Why Workers Are Disengaged, and How to Fix That

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:59Scott Greenberg was teaching people how to be leaders, but he had not actually been a leader himself. This wasn't a situation that he had sought out. He stumbled into this career. As a New York University film student, he had a bout with cancer, and that led him to give a talk about overcoming adversity. And then he got invited to do more talks. And soon he was a motivational speaker. And soon he was a peak performance and leadership speaker. But like I said, there was a problem. It bothered me that I hadn't had any real leadership experience. So he decided to go out and get some. Scott got into franchising.

2:37He bought some businesses that he could run. I bought my first of what would be two edible arrangements franchises. So I, you know, jumped into the deep end and realized that my golden nuggets of wisdom, like there's no I in team, didn't translate at all. So I had to unlearn everything. And I really spent 10 years while still speaking, immersing myself in the business and trying to crack the nut as to how to get the most from my employees and specifically hourly employees. And we figured it out. In the meantime, I started looking at other businesses who I was able to speak to. So I was able to really get embedded and identified really great leaders among them.

3:14And based on all of that time, was able to get enough information to write this book that I'm really excited about. And that book is called Stop the Shift Show. And to be clear, that is Shift Show. And it's been so much fun doing these interviews and watching people occasionally get that wrong. The book's full title is actually Stop the Shift Show. Turn your struggling hourly workers into a top performing team. And this is what we're going to be talking about today, or rather very specifically, a really important lesson that Scott learned when he became a manager. Because as Scott will tell you, he was not a great manager at first, and he couldn't understand why his employees felt so disengaged from work until he realized that he was part of the problem, the big part of the problem, and also he could be the solution.

4:04Today on Problem Solvers, we are talking about how to keep your teams engaged, how to build a culture that they want to be a part of. It's not easy. Scott learned it the hard way. But now, now, he's someone who teaches leadership, who has really figured out how to be a leader. Coming up after the break. On this show, we talk a lot about entrepreneurs who tackled business problems and came out the other end more successful. It's about learning from those experiences so that you can grow your business the smart way. Well, now U.S. Bank is offering a new product called U.S. Bank Business Altitude Power World Elite MasterCard.

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5:30Apply for the U.S. Bank Business Altitude Power Card today at usbank.com slash bizpower. That's usbank.com slash biz, B-I-Z, power. Limited time offer. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association pursuant to a license from MasterCard International Incorporated. MasterCard is a registered trademark and the circle's design is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. some restrictions may apply. All right, we're back. I am talking today with Scott Greenberg, author of the new book, Stop the Shift Show. And to begin, I asked Scott, what's causing the shift show?

6:14Why is it often so hard to engage employees? At the end of the day, we are emotional creatures driven mostly by how we feel much more than anything else. We all know that. We all agree with that. We all understand that when it comes to customers, we need to provide a better experience so that they'll come back and tell other people. But we don't think that much about with employees. So we think they don't care. They're not coming to apply. They're not staying. So I'll just give them more money. I'll give them more stuff. Believing that's the only thing that motivates people. But ultimately, it's not that people are emotional in nature.

6:49And so we need to be able to step aside from our busyness to make them feel better. And there's so much more to it than just being nice to them or giving stuff. And I think that the work environments that make that a priority about taking care of them, giving them things, but also focusing on how they feel. These are the ones who become employers of choice. They attract more and they retain more and they enjoy better performance. As you're talking, I was remembering this moment earlier on in my career, I was a low level editor at a magazine. I was making, I don't know, $45 ,000 a year and was very overworked.

7:30And there was a big morale problem at the company where I was at. And one day somebody told me this thing that the CEO had supposedly said, which is that she just expects people to want to work there. That it's a great company and that the reason that people should accept the low pay and a lot of work is because we create great things, create great magazines, and you should just be honored to be a part of it. And I found that, I don't know if she said that. I don't know where that came from. But I remember feeling infuriated by that. Infuriated. Because I thought, yeah, all right, CEO lady, I understand why you feel really bought in here.

8:14You're making a lot of money. It's very exciting. You're running this company. I don't really understand why you think I'm supposed to be excited just because we happen to be at the same company. We have different relationships with this company. And the reason why I tell you that, Scott, is because what it makes me think of is how leaders are very rightly tied to and very proud of their companies, particularly if they're an owner or a founder or something. Even if they've just worked their way up into some high management position, They feel a sense of ownership. I get it. But I think that there's a blind spot where because they feel such a sense of ownership, they don't always think about why others might not intuitively feel that same sense of ownership, which is perhaps why they do the thing that you just described, which is that they say, oh, people just need a little more money.

9:12Just give them something and then they'll feel happy. but no because there's something fundamental happening for the leader that is not necessarily happening for the person who is lower down on the chain and it is emotional it is that emotional connection which the leader more naturally has because they have more control so what are we supposed to do and also do you think my hypothesis is right absolutely and what really triggers me about your story is I'll guarantee you that the underperformers within that company were probably described by that CEO as entitled. But you think the one who's entitled, she thinks that without having to build culture, without having to understand the emotional needs of people, without having to really lead them, that she's entitled to loyalty, that people should just feel so excited because of the brand.

10:04That's a wonderful way to put it. Yeah. It's absurd, especially with younger workers today who are not joiners, who are less trustful. It takes a lot more to impress them. Like they don't care who you are, how long you've been around, or people are now questioning brands and institutions that formerly were considered prestigious. And I think that's great. We shouldn't rest on our laurels. So it upsets me to hear that, but I'm glad that we're able to challenge that. Yeah, I love that. The shift on who is entitled there is a really powerful ones. Okay, let us strip away the entitlement of the leader.

10:40What should they be looking for and doing? The leaders themselves? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, if I'm a leader of an organization and I'm trying to stop the shift show, so to speak, I've got teams that are disengaged. How do I start to diagnose this problem? Okay, so first, I believe that in business, the first place we look for any solution is in the mirror. How am I getting in my own way through my belief system, through my biases? And in particular, what old ways of doing things and looking at things from the past am I still hanging on to? We tend to want to judge workers, especially younger workers, kids these days.

11:17We've been repeating that phrase. We need to catch ourselves. Jason, I assume that you are a millennial. Is that right? A little older. I'm 43. So I was born in 1980. Oh, all right. Good for you. Thanks. I know. I keep the baby face. Okay, good. So then perhaps you're joining me in the jet X generation and certainly baby boners who've been bagging on millennials for ever since last quarter of a century that they've been in the workplace, right? Young, entitled, they don't want to work. But you look at today and millennials are running companies. They're editors and chiefs of magazines. They're performing surgery.

11:49No, they've, they've made it. They're functioning. We couldn't function without them. But now millennials are complaining about generation Z for all the same things, right? Right. We need to get over. This is as old as time is this, is people complaining about kids these days. You can find it literally as far back. This is true because I've looked into it. You can find it literally as far back in one way or another of Sumerian text in chuniform tablets. It is as old as anything, which is that we think that the people who are coming after us, who frankly, let's be honest, are going to replace us and therefore we are threatened by them are somehow lesser than we are.

12:28But the answer is that they are not. Because if they were, then Scott, you and I would be having this conversation rolling around in the mud, hitting ourselves with sticks or something. But instead, every generation builds upon the next generation, builds amazing new technologies and systems, and we get better with each generation, not worse. I really believe that. And so at some point, we need to break the cycle, right? So it starts with ourselves of overcoming that bias. And look, are today's younger generations worse? Yes, I think so. That's my generation's next perspective. But what I need to do if I want to manage them is put my judgment aside and just seek to understand them.

13:03I think they're worse because I have bias because I'm Generation X. I'm probably wrong, though. But I acknowledge it. But I appreciate it. Okay, great. I love the openness. So are they better or worse? It's the wrong question. The question is, how are they? Who are they? What do I need to do to understand them and connect with them? Once I answer that question, only then can I be a better manager, a better leader, and then bring out their best. And I think you're probably right. In spite of my bias, I bet the best is yet to come when it comes to workers and management, that kind of thing. So the first thing is, let's get over ourselves.

13:37Let's manage ourselves so we can better manage our managers by coming back to a more objective, curious place, and less judgmental. So that's my first suggestion. Second thing is we need to provide better formal management training. The average person in charge of people in a workplace goes 10 years before they get any formal management training. So how do they manage? The way they were managed. So there's this continuity of bad management that gets passed on from generation to generation. It's an oral tradition. It is, right? So how do most people get promoted from worker to manager? They're really competent at work.

14:14Maybe they're responsible. And we're desperate now for an assistant manager. So we promote them. And maybe we teach them how to do payroll. We teach them the systems. But if they're not taught in people management, then it's a whole different skill set. And so at some point, we need to teach people how to manage people on top of how to run the pizza restaurant or the factory floor. Which means that if you're a leader, what you need to be thinking about is a more structured track for the people who you want to step up and be managers and leaders? Certainly, I support that. But I think what needs to happen is once someone becomes a manager, once they get the job, they need complete training for this new skill set.

14:59And such a huge part of the skill set is managing people. And that's the piece that's missing. Normally we just give them a set of keys. Congratulations. Now you do the schedule this week and make it happen. But they're not taught how to inspire, how to engage, how to solve problems, how to build culture. And because upper management themselves often, or the owner may not even know how to do these things. So I think that if we can seek that out, and look, if you are a manager and you're listening to this and you weren't provided this, if you could seek out your own education, your own books and podcasts and resources to learn people management, you're gonna be a lot more effective.

15:39So can I ask you to draw a line from this, which feels useful and tactical, but also perhaps a little abstract for someone who maybe doesn't recognize whether or not they are on the right or wrong side of this. You, as you had told us a little while ago, bought, some Edible Arrangements franchises. You came in, you had to manage a staff, you had to create levels of leadership. Did you recognize this gap in your own teams that there was an absence of management training? And what did you do to make sure that when people were elevated into a management position, that they were also being trained to be great leaders of people?

16:28Sure. In the beginning, I was terrible at this. I thought I came in as a motivational speaker. I knew all the cliches, read all the books, but my employees hadn't read the books, so they didn't know how they were supposed to be responding to my brilliance. Yeah. It was through a lot of mistakes. What helped, though, was I was doing the speaking and I felt the responsibility to figure out what works so I can actually give something useful to my audiences, not just regurgitate stuff. So we did a lot of experiments and we asked a lot of questions. And I eventually did start taking things from various books and trying stuff out.

17:02And I would ask if I promoted someone to assistant manager, I would ask them, hey, where are you struggling with the problems? And I would give them resources. And I would talk with them about the people side. So it wasn't that I necessarily sent them to a class, but at least I had the conversation and tried to identify what is their emotional need here? Where's the difference between them? And how can I fulfill that? As opposed to training them in systems over and over again, or telling them to be tough, or telling them to be like the broad stuff, to really get in specifically and try to have a bit more empathy.

17:33And what was the response that you would get to that? If you sit down with a new manager and you say, where are your problems? Do they, you're their boss. Do they tell you truthfully where the problems are? Yeah, once you ask them five or six times, Once you create the safe space for them to do it, like I had to offer them so much reassurance to say, you're now beyond the having to impress me stage. Now you and I are partners in your awesomeness. And if you're struggling, it's my fault. So I need feedback on how I'm doing and tell me what it is you need. Now let's work together so that we can bring out the best in the team.

18:11I had to really reassure them of that and tell my own stories of struggling and my own mistakes. share a little bit of my own humanity and vulnerability to make it okay for them to do the same. And stop asking questions like, do you feel okay? Because they're going to say, yes, I'm fine. I'd say, tell me where you're struggling. So the only thing they can respond with is a struggle. And then thank them for that. But it meant, Jason, being willing to go to that human emotional place. And for a lot of my employees, nowhere else in their lives were they having these kind of touchy-feely human conversations.

18:46I think they liked that and appreciated it. And I bet that also started to create the bond that we were talking about at the very beginning that most people do not feel to their workplace. They don't feel the emotional connection to the workplace. And the answer, perhaps that I'm seeing reveal itself in this moment is that you don't feel a connection to the workplace. Why would you? What you feel a connection to are the other people in the workplace. and particularly the people who are above you and are supporting you. Yeah, I can't tell you how many owners, business owners I've heard say, I want them to treat the place like they own it.

19:26I have a great way to help them do that. Give them equity. Give them ownership in the business. And if you're not willing to do that, then it's an absolutely ridiculous concept. They're not going to have ownership in the business, but they can have ownership in the culture, provided that you help create one that they want to be a part of. And so I mentioned before, I guess the first thing is that we need to overcome ourselves, be less judgmental, more curious about our teams. Second thing is more management training. But the third thing that speaks to this is I think in management, we need to identify and meet our team's soft needs.

20:03You hear about hard skills and soft skills, right? Employees also have hard needs and soft needs. Hard needs is the stuff they need to survive and to make them want to do the work. The main thing is money. But what other perks? It's the stuff you give them. But employees also have soft needs, emotional needs, ways they want to feel. And that drives performance and retention or lack of much more so than anything else. And a big part of that is building and preserving and protecting culture. And most business people have no idea what culture is. They think it means buying them pizza on Thursdays or giving them stuff or being nice.

20:39That's not what culture is. The military doesn't breed loyalty by buying soldiers pizza. Culture is the way people interact with their social norms. And so if you can create awesome, warm, loving, but productive dynamics among people, they're attracted to that. They don't want to leave it. All things being equal, yeah, people will go next door to make another dollar per hour. At the pandemic, they did surveys and people saying the main reason for leaving their jobs is for money. That's because there's no other reason to stay. All things being equal, yeah, I'll go and make more money. So don't let all things be equal.

21:13Create a culture where they have a sense of belonging, where people treat each other, then they're not going to leave for an extra dollar per hour. I'm curious if we can draw the line back now to your experience at Edible Arrangements, what that looked like for you. Because as you point out, understanding culture is difficult, particularly for new leaders. I think what you described tracks with every smart thing that I've heard about culture building. And I think that people will listen to this and they'll say, yeah, I know that. But of course there's knowing it and then there's creating it. And those can be two very distinct experiences.

21:54So for you, you said you'd started out not very effective as a manager, but you learned it. So you had to scale that out now and build a real culture at these edible arrangements. How did you do that? So not only is it a great question, it might be the greatest question that anybody has to ask in the management space is how do you actually build culture? And so to have the most tactical answer, I would say bring culture off the mountaintop and onto the floor. Culture is so something we associate really with like white collar environments where they have their mission statement and their values and their statement of purpose and all these things.

22:31The question is, does that mean something to people who are making minimum wage? It's not where they're going to have their career. I think that too often, in everything related to culture, all that language, there's abstraction, right? So if the mission is we want to make the world a better place, but the work is that they're serving frozen yogurt, are they really going to believe that serving cups of frozen yogurt makes the world a better place? Now, I believe that, yes, frozen yogurt does make, in small ways, it makes the world a better place, but they need to see that connection. And maybe say, our mission is to bring people a little bit of joy every single day.

23:07Something that makes more sense. That's more in line with what we're doing. it so happens that it makes the world a better place. So have a mission statement and talk about it a way. Maybe not even call it a mission statement. Say, hey, this is why we're here. And chill out with the language, but especially Jason with values. Every business, they list their values, teamwork and integrity and all that. I'm working with a chain of restaurants right now, helping them do better with their culture. And they said, one of our values is integrity. So we constantly talk about integrity with our employees.

23:36Everyone knows that integrity is one of their values. So one of their employees came into the Zoom and I said, hey, what does integrity mean? And they couldn't define it. You go, integrity is not what it means. So what I had them do is I said, for every one of your values, come up with a list of behaviors, do's and don'ts that reflect integrity. In this particular case, they said things like, we always tell the truth. We follow through in our commitments. We don't talk about each other behind each other's backs. List of do's and don'ts. Then they taught those things to the employees, things that we could then hold them accountable, that we could praise, we can reprimand when they don't.

24:08That was more tangible. That makes a lot more sense. So get all the culture stuff off the mountaintop and make it practical daily things that if everybody understands that and does this stuff, it's just a cooler place to work. And then people... Yeah, that's a really great point. Also, I'm thinking about being an employee somewhere where integrity is a core value and thinking, okay, this isn't just what is expected of me. This is what I should desire in my colleagues. What do I want from my colleagues? Integrity? Nobody would say no to integrity. But if you can't really identify what it means, then it becomes meaningless.

24:50But if you're going to tell me, look, this is a place where one of the things we're going to do is make sure that we really hold each other accountable on truthfulness and on X, Y, Z, where you're going to give me very specific, tangible things that I can expect from others and therefore that I need to live up to in my relationships with them. That creates, I almost said the word bond. I don't know if that's quite right, but at least it creates such a strong, positive expectation that it turns into a kind of useful social currency in the culture. Yeah. And I would even, I would go for the most simple language possible.

25:26Again, it depends on your work environment, but in hourly work environments, people tend to come with fewer skills and less education. And so the more simple we can make it, even in our language, the easier it is for people to buy in. Hey, how would you like to work at a place where we agree that we don't lie to each other? Like keeping it like that simple. Yeah, of course you found it. But if you're going to be here, you have to commit to that. And the people who should be having that conversation are other employees. We should learn culture from other employees because then it seems like it's more that it belongs to everyone.