admit to what I’m about to admit to.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m into it.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, but I’m going to because of the direction that this conversation just took. During this conversation that we have been having, in my mind, because I’m also monitoring what I’m saying, a thought popped into my head and it was, “Be careful not to give away all the content of the book, Robert, right, because you want the listeners out there to be hungry for more and to go buy the book.”

And as soon as I had that thought, I thought of that as a disservice to the listener. And I thought, “Really, this is in the service of the listener. What we want is to give them as much usable content, as many fresh ideas as possible. And whether they buy the book, don’t buy the book, should not be my primary concern because that is that egotistical bias. But instead, I really should be doing this in service of them. Can I just tell you as much information as possible and you, the listener, can decide what’s useful for you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re riffing on these things, that reminds me of, I’ve been reflecting lately. I think it was by this book by Marcus, somebody, called They Ask, You Answer, and it’s about content marketing. And so, he says, “Consumers find it very frustrating,” and I agree. If I’m on a website and I want to know, say, “Hey, what’s this thing costs?” and they will not give me a price, or even like a guideline of what the price might be, it’s frustrating.

Because, as consumer, it’s like, “You know the price or the price range, and I know that you know it, and you know that I know that you know it, but you’re choosing not to give it to me,” especially on a frequently asked questions, an FAQ, “Really the price is not one of the frequently asked questions? That seems like among the most frequently of asked questions.”

And so, likewise, there are some YouTube channels or podcasts, and I won’t, you know, poo-poo them by name, but it sits a little bit wrong with me when I know. I’m all about building curiosity and teasing and being intriguing. But if they say, you know, for example, if we were to tease this interview and we started with you with a clip saying, “And the number one most transformational key to listening is…” and it like bleeps it out and it like blurs it.

It’s like I, as a listener, a consumer, I find that troubling because like, “You know it, I know it, you’re deliberately withholding it from me. And I don’t like that. And in order to get me to listen, to watch more, to view the ads, or whatever. And I think it’s counterproductive. Because if you give me something mind-blowing, I’m like, ‘Whoa, Robert, this guy has got insights. I better listen to more of him.’” So that’s just my take on that practice.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Well, I absolutely love your take. And I love the direction that this conversation has taken because it’s like a real moment of authenticity in, otherwise, what could feel scripted. You ask me some questions about the book. I’ve been on lots of podcasts. I give you lots of answers that I’m pretty practiced at. But here, suddenly, we’re getting into, I think, a very real example of listening and all the foibles around listening, which is sometimes I have my own agenda and it interferes with another agenda. Sometimes I’m not sure what to do. Sometimes I don’t have a clear intention.

And all of this is happening within us while we’re trying to be good listeners. And that just feels very realistic to me. So, I’m not a person that’s like, “Oh, go buy the book, learn these five steps, and I promise you, you’re going to be a transformed, perfect listener.” You won’t. I mean, I think that you’ll learn more about listening. You might appreciate listening more. You might experiment with some things. People might notice that you’re listening a bit better. And I think there is some mileage to be had in that kind of realism.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand that you cannot give us the magical spells, the super five things that will cure all listening foibles but, nonetheless, I do want some of your actionable tips. Do we have some big dos and don’ts that just make a tremendous difference in your listening and all the relationship goodness that unfolds with great listening?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. So, we present six skills and, again, let’s be honest, there could be eight skills, there could be five skills. We chose six. Three of them we think of are internal. They’re things that would be invisible to your interlocutor. They’re just happening within you mentally. And three of them are behavioral, things that your conversational partner would notice.

So, I’ll just give you one that’s a little counterintuitive about what you would notice, one of the behavioral ones. We say that interjecting, or if you prefer, interrupting, is a highly engaged form of listening. And for most people that’s pretty counterintuitive. Most people have learned that politeness equals turn-based conversation, you speak, I speak, you speak, I speak, back and forth. And yet there are excellent reasons to interrupt.

So, I’ll just start by saying that if interruption is just overlapping speech, if that just means two people are speaking simultaneously, we’re all doing it all the time. So, if I say, “Mm-hmm,” while you’re talking, that’s a short interruption. If I say, “Oh, wow,” while you’re talking, that’s a bigger interruption. If I say, “What? Wait, I can’t believe it. No way,“ while you’re talking, that’s an even bigger interruption.

If I jump in and say, “Wait a minute. Say that again. What?” those are all forms of interruptions, and those are excellent because they show the person, “I care about what’s happening. I’m right here with you.” And the alternative is letting the person prattle on for 10 minutes. And then in return, you say, “There’s something you said 10 minutes ago that I’d like to go back to.” And that can feel really kind of dismissive to the person because they’re like, “Why did you just let me talk for 10 minutes if the thing that was interesting to you happened 10 minutes ago?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really strong perspective. But, again, following that principle of your conversation partner is taking center stage, the interruptions are in service of them and your understanding, like, “Wait a minute. He said what? But didn’t he just say the opposite?” Or we could go, “Yes, he did. And that’s why this is a big deal.”

And so, you could see how the conversational vibe goes into a very connected place with that interruption as opposed to waiting, and just makes sure you clarify. It’s like, “Wait, Robert? Oh, no, that Robert. Oh, okay, now I’m tracking with you. I’m on the same page.”

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. And that clarification, that’s a perfect example, and we do these all the time. Another type is called an alert. So, let’s say you and I are both talking about that Robert, and here comes Robert, but you can’t see him because your back is to him. And I might say, “Pete, shut up. Here he comes.” That’s an alert and that’s an interruption, but you never think that’s rude because you think it’s in the service of you. So, anytime that I’m essentially jumping in, but then returning the turn to speak to you, people just don’t even clock it as rude at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, interruptions can be helpful. What else you got?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Absolutely. Let’s do one on the other side of the fence. One of the internal skills. Let’s start with just, I think, a tough one, and that’s acceptance. This is probably the toughest skill we have, and I just say it like, “Oh, just accept the other person and what they’re saying.” But anyone who’s been alive for five minutes knows that that’s really, really a hard pill to swallow.

So, what we mean when we say acceptance is not that you are agreeing with the point of view. You’re welcome to present counter evidence, alternatives but, at some point, you have to sort of understand that the person you’re speaking with has a right to a point of view. And to do this, it requires some personal intellectual humility. And intellectual humility is like a cousin to actual humility.

Humility is thinking that you have no more fundamental worth than another person. But intellectual humility is a recognition that you are limited, that you haven’t figured it all out, that you do have some natural biases, that you do have a skewed vision, that your personal experience colors your vision of life. And it’s fine for you to come up with moral reasoning or professional expertise, but it’s equally fine for another person. And you can’t just assume, you’re wiser, you’re smarter, and you happen to have landed on the truth, lucky you.

You should think, “You know what, that person may have different values, they’ve had different experiences, they have a different professional role, and so they’re going to arrive at slightly different conclusions. I don’t ever have to agree with them, but I always have to respect their right to have them.” And that takes some work, but when you engage in that, you have more types of conversations and you open a door to conversations that you might otherwise avoid that can ultimately be productive conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example?

Robert Biswas-Diener
I think, day to day, this happens at work all the time. And it’s just, you know, one person wants to greenlight a project and the other person says, “No, I don’t think we have capacity for it right now,” or, “I don’t think it’s fleshed out well enough,” or, “I don’t think the strategy is in place for it.”

And you have two totally opposing views. And often what happens is the two parties are embattled and they simply aren’t listening. It becomes this sort of feat of who can bully the other into getting their way, “If only I can lob so much evidence at you, so much passion at you, I’ll convince you that my chosen direction is the right direction.”

But it gets back to the kind of that seven habits idea, you know, first seek to understand and then be understood. Kind of like, “Look, I already know what I think, but I am curious what you think. What is it you’re looking at? What is it you’re seeing that I’m not seeing?” And when you do that, every once in a while, you’re surprised. It helps you retain a more positive view of the person you’re talking about.

They’re not just some, you know, bumbling dolt that that happen to arrive at something, that they actually are pretty thoughtful and pretty intentional in their approach. And you may or may not get what you want out of that, but it is going to lead to a better team dynamic in that.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, Robert, tell me anything else you want to make sure to put out there before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Robert Biswas-Diener
I’ll just mention that this applies, to some degree, across cultures, but culture is kind of interesting. We learn cultural scripts for interacting with one another. I’ve recently been traveling with someone. I’m American, and the person I was traveling with was not American. And I just realized that they didn’t have a script for some basic conversations.

Like, “How does this coffee shop banter work? The person asked me how I was, not just what I wanted to order. And I don’t know the level of depth I should be answering that question in, how much honesty I should be giving them.” Things that we would just take for granted because we have a good intuitive sense for those kinds of answers.

I was in the elevator with him and I was speaking to strangers on the elevator, and he’s like, “How did you know you could do that? What were you taking into account that made it okay for you to speak with strangers?” And I just started realizing, “Wow, this is really, really different across cultures.” And some of the things that listening does across cultures is, for example, the role of silence.

People interpret silence differently across cultures. So, for example, in Japan, just to use one instance, silence is often considered respectful. It is a sign of thoughtfulness and it’s usually perceived as something, not the absence of something, and you are kind of paying attention to silences. So, like, if people aren’t talking, maybe it means they don’t agree, but they don’t want to say it. And so, you are kind of trying to read the silence a bit.

Whereas, you imagine in the United States, silence is often felt as awkward and we rush to fill it in. So, some of these kind of communication exchanges, some of the communication technology is going to shift a little bit based on people’s cultural script.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Robert Biswas-Diener
It comes from George Bernard Shaw’s play, “Julius Caesar,” and it is, “Forgive him, Theodotus, for he is a barbarian, and thinks the ways of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” And I just love the idea of kind of intellectual humility built into that.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
One of my colleagues, Shige Oishi, had people shoot basketballs or shoot darts, and he saw how well they did at each. And he invited them back the next week and said, “Take your choice. Do you want to do baskets or darts?” And the Americans who did well at one wanted to stay with it and keep doing the one because they wanted, wanted to stay with the thing that they felt good about.

And the Asians and Asian Americans in his study, if they did well on one, they wanted to shift and do the opposite one because they were more inclined to want to master something new. And I’ve always just felt like that was a very clever methodology and a very interesting cultural study.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Robert Biswas-Diener
This is a recency effect, but I just finished Dracula and I loved it.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
A pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Any particular brand or type or features?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Well, I do a lot of drawing also, so I like anything that doesn’t smear, but I just use a lot of Bic roller balls.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Oh, my favorite habit is to wake up extraordinarily early and draw for one hour before I start the day. I always prioritize my wellbeing so that I feel strong and centered before embarking on everything else I’m going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them put it back to you often?

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, a recent one, and I stole this actually from my co-author, but just the idea that you should remember that everyone is in the middle of something. And if you just approach everyone all the time with, “You know what, they’re in the middle of something. I’m in the middle of something. They’re in the middle of something,” it can make you a little bit more forgiving and a little bit more patient.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
I would point them to my website, IntentionalHappiness.com. And I’d love to hear from people.

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

Robert Biswas-Diener
Yeah, absolutely. And let’s keep it thematically aligned with listening. I would pay attention to times that you, this coming week, feel really listened to, and note what the other person is doing. What’s happening that makes you feel so heard, so validated? And see then if that’s what you can do to pay it forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Robert, thank you.

Robert Biswas-Diener
Oh, thanks so much. This was super fun.

1047: How to Reignite Purpose, Happiness, and Motivation at Work with Jennifer Moss

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Jennifer Moss gets to the heart of why so many are dissatisfied at work—and what we can do about it.

You’ll Learn

  1. The driving force behind our unhappiness at work
  2. 20-minute practices that rebuild hope and morale
  3. Why remote work isn’t the culprit for loneliness—and what is

About Jennifer

Jennifer Moss specializes in future-focused leadership development, expertly balancing employee well-being with performance. As an award-winning writer and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, she specializes in transforming workplace culture using data-driven leadership strategies. She writes for Harvard Business Review, sat on the United Nations’ Global Happiness Council, was named to the Thinkers50 radar, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, CNN, Marketplace, TIME, Fortune, Fast Company, and more. Her book The Burnout Epidemic tackled employee burnout and was among Thinkers50’s “10 Best New Management Books for 2022.”

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Jennifer Moss Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jen, welcome back.

Jennifer Moss
I’m so glad to be back. It’s been a while.

Pete Mockaitis
It sure has. Eight whole years. Boy, a lot could happen in that timeframe. Can you share with us something transformational you’ve learned over the last eight years?

Jennifer Moss
As I’ve gotten older and I think become a little bit more, aware that change takes a really long time to happen, and you sometimes move sideways, and you move backwards.

And yet there has been, when I look back to when I first wrote Unlocking Happiness at Work, and now Why Are We Here, there has been some real advancement in the discussion around happiness and well-being at work and that’s a positive thing that I think has been really impactful on me and my level of hope for the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hope is good. We like hope. More of that, please. So, tell us, in your book, Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants, any particularly fascinating discoveries you’ve made along the way?

Jennifer Moss
There is just such brilliant research going on out there that’s been untapped and we need to spend more time, I think, with our academic partners in workplaces because it’s just so necessary to learn that there are ways that we can actually improve the workforce.

And I broke the book out into these three parts, the foundations, which is really hope, purpose, and community, and then I go into the second part, which is all of these unbelievable shifts that have happened at work in the last five years that feel like we’re in the multiverse of work. This isn’t the future of work. It’s the multiverse of work. And it really is dealing with AI and the rapid evolution of technology and generational bias and how that’s polarized the workforce. And then also just flexibility now, a right not a perk.

And so, I talk about that from a sense of compassionate leadership and leaders having a sense of openness as a leader, and really around understanding freedom. And then the third part is how we’re going to get there as a collective, and that’s belonging and recognition. And so, this, for me, across the board, every single chapter was this real understanding of the psychological barriers that we’re all facing as human beings that keep us from feeling and behaving with those kinds of traits. And so, it was a lot of learning and a lot of self-discovery too, as a leader myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a lot of rich stuff to dig into here. Thank you. Can you tell us, in terms of the academic community, sort of researchers doing studies and publishing them in journals, is there a particular discovery or thing that is well understood amongst academics looking at this stuff, that is generally not at all, or not frequently, implemented in the real world?

Jennifer Moss
Yes, and, one, is I would say it’s the first chapter, which is really interesting because today Gallup just put a note, basically, that hope is what every single organization needs to be fostering to be able to build out a future-ready organization, and it is the first chapter of my book. And, actually, John Clifton was interviewed, and he’s the CEO of Gallup, and talked about kind of the book and the importance of the book, and I think it’s because he had been seeing this hope need and this loss of hope inside of organizations.

And the thing is we constantly say in leadership, “Hope isn’t a strategy, and we can’t make hope a strategy.” And the thing is that leaders are getting that completely wrong. When I interviewed senior leaders in the military, they said hope is their only strategy. They always make hope foundational to the mission because how is anyone going to put their life on the line if they don’t have hope that they’re going to be able to achieve the end goal?

And so, in the book, I talk about how practical it is to build hope. It’s easier than building empathy and almost any other trait because it’s really, it’s tactical and you build it through these small incremental settings of goals, having the agency and the support to get to those goals, and then creating plan Bs and plan Cs so that if one plan to your goal fails, you have another plan as a backup.

And so, I talk about how we can do this, like 20 minutes every single week can build cognitive hope in an organization. It’s not hard, and I think that it’s been easy to put it off as something that’s simple and too simple to be valuable, and instead, it’s actually so needed right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so hope, we need it, got to have it, are missing it. Can you define, specifically, what do we mean by hope?

Jennifer Moss
Hope right now is this kind of key trait that we need to get people to feel like they can see themselves inside of society, writ large, but also inside of our organizations. If you don’t have hope, you feel disconnected from the mission because you don’t see yourself as part of the future. You also have anxiety around things that are new. AI, for example, if you see yourself as becoming obsolete, and you don’t have hope that you are part of that picture of an organization, you disengage, you’re less productive.

Hopelessness makes you have to be in a survivor state every day and you’re not thriving so you’re not actually thinking about the future, which is what we need right now. We’re just moving so quickly that if we don’t have a future perspective in our organizations, and people are in just survivor mode every day, we’re going to see attrition or we’re going to see what Gallup calls the Great Detachment, which people are at work, but they’re extremely unhappy, they’re actively disengaged, and they’re actually spending time trying to get other people to be as unhappy as they are, which creates a social contagion and it’s really unhealthy.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, hope, very important. And so, what exactly is hope?

Jennifer Moss
Hope is a sense of feeling that you are encouraged by the future, that you see that yourself in the future, that you feel like you have a legacy, that you have a sense of mattering and meaning in the world, that the world itself cares about you, that the world itself is safe, and you feel psychologically safe in it. Hope comes a lot with a sense of community. So, you believe that there are people there for you in a time of need.

Whether it’s actually tested or not, it’s a perception that you have social support, and that’s a big part of a sense of hopefulness inside of your community, inside of society, and your place inside the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m hearing that hope is a belief, and it seems to encompass a lot of things. Could you tell me in one sentence, how are we defining hope in this context?

Jennifer Moss
I think I just described it, but, yeah, hope is…

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I guess it’s like a lot of things, but like what is the umbrella that is encompassing all of those things?

Jennifer Moss
Hope is a sense that everything is going to be all right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. A sense that everything’s going to be all right. And so, then we’ve sort of already gotten a sneak peek at some of those segments there. And so, within everything being all rightness, there’s a component associated with the future, like what will unfold. There’s a component associated with community and people and relationships, like I feel a sense of comfort and belonging in their midst. And I guess, are those the key pillars? Or, what would be the subcomponents of this belief?

Jennifer Moss
I mean, you just listed really all of what those subcomponents are to hope. But I think the important part right now to, I think, for us to focus on is the fact that we have a high rate of hopelessness inside of our world right now.

Globally, the sense of hope is significantly reduced. And that’s because we have moved from a state of the pandemic being a crisis, but we’re in poly-crisis right now, which is a cluster of crises that have all come together to make each crisis actually worse than if it was individually on its own. And so, that poly-crisis, that sense of always feeling uncertain, that fluidity of our lives and never feeling on solid ground, that is creating a lot of questioning.

This is why I wrote the book Why Are We Here? because people are feeling like a lot of “what’s the point-ism?” And you feel that if you don’t have a sense of hope that you are doing something that actually is going to make a difference, that the belief systems that you had and the infrastructure that you trusted is going to stay a trustworthy institution. And our hope is being eroded by a lot of the issues around the world and poly-crisis and this political instability, and that is eroding our connection to each other and our sense of who we are as human beings.

I mean, progress and cooperation are a big part of what make humans, humans, and successful. And we’re not going to feel cooperative if we haven’t felt hopeful that there’s a reason for it. And hope gives you a reason for being, and without that, we lose progress, we lose innovation, we lose a sense of societal congruency, which is, I think, one of the biggest problems that we’re seeing right now is this real separation and disconnectedness amongst people today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s a cluster all right, Jen. Poly-crisis, that’s a good turn of a phrase. I hear you in that when there’s multiple things, it does really feel greater than the sum of its parts, like, “Let’s worry about one thing, and take your pick, politics, climate change, my economic footing, AI is going to take away my job, like, fill in the blank.”

And then if you have multiple, you can just leap from crisis to crisis and really dwell in it. And once one gets boring for your brain, oh, not to worry, we can anxiously stew and ruminate on another one. I served up right for you. So, a cluster, indeed. And so, the “What’s the point?” I think that really hits it for me.

And I was grilling you a few times on the precise definition of hope, it’s like I think the “what’s the point-ness” really does feel, at an emotional gut level, like the vibe, the experiential definition of hopelessness. And then I guess if we take the opposite of that, it’s like, “Well, what’s the point?” I mean, like, “Hey, we’re making a cool thing happen with people we care about to make things better for all of us and a group of folks that we’re serving. That’s the point. So, we’re going to get after that, and that feels pretty good to our just basic human longings for progress and cooperation.”

Jennifer Moss
Yeah, and if people feel like everything they’re working on is some sort of pipe dream that’s not going to be realized, you can imagine inside of organizations that want to build new things and get people excited about new innovations. productizations of cool stuff that it just will, you know, it just makes people feel like, “Why bother? If I’m going to see this thing through and at the end, it’s just not going to actually matter or it’s not going to affect any change.”

And when you look at the data around people that have a sense of purpose and their goals being realized, it’s such a different type of mentality and level of performance in an employee. If you feel like, “Okay, I have leadership that’s going to see my project through, they support me, they give me the resources, and then they’re going to amplify it or use it,” you’re much more eager to try new things and experiment and put yourself at risk.

You’re not going to see that if people feel like they’re constantly in this rotation of projects that never actually end up going anywhere, or that the organization is only building something that isn’t going to improve the world. You see so many Gen Z’s attracted to organizations with purpose, they feel tied to the end goals, and they’re rejecting organizations that don’t foster that.

And so, we need to be able to recognize that when there’s hopelessness, people are seeking hope, so they’re going to be more even more inclined to be attracted to companies and work that support that sense of purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
And you said there’s a 20-minute practice that builds hope. What is it?

Jennifer Moss
Well, and I keep saying, like, culture can be built in 20 minutes or less, and middle managers play a huge role in that, and hope can be built just through this idea of setting a goal and having a manager and the organization support you getting to that goal without micromanaging you or making it about hours worked, not the goal itself. Like, the productivity measure shouldn’t even be relevant here. And then having people come up with different pathways to getting there.

This is Snyder’s theory of hope and it’s really applicable in the workforce. You see Google with their OKRs they’re really looking at, and the way that they do goal setting within the organization. It really is peer supported. They co-create their goals. They talk about it transparently with the organization so people can support. There’s a lot of support for continuing development to hit those goals. Those goals are challenging enough, but not so challenging that you can never actually achieve them, so you’re always building hope.

And it’s also that you have milestones, so you’re celebrating along the way, instead of it being like, “Oh, we sold a million-dollar, you know, whatever product,” or, “Landed a client,” and/or, “The project is finally done after three years and then we finally celebrate.” It’s about incrementally reminding people that they’re hitting milestones, which builds cognitive hope. So again, it’s just weekly and then incrementally, and then over time it really does change the atmosphere of innovation inside of these organizations that obviously are known for their innovative thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, this is resonating. And it just sounds like we’ve had previous guests talk about the intrinsic motivators of play, like it is fun to solve problems. You feel like you’re actually getting to use your brain. And some people pay good money for the pleasure of solving problems with video games or whatever, they’re at kind of escape rooms, activities that they’re into.

So, could you tell us a story about a team that had a cool shift in terms of they were doing things the hopeless way, and they made some changes, they started doing some things hopefully, and cool results unfolded?

Jennifer Moss
Well, I go back to Atlassian, who’s a great example of distributed workforce, and they just do things really well. They were finding that people were not using the space, and they were dealing with a sense of loneliness, and they started to test, “How do we make it so that people feel excited and that they’re inspired by the organization?”

And they started their hackathons as one, where everyone comes to the table once a quarter, and they just play and do cool things, and everyone’s so excited about it, and that really has led to some incredible innovations, but, plus, it also created this other part of the hope strategy is that they were bringing people together. And there was another part of, again, that these satellite offices were, now they’re 91% occupied in an, interestingly, fully remote workforce.

They have all this in-person time, and they realized, “Okay. Well, at this point, we’re not necessarily giving people a sense of their product or their work being seen.” So, they started this togetherness focus and started to have people go and work in other offices, and really championed and supported people actually going and spending a week with a peer in another market. So, at any one time in New York, 50% of the office is occupied by people from around the entire organization.

And in these environments, they also are bringing CEOs and C-level executives to come into these spaces, so there’s an opportunity for everyone’s ideas to be seen, which makes you feel like, “I’m not just doing things in a vacuum. I actually am being evaluated and supported by some of the senior people around the organization.”

And so, they’ve done a really great job of pushing back on this idea that you can’t have remote workers be cohesive or have friendships or it’s just always loneliness for those people working remotely. They totally bucked that myth. And they do that by building up their workforce to still feel like when you’re together, it’s not about distraction, it’s about getting what they call “getting s**t done,” that’s their motto. And you go in the office to still get s**t done, but you are also focusing on building a sense of pride in the work that you do, and for others to see what you’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool and fun, and that just lights me up in terms of whenever there’s just a beautiful win-win in terms of people experience, as well as organizational functioning and profitability. And, like, building the remote offices, I’m sure like, from one frame of reference, I imagine there is a finance employee somewhere at the spreadsheet, saying, “No, no, no, no, this is not net present value positive for these funds into this purpose.” Because it can be hard to see a measure. Well, what is the value of people feeling like they’re seen, and like they belong, and like they have friends, and the engagement and reduced attrition that comes with it? It’s hard to quantify.

But I recall, and I just sort of thought Bain was really nice to us with regard to some of the investments they made. Like, you could just transfer to another office in the world for six months, and I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool of them. How generous.” And maybe there’s a part of that, but, really, it was a deliberate move to facilitate best practice sharing across the worldwide network.

Jennifer Moss
I love what you’re saying because I’ve been, for many years, an advocate of spending money on making sure that people get to see each other and investing in that travel spend. I mean, right now, we’re supposed to be saving money on our commercial real estate, hopefully, the people that have downsized. Why aren’t we moving people around so that we can get them to see each other?

Because one of the things in the book that I learned is that we have this real shift in the last five years where people used to see other people in their organization. They used to make friends with people because you talked about your kids’ baseball team, or you were friends because you like the same type of movies. And it would create these ad hoc kind of outside of work relationships so we move from these simplex relationships, which are just transactional to multiplex relationships, which include knowing about each other.

And since the pandemic, we are really much more focused on simplex relationships, it’s much more transactional, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we’re only seeing our team. And I’ve heard this across the board in my interviews, “I just feel like I only know my team. I don’t know anyone else in the organization. We’re so siloed.” And that was already problematic, but there were ways that we fixed that by just creating opportunities to meet and connect.

And so, it doesn’t need to be five days in the office. Lots of data shows that’s actually counter to cohesion, but it is concentrated focus on getting real time with each other, that has more meaning and develops these multiplex relationships. And we’re not doing that very well, so we just blame it on it being remote work that’s created loneliness. But it’s actually so much more complex than that, but the solutions are much easier than people think. And it isn’t just like, “Yeah, that strategy of forcing everyone back through return to office mandates.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, a couple follow-ups there. Five days in the office is counter to cohesion. What is optimal for cohesion?

Jennifer Moss
Well, Gallup says one to two days in the office per week and then you have others that say, I mean, hybrid is optimal if hybrid is done right. I mean, Mark Ma, from University of Pittsburgh, and Nick Bloom from Stanford, they’ve done lots of lots of research and found that, from a purely capitalist standpoint, the most financially viable is hybrid. People feel like that’s an okay meet in the middle.

And that five days a week, it ends up, actually, making people feel less connected, they’re more resentful to the organization and feeling less loyal, so they don’t invest in relationships in the same way. We also see organizations that have been focused on return to office mandates tend to also, as part of their kind of work personas, they’re overworking and there’s a lot of burn out there. And when you’re burned out, you also don’t really want to hang out after work or spend a lot of time chit-chatting. You feel like that 20 minutes of just having lunch every week could mean an extra hour in your pajamas at 11 o’clock at night so you avoid it.

And so, we’re seeing a lot of data that shows that that’s not great.

And fully remote is not great either in many ways. Some organizations, like Atlassian and others do it well, but from a purely capitalist standpoint, it is kind of that Goldilocks zone where there’s a little bit of both. But ones that are most successful are like the ones like Microsoft where it’s 50% of your time, not Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It’s sort of fluid, and managers get to say, “Hey, let’s talk about what makes sense.”

They have moments that matter, which is like, you know, an onboarding or a project that they really want to work on, or some specific reason why you’re in it together, but that can be fluid from week to week. And so, that kind of autonomy but a little bit of time together that’s used in a better way is where we see higher cohesion and happier workers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we talked about hope a lot, but you actually mentioned eight areas for folks to address. Could you give us the quick one sentence, what do you mean by this area, and then maybe one quick tip for giving that a boost?

Jennifer Moss
So, purpose is the second chapter. I was able to talk with Adam Grant. He and I are really aligned on this idea of that leaders get this purpose wrong. It’s like part of the mission statement, your values and your purpose, and it’s always tied to this big grand mission statement. But no one really cares about that unless you’re in this executive group. There’s about 20% at the highest level that really feel connected to the purpose. Most people just want to tie their daily values to work.

So, one of the things that we recommend is that leaders of their teams have this one meeting every single week. And I know we’re meeting fatigued, but it’s 20 minutes, again 20 minutes to fix culture, and it’s a non-work-related check-in. You ask, “What lit you up this week? What stressed you out?” and everyone goes around and talks about that. And then, “What can we do to make next week easier?”

Because purpose really is about, “Does the thing I do every day, even the tedious and boring things that I do every day, do they matter? Does anyone care about it?” And if that’s connected to who you are and you feel good about it, you feel like you have purpose. And so, “What lights you up?” that’s like pure magic for managers to motivate. You know, “Okay, now I know you like this. Now that makes you excited. Oh, let’s try to create some of that thinking and fuel your work with that.”

And then, “What stresses you out?” that’s how you prevent burnout. That’s how you make sure that someone saying they haven’t slept every single time you ask them this question or they’re not sleeping, you can dig into it. Then you have managers as mental health conduits, not professionals, and they’re just able to get to it.

And then, “What can we do for each other to make next week easier?” builds that sense of shared goal-setting and helping each other and quick wins, which also builds cognitive hope. And it really, from the interventions where we’ve tried this, it’s really done incredible shifts in morale. And so, I think, like, that’s purpose and why I really feel like that’s a key critical thing that we should be working on.

Pete Mockaitis
And community?

Jennifer Moss
Community is just we’re all lonely. We need to have friends again. And the way that we’re seeking out friendships right now are based on accountability and conscientiousness. It’s a huge switch from pre-pandemic, where we were looking at shared interests, likeability, someone made you laugh, but now it’s like, “Can you get your job done because that’s all I care about?” And so, we need to bring rituals back.

We used to have what is called, I think, before it was called forced fun. And we don’t want forced fun, but we want rituals because that’s how you build social contagions, and people feel like going to work isn’t just like going to school without our gym or recess. It’s super boring right now. So, building friendships through rituals.

And then when we look at solving the big problems, compassion is how we, as leaders, address AI anxiety. We have to understand that there’s a lot of people, especially our younger cohort, one in two are feeling AI anxiety, which Gallup calls FOBO, fear of becoming obsolete. And so, compassion is how we do that because empathy is listening, compassion is taking that listening and putting it into action.

And then when it comes to really looking at openness, if we create openness, this is going to solve that generational divide that we have right now. A lot of mature workers say, “I don’t fit into this workforce. Like, this is not at all my philosophy, and I don’t really want to worry about obsolescence in my final years of work.” So, we’re seeing them, a lot of mature workers leave early, and I think that’s actually going to be a major labor force catastrophe if we’re not careful with that group.

And young people are just opting out. So, we need to stop this hyperbolic, “Boomers can’t Google, and they’re micromanaging,” or, “Gen Z’s are lazy and entitled, and they’d afford a home if they just stop buying avocado toast.” That, to me, is just like, people think it’s funny, and, actually, it’s creating a real sense of ageism at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so you’re saying, in both directions.

Jennifer Moss
In both directions.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the Millennials think that the Boomer is an idiot who can’t Google, and the Boomer thinks that the youngsters are irresponsibly burning their cash. Whereas, like, there are realities associated with, like, affordability is harder now. And then on the other side, it’s like, “Hey, technology is changing much more rapidly now.” Like, that’s also true, and that is also hard, and it needs to be acknowledged.

Jennifer Moss
It is. And you know what? I keep saying, like, stop using terms like “reverse mentoring.” We use that all the time. And it assumes that an older worker knows less about technology or something than a younger one, and we talk about Boomers know this and Gen Z knows this. We see this always when we talk about technology, and it’s just assumed that one generation knows something more than the other, which is not accurate.

Like, look at Dr. Hinton, he was the founder of AI, probably knows a lot about AI, and he’s in his late 60s. And so, this idea that we have to learn in this reverse way, instead of peer mentorship is a way better approach to talking about it. And, really, in the book, I just go through all the language that we don’t realize we’re using, the narratives that we use a lot, and that it just creates this continued labeling of an entire generation as being a very specific thing. And instead of just taking those assumptions away and looking at it, I think, with an openness, that’s what leaders need to do.

And then I think my favorite chapter was freedom because this whole idea of the reason why workers don’t want to have these RTO mandates, or don’t want to go back to work is that we’re missing the psychological barriers that people are feeling right now, which is, “I had my freedom in this certain area of work,” and it goes across the board, not just with return to office, but across the board.

There was more investment in well-being, DEI, you know, all of these commitments, and promises that were made to people. And when they started getting those clawed back, it felt like, “Wow, now my freedom, my sense of freedom is being taken away.” I talk about this from a neuroscience standpoint, and our sense of freedom is deeply baked in our neural wiring. It’s something we would go to great peril to stand up for, and a lot of this resistance is subconscious.

It’s conscious and subconscious because we’re fighting for something that we feel like is ours now. And so, that trust is a big factor, and so organizations that are making these choices really quickly and just sort of throwing it at employees is why I believe that this whole issue has continued to be so polarizing. Instead of understanding that people shot up when it comes to the rates of social anxiety from 4% to 36% of people explain that they had social anxiety through the pandemic.

So, you’re not just saying, “People, go back to work. Deal with it,” and if they’re resistant, it’s because they’re lazy. It’s because they have generalized and high levels of social anxiety. So, I think this, for me, was a big aha, recognizing why the pushback and why the resistance is so, so difficult for leaders and employees to get on the same page.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, could you share, if folks are in the individual contributor role of things, and they’re vibing with what you’re saying, like, “Yes, Jen, this sounds right and true and good, and I wish my organization would do some of this enlightened stuff,” what do you recommend they do?

Jennifer Moss
Well, as an individual contributor, your life is still—you’re still in charge of it, and although happiness at work, it really needs to have societal and policy change. You need to have leadership and high-level executive managers and individuals all play a role to make it the kind of culture that everyone wants. We have a lot of responsibility too of our own choices. It’s a privilege to just quit so I don’t just say, “Oh, everyone can quit.”

Not everyone can quit. It’s not that easy to do. But I do say that there are a lot of things that have happened, habits that have been imposed on us and self-inflicted habits. Like, I just wrote this article for HBR that was really, I think, well-received and it was titled “Let’s End Toxic Productivity.” And we’ve become toxically productive. We’re waking up in the morning and checking, we’re sitting in our pajamas, we’re calling it fun work. We have our glass of wine while we’re doing admin, and it’s like, “Oh, this is fun work because I’m drinking and I’m doing my admin work.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s one way to do it.

Jennifer Moss
Yeah. It’s like, “No, this is still not healthy.” And you see this increase specifically in women that are just completely burning out, and they’re hitting that wall. So, we do feel a sense of pressure that, again, it’s like institutional stress, but it’s also us feeling like we need to perform at these high levels. And a lot of that is because we’re still in this sense of urgency mode. We’re still in surge capacity mode, and we haven’t stopped that, reset that habit and replace those with more boundaries.

We can’t always make those choices because there’s a lot of reasons for it, but in the book, the first chapter was me interviewing Kara, who was on track to be the first female black partner in her law firm, and she lost three members of her family. And when I met her, she was driving an Uber, and I said, “Wow, that’s intense. And what made you choose to do that?” And she said, “Life is short. I’m working on my nonprofit in Costa Rica, giving microloans to women, and, yeah, I’m making less money, but I just feel like I needed to do this. Like, I’m compelled to do this.”

And you’re seeing more women, why we have the thinnest executive pipeline in history right now. And for the first time in a decade, we see the global CEOs of females decline, and a lot of it is just a purpose shifting, and we’re going to lose a lot of talent because people are just, overwhelmed. But we do have the choice, and I have had so many interviews.

I interviewed over a hundred Uber drivers for the book, and every single one of them said, “I feel better.” And it’s shocking because we would think, “Really?” Our perception is, “No way. You had this opportunity to be the first black female partner, like, how could you be happier?” And she said, “I am. It’s extraordinary how much healthier I am and happier I am in this role.”

And I think, when you face your mortality, you realize that. And a lot of us have collectively faced our mortality over the last five years or have a sense of it potentially being uncertain, and that changes you. And this is what we need to look at, it’s like, “What are our deathbed regrets?” And if that doesn’t fit into the schematic of, “Okay, is answering an email at 11 o’clock at night drunk, is that going to be our deathbed regret? Probably. Or, is missing time with my family, or is being healthy, or is actually setting boundaries?” And that is where I see a lot more people making those choices for their own happiness and healthiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s zoom on this, you interviewed a hundred Uber drivers, and all of them said they were happier driving Uber than doing another job.

Jennifer Moss
Well, I would say maybe 80 to 85 percent of them did, 15% were just like, “I’ve been always driving this car and it’s good for me because I…” That 15% and I found were really proud of making a paycheck to be able to put their kids through school or giving them a better life, and so there was still a sense of pride. They hadn’t left another job, but the majority of them had.

And there was three people I interviewed that had left Wall Street. They were making lots of money and, fortunately, they had some money to be able to support that. I saw a lot of retirees that took early retirement but didn’t want to return to corporate, so they were driving an Uber just to continue making money, but they had no desire to actually go back. And a lot of them had very solid positions within their company. They made good money, but they didn’t want to be in that environment.

This is where they would say things like, “I just don’t fit. Like, this is good for me, this pace.” And I also found, too, what was a really interesting data point is that 20% of American grandparents are primary caregivers. And so, we never think of that, and now we’re seeing more organizations have grandternity benefits, which I think are fantastic.

But we think only older Gen Z’s and Millennials need that help with the kind of paternity and maternity leave, but grandparents are taking on primary care, so flexibility has become extremely important for them. And so, so organizations that didn’t offer that, that was leading them to go into places where there was flexibility. And I would say across the board, that was one of the main factors, was just “The flexibility to be able to do what I needed to do as a parent, as a grandparent, or even just for my own passion pursuits.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, I think that is so stark in terms of many workplaces are failing their workers so profoundly, in terms of flexibility, purpose, belonging, that folks would prefer to receive a fourth or less the compensation in order to just drive a car and not have to deal with all that crap.

Jennifer Moss
Yes. And, really, again, it’s the focal point of the book because people described what they were missing, and the data shows that the big Gallup whirlpool that goes into the happiness report found that people would take 37% less pay if it meant higher work-life balance and flexibility. I mean, we can solve these problems and yet now we’re seeing more people double and triple down on less flexibility, which just erodes that trust, and I think the data is there.

There’s so much evidence to show that if you provide autonomy and trust in your workers that you hired, that you spent a lot of money to recruit and retain, they’re adults, you hired adults, so why are you treating them like children when you bring them into the organization? And so, to me, the freedom chapter of flexibility, specifically, it’s like, it’s just such a no-brainer, and organizations are just making this real play to have control, and it’s turning people off.

And they are willing, at this point, to take much less pay to have a life that feels like that there’s a sense of freedom in it. And that’s why you’re seeing this high level of disengagement, this constant turnover. People, even if you’re in the organization, are just not feeling like they care about work. Quiet quitting, and disengagement is so high, that you’re not even getting the most out of your people. You’re actually getting a fraction of what you could be getting from your people if you just let go of the power and looked at this as a mutual respect of transferring skills and just working together.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, Jen, tell me, anything else you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jennifer Moss
I just really hope that people just start caring more about each other, and putting five percent more of their effort into just being kind and altruistic. And, you know, it really is 20 minutes, 20 minutes of eating lunch with each other, Cornell found, actually improves well-being and happiness at work. It’s just one lunch every single week together.

If I can tell people to just take 20 minutes of thinking of some sort of tactical strategy that you could do to make someone in your organization’s life better, you will feel better for it. And if we could create a bit of a social network or contagion around that, I think it would spill over into something really, really transformational.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jennifer Moss
“You can have anything, not everything.”

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

Jennifer Moss
I love Dr. William’s study that he did for the Oxford Wellbeing Institute this year, and he said, basically, well-being programs aren’t working, wellness is not working, but the one thing that does work is volunteering and altruism. So, just being nice to other people is the one well-being program that we should be focusing on this year.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jennifer Moss
I love A Little Life. It’s so painful but it is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Jennifer Moss
One of my favorite tools right now is ResearchGate. Being able to have the ability to go through there and be able to use it for really incredible research that you can, as a journalist and as an author, be using so that we aren’t spreading misinformation, so that we really are getting it from peer-reviewed sources.

That makes me feel so much better about the content I’m putting out, and that people are reading something that I know has been backed through evidence. And I think every single writer and journalist, and anyone communicating to the public, should be using that source instead of some of the AI sources that might be not as accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Jennifer Moss
I do practice gratitude. And I know that sounds hokey but it’s something that I really try to do. We do it around the dinner table but, lately, just for me, it’s like, “What went well this week? What can I work with that I have versus what I don’t have?” and it does work. It gets me out of my habit.

And just taking a moment to take a breath, and realize that there’s still a lot of good things in the world that I appreciate. It does ground me in this time of poly-crisis.

Pete Mockaitis
And, if I may, when it comes to practicing gratitude, I think that there’s some nuance in doing this excellently, because sometimes I can list a thing that is objectively a blessing or, “This is a good thing, and I am noting it, I am listing it, I am acknowledging it.” But sometimes when I’m doing gratitude, I actually feel gratitude for the thing that is objectively good, and other times, I don’t have the feelings. And since you’re a good researcher, can you tell me, does that matter in terms of doing a gratitude practice? Or how should I do it optimally?

Jennifer Moss
Dr. Robert Emmons in his book Thanks, and a lot of his research, are so useful on this concept of gratitude and how it impacts. And sometimes it is tail that wags the dog, you know, like that idea that you think about these things, it is a narrative that your brain is using. So, anytime that you refocus on something that maybe you’re not feeling, but you know is valuable, like, “Oh, be thankful for having clean water.” And at the moment, I’m just not like, “Oh, I’m so grateful for clean water,” but I’ll mention it.

And it does help you have perspective-taking because from a neuroscience standpoint, it does take out the things that you could be focusing on that are not positive. You have only so much you can attend to at any one time. It’s like 40 things that you can attend to in the moment while you’re processing tens of billions of pieces of information. But if you’re attending to something, even if you don’t feel those, you know, necessarily those chemical reactions to it, it is creating a desire path in the brain.

So, the more that you put that focus, that neural wiring, and you go over it and over and over again, you create what is called gratitude fluency. So, you go from practicing gratitude to being grateful, and that happens over time. It’s like a language that you learn and you become fluent in gratitude, and so then it’s an automatic response to feel gratitude towards something versus having to practice it. But it is something, as it works through your life, it does change the chemistry as well. It just takes time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is helpful. And if nothing else, the fact that I have oriented my thoughts towards a thing worthy of gratitude means that I wasn’t like whining about “This water doesn’t taste very good. And a key nugget, something that you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Jennifer Moss
One of the things I would say is that we have more agency sometimes than we think if we’re really stressed and burned out. And one of the best things that we can do is really do a values assessment. What do you care about? What do you love? And then make your priorities for the year. Focus on that.

And if you’re saying yes to something, like a project that maybe you’re excited to participate in but it’s going to take that extra 20% of your time, put it on that scale of “Is this FOMO? Is this something I have to do? Or, is this another thing where I’m going to regret saying yes in the future?” And take some time to rest.

Rest is not a four-letter word. Look at what you can be doing with that time for work, and instead refocus it on making sure that you’re well and healthy and prioritize your own well-being and the well-being of the people around you first. And then, hopefully, you’ll start to see the benefits of that.

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

Jennifer Moss
Jennifer-Moss.com.

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

Jennifer Moss
I would love for all of you to spend the next month and every day say something nice about another person behind their back. Spreading positive gossip inside of an organization actually improves psychological safety for those people coming into the space. And when it gets around to someone that you said some awesome thing about them, it really does make them feel incredibly special. So, just for the next month, just talk nicely about all your co-workers and see how that spreads a positivity contagion.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jen, thank you. This is fun.

Jennifer Moss
Thank you so much, Pete. It was great. Too many years in between, but maybe it’ll be less next time.