He Studied Gallup's Data for 25 Years: Here's What Makes People Great at Work

25:26Marcus Buckingham:I love that team. Those seem like such different orders of magnitude. But if you really unpack it, Jessica, when people say I love something, if you imagine this, every human goes through life armored against the challenges of life. Life's scary. And we humans move through life like a bit like this. But we don't want that. We want to get to 95 years old, sit on our porch and feel like we've opened ourselves up and at least had a chance to express the uniqueness inside of us in some way. Maybe we want financial success, maybe we want familial success, there may be other things, but we also want to feel as though our uniqueness got a chance to be expressed.

26:05Marcus Buckingham:And yet we go through life kind of battened down. So if you think about it that way, any experience that we bump into that allows us to take off one plate of armor, any experience that allows us to feel more fully ourselves or express something that's a bit more us. The word that we instinctively attach to those sorts of experiences is love. So if you go, you know what, when I put that outfit on, I don't know, I just feel, I just feel more me. I just, the shoes, those shoes, when I put them on, I just, I feel a little bit more me. That mentor, I don't know, working for her, I just, I just felt like I was on fire, but in the best ways.

26:46Marcus Buckingham:So it's almost like any situation, whenever we bump into a situation that allows us intimately to open ourselves up a wee bit, we attach the word love to that. And we know it. We know what it feels like. It's different than learning or trust or respect. It's like that situation allowed me to take off a plate of armor. So my working definition in the book of love was that it's the feeling of feeling more fully yourself over time. because it is over time. You feel more fully yourself over time. Whenever you're in a situation like that, it's a loving environment. Or you could put it another way and say, love is the deep and unwavering commitment to the flourishing of a human.

27:26Marcus Buckingham:Whenever you think about flourishing, the word we attach to that is love, which means, of course, love can be super tough. You can say, come in, sit down. I love you. You're fired. I still love you. I bet you've had a million of these conversations at Netflix. Like, I love you, man. I have a handful. It's not an easy thing, but you're going, this job isn't right for you. This job. You know, it's funny. Every time, and I had to have many, many of these conversations. Yeah. Every time I let someone go, regardless of whether it was my team or I was helping the organization say goodbye, I always got a hug.

28:04They always hugged me and thanked me.

28:07Marcus Buckingham:I think you probably instinctively understand that you can do any sort of conversation lovingly or unlovingly. And lovingly, if people are hugging you after you fired them, and you're clear that you're moving out, then on some level, either implicit or explicit, they would have understood that you want them to keep flourishing. Just it doesn't work here, which, by the way, isn't soft-shoeing it. That's legit. I've built businesses like you have. It's so hard. People are complicated. I built Strength Finder, for crying out loud. I'm supposed to know exactly how people's uniqueness plays out. You still can get it wrong.

28:50Marcus Buckingham:You put the wrong person in the wrong slot. They're not a bad human. They're just not in the right slot, in which case you leaving them in it is cowardly. It's not caring. You're not dealing with full performance. It's cowardly. it's it's unloving so in the end the book sort of defines loving loving is bigger unloving is smaller any situation that makes you small and shrink and and put the armor plating up around you even if it's justifiable it's unloving there's an awful lot of stuff we do today that's super unloving we've actually we've normalized unloving which from a business standpoint is unintelligent deeply unintelligent, whether it's customers, patients, students, or workers.

29:31Marcus Buckingham:We actually, the whole point of the book was to go, we need to be a heck of a lot more fluent about the most powerful force in human behavior, love. We need to be more fluent as business people. Otherwise, we're just normalizing from a business. Put the moral issue aside for a minute. We're normalizing behavior that's just not productive. Right. Which, you know, I think you and I both know is a plague, you know, for businesses, around the world. And, you know, it's so interesting to talk about it in the context of love, because it feels like a foreign word to work, because it's, you know, it's work.

30:12We're, you know, and Netflix, we talked about we're a team, not a family. You know, you love your family. We're a team. So it's sort of a foreign concept. And I think, you know, So you're right that businesses focus on, you know, getting the, let's get the two to the three, let's get the three to the four. And to your point, like, okay, but that's a big old waste of time.

30:37Marcus Buckingham:Well, and as you know, I mean, change follows the focus of your attention, right? I think it was David Cooper, I just said that, which I've always thought was really, you know, intention's a creative act. so if you're spending all of your time as a business looking at the twos trying to move them to the threes or taking the threes trying to shift them to the fours and you look at the fives and you go well they can't get any better then your whole organization becomes fixated on deficits and there's two problems with that number one the deficits don't actually help you understand the fives fixing the deficits like fixing divorce doesn't get you to happy marriage sorry it just doesn't so you you you you get the whole organization focused on something that is distracting from what you want more of.

31:19Marcus Buckingham:And then secondly, of course, I mean, the lovely love poet Pablo Neruda said this, love is born in savoring. It lives in intelligence, but it dies from forgetting. You don't kill love. It just dies from neglect. And so the whole organization, if you're not careful, just becomes super disfluent in the language of love. And that's a tragedy for the organization because love dies. And then you end up, you sink into mediocrity because no one is passionate about anything. And of course, what you're trying to do at Netflix, I'm sure what Reid was all about when he first started the business, I'm sure of it.

31:55Marcus Buckingham:I know it's true for other businesses you can think of that you and I could name. They're activating obsession. They're trying to get people obsessed. And I don't mean just team members. I mean, customers. We want customers to be obsessed with us. We want our team members to be obsessed with us. Well, I'm sorry. Positive obsession is It's called love. We have a word for that. It's love. And we know also you study the A players. You're writing a book on this. You study A players and it's like they don't love everything they do. That's daft. But they do find the love in what they do, which is so different.

32:29Marcus Buckingham:Love, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's or actually Anders Ericsson's stuff about 10 ,000 hours. Yeah, of course, you know, practice makes perfect. But that's not a terribly profound thing to say. what you've got to get to is, well, what's the appetite that drives the practice that drives the performance? Appetite is the thing that's really interesting. What do you have an appetite to keep doing again and again? Well, another word for appetite is what do you love? What are the things you love? What are the activities and moment situations that you love? You better figure those out. I call them red threads because every job is a fabric of different threads, some of which are pretty emotionally neutral.

33:02Marcus Buckingham:They're black, they're green, they're white, whatever. You just got to do them. But some of the activities in a job are red. They're activities that you love for no good reason other than you're you. And the most successful people are so serious. This is why I presented at ATD, as you know, they're so serious about going, what are my red threads? What are the activities that I love? No one's going to tell me. Everyone else, even my mom is colorblind to my red threads. They don't know. That's why feedback can be pernicious because if you're not careful, it's somebody telling you what your red threads should be, which they aren't, right?

33:33Marcus Buckingham:Of course, the person who knows what their red threads, I don't know how old your son is, but very early, you know what you love. And the whole of the rest of your life should be this like scavenger hunt for love. It's a scavenger hunt for red threads, because the only person that can figure out is you. But you look at excellence in any job, and those people have figured out what bits of the job they love. And then to your point at the beginning of this conversation, they don't go, forget about that. They go, no, no, no. As Pablo Neruda said, I better than use those red threads intelligently. Love lives in intelligence.

34:05Marcus Buckingham:So how do I intelligently weave those red threads, the things I love to do, into contribution for the team or for the customer or for the company? Okay, therein lies excellence. Love is this really interesting raw material for sustained excellence. And the more you sort of dig at it, the more you're like, oh my word, We've missed, we've kind of turned everything into this mundane, banal, professionalized. I mean, I don't know what you think about competencies and competency models, but if you're not careful, we start to tell everyone, I don't care who you are. We've defined the job before you came.

34:45Marcus Buckingham:And it's the same for everybody. And our job is going to figure out how closely you match our model. And then all of our conversations will be, you'll be about closing the gap between you and the model. Okay. I don't know what that is, but it's not the way you get excellence. Nope. It sure is not. So I'm preaching to the choir. No, but I mean, but this is, I mean, I could talk to you all day. Oh, my gosh. So let's go back to the CEO because, you know, I think I got, you know, Netflix, we got lucky with Reed. He was obsessed and he made us obsessed. And we were obsessed because he was obsessed.

35:19And we'd used that word, obsessed, and we were obsessed over excellence and being excellent, right? And that was with everything that we did. We didn't call it love because that's definitely not him. But we were obsessed. And I now work with all these founders and different CEOs, and they all want these things very, very much. A lot of them, it's their first company. Some of them, it's their second, you know, some are career CEOs, but they just want it to be. And, you know, my point to them, and I love that you refer to this as an experience, and I hope you don't mind if I steal that, because I think it explains it a bit better.

36:07But the way that I've always tried to help them understand is like, if you want high performance, you actually have to do that yourself, right? And you have to let go of the founder, you know, your co-founder that's been here for five years that doesn't do anything. You know what I mean? Like you yourself have to have a high-performing team because if you do, then guess what? The other teams will. But it's really hard for them to like, because they love, maybe they love revenue. Maybe they love product. And that's where they want to spend their time. But they want to have these things. But then doing this work and building that experience is really foreign to them.

36:53Marcus Buckingham:Well, that's why I wrote the book, really, is to go, dear founder or dear CEO, if you want the growth that you want, if you want the outcomes you want, customer growth, customer obsession, people loving your brand, people loving working here. I mean, in a sense, by the way, the two most powerful criteria you could use to assess the value of a business would be how many customers love you tomorrow versus today and how many people love working here tomorrow versus today. I bet if you pushed Reed and you gave him the proper definition of love, I bet he'd go, yeah, that's extreme positive obsession.

37:32Marcus Buckingham:I mean, it happens to be a four-letter word for that. And the word we humans use is love. I flippin' love that. but for for any vc by the way i mean if you want to access the future value of a business it's like how many customers love us tomorrow versus today oh you don't know the answer to that question okay that's knowable the fact that you don't know it really worries me because you don't understand the future value of our business how many people love working here tomorrow versus today you know the answer to that you don't go find it out because otherwise we can't predict the future behavior of employees or customers loves it i mean we ought to take that we should dump all the rest to these customer surveys and employee surveys.

38:08Marcus Buckingham:We should have just a two-question survey. I love that. Right? Seriously, it's like, gosh. Anyway, the thing for founders to realize is, there's an intelligence that we don't talk about that I call experience intelligence. Experience intelligence is the ability to shape experiences that drive behavior. It's an intelligence. Some of us are naturally really good at it, and some of us, well all of us can get better at it and so what you're saying to founders really is i'm sorry man you have got to be in the experience business you've got to understand what we even mean when we say that you've got to have more experience intelligence it's not emotional intelligence although that's jolly good this is how do you shape experiences to shape behavior so by the way in the book if you if you imagine a continuum of over time jessica so on the far left you've got a person just beginning an experience.

39:05Marcus Buckingham:Maybe it's a customer just being onboarded, or maybe it's a customer calling up your help desk because they're confused, or maybe it's a new employee. But anyway, it's someone just beginning. Maybe it's someone beginning their day. They're beginning an experience. On the far right, you've got somebody at the end of that experience walking around with love in their heart. They're walking around as a five. They're walking around going, I love that. I don't know. I love that. I love that. I love that. Whatever the experience was. The question for us as leaders, which I think if I was talking to your founders, I'd be like, folks having a whole bunch of people walking around with love in their heart for your company whether it's customers or employees is jolly good it's the future growth of our business the question for you is how did they get there how did they move from from starting an experience to the point where they're walking around going love that well if you actually reverse engineer somebody's i love that feeling and you reverse engineer it you find five feelings in sequence not hierarchical it's not maslovian it's just sequential which you can think of as like five plates of armor that a person is taking off and you can't take off the last one first because it's buried beneath the other plates of armor but those five feelings then turn which we can talk about if you want but they are they're the they're the blueprint if you're talking to a founder you'd go and the founder goes well how the heck am i how do i get in the experience business what the What are you even talking about for you to be able to go, here are these five feelings.

40:27Marcus Buckingham:If you want people to say they love you, they love your company, you've got to move through these like a sequence. And how you activate those five, that'll be up to you. But we humans, we have these five, all of us do. And we're unique and distinct in our own talents and strengths, but we all have these five feelings. And if you can create those five feelings intentionally, then you will get people to continue to lean in over time until they pop out and go, I love that. So the whole point of the book really was to go, there's a blueprint. I know it sounds terrible because love is ineffable and mysterious and magical, but it's also designable.

41:09Marcus Buckingham:And so those five feelings became like, okay, yeah, you could design it in guys, folks. You could, hey, you could design it in if you took it seriously. Yeah. Yes. And I want to get into all the five feelings, but I know we're running out of time and I do want to talk about something because, you know, AI is around. It's here. And a lot of organizations are struggling. And I've been talking to a lot of organizations about you can't look at AI and slap it on what you're already doing. You have to redesign. The work. And I love your concept of design it in because I think love is going to be a big component of this redesign, right?

42:00If you really want to be competitive and successful in this new era, if you're not really looking at how would we design this organization, knowing what we know now, not how do we take our existing frame and work within it, you have to reframe everything. And love needs to be part of that reframe and that redesign. design?

42:28Marcus Buckingham:As you know, AI is simply, it's an algorithm that's optimized for certain outcomes, and you can optimize an AI for any sort of outcomes you want. I think what we would suggest is if love is the primary driver of all productive human behavior, which it is, then we ought to be able to design AI for love. We ought to at least think through that. By the way, those five feelings, in case you're out of time, are control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth. And if you can understand people's need, control doesn't mean control over someone else. If you're trying to design an experience that somebody leans into and finds loving, the first thing you do is you give them control so they understand the world that you're moving into.

43:06Marcus Buckingham:Rules fit into there. Tools fit into there. Helping somebody understand how the tools work within the rules within the world. That's actually a very loving thing to do. Chick-fil-A saying we will be closed on Sunday is loving because it's clear. And it says this is the world you're moving into. The opposite of love is confusion, actually. Harmony is like, do you understand what I'm feeling and do you care? Significance is, do you understand my front and back story and do you care? Which speaks to uniqueness and individuality. And don't start with that, by the way, don't start with that because it confuses the heck out of me.

43:36Marcus Buckingham:Start with control, then harmony, then significance. Warmth of others means who's with me and how can they help? Don't start with that because then that's fake friends and no one, it's just fakery. So much of social media is that. But who's with me? Who's the warmth of others? And the last one is growth because with your six-year-old, right, you know he's never done. He's never finished. He's always in a state of becoming and he's going to have to go out and face the world again tomorrow. So if we love anybody, we're always thinking about helping them be more capable tomorrow. But you can't start with growth because you haven't earned the right.

44:10Marcus Buckingham:That five-feeling sequence is a blueprint for designing experiences for customers or for team members that ends up with them going, that's loving. It's not easy, but it's impossible if you're not even doing it. So those five feelings were like, okay, that's a flow that a person can design against. It's a psychologically coherent flow to get people to go, I love that. In terms of AI, what's super interesting about that flow, if you think about it, and I maybe, I haven't read everything there is to read around it, so maybe I'm someone saying this already, but it sure seems as though no one said clearly enough that our understanding of AI should be bifurcate it, that we can love it, just like we can love a pair of shoes, just like we can love a song.

44:58Marcus Buckingham:We can love AI. Why? Because it amplifies us. It augments us. It enables us to move from left to right. It manifests me and helps me feel more fully myself over time. Okay, that's loving. I can love it. The question on the flip side is, can it love us? Can it love us? Can we And by the way, one of the people I quoted in the book, I can't remember her name, but she was the CMO, maybe is the CMO, I don't know, of Netflix. But she was talking about delivering, I think, through Workday. And I'll name names just because, I mean, Workday does a lot of things really, really well. But let's AI-ify performance appraisals.

45:39Marcus Buckingham:And she was saying how great it was that she saved all this time because she did 34 performance appraisals in like an hour. And in previous times, it would have taken a week. And of course, from her standpoint, that's amazing because it freed her up for so much time. So of course she loved it because it was like accelerated her ability to turn her attention to things that perhaps were more value adding in her view than what she was writing in terms of the performance reviews. But if you imagine that you're on the other side of that, and you're one of the 34, well, now you're looking at AI going, does it love me?

46:12Marcus Buckingham:As in, do I now know, because I've been contained, I'm on the receiving end of this AI, do I feel like I know what that particular leader thinks of me? Do I lean in more to that leader? Do I feel more control, more harmony, more significance because of that performance appraisal or review that I've just received? And I think I don't know the answer, but I think we at least have to question whether or not if you're on the receiving end of an AI generated experience. Yes, yes. If am I contained, in which case I'm putting the armor back on? Why am I putting the armor back on? Because I don't know.

46:46Marcus Buckingham:I don't know what she feels about me. I don't know what she wants to do with me. I don't know what her intent is toward me because I know that all the words that I'm receiving aren't hers. She may still be amazing. I may still lean into her because I sort of deep down know what she feels about me. But if we're not really careful, we create a bunch of unknowingness, whether it's for customers, where let's face it, silence is abusive to customers. Having them feel like they're on the receiving end of a contained experience is abusive. And yet you look around, we are inserting so much AI into experiences, which when you just unpeel it even a little bit, we'd go, yeah, that's unloving and therefore stupid because it's value depleting.

47:35Marcus Buckingham:The very first experience you're giving to your customers is one that is contained by an AI. Are you sure you want to do that? If you do, boy, you better know control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth. Boy, you better design it so that you are moving a person intelligently through that sequence of feelings. That, I think, is the big dichotomy in AI. We can love it. Okay, let's build a bunch of tools to help us to augment ourselves. But when we're using it to define or describe experiences in which others are contained, let's make sure that we don't design it unlovingly because it will destroy the value of our business.

48:12You're so right. And I love that. I hope everybody just heard that. Please. Please listen to Marcus. He's so right. And I don't think enough of us are maybe thinking about it in that way. So I hope that we do. I know we're running out of time, which I'm really sad about because I don't know. I just have loved having you. I always put pressure on my guests, be it fair or not fair, be it loving or not loving. But I put pressure on you to leave us with something inspirational. And you've said so many inspirational things already. But what's the one thing you want people going away thinking about in their week this week?

48:54Marcus Buckingham:Well, I think it would be two things. I think of love as having two sides to it, which I would call mover and maker. And I think this week, if you want to take love seriously in your own life, then you'll think about mover and maker. The mover side of things, think about how do you move through your own life as powerfully as possible? How do you find your own red threads this week? No one can find them for you. When you are playing to a red thread or weaving into what you do, you look different. We lean into you. You're more fluid. You're in flow, as Mike Cechsian Mahai called it. But we can't force you to do that.

49:37Marcus Buckingham:You have to take your own thread seriously. That way you can move through your life and not be drained by the moving, but be invigorated by it. That's movery. Makery is, please know that you are an experience maker, whether intentional or not. Every time you walk into a room, you're making it either a little more loving or a little less. Every phone call, a little loving, a little less. Email, you are making experiences. You're not going through the motions. You're not tracking a process. You're not part of a program. You're not part of a transaction. You may be all of those things. But in the end, you're making an experience for another human.

50:13Marcus Buckingham:And the question for you would be, are you making an experience for that human that gets them to say, I feel bigger? Or are you making an experience that makes them say, I feel smaller? If you, Jessica, have had people hug you after you've had an experience with them where you're letting them go, they're hugging you because they feel in some ineffable way bigger. You stepped into that. I'm an experience maker. It doesn't mean I'm soft. It means I'm taking seriously the experience of the other person and I want to be loving of them, even if I'm tough loving of them, hence the phrase tough love, even if I'm tough loving of them, my fundamental orientation as a human being is that I need to be loving of other humans.

50:51Marcus Buckingham:And that's the thing that I would give all of our listeners would be like, mover and maker, you move through every single day of your life that way. And we are living sadly in an increasingly unloving world, in what you would say is a loveless world, where we are becoming disfluent about love and even dismissive of it. But rather than try to tilt at the hugest mountains that we could try to move ourselves, instead, just live in your own life and go, no, no, no, I can move through my own life lovingly by finding the red threads that I have in my life. And second, I can be an experience maker of others.

51:24Marcus Buckingham:Everything, even tough conversations, I can do them lovingly. Why? Because that's how humans flourish. And I'm a human. And I have to add my light to the sum of light. That would be my inspiration for me as much as anyone, for you, for your son, for anyone. I mean, I just got goosebumps. It's super inspirational. And I know I am going to think about it and I'm going to actually do it. I'm going to look, whether it's my kid or work, I love thinking about this as an experience maker. And you have control over that. You can create a loving experience or not. and so I'm just so grateful that you were able to come on the show and I'm you know I will say I love you I love what you do and keep doing it because it's it's making us all better thank you well thank you for having me yeah you're welcome thanks for listening to TruthWorks