684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business

19:17Marcus Buckingham:And the people, whether it's customers or employees, are picking up what you're putting down. That email you just sent, it's not an email. It's an experience. That meeting you just called, it's not a meeting. It's an experience. That big company gathering that you're doing, that's not a big company gathering. It's an experience. You can design it intentionally so people lean into it and get the behaviors you want, or you can be accidental about it, in which case people are going to pick up what you put down even if you just dropped it. But they're making an experience. Culture is just a series of experiences, which is why actually it's pretty hard to change.

19:48Marcus Buckingham:But if you look at the best leaders, they are so unbelievably intentional and intelligent about experience making, both for customers and employees. And really, that's what the book's about. It's like, hey, listen, if you want to drive to these incredible goals and you need to beat people over the head with a big stick to get the goals, okay, fine. You're an average leader. Just look in the mirror. You're an average leader. You want to excel sustainably. You want to differentiate yourself and give yourself an unfair advantage. Become an experience maker. become an intelligent experience maker, because that will drive the behavior that drives the outcomes.

20:23Marcus Buckingham:That's really what the data would show, and it's what the book's about.

20:27Ryan Hawk:Danny Meyer, business like life is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple, and it's that hard.

20:37Marcus Buckingham:Danny Meyer, one of the best restaurateurs of all time.

20:40Ryan Hawk:Will Gadara, Unreasonable Hospitality. I just recorded with him, so it's very fresh, Marcus. I don't know if you guys are friends, but you should be. but that is so true. While they may have written it about restaurants, it's about life. It's about business. It's about families. It's about friends. It's, it's all that it's all about thinking, how did I make that person feel? Like I actually see some of the clients I work with in the gym. It's interesting. You know, we're in there to do it, to get a workout in, but still there may be a three minute interaction in between sets or after getting off the treadmill or whatever.

21:15Ryan Hawk:And that's a deliberate attempt to make that person feel better, not like in a fake flattery way, but an honest connecting way of let's have a short conversation because we're both interested in this thing about, you know, working out or something like that. Business like life is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard.

21:35Marcus Buckingham:I completely agree with you. And Will's great. I don't know, Danny, but what we see from the data is, and obviously I'm a data geek. So that's where all of this comes from for me. if you have measured experiences. And by the way, measured experiences, normally we measure them on a scale of one to five, five being strongly positive, one being strongly negative. A lot of the stuff from this book came from something from the data actually on this that is basically undermines a fundamental belief that many leaders have. We seem to believe many of us, the relationship between experiences and the feeling of those experiences and outcomes is, and I'm sorry, it's going to get a tiny bit wonky, but we think the relationship is linear.

22:17Marcus Buckingham:As in, we think if we move a two experience, which is below average to an average experience, which is a three to above average, which is a four, if we're moving twos to threes to fours, whether it's for our employees or our customers or indeed ourselves, the same amount of outcomes increase, which means if we've got a lot of customers at twos, we should move them to threes. And if we've got a lot of employees just at a three, then we should move them to fours. The problem is, and then normally, by the way, where we put the fours with the fives, and we call that a top two box, or percent favorable, or we expand it to net promoter score, and we put nines with tens, you know.

22:51Marcus Buckingham:Okay, all of that's wrong. Because when you look at the data at scale, the relationship between experiences and outcomes isn't linear. It's what's called curvilinear, which means it's like a hockey stick. Moving people's experience from a two experience to a three doesn't change their behavior at all. Moving their experience from a three to a four doesn't change their behavior at all. It's only when you do something with a customer or an employee that changes their experience to the point where they go five that we can start to predict what they're going to do next. Like if you say that movie's a four, I can't predict if you're going to go back and see it again or who you're going to tell.

23:24Marcus Buckingham:If you say that restaurant was a four and I moved you from a three to a four, I can't predict if you're going to go back or spend more or tell anyone else to go to that restaurant. Fours are threes. Never put a four with a five again. Never top two bucks again. never percent favorable again. Fours are threes, threes are twos, twos are ones. When it comes to the data, the world's binary to your point, like the world of business is feelings. Yeah. But actually there's only two feelings in the world. There's love and there's everything else that is just not love. There's love, not love. And the data on this is unequivocal, whether it's student grades or patient outcomes or employee productivity or customer loyalty, you've got five and everything else is just not a five.

24:08Marcus Buckingham:And when you push on fives, that's when you bump into that word love. Fours, what's the word for fours? I enjoyed it. I respected that leader. I learned a lot from that leader. Like all of these are jolly good words. They don't predict behavior change. So for any leader listening, I'm sorry, I know the bar becomes higher, but I promise you, if you're in the business of behavior change, fives are the only thing that predict it. Everything else doesn't. And when you unpack the five, that's when people spontaneously use that word love. That's why we're talking about love, because it's the most powerful predictor of positive human behavior.

24:46Marcus Buckingham:That's why it's worth unpacking. It's not a nice to have. It's the fundamental driver of anything good. And anything below that is just, it's like boiling point of water. If you want to predict when the water is going to boil, when will water change its state when it hits 212? Anything else below that is just not boiling. And we ought to, as leaders, we ought to be as binary as that in the world. Either you're getting people to say, I love that, or you've failed to change their behavior. Love is as hard edged, if you will, as that. And that's kind of why I started the book with data, Ryan, because it's like, hey, if we're not careful, love gets really soft.

25:27Marcus Buckingham:Okay, it ain't soft. It's a driver of behavior. If you're interested in driving behavior as a leader, take love seriously. If you're not, fine, don't read this book.

25:34Ryan Hawk:Have you ever seen the Savannah Bananas? Yeah. Okay. Yes. So I went down to Savannah a few months ago to spend time with Jesse Cole, their owner. He actually owns six teams now. So it's a banana league. It's not just a banana. So there's six teams. Anyway, they were all there that day. They were practicing at different times. So some of them were in the weight room, some were on the field, locker rooms, whatever. We did a big tour. Just Jesse, me, and a couple other people were walking around. and every single person that he saw, and we saw lots of them, players, staff, all different types, hundreds, he knew everybody's name.

26:09Ryan Hawk:And he wasn't showing off or trying to be, and he was genuinely curious and asking about them, their kids. How is this possible? And I remember the way he looked at me, I think he thought it was a stupid question. When I asked him, how do you know everybody's name? How do you know all the details about all these people? And you could just tell he's obsessed. He loves them. He loves what he does. He loves his business. He loves his teams. He loves his people. Yeah, it's an obsession. We talked about obsession when I recorded with him. I mean, it's not a surprise then when you see them selling out 100 ,000 seat stadiums after inventing essentially a new sport.

26:42Ryan Hawk:And so those are great, great examples of how love shows up.

26:46Marcus Buckingham:Yeah, he's a super interesting character. And he takes his own loves delusionally seriously. And as you said, he manifests it in the way that he's designed a product, but also the way in which he loves on the people that are making the product. I don't know him, but I've seen what he's done, and it's just super intriguing. He reminds me of the person that I profiled very early in the book, Josh DeMauro, who, when I was following him around, he was the head of Disney Parks, Resorts, Cruise Lines, Consumer Products, and Imagineering.

27:17Ryan Hawk:Jesse, that's like his number one mentor in life is Walt Disney.

27:21Marcus Buckingham:Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. And not every Disney executive, I've studied many of them over the years. They're not all like that. But Josh, and he's, by the way, two days ago, right, took over as the CEO. He's replacing Bob Iger, which I'm so happy about, by the way. Like the board could have picked, they had a number of different possible successes to Bob Iger. It took a fair amount of courage to pick someone. Josh is the kind of person, like you were just describing, you walk the park with him and you can't get 20 yards. not just because all the cast members are gathering around him and he's hugging them and he knows their names and there's a chef here and there's a line order cook there and there's a cast member there and there's and he genuinely is is all about them and they're cutting through 15 layers layers of hierarchy which you can imagine a Disney hierarchy exists and they're breaking through all of that just coming up he's got no handlers smoothing his part but it's not just the cast members right somehow the guests all know him too and you You can't get five yards without them being, it's just a mob scene.

28:25Marcus Buckingham:And I think as I was writing about it that day, this was a year before he was picked, but I think what I saw that day, a bit like you were describing, what you want from the Savannah Bananas is, you want it to be real. You want the whole ecosystem to be real. It's fun, it's engaging, it's sweet, it's disarming. You want the whole thing to be like that. Imagine if the CEO of that company wasn't like that. In a world of fakery, we're just reaching for real. And you could see the guests looking at Josh DeMauro and in a sense going, thank goodness the head of this company seems to be as geeked out by this whole mysterious world we've built here as we are.

29:03Marcus Buckingham:Thank goodness he's not a financial cynic who's just extracting value from our own love of Disney. Thank goodness he seems to be as into it as we are. and in a world of ai frankly the idea that we're reaching for genuine love opposite of ai of course is genuine emotion genuine feeling and not that ai isn't good it's got some great things but but we want genuine feeling and you can see that in josh and you can see that in the savannah bananas and of course they'll be different i mean i'm not suggesting that everyone should be hail fellow well met just and glad handing i am suggesting that if we take love really really seriously.

29:42Marcus Buckingham:We get lots of moral and business benefits from it.

29:45Ryan Hawk:So maybe I can get some free consulting advice from you, Marcus, since you're one of the best in the world with this. Okay. So we run a leadership development company. That's what I run with my teammates. And occasionally you're asked, okay, what's the ROI? Like a CFO will ask me that question. What's the return on investment we're going to get from hiring you guys to work with our leaders at our company? And it's not like the easiest question to answer because it's more subjective. It's a service-oriented type of a thing that we offer, right? And one of the things I say, and I'll be curious to kind of get your take is the reason why our guys are good, why our team is good, is we authentically live every single thing that we teach.

30:30Ryan Hawk:We've done it all ourselves. We continue to do it ourselves when it comes to our purpose and values and behaviors and culture and all this stuff. Like this is what we actually do. And then we just teach the exact same stuff that we live out. And I think part of why we win and sustain and work with people for years and years in a space that people don't have engagements that long is because of that exact thing. This authenticity of living it out ourselves. Now that comes from love. That comes from obsession. It comes from curiosity. It comes from us trying to continually raise our standards. When you hear all of that in this service-oriented business, which I know you understand, what do you think?

31:08Marcus Buckingham:I spend most of my time trying to figure out over the years, how do you quantify increases in engagement? And if you go back through all the Gallup data, if you were ever talking to a CFO, I would bring up increases in employee engagement are drivers of, not just correlates of, causation drivers of certain behavioral changes on the part of employees. And you can quantify that. And of course, we know that the biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader. It's not the culture of the company. The culture of the company is like the river which you're swimming, but there's a lot of different eddies and the river feels really different according to which part of it you just climbed into.

31:43Marcus Buckingham:You join a company, but then the sun, the moon and the stars of your work is that local leader. And I'm sure you've said this to every client you've sold to. It's the most important decision you make is who you make leader of that team. And so goes that team. So goes everything. So if you control over the budget of this company, if you don't understand that, again, it's not because it's not so, it's because you don't understand that. And so let me try to show you some data which shows quantifiably the effect of, and in fact, by the way, in the book, I'm sure you saw this, Ryan, I show a company.

32:15Marcus Buckingham:It's a very large retailer in the US. They've got like 8 ,000 stores. and I show the relationship between customer and employee experiences on the x-axis and profitability of the store up the y-axis. And in general, the line of best fit shows that there is a very strong relationship between experiences of the employees and customers in the store and the profitability of the store, which is great because it quantifies the importance of experience making. You make bad experiences, people don't come back more. You make good experiences, of course, people will. But the biggest takeaway from it actually is variation.

32:50Marcus Buckingham:It's a scatterplot. It's the same company, one stock price, supposedly one culture. But as you can see from the scatterplot, every single store seems to have created a whole variety of different sorts of experiences for customers and employees. Well, who's the main driver of the creator of those experiences? It's the leader. The leader makes a huge difference inside the same company. So I can't remember what page that's on, but if you wanted to, like, what's the value of a leader? Show that graph and basically go, what's the difference between the dot on the top right and the dot on the bottom left?

33:25Marcus Buckingham:It's the leader. And so anything you're doing to, not to sell for you guys, but anything you can do to build the capability of your leaders is money well spent because you're trying to move all the dots up and to the right. And the idea that your people, your team is, I always think of ABC, authenticity, beliefs, customs, authenticity, beliefs, customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection. We want authenticity. Why? Because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you're going to be around the corner. And that means I'm more likely to follow you around the corner.

34:01Marcus Buckingham:I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable. That's authenticity. Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs. What do we genuinely believe? And that better to be coherent with who you authentically are, because if you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it and I don't want to follow it. And then of course your customs are the living manifestation. You could call them routines or rituals, but in terms of ABC, they're the things you customarily do. I've got a flow from your A's and your B's. So if I think of the best leaders that I know, their ABCs line up beautifully. Like Josh DeMira, I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's authentically who he is.

34:40Marcus Buckingham:I know exactly what he believes. And then in the book, actually, we detail out some of the very specific kind of weird customs that he has that brings those authentic beliefs to life.

34:53Ryan Hawk:Love it. Let's get even more practical. Okay. A very high aware leader, they have high level of awareness is listening to this like, I love this. And then they're thinking, wait a second, I'm not sure I'm doing a good job of this for whatever reason. What are some things that a high awareness level leader who's leading a team right now, how they could get better? What could they implement immediately following this podcast to say, okay, I've been kind of lax on this love thing. I, again, I try to show my gratitude for my people and for our customers, but I don't know. I don't know if I'm being very honest with myself.

35:33Ryan Hawk:Where do we begin? How do we get practical right now?

35:36Marcus Buckingham:Yeah. Well, obviously there's not a simple answer to that question. There's places to start. The first place to start would be what the heck do your people mean by love? If someone's going to say, I love working for that leader. What do they mean by that? Do they mean I really, really like that leader? Do they mean I really, really respect that leader? What do they mean? Although everybody's got a different definition of love around the world, it predicts behavior. So there must be a uniform definition of love. It must be, must all mean something similar. If you really push on it, what people mean when they say, I love, and by the way, it's weird.

36:07Marcus Buckingham:It could apply to, I love that cup of coffee. I love my mom. Wait, what? I love that movie. I love that mentor. How can we use the word in such different contexts? When you really push on it though, Ryan, when people use the word love, it's because we're reaching for a meaning, which is, it's an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time, which is basically flourishing. It's a feeling of flourishing. If you think about most of us, we go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating against the harshness of the world, which is sensible because the world is pretty harsh.

36:42Marcus Buckingham:But inside of us, we want to take what's inside of us and express it. That feels healthy to us. We want to get to 95 and have expressed some of ourselves. So any experience that gives us a chance to take one little piece of armor plating off. And it could be, I love those socks because when I wear them, I don't know, man, I just feel, I just feel a bit more me. It could be, I love that mentor because that mentor was the first person who pushed through my performance rating and went, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is the kind of place in which you can really flourish. And I'm going to move you there, which by the way, is why we have the word tough love, because sometimes the mentor has got to yank you into a situation where you can be more fully yourself, even if you actually are still cowering in the corner into an area of your world that feels more familiar.

37:23Marcus Buckingham:So love really means the opportunity to flourish in small ways or large. So if that's your definition as a leader, then you should be thinking about is what are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team? What could I do? And in the book, and we could go through this if you want, but if you reverse engineer that, and I know this is going to sound so weird to your listeners, but if you reverse engineered that, you reverse engineer somebody going, I love that leader, or I love working on that team. You find a sequence of five feelings and it's sequential.

38:06Marcus Buckingham:and if a leader knows those five feelings, that's like a blueprint. It really is different, but there's a blueprint there for what you could do as a leader to get people to the place where they go. I flippin' love working for that leader. Okay.

38:23Ryan Hawk:Control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth. Is that where we're going?

38:26Marcus Buckingham:Yes, that's where I was headed.

38:28Ryan Hawk:Okay. Let's unpack those five feelings of love and they need to be sequential, So right, each bill is on the last. So let's go through them.

38:36Marcus Buckingham:And don't get the sequence wrong. And these aren't hierarchical, like Maslow's hierarchy. These are sequential. And it's one of the reasons I wrote the book. So it's like, if every leader could just take away, love isn't magic. Love's built. Love's designed. And you can design it in. That's why in the end, I ended up calling the book, Design Love In. It's like, you can design in. The first feeling, just imagine, somebody's going to an experience, they're joining your team for the first time, and they're coming into your business for the first time, or they have an experience for the first time, the first feeling they want is a feeling of control.

39:07Marcus Buckingham:That doesn't mean control over you. That means they want control over their own choices and their own actions. So the question they're asking, even if they don't say it to you is, what's this world you've invited me into and how does it work? Which if you're in a company, it's like, what's the mission of our company? What do you stand for? You know, when Chick-fil-A says we're closed on Sundays, is that loving or unloving? I would say that's super loving because even if you don't agree with it, you know what it is. And you can either choose to move into that world or not. That's a loving thing to do with anybody.

39:37Marcus Buckingham:And then in that world, how does it work? So for you as a leader, have you been clear about what your world is like? Have you said what you stand for? Going back to the authenticity thing, the more vivid you can be, the more loving it is. And then how do the tools work? What decisions am I allowed to make in the world? Tell me what the decisions are. The opposite of control is powerlessness. And we know from everything that Martin Seligman did about learned helplessness. We humans hate that. We will lean way the heck out. If you're vague as a leader, vagueness as a leader is the most damaging thing you can possibly be because people keep their armadillo plating on.

40:16Marcus Buckingham:Why? Because they don't know what the world is you invited them into and they don't know how it works. So that's the first thing. That's control. All right. Well, the next one's weird. The next one's so weird, but it's harmony. Think about this, right? You've got an armadillo coming in and you want them to keep taking off armor plating. Well, one piece of armor plating that they're going to keep on, if you're not careful, is the one that protects their emotions in that experience. And when you don't show people that you know what they're feeling and you care what they're feeling, they keep the armor plating on.

40:49Marcus Buckingham:If you have an experience on the team that feels jarring, humans lean out when an emotion that they feel when there's not nothing in the experience says i know what you're feeling and i care what you're feeling we studied nurses who gave painless injections and weirdly there are some who do and we tried to unpack how they did that and we looked at the technique with the needle and the swab and the this and the that but it turns out the reason why some nurses can almost share your pain when you're getting an injection is because they all say the same thing right before they put the needle in. They say, this is going to hurt a little bit.

41:25Marcus Buckingham:I'll try to make it hurt as little as I can. And somehow in just saying what you're feeling and obviously saying that I care about it, they reduce it. So as leaders, what we need to remember is no matter where you want to move your people to, you've got to meet them before you can move them. You've got to tell them that you know what they're feeling in the UK. Otherwise, you can't move them anywhere. You've missed them. Why have you missed them? Because they are a plating still on. The example I quoted in the book was Audi. I like Audi. I had an A4 and I got to the end of my lease. And you think that a really sophisticated company like Audi would know that at the end of the lease, what most customers are feeling is excitement because I'm about to look for a new model.

42:02Marcus Buckingham:And it's like, oh man, it's great. But instead, three weeks before the end of my lease, I got a robo call from a very sophisticated company called Audi that simply said in a robo voice, you failed to schedule your termination inspection. And I'm like, what? I don't even know what a termination inspection is, but I've already failed it. Next week, same thing. Next week, same thing. And I just leaned out. You know why? I couldn't even put words to it initially, but it was jarring because I was excited and Audi was pissed off. And so in the end, they lost me for five years. I don't hate Audi. It wasn't like it was a three or a two or a one experience.

42:39Marcus Buckingham:It was disharmonious. I lent out, so they lost me. So the second feeling is harmony. You got to tell people that you know what they're feeling and you care, otherwise they won't keep leaning in. I mean, that's kind of a one.

42:50Ryan Hawk:That's or a zero.

42:52Marcus Buckingham:Yeah. Well, it wasn't like it was a massive service failure.

42:56Ryan Hawk:It kind of is though. I mean, to have a robo call for a long-term customer who's leasing an expensive car, that's very surprising. It's very stupid.

43:05Marcus Buckingham:We don't take Harmony seriously as businesses or as leaders very much. We don't.

43:12Ryan Hawk:But think about the meeting room for a second. Sorry, this one just is a bunch of execs are sitting in a meeting room and say, okay, here's what we're going to do, guys. When somebody is at the end of their lease of this very nice expensive car, instead of having any sort of human touch, they're going to get a robocall and they're going to tell them that they've messed something up. They failed at something. All right, ready break. Let's go. Like, how does that happen? How does that happen? That's insane, you know?

43:38Marcus Buckingham:Well, here's one of the big things that leaders that are listening could change right away. We don't design for experiences. When I first was thinking about publishing this book, I thought the pushback would be on the word love. But actually, the pushback's on the word experience. Because we don't design for experiences. We design for processes. So I think what happened in the case of Audi was the whole notion of an experience, that somebody comes to the end of the lease, what are they going to be experiencing at the end of the lease? What are they going to be feeling? Have we shown that people come to the end of the lease that we're aware of what they're feeling and that we care about what they're feeling?

44:12Marcus Buckingham:However, we want to have them end up feeling, what are they actually feeling coming into the end of their lease? I don't think that conversation ever happened. Why? The idea of experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes, as obvious as it sounds when you and I are talking about it, I don't think that conversation comes up in most companies because we design for process and efficiency, which leads to silos. So the problem for Audi was there's a person somewhere in a dealership going, Marcus is coming to the end of his lease. I'm going to get to selling this new model. But that person's in a different silo than a person who's writing the email or the script for the robocall that comes to Marcus.

44:48Marcus Buckingham:It's like no one creates a holistic experience map. map. We talk about customer journeys or customer experience maps, but we don't actually design for a holistic human. Like just go to a hospital and it's one handoff after another. The person that checks you in isn't the person who takes your vitals. The person who then sees how you're doing in the middle of the night isn't the person who took your vitals. Then there's another healthcare professional. There's another doctor. And the person who's supposed to hold the narrative of that experience coherent one hand off to another is you, the patient, who deep down knows we don't actually know which details matter.

45:29Marcus Buckingham:But the whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience, which is probably, Ryan, why the patient outcomes are so bad compared to how much money we spend on them. We haven't designed for an experience. Go back to savannah bananas he's designed a holistic experience and as a result we cram into stadiums to watch it because it looks then there's a phrase from a poet whose name i'm blanking on what beauty it all coheres because it's coherent we're like we lean in audi has designed a desiccated disconnected, disintegrated set of processes. And the person who's supposed to knit it all together is me, the buyer.

46:16Marcus Buckingham:Well, that's daft. I mean, Disney isn't a perfect company, Ron, but I'll tell you what they did do. They created, the first thing you do when you build a Disney park, in case anyone's thinking of building a Disney park, is you build a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. Well, Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why do they build a berm? So that you don't see out. You can't see the red roof in over there on the parking lot. Because why? Because we're trying to create a holistic experience. And the first thing we got to do when we get you in is you can't see out.

46:46Marcus Buckingham:Okay, you start looking at these companies that have figured out, whether it's Savannah Banana or it's Disney, they're thinking holistically about a human having an experience. And for those leaders that are listening, you know, like, what could you do differently? Well, you could think about a human. There's a before, there's a during, there's an after to everything. Have you thought that out? Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes. That's why that company had a scatterpot graph of all those different stores in the same company producing different outcomes. Because the experiences weren't designed.

47:24Marcus Buckingham:Hey, leaders, you're an experienced designer. That means think about it holistically.

47:29Ryan Hawk:Okay, I'll cut you off. Three, significance.

47:32Marcus Buckingham:Yeah, so significance is the question which comes after Harmony. But at some point, somebody's going to say, do you know my story and do you care? Or just, do you know what I'm feeling? Do you care? Do you do my front story and my back story? And if you listen to the best leaders, when you ask them, how do you motivate people? The answer is always the same. They always say it depends. It depends on the person. If you ask a teacher, what's the best way to help a student learn? They'll say it depends on the student. You ask a doctor, what's the best way to help that person get better? Depends on the person.

48:00Marcus Buckingham:There is a point at which the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. So many leaders get this wrong. No, no, start with control. Give me the rules. Give me the world. Help me know the world, how it works. at some point though I'm going to want you to individualize tell me you understand my story and what will change because of that story that's significance opposite of course is insignificance and everyone leans out when you start to realize that the leader doesn't really see you that's a problem the fourth one is warmth of others and it's the fourth one because at some point you pop your head above the parapet Ryan and you go am I going through this alone and so So the question that people are asking in a loving experience is, who's with me?

48:44Marcus Buckingham:How can they help? Who's with me? How can they help? So many companies have designed onboarding experiences for customers or onboarding experiences for employees, where you're going through it by yourself. There's no deliberate linking of you, not just to others in the social media sense, but the warmth of others. It's super interesting to me that the best patient outcomes in hospitals have come from a group called the hospitalist movement, where they looked at that siloed series, Ryan, of like experiences for patients. And they went, well, we're not going to change the entire structure of our hospital.

49:18Marcus Buckingham:But what we could do is we could give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. And we'll call them a hospitalist, which they do. and there'll be a physician, like they're a healthcare professional, but their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. And as a result of that, you feel held. There's one person in this case who's with you on your little journey. They're going to help you. We humans love that when we can see intentionally that we're not going through this in a way that's isolated.

49:54Marcus Buckingham:Well, there's so much that a leader could do for customers or for employees to maximize the warmth of others. We could get into the whole Jeep thing with Jeep ducking and how wonderful it feels when you drive a Wrangler that people give you these plastic ducks. But no one in Jeep tells you how to play. It's like they've got the natural, organic warmth of others when you buy a Wrangler, but Jeep's not doing anything with it. It's crazy to me that they wouldn't maximize that in some way.

50:19Ryan Hawk:What would you do for them? What advice do you give them?

50:22Marcus Buckingham:Well, so you've got to be careful. Going back to your point about authenticity, you can't blow it by having a big corporate machine come in and go here are the three rules for using a jeep duck and here's we put it on the left side of the hood not the right the green ducks mean this and the white ducks i wouldn't do anything like that at all i would instead tell stories about jeep owners i would have stories about what people love about their jeep and i I would share it as an ongoing narrative, a web of love. For when you buy a Jeep, you're a certain kind of person. And we've got lots and lots and lots of stories about that.

50:58Marcus Buckingham:And the way in which you recognize somebody else in the world that has that is you give them a duck. Why a duck? And I would tell the story of Caroline, the Canadian person who came up with Jeep ducking. And her whole thing was just pay a little love forward. And that's what Jeep Wrangler is all about. Pay a little love forward. And hey, here in this dealership, you can buy some ducks. We don't care how you use them. it's just about being connected to one another in this crazy world about that that's how i would do it and i would make it feel kind of human and messy and idiosyncratic and like it just came from caroline wasn't us but we love it and we support it like there's so many ways you could do it in a nurturing way rather than a mechanistic way but actually at the moment they do it like no one tells you how to play yeah i just came back one day and there was a duck on my thing like what's that?

51:45Ryan Hawk:It's weird. All right. The fifth one's growth.

51:48Marcus Buckingham:The fifth one's growth. It's because love is a forward-facing emotion. If you love anyone, then you don't imagine they're ever finished. You always imagine they're going to wake up the next day and have to face the world again. So what everyone in any experience is asking themselves on some level is, how will this experience make me more capable? How will it make me more capable tomorrow? And so there's so many lovely little ways in which you as a leader can help people feel more capable, a tip, a trick, an idea, a thought, anything. Could be big, could be small. But that is actually the last feeling on the sequence.

52:22Marcus Buckingham:Don't start there because people won't give you the right to. And this is what we get wrong when we think about designing love. And we think it's just, well, we'll throw a bit of growth and we'll throw a bit of warmth and we'll build it backwards. We'll start with growth and then warmth. It's like, no, what's happening is feeling by feeling by feeling we're taking off one plate of armor. And if you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth. It's like banks who try to teach you about financial fluency, but they haven't done any of the first four. So you're not available emotionally or psychologically for that learning.

52:59Marcus Buckingham:So as a leader, every leader should know like this is a sequence. There's a lot of stuff you could do to give people a feeling of control. Okay, figure that out. then ongoingly there's a lot of stuff you could do to give people the feeling that you know what they're feeling and you care i mean by the way simplest thing the leaders could do would be ignore growth ignore warmth of others even ignore significance just start with the first two and i would suggest you just check in with each of your people for 15 minutes one by one every week and just ask them how do you feel about last week what are you working on this week how can i help last week how do you feel what are you working on this week how can i help do that 52 times a year with each person individually and you'll hit control and hit harmony, hit control and hit harmony.

53:42Marcus Buckingham:I'd argue you'll hit significance too because over time, people will feel like you see them. But if you wanted to operationalize love, which does sound a little weird, but if you wanted to operationalize it, you could do a lot worse than put in place that simple check-in rhythm because it will hit those first two feelings so well.

54:02Ryan Hawk:Marcus, we opened talking about you and being the fool who blew it up. I want to close by talking about you. Let's fast forward exactly one year from today. And you are surrounded by the people you love and that love you. And you guys are popping bottles, right? You're celebrating like crazy. What are you celebrating?

54:22Marcus Buckingham:Well, gosh, I am doing this because I have kids and I don't want them to continue to grow into a world that is accepting of the pragmatic sense of lovelessness, loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. I don't think that's okay. We know from data that humans don't thrive in loveless environments at all. We can get by, things function, but on some level, they're broken. And one of the things I'm going to do, Ryan, is create a free app, which is going to sound silly as I say this now, but I'm just going to have a free app that's got like a a Staples easy button on it. And it allows you just be a slider, loving, unloving, loving, unloving.

55:04Marcus Buckingham:And I'm going to give it away and just say, listen, add your light to the sum of light. I've made an AI. That's all they're doing. They know everything that's in the book, everything from the last 30 years of research. And all it really is, is a design partner. And behind the paywall, if you like, is going to be this AI will sit there as your design partner, loving, unloving, whatever experience it is. It could be at the bank. It could be the car rental counter. It could be at your work, loving, unloving. And if it's unloving or loving, then you can just tell the AI what you did and it will come up with ways in which you can build more love or design more love into that.

55:36Marcus Buckingham:And then you can send that to whoever. So all of us, and this is like a beautiful use of AI, I think, is that sometimes it's tricky for us to figure out, how do I make it more loving? I don't know. I've never, my muscles atrophied. I don't know what to do. But what you can do is notice, you can notice what's loving and what's not. Let's call it what it is. There's a whole bunch of stuff in our world right now. It's unloving. Let's not have complicated Yelp reviews or complicated Amazon. We don't need a scale of one. It's five or nothing. So it's love or not love. Let's have everyone use that. And then we can have a really smart, tightly, precisely defined AI help you think about ways in which you can make it more loving.

56:14Marcus Buckingham:And if we all add our voices to that, right, we get a world where from the bottom up, we've got a whole group of people going, it's not okay to live in a loveless world. A loveless world doesn't mean, like for us, we want more love in the world because humans flourish in that way. It doesn't mean soft. It doesn't mean warm and gooey. It doesn't mean kumbaya. It does mean that we should call out unloving when we see it and it shouldn't be okay to leave it that way. So if I was popping champagne, I would have 10 billion downloads. let's go with 10 million, 10 million downloads of that free app. And people would be able to use it in their life to add a little bit of their own light to the sum of light.

56:57Ryan Hawk:So good. The book's called Design Love In, How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. Thanks again, Marcus, for writing it, just like your past work. So good and so useful, so practical, so important, honestly, just so important. And I love this topic and I love that we got a chance to talk about it and we use the word love more in this conversation than maybe any I've ever had. So thank you. I loved it. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

57:26Marcus Buckingham:Well, me too, mate. Thank you so much for having me on.

57:32Ryan Hawk:It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Marcus Buckingham. A few takeaways from my notes. Name your non-negotiables. Marcus is clear. The opposite of design is drift. Decide what loving leadership looks like in your world and then commit to it. Write it down. Make it real. Make it visible. Remember, we got to start with control. The first feeling of love is giving people orientation. Before your next new hire, onboarding, or team meeting, Ask yourself, does this person know what world they're walking into and how to navigate it?

58:18Ryan Hawk:They need to start with control. How about checking in weekly one-on-one? Not a performance review, not a status update, a real conversation with another real human being. Marcus says, it's the single most powerful loving practice a leader can do. Most leaders skip it. They get busy. They got other things going on. Do not be most leaders. Check in weekly one-on-one. make sure everybody is good and progressing. Then ask two questions about every major decision. How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more? Not every choice will satisfy them both, but leaders who ask these consistently will be more effective.

59:05Ryan Hawk:Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling our friend or two, spreading the love. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Marcus Buckingham. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and you love on The Learning Leader Show. Write a review, rate it hopefully five stars. Do all of that. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much.

59:38Ryan Hawk:Talk to you soon. Can't wait.

59:49I'll see you next time.