Marcus Buckingham: Why "Love" Is Fundamental to Career Success

0:00Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Hey friends, Olivia from OLLI. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where OLLI comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics. And we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams.

0:34Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

0:53Welcome to the new world of work. I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review. And each week on this show, we bring in a guest to talk about some aspect of the future of work, how we collaborate together, how we work more effectively together. We have a great guest this week, and I will introduce him in just a second. But first, a quick word from our friends at Unisys. When you think about how the cloud can help your business, are you thinking big enough? We can help you drive more value from the cloud. We're Unisys, and we do cloud really well.

1:32All right, I'm back. Welcome again to the New World of Work. Our guest today is Marcus Buckingham. Now, Marcus is a bestselling author. He's a very experienced researcher, particularly on workplace relations and workplace issues. He currently leads research at ADP Research Institute. He's the author of nine books, including a brand new one, Love and Work, How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life. Full disclosure, Harvard Business Review Press is the publisher of that book. So, Marcus, welcome. Thank you very much, Eddie. All right. It's great to have you.

2:08And these are big concepts, love and work. So what does love have to do with it? Plus, it's nice to be in the same room.

2:16Marcus Buckingham:I know. Imagine. It's a whole new. We're post-pandemic-ish. Yeah, don't push the envelope. Yeah, love and work. I mean, well, first of all, just to be clear, from a research standpoint, there is no data that says that everybody who excels at what they do has to love all that they do. You know, the old cliche, find what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life again. Yeah, that's not real. At least there's no data behind that. But what we do find, and really from the last 25 years of my career, when you do a study group, focus group, and you're studying highly successful people in any role, from housekeepers to teachers to lawyers to doctors or whatever, and you're interviewing them about what they do, you always find that there are moments, situations, or contexts that they love.

2:58Marcus Buckingham:That they don't love all that they do, but they do find love in what they do. And so that's the challenge for all of us. And it's not once a month. It's like this is an everyday thing. In fact, if you look at all the questions that might separate high-performing people from low-performing people, I mean, yes, people want a sense of mission. They want recognition. They want development. But the two most discriminating questions in terms of high-performing and low-performing is, do I have a chance to use my strengths every day at work? And was I excited to go to work every day last week? So there's a frequency in an everydayness to finding love in what you do.

3:32Marcus Buckingham:And so that's really what the point of the book was, is to go, you don't have to love all you do. But if you have a working situation where there's no love in it, you won't be creative. You won't innovate. You won't be resilient. All the outcomes that we want, you won't get with our love. So that sounds great. And, you know, I'm willing to remake my career along those lines. But, you know, I've met people who just have this clear delineation, this separation between kind of the life they love and the work they do. But they're really good at their jobs. They come in, they do a great job. But then it's like five o 'clock.

4:08I'm out of here. I mean, right.

4:10Marcus Buckingham:I mean, I mean, isn't that also a manifestation of successful work? Well, yes. And you heard that, of course, in my work life balance. I go to work. I'm not expecting work to love me back. Work isn't family. It's transactional. I go in, I sell my time and my talents and I get the money and I go home and I provide for the people that I love. It's work life balance. But if you look at in the real world, nothing healthy in nature is balanced. everything's moving so so health in general is motion it's how do you move through the environments and draw nourishment from those environments well for humans one of those big environments propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes hey friends olivia from ollie between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life.

5:08That's where Ollie comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Ollie.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

5:30Marcus Buckingham:Here's work. Not all. You've got other domains of your life. But one of them is, well, you spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week doing something. And what we know from understanding people that are excelling at their job, when they're doing something that they love, the chemical cocktail in your brain, the anandamide, the vasopressin, the norepinephrine, the dopamine, that chemical cocktail looks almost exactly like when you're in love with someone. And we know when you're doing something that which you love, your brain is more, it's like your neocortex is dysregulated. You're more open to new ideas and new innovations and creativity.

6:05Marcus Buckingham:And so all the stuff that we want from our work, the opportunity to feel like we are ourselves, the opportunity to open our minds, to broaden and build and grow. All those only happen when you're doing something that you love. So you could, I guess, have 50 hours of lovelessness and you make a little trade for yourself where you go, well, I'm going to suck it up here so that I can provide over here. But it's a really bad calculus. A, because you look at the most successful people, they don't do that. B, love's a force. It needs to be expressed. And if you go to work and it's blocked, that's not neutral.

6:41Marcus Buckingham:Over time, you become damaged by that. And the people that feel the damage most are the people at home. It's not like you're taking your personal life to work. It's like, no, you're taking your lovelessness home. These people feel it. So it's not as though you have to have a life full of love at work. But if your entire 50 hours a week is, as you said, filled with competency, but no appetite, no joy, no passion, no love, then you're a lesser human over time. It just, it drags you down. So if you're watching this, if you have questions for Marcus, put them into the chat and we'll get to some audience questions later.

7:21So I think there are companies who have tried to deal with this problem, you know, this lack of full engagement, passion, love, whatever you call it, by empowering their workers. You know, we empower them at the front lines and that that will achieve better results and will make people feel, OK, I'm valued because I'm empowered to have flexibility in how I handle situations. And is that is that what you're talking about or is it something else?

7:48Marcus Buckingham:Well, certainly that direction is a good direction to go in. And more and more, the way that technology works, of course, is that we're automating some of the rote functions of most jobs. So you think about where technology fits in, indeed, where AI and machine learning fits in. that does more and more apply to the parts of our jobs that are routine, thus leaving a lot more room for maneuver for many people in many jobs to use their judgment, to use their emotional intelligence, to use their authentic connection with a customer or a colleague. All of that is good, no question. But if you look at the way that we've built our human capital management systems inside companies, we haven't embraced the idea that your uniqueness and the unique things that you love.

8:30Marcus Buckingham:And by the way, if you took 30 emergency room nurses and you dove deep into what it is, what is it that you actually love and what you do? It's not, and they're all great. They don't all love the same. It's not that they all love the same things. They're all different. They're all unique in terms of what drives them, in terms of where they learn best, in terms of how they best give care. And what you would really want in a human capital system is something that when those loves of yours, A, they're real, B, they're really interesting and would like to figure out ways, not that you do it all the time, but we'd like you to figure out ways in which you can express them at work every day in some way.

9:06Marcus Buckingham:And by the way, it appears that 20 % is the threshold number. If you've got 20 % of your activities in a day that are things that you love, you are far less likely to burn out, far less likely to attrit, far less likely have all those negative outcomes of lost work days and so forth. 20 % is a good number. What you'd want is a human capital system that tries to help you find out what you love and express it, share it, I don't know, with your teammates. We don't see that at all. We see... Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self.

9:41What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Hey friends, Olivia from Oli. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics. And we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

10:12This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

10:15Marcus Buckingham:Models of skills you're supposed to have. Competencies you're supposed to have. Measurements of performance reviews. against those competencies, which then expose your gaps. And then we tell you to, well, basically we say to you, success for you in this job is how closely you fit the model. By the way, we defined the model before you walked in. The model has nothing to do with who you are at all. You are supposed to match the model, which is understandable in the sense that you want everybody in the same job to deliver the same outcomes. Like there's a minimum requirement, but we've taken it beyond that.

10:47Marcus Buckingham:So that basically your unique loves and everything that you felt was you about you, when you come into work, it's not just irrelevant to your performance. It's an impediment to you hitting the performance criteria that we've established. It's almost like we've said, that your uniqueness is a bug, not a feature. And when you come to work, and as we've talked about over the years, all the way through college, this is true too. But anyway, at work, you're basically told to put whatever your unique loves are aside and try to match the model that we defined before you walked in the door. Okay. So let me push on that a little bit.

11:23So I'm an editor. I have teams of editors who report to me. My hope is that they will edit things very successfully. Now, but here's a person and his loves are, you know, motorcycles and coin collecting. What do I do with that? I want him to be a great editor. Well, a life with more love in

11:46Marcus Buckingham:it is a jolly good thing. So if he's got a hobby with motorcycles and coin collecting, and he's not good enough at coin collecting to quit your job and go be a professional coin collector, if there is such a thing, that's fine. That's called a hobby. A lot of us have things that we love that we're not good enough actually to be paid for. And that's not a bad thing. It's a hobby. And a hobby is a love bringing thing. So more love in your life. Great. And though, if you're leading your team of editors as well, one of the questions that should be of interest to you, and I'm sure it is, is each one of them going, what is it about what you do that you love?

12:18Marcus Buckingham:Where did you, as Mike Checkscher, my highest, when does time fly by for you as an editor? When for you do you find yourself positively looking forward to something? When for you do you feel like, and you probably should know that about them, because for them that's part of, not only, but it's part of the nourishment that they bring to their work. And as you know, with your 10 editors or whatever, they're all really different. And so as you're thinking about assignments and you're thinking about ways in which you want to get them to do more or do better, starting with that which they love and their understanding of it and what they've shared with you is a really interesting way to help someone basically contribute, not only contribute over their best, but do it in a such way that they get the nourishment to keep doing it.

12:59Marcus Buckingham:Their loves are like appetites and they're different. And that's a good example. 10 editors, well, they're just editors. No, they're 10 individuals who happen to be editors. And your job, of course, is to see them and then want them not to be better, as in, I'm going to fix you all so that you're one perfect homogenous editor, but to make them bigger. You want them to come into HBI and then go, okay, what's your unique contribution? If you don't actually talk to them about that, which they love in that conversation, you're missing one of the most important raw materials of their contribution. Not the only one, but you're missing a big one.

13:36So this moment we're in now, whether it's the great resignation or the great reshuffle, you know, people seem to prefer that now to the idea of mere resignation. You know, to you, is that a manifestation of, I don't know, the lack of empathetic leadership, of love, you know, in the workplace that's driving people either out or to look for new opportunities?

14:00Marcus Buckingham:Whether we call it the great resignation or the great reshuffle, undoubtedly over the last two and a half, three years. We are changed people. I mean, for many of us, I mean, for me, I sold my company, I lost my dad, I left my marriage. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Hey friends, Olivia from Oli. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life.

14:38That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

15:00Marcus Buckingham:I had the same pandemic experience that many people did where you look in the mirror and you go, who the heck am I? And what sort of mark am I trying to leave? And some days, for many of us, the answer is pretty bleak. You're like, what am I doing? And other days, you sort of go, no, no, no, no. I'm here for a really short time. I want to try to do something that matters. And for many, many, many millions of us, we've come out of the pandemic and gone, I'm not a cog in a machine. I'm me. And I've had a really deep relationship with me over the last two years. Any CEO that thinks, oh, it's just press rewind and then we'll start again.

15:38Marcus Buckingham:We'll just go back to normal because normal was so great. But for many of us, as we've seen in data relating to engagement, relating to resilience, normal wasn't so even pre-pandemic. By the way, pre-pandemic, we had a burnout problem with doctors and nurses. It wasn't the pandemic that created. Work wasn't really working for us pre-pandemic. Then the pandemic turned it up to 11. And then we sort of come out and gone, okay, look, we've got about 1.8, 1.9 openings for every person applying. So I've now got a bit of power. And I want to join a place that actually does, not in a soft woo-woo way, but does see me and is interested in what I love to do and how I can contribute it.

16:19Marcus Buckingham:Not that everything should be individualistic. It's not about narcissism. It's about contribution. So we've come out of this pandemic with a lot of us going, I think myself included, probably you included, going, what is the unique dent I'm going to make here? And is there a company out there that is actually going to build their talent brand around that? Not that everyone's skipping to work. I mean, the old thing about they call it work for a reason, right? But I'm not going to go there and be emptied out. I'm just not. But so for those companies who want to be the ones that attract the one person when they've got almost two job openings available to them, if the companies that want to really draw me in, they've got to speak directly to my, sorry, but I'll say it.

17:02Marcus Buckingham:They've got to speak directly to my heart. Are you really genuinely interested in me? By the way, dear hospitals, if your org structure is one nurse supervisor to 60 nurses, so you've got that poor nurse supervisor is going to try to pay attention to the heart. You know, you said 10 editors, 60 nurses. How can that poor nurse supervisor even know their middle name or whether they're married or whatever, let alone what their unique loves about nursing are? So it's going to push companies to look at things like what are managers doing? What's our performance management system look like? But also, what's our org structure look like?

17:34Marcus Buckingham:Do our spans of control actively prevent any well-intended nurse supervisor from paying attention to the heart of another human? But those companies that do that well, genuinely, I am interested in who you are and what you bring. They will be, I think, in emotional sync with where many millions of us are. So one area where I think it gets complicated is, you know, as companies try to connect more with their employees and understand that they have options. you know part of it is the return to work question and whether you allow more people to work from home if you kind of you know keep a hybrid thing going on which in some way seems to conflict with one of the ideas in your book which is that we like to be together we like to be in teams and we're we're we're sort of empowering people to yeah you're you kind of you know it's not that You cannot have teams remotely.

18:30Of course you can, but it's different. So, you know, is that a cautionary moment to you?

18:37Marcus Buckingham:Well, no. From our data, what we know is, I mean, because I run this research institute funded by ADP, I can have an opportunity to go out and actually find data on that question. So we've just come out of the field with 27 ,000 people, 27 countries. And when you ask people whether or not they feel part of a team, unquestionably, if you feel part of a team, you're more likely to be engaged, more likely to be resilient. But whether you propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self.

19:12What propels you propel with Gatorade electrolytes. Hey friends, Olivia from Oli. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science-backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Oli comes in. Start your mornings off right with Maltese made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fan chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

19:42This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

19:46Marcus Buckingham:Work remotely or on-site or hybrid doesn't seem to have any relationship to your feeling of being on a team. So it seems as though the feeling of team lives in the person, not the place. The other part about it, which is really interesting and important, is that when people say, what do you right now? What do I want from work beyond salary and benefits? It's interesting in our data release that seems to suggest they don't want necessarily flexibility of hybridness or not, remote or not. They're more interested in flexibility of hours. So it's maybe not that I want to work from home. It may be that in this new world, I want the freedom, whether I'm working on site on a construction site, whether I'm working in a restaurant, whether I'm working in an office, I want the freedom to be able to go back and deal with that life that you saw in my Zoom calls with my kid or my mom who's living with us.

20:33Marcus Buckingham:I need the freedom of time, not necessarily the flexibility of working from home or not. So it seems as though if you want to be meeting, if you're a company and you want to meet people where they are, yes, they want to be part of a team, but team actually can function remotely or not. A team is a function of a team leader seeing you and then collaborating. It doesn't necessarily have to happen around the water cooler. And then the real thing is you're trying to give people more trust. Love and trust are linked. And part of trust is flexibility of time. You give us flexibility of time to be able to accommodate the responsibilities that we have beyond the domain of our work.