The Community Expert: The REAL reason why we're lonely and can't make friends - Charles Vogl

0:00Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Cutting-edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Shoghers. Okay, I just had my mind blown. Charles Vogel, this is where I met him, out of communities, brand communities. I'd suggest reading those. The guy is a famous movie maker, a charity worker, Peace Corps, all that stuff. But now his stuff on brands, the guy works with the U.S. Army, Twitch, Google, you name it. He's working with all these massive companies, medical doctors, how communities impact. And some of the stats he just gave us around people and relationships and how they can impact your growth, your profitability, just your life in general.

0:52I can't imagine, but if you think that 20 ,000 Google managers go through his training on brand, on community building and working with people, that's going to blow my mind. Actually, the first five minutes, he blew my mind just with friendship statistics and stuff. Dive right in. Charles Vogel, he's our man today on the Big Success Podcast. So, Charles, my friend, how do you define success? Well, that's a good question. At this point in my life, Brad, I'm thinking about success as the scale and the level of difference I can make for people, given my talents and skills at this point in my life.

1:33As you know, it's where we are now. It took a lot of years, literally decades, and a lot of failures. And so how we can contribute is radically different. And I'm trying to be really clear with these skills and experiences what will make a difference for others. How do you feel that changed over time? I know even you're very clear in all your books about your story and you talk about that a lot in your events. How did success start for you? What was your definition early on and how did it evolve to this new definition? Well, I was normal in that for many, many years, I want to distinguish myself as worthy in the world by accomplishing things others admired.

2:13And I spent at least 20 years doing that, at least. in several fields, it turns out, on more than one continent. And it wasn't simply just about impressing others. I mean, there are many, many ways to do that. But I wanted to show that I was someone who had merit, could get things done, could do things that certainly at least looked generous, if not, in fact, weren't. So you know that I served in the US Peace Corps in Zambia when I was in my 20s. I knew I could make a difference volunteering in the United States, but I went to the sub-Saharan Africa where I would be challenged physically and mentally and spiritually and culturally.

2:53And I'm certain part of that was just proving that, you know, I was tough enough to do things others couldn't do. Part of it. There's a reason I was in the Peace Corps, not somewhere else. But the point is there was a lot of effort to show that I could do extraordinary things. So when you think about the transition over time, do you think it was a gradual shift to this definition or was it a just one day you got like you know what no this is the way to go i think there's a couple layers to that i think at one point um i got to a point where i understood look um i have enough accolades and however i wanted them that i didn't need anymore and i remember thinking and i still think it occasionally look if if i can't impress you if you're not impressed by what I've done or what I do or what, then I'm not going to impress you.

3:45You're just looking for something else. And fair enough. My point is, is more is not better. And that became a silly game. Now I know it's very easy to say this on this side of that mountain, right? But at least I could give up all the energy I was spending on that. And then the other thing is, as I get older, no surprise, I've learned that the things that really matter are the people in my life, their welfare, their relationship to me, how they're growing, how we're making a difference for others to grow. And if I have success in any other areas of my life, like the easiest one to measure is money, another one is prestige, another one is material goods, and you and I have talked about this, fair enough.

4:28You can try to win that game. Maybe you will win that game. Good luck on that. But if your family isn't there for you, if they can't call upon you, if on a cold Friday night there's nobody to share a soup with you. if when you stand on stage there's nobody to hug you when you come off stage then let me tell you it's an empty and wasted life as far as I'm concerned yeah I love it yeah the the running for material I don't think I'm gonna beat Warren Buffett or uh or Jeff Bezos at this point I like you know the the old enough is enough thing let's go backwards a little way though where do you feel in your life you chose success was it as a young boy a young man was it something from your parent Where did success become your standard?

5:14I don't know if there was a single day, Brad, but it became clear to me no later than my undergraduate years that my minimum standard of acceptability for myself and presumably people I was working with was above the aspiration of other people. and to be honest, at a really snobby level because people have different capacities. If you invite me to go run with a bunch of Olympic marathoners, I'm never going to keep up, not even for the first two miles. It's just not going to happen. That doesn't mean I'm a bad person or they shouldn't hang out with me. We just need to acknowledge I'm not good at running and they are.

5:54But I was at a place where I just wanted people to keep up with me on the things that I was choosing to do. So early in life, I went to an undergraduate school that was famous for preparing people to work in global mass media. And I wanted to work in the studio system. And surprise, surprise, people have different levels of talents. And I just wanted to make sure that I was as good as everybody else and quite frankly did the work for that. It wasn't just a matter of what I was born with. And you know that within some years I made films that went around the world and won those awards and I stood on those stages after many, many years of hard work.

6:31But on that journey, I was holding myself to a standard that I noticed other people weren't. And I remember being at film festivals and talking to other filmmakers that, you know, they had finished films and they were in film festivals. That's why we're at the film festival. But they were just amazed how my team achieved so much success in that world by those standards. And I was amazed that they, like, didn't understand what it took. The level of integrity you needed, the level of drive, the level of focus, the level of relationships you have to build, because there's no one person who has all the skills to build the level of films we were making, from animation to audio to legal to archival.

7:08Nobody has those, so you have to build a team, which means you need the skills to build the team, and then have people work together in a way that creates something extraordinary, not just a laundry list of action steps. So it's been since the beginning of my adulthood that I remember, and it wasn't always healthy. I mean, I've at least three times pushed myself to beyond what I know is healthy, emotional collapse and physical collapse. And quite frankly, those collapses were part of the journey of understanding, wow, this is not creating the life in a pattern that I want to do forever. There's another way to relate to work.

7:44So formula or theory, how does success happen in your mind? Obviously the hard work and doing, putting in the time, You've mentioned building the team, all that stuff. What else would you say to someone that wants to understand how does success happen? Well, of course, the first thing that we have to do in that conversation, Brad, is understand what the person we're speaking to defines as success for them, right? Because you and I can talk in blue. We can give them large books and lots of exercises. And if their idea of success is foreign to us, we are wasting their time and ours. With the people that I talk to who are usually working in, frankly, now global organizations, right?

8:22Success involves bringing people together with very specific, usually highly honed skills on very challenging problems. And I'm at this place in my career now where I talk to people who are working on challenges. When they get it wrong, people die. So military, medical services, education, and then certain areas of high innovation tech. Those are the people I talk to. And obviously, we can talk a lot about different areas of success, but a big part of them is, do you recognize who you need? If you're running a hospital, there's a lot of people involved. And then are you bringing them together in a way where they can be effective with one another?

9:04And if you're not, what's missing? And if all you think is, I'm going to bring people together, I'm going to cut a transactional relationship with each one of them, let's call that a salary, I'm going to tell them when to show up and what the responsibilities are, and then I'm going to hope it all works out. I see you nodding your head. We know exactly how that's going to pan out. Exactly, right? And there's going to be a lot of this, not my job, oh, look, it's five o 'clock going on. And when you're handling extremely challenging situations globally where people die when you get it wrong, that's not going to work.

9:35And if you're competing with other organizations, as do High Innovation Tech, and your team's using the phrase, not my job, oh, look, it's five o 'clock, you're going to be dead within a year. Yeah. Yeah. So that brings me to the relationship. What's your theory on the relationship between failure and success? Yes.

9:57All right. That's a curious way to put it. I'm going to say that if you are in a leadership role, which is to say by definition, you're working with other people and they are looking to you to at least have a vision of the future. Like that's the least needs to happen. Right. And you don't know how to build a relationship where others believe that they share value and purpose with you, and they believe that you have an integrity to work toward that end goal, even if that's keep our students safer, right, then you're going to fail. I don't care what your vision is. I don't care how loud you speak.

10:35I don't care how much capital you have. You're going to fail if other people don't understand, oh, these are the values you're living life by. Here's the purpose of your action, and I want to join you because you can't do this by yourself. Now, there's literally libraries of other leadership stuff, but I believe that if you can't cross that relationship, just go home. And Brad, I know that you're well-connected. You know people who have fabulous amounts of capital, really lousy relationships, and they complain a lot how things just don't get done. Am I right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, execution, all those things.

11:09And every time you go in and chat with them, it's like, oh my God, they're missing the whole point. Exactly right. so all right we're going to take a quick break we're going to be back with charles we're going to dive into the art of community and how to actually do this stuff follow along as the coach demonstrates how to successfully navigate the challenges and recognize the opportunities business owners face every day the business coach uses strategies developed by brad sugars and the business coach is an action coach who have helped millions of business owners worldwide realize their dreams.

11:42We're back. Charles, you and I got to meet through the books. First of all, I didn't meet you, but I read this one first, then Building Brand Communities second, and made all of my team read Building Brand Communities. But we met at the kid's school, my kid's school, who brought you in to help build community there. I want to start with a question that's easy for you, but hard for others to understand is why community now? Why is it such a massively important thing? In a leadership context, Brad? Yeah. So I define community in my work as a group of people who share mutual concern for one another, and that's it.

12:24And so you can have a community in your neighborhood, at your kid's school, among your sports friends, and of course at work, anywhere. Why is it important for people in leadership roles now? Well, the research is pretty clear that the United States is now living in what may be the loneliest era ever, certainly profoundly more lonely than simply a generation ago. And just to give some numbers to ground that, Brad, the latest research shows that half of Americans do not have four friends. Or said differently, half Americans have three friends or less. And that sounds bad, Brad, but it's worse than that.

12:5913 % of Americans and fully one of six American men have no friends, no close friends. So, and that's not friends at work, Brad. That's just friends. So every business leader that's listening right now is hiring people in that context. And that's a very fragile way to have a life. And when you bring those people together, a very fragile way to run an organization. And especially, remember I said that people contact me when they have high stakes involved? Well, we know that when formal communication systems collapse or fail in an organization, and they always do, right, Brad? The friendships create the informal communication network that saves the organization, right?

13:46Because if I'm afraid to ask a question because you'll find out I don't know it and I might burn down the warehouse, right? If I have a friend named Brad and I say, hey, Brad, I'm closing the warehouse. you know, which order do we do the valves? And you say, Oh my God, make sure you do it in this order. I never call someone and say, Brad, just saved me from burning down the warehouse. But we did save burning down the warehouse. We'll apply that to an airport, apply that to a surgical team, apply that to, you know, military teams, literally, you know, pulling hostages out of rooms. We as leaders need to understand, okay, I'm hiring people in a context where they don't have the skills to build the relationships they need for personal success or quite frankly, any other kind of success.

14:30There are things we can do in organizations to create contexts where those relationships are knit together and then make my organization more resilient, more adaptable to a world that's changing, quite frankly, faster than we can even track it. so if i think about this from my perspective when i'm hiring someone that person has under three friends on average they don't have the relationship skills to build friendships how do i like what what do i do to make that change like how do i bring them into a community because we'll talk about it from a brand perspective in a moment but just how do i get my team to be a community type thing is a big part of that.

15:17Right. Well, there's a bigger conversation here because we've got to talk about what kind of people and what context, but it always starts in the same place. First of all, we bring people together on shared values and purpose. So let's, for the purposes of this conversation, think about a surgical team. If you're not on a surgical team to save people's lives and make people more healthy, you shouldn't be there. And if you're leading that team and you figure out someone else, someone is there and that is not a value and purpose they have in showing up to work, then it's up to you to get them out of the team, right?

15:44So first of all, we identify the shared values and purpose. And then we know that people build relationships when they spend time together. Not just any time because you can create toxic time and people do. Hundreds of organizations spend millions of dollars creating toxic time together. But we need to start by actually inviting people to spend that time. And I know that sounds silly or may sound silly. Well, Charles, the community expert said we need to invite people to things. Well, Brad, I've noticed we live in an era where people like to skip the invitations. In my work, an invitation is a request to spend time where the person invited knows that someone cares if they show up.

16:21Simple as that. I've noticed in our culture, we have an assumption that we can try to invite people but not let them know that anybody cares if they show up. And I have a name for that. We call those announcements. And I can't tell you how many times I go to an organization and they say, oh, we're having a hard time. And I say, well, what are you inviting them to? and they say, oh, well, we send out a mass email in October to come to a gala in November, and gee, we're not getting a lot of engagement. Well, first of all, that's not an invitation. It's an announcement that you're doing at a gala.

16:52And second of all, that gala is not an intimate experience for people to build connections. It's an opportunity for you to get their money. I'm not against you getting their money if they want to give it, but let's not pretend you're building community. So we start with the invitation. And then the next lesson I teach when I'm working with leaders is, well, what do we invite people to? and we have to invite people to do, we have to invite participants to things where they actually have an opportunity to build a relationship they want, right? First of all, they know the people there share at least one value purpose, keeping kids safe at the school counts and it needs to be an intimate enough experience that they can have the conversation they want and, you know, Brad, just this year, we're in February, I can't tell you how many events I've been to where somebody spent a lot of money and a lot of time creating events and made sure they were so loud and so distracting, all I wanted to do was get out of there because they made sure inadvertently that I couldn't actually have an intimate conversation with someone like Brad sugars, or we could talk about something deeper that we care about.

17:47Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's interesting. You know, I, I see those same events when I'm in the green room, I can have great conversations with people. As soon as I get into the main room, it's like, I, I can't talk to anyone. So I remember you gave me that little button, invitations matter. And I still, I have it in the, in one of the drawers at home and I see it like every week or two and I make sure. And my wife and I have always been invite us. I want to just flip over just for a second to brand communities. What is it about brand communities today that people, I guess the big question is how do I help people understand just how vital this is today to build in your business, to build a brand-based community?

18:35Well, there are different kinds of brand communities we can build. And so different businesses are going to need different kinds of brand communities. For example, Patagonia has elite athletes that they name and they invest money in bringing those athletes to the campus here in California, in Santa Cruz, and giving them experience and connecting with them. And a couple of things happen for Patagonia. Obviously, at some level, those athletes are promoting Patagonia, but Patagonia could pay people to wear stuff. That's not a problem. One of the things that when I spoke to people at Patagonia, they shared that was really great about that is when you have the most elite windsurfers in the world connected with your team and each other, you learn what's good for them and what could be innovated that people who don't have relationships and aren't listening don't get.

19:21Said differently, they're innovating faster than their competitors because they have a genuine relationship there. And it's not what I call simply extractive. You know, Patagonia is a good example because it started with a rock climber who literally was building equipment to keep his friends alive on the mountain. Yeah. That's actually what Yvon Chouinard was doing. And then after he was building that equipment, he realized they needed better clothes and he had a friend sew a pair of shorts that was tough enough not to get ripped up on the rock and that was the first piece of Patagonia clothing.

19:53To this day, the people of Patagonia, And you know, Brad, that Patagonia has a hard time handling the avalanche of resumes they get of the best talent in the world who want to work there. They care that athletes who they know are going to wear their garments in the most extreme weather in the world, that that stuff works. It's not going to catch on fire. It's not going to rip. And it's not going to let them freeze to death, no matter what it is. And that's not true of every organization. You know, whenever we approach a community, be it within our company or outside our company, and our number one or, in fact, only intention is to extract, to do a calculation.

20:31What can I get out of these people by buying this pizza or giving them tickets? That's going to fail. And here's why I know, Brad. You know, you're a successful guy, Brad. You engage with a lot of companies. I already know how many times you want to go to an event and build a relationship with somebody that you already know before you meet them is only calculating in their head what they can get out of Brad Sugars and is it going to benefit them. Yeah. I already know. So I don't understand why so many people leading large organizations approach connecting the people important to them, be them inside or outside the organization with the same attitude.

21:08Because you're only starting with an attitude that's going to toxify that and you're going to get results consistent with that. Yeah, yeah. I look at what we've done to build communities and I think that the virtual nature of the world shifting so dramatically in the last few years has really helped us with community building. Is online community today getting stronger or am I just out of my mind thinking that this is actually getting better because of the way people have interacted online? So it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Largely, we know that online community does not nearly deliver the benefits to our lives as in-person city building.

21:51In fact, according to Marissa King's work, and she was at Yale School of Management, she's now at Wharton, according to her book, Chemistry and Social Chemistry, it takes five times the amount of time to build a relationship digitally mediated as it does in person. or said differently, Brad, if you come to my home for dinner from six o 'clock to nine o 'clock to have an equivalent relationship, we need to spend 15 hours on Zoom. Well, here's what's so. You and me, we're not spending 15 hours on Zoom. So we're not actually going to build that relationship. And quite frankly, after three hours over dinner and presuming the lasagna is good and you like the wine, you may stay till 10, I don't know.

22:27Whereas that's not going to happen on Zoom. So Zoom, the online stuff can be helpful, but we largely see the help in outlier situations where there's stigma for community to come together and they can't find each other. Or if someone is physically remote, maybe from medical limitations or geographically they're posted somewhere. But for most of us, building the friendships around us has a dramatically bigger effect. And you know, what you didn't mention is social media, which I found that for younger folks, there's a real confusion about community, a group of people who share mutual concern and social media followers.

23:04And the research is clear. No matter how many followers we get online, our lives don't actually get that much better. And yet a single digit number of friends near us dramatically makes our lives better. And when you understand that, it becomes crystal clear where we want to invest our time. Because our time is precious. In fact, that's the thing we can't buy more of, right? And so if I know that the social media stuff is not going to deliver it, it's largely wasting my life. Huh. We're going to be back. We're going to talk more success and talk about scaling communities, all that sort of stuff, but also getting the most out of the inside of the communities.

23:43Charles Vogel, he's our expert today. Charles Vogel is an advisor, speaker, and author of three books, including the international bestseller, The Art of Community. He is also a founding member of the Google Vitality Lab, which works toward innovating healing strategies. To learn more about Charles Vogel, please visit charlesvogel.com. And we're back. So Charles, I want to talk about the difference between groups that build okay communities and groups that build amazing communities. What's the differences between the two? Well, overwhelmingly, what I believe the difference is, I mean, there's many, many layers, but we'll talk about the one that comes to mind.

24:25People invest in communities temporally, physically, and financially because they believe that participating grows them in the way they want to grow. So if you think all the communities are really invested in your business life, Brad, my guess is at the time you were showing up, you believed there were people there that could help you grow in the way you want to grow. Here's the good news. You grew into someone different, a more mature version of you. And so now you're looking for radically different communities. However, if those elements hadn't been there to date, you would have never participated.

24:56You'd still be looking. and that's important because I see people just want to do fun stuff and great fun stuff can be great for people who want to grow and having fun but Brad Sugars is probably looking to grow in other ways so if you want to get him to participate you got to think and it's not rocket science you can ask people and you can intuit now for many people just having more friends especially in a lonely era like now counts a way that we want to grow is just have more friends I want to have more supportive friends I can call for favors and call me within five minutes driving my home and I invest in that and so that would count but if you're just say well gee this would be fun maybe even wacky I'll invite people um people might come from novelty uh you might get lucky but largely uh you're not building something that people want to come back to got it got it okay so then let's talk about uh activity within a community how do we get the people already they've come to the community they've joined the community How do we get them to really want to participate and really want to be a part of that group?

26:00Yeah. One set of ideas that comes to mind is what I call the three promises. Every event that we create has to deliver on three promises. The first one is participants need to be able to say yes or no to the invitation. If they can't say no because you said you will be at the happy hour at 6 p.m. on a Friday, and they have sick kids at home, or in your case, multiple kids at home, and you're like, I don't want to be at a happy hour at 6 p.m. when my kids are out of school. And I say, well, Brad, if you're not there, then I know you're not a team player. Or if I say, well, gee, Brad, if you're not there, I know you're not really committed to growing in your career.