A Conversation about Disengagement in the Workforce

When I first met you and you told me about your book and actually our very first conversation, and you were telling me in that first conversation about the numbers of employee disengagement and dissatisfaction. Why do you think employees have become so disengaged with their jobs?

In companies where you have a management that looks at the employees as the most precious resource they have, people are not disengaged. So to me, and in my experience, it's always been the case that employees react to how management treats them and they get disengaged as soon as the, as they are not the focus of the company. You know, when you're a means to an end, you stop liking what you're doing and you get disengaged. And you know, when, when a management company, when the management does that in a company, the interesting thing is it's not just happening to the employees, it's, it's happening to the management itself that they become disengaged as well. And that leads me to say that the core of the whole issue is our understanding of work and our approach to work. The why of work ends up being unfulfilling. And therefore you get disengaged because, let's face it, we spend the majority of our waking hours at work. And so the majority of the time you better have a good why for, for what you're doing during that time or you're not gonna like it.

How does someone know if they are one of those, you know, disengaged workforce?

But let me ask you, ask you this way. How do you feel on Sunday evening if you have to go to work or do work on Monday?

Yeah.

And thinking of your work, how does that make you feel? Right. And how do you feel about it? So let's say, and I've been in this, in this situation many times, and, and this is why one of the reasons why I'm writing and talking about it, and there's really three kinds of reasons that I would want you to examine yourself. So think about it could be that you're disengaged and sort of alienated from your company. You could be alienated from your co workers or you could be alienated from your actual work, from what you do, your job. Not everybody is disengaged for the same reason. And let me also say being disengaged, there could be a very good reason for, for you being disengaged or for me being disengaged, which might be a sign that I should leave that job or that work or those co Workers, that's the first thing. So that, that doesn't mean just because you're disengaged, it doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It also doesn't mean that you're to blame. I wouldn't want to play the blame game on individuals. I think it's a cultural thing. We're almost trained to have this utilitarian approach to our work, right.

And so like thank God it's Friday, oh God, it's Monday.

Yeah, exactly. We're trained to do that. And so I don't want to blame some individual for something that is cultural at this point. But I want to give people hope, to say, you don't have to live in the mainstream, you can actually do better. And that misery that you feel, you don't have to feel like that. So I'm saying let's separate it. Is it the company? Is it your co workers? Is it your job?

Gotcha.

When let's go through this. So if it's, think about your company, if you say maybe, maybe it's my company, I don't like, try to say what is actually wrong. Maybe you don't like the industry, you don't like what you're doing and how you're doing. The culture in a company is of course a huge issue that could be stifling. It could be the proverbial dog eat dog world, it could be politically motivated, you know, company politics, stuffy, you know that you just say I need to get out of this. So try to identify the points of what's wrong with this company. And then I would say that then even that doesn't mean you have to leave. My first question is always, can you be a part of the solution?

Right.

Look, anything also what we're dealing with, the culture, you can be a part of the solution or a part of the problem. And that's also in how you approach any, any interpersonal issue to if you just show up at the baseball bat and say, you know, smash everything that you disagree with, that's part of the problem. I want to say let's be constructive, keep can you be a part of the solution that you start to change behavior and then based on your change behavior, it has a chain reaction to others and you can be surprised in how well you can manage up as well.

You kind of look at your situation and you're like, like what can I do to bring, you know, to almost to be the change you want to see? Kind of, kind of, kind of thing. Is that what you, is that what you mean by that?

Yeah, exactly. And you would be surprised. That doesn't mean you have to be the leader of the company. I, I just, off the top of my head, I always remember this one guy I used to work with. And, you know, there was like the sort of politics play, company politics, gossip, stuff like that around the water cooler and behind people's backs. And this guy comes into the company and he is completely honest and repeats things that you say about somebody else in front of everybody.

I'm telling you, wow, that'll change some stuff fast.

Like, he, he had the right way of doing, but the way he started to do this, shut the whole thing down in terms of the gossip. And it just, he, he also had a Persona to be able to carry it off, and it changed. It reduced. So on the one hand, it reduced the gossiping, and on the other hand, he created an environment because of the way he said it, that it was okay to have conflict or to disagree and to have conflict. And he taught the company how to disagree and how to work things out. And this was not the boss, right. So this person was a part of the solution. He loved the company. He did this. I've never talked with him about it, but he stayed obviously in the company and he had this huge effect and it affected me. So I think that's being a part of the solution, but it requires you to make an analysis. And that's my sincere question to anybody who's watching this to say, tell me what's wrong with the company. Right? And you don't just have to say one thing. You can say several things and see if you find patterns and if you can consolidate them over time of what's really wrong, because there are reasons to leave. Again, this is not, this is not. Oh, you, you feel, you feel disengaged, so it's your fault. Maybe you should be disengaged. It's a. Our feelings are usually something that is a signal to us and we should act on it. So my first thing is analyze it. Figure out if you can be a part of the solution. If not, then don't just jump and change, but make a plan to say, how can this experience here select you the next company you're going to work for so that you actually define what's wrong and therefore make the opposite and say, here's what needs to be right? And then when you go for the interview process, and this is where most people make so many mistakes that they just go with whoever would have them, don't do this Right. Have a profile and you interview this company as much as they interview you and say, based on your negative experience, turn it into the positive and say, how can you, what are the litmus tests for this? How can you test that with the company you're interviewing for to make sure that when you land, you don't do this over and over and over again.

That's such a, that's such great advice. It's almost like whenever you're like, if you're going to like, say, buy a house. My wife and I, whenever we were buying our, our second house, our first house had all, all of these things. It was a great first house, but it had all. We were able to make the list of things we didn't want in our second house.

Exactly the same thing.

Yeah. And so that's what you're talking about doing with work. Work is going to be with you for a long, long time. So make that list of sort of non negotiables and what is it you're looking for in a company and how

do you, and the key that I want to add is, and how do you test for it? How do you know you walk into a company and you know that they're not like that? And there's, there's many ways I would ask to meet some of the other employees and stuff like that so that you get, you know, you get to see other than the HR individual or the hiring manager who's going to tell you anything you want to hear, but to maybe be as diligent with them as they are with you because a lot depends on this. And you know, hopefully, hopefully many people watching this are, are also going to be entrepreneurs, maybe startup entrepreneurs eventually or leaders in companies. And I kind of keep a list of my pet peeves of saying, here's what I'm not going to do when I run the company. Now the news for you, the news for me really is that every company has cultures and I make other mistakes than the ones that are my pet peeves. Okay, so nobody's perfect, but you can have an open mind of saying, well, I'm not going to be that hierarchical and I'm going to, you know, like on the hierarchy, I write in the book something about have, have the youngest person speak first in meetings. Don't have, if you're the boss, don't speak first. Because if you, if you don't want that thing of everybody kissing your behind because you said such and such. If you want to hear challenges, then let the youngest person speak first. Meaning the youngest 10 year person and then go from there. If you want to really hear what people have to say and then you just listen in meetings first, it's almost like do that. The second reason for disengagement is your co workers. There are, you know, other than culture, there's also just the individuals that you're working with. And that's a tricky one because, you know, we deal. Business is intrinsically human, meaning there's other humans in it. Nobody works alone. I mean everybody somehow is in a long chain and a complex process. I always say that there's no companies, there's only you and me. At the end of the day, there's no company, there's just you and me. Companies come and go. The people are the ones who have this. Throughout the career there are going to be other people and maybe in the industry even always the same people. They sort of, you know, in. I've been in high tech for a long time. It's kind of the same people that you see popping up all over the place and they just are in different companies. That's why pay attention to the co workers. And there's, there's three things I have to say on that. The first is try, try to have empathy for the person in front of you. To say you need to in order to have empathy, co feeling with them to understand their situation. You know, they say to walk in their shoes, try to know them better. One of the things that we did on our team is we start to have lunch together and we basically take in lunch and we have coffee afterwards. Somebody makes Cuban coffee, it's really cool. And so it attracts people and they all show up. And I'm telling you, there's no script, it's just a lunch break. But we're a small team so we all eat right there. And this has increased empathy on the team tremendously. Because people talk about their ailing parents or kids who have an issue or there are somebody's own health issues and everything that this carries over that when you see somebody grumpy, you understand what's going on and it increases empathy.

Yeah.

And that leads to the second thing. Empathy allows for love. And I know I speak in the book about. Is love the wrong term for work and. No, it isn't. It's actually one of the core principles if we want to do good work. And you see in love you give the benefit of the doubt. It's. I read this somewhere that when we, when we judge our own actions, we always justify ourselves by what we intended to do. But when we judge somebody else's action, we always judge them based on the outcome.

Wow, really interesting. Yeah, that's a great.

You know, that's what you do with the person who cuts you off in the traffic. But I only do it once because I have a reason. This jerk.

It's an accident.

They have no reason. So we judge them by the outcome. Love would entail that we actually give them the benefit of the doubt and that when somebody does something annoying that you basically think that they have a horrible issue that they're dealing with and you actually feel the love for them. And I think that's the second thing. When you're looking at the co workers, try to love them and see what happens. Right. And by the way, that attitude of love, of wanting the good of the other gives an echo. I tell you that the psychology of this goes very deep. If you approach somebody with that by intrinsically wanting their good to seek their good, they react to you differently. We can hear this in each other's tone, in our body language, and people start to act differently. However, you also have to love yourself. So the third thing is maybe you should quit because you, if there's toxic relationships and people who are narcissists or otherwise abusive, you should leave relationships that are abusive or toxic in any, in any way. So you also have to love yourself. Right. And there's a line, we all know what a toxic relationship is. And when that happens, it's probably time to take inventory. And then again, go look. Always learn from these mistakes or these situations. Go find out. How do I find out somebody who is a narcissist or who is an iglomaniac or whatever and say, how do I find if, how do I notice that somebody is like this before I work with them? And then make sure in your next process, whether it's an interview or whether you, you hire people for your next company that you screen for that. Right. We sort of in my, in my language in Switzerland, we say you lay in the bed the way you made the bed. Right. You're going to lay in your bed the way you made it before.

Yeah.

And that's what I'm talking about. I want you to go find to not just walk away from a bad situation. I want you to analyze it to the point that you recognize it so you can prevent it in the next one. You can see the trouble when it's coming. That sometimes means that you don't run out of the place right away, but you do a little more analysis and Sometimes it means because it's toxic or abusive, you have to leave right away. And then ultimately the last thing we talked about that could be that you could be disengaged from. And that is really the core of it all is from your actual work, your job, your, your profession. And there I find that. And, and I wrote, I wrote many times in, in my newsletters about this because it's one of the things that I see most people, Our school system is, is designed in a way that it, that it misleads people on this. But when, when we work, we're not just supposed to make more, we're supposed to become more. More fully human. You're supposed to become the better you. That entails that you build on what talents you already have. So I, for example, I'm not good with numbers yet. My family back in Switzerland are like finance people. I could, I worked in that field. It makes me miserable. But if it's expected and they say, well, this is where the money is and everything, you go do something which is not your talent, so you're not going to be very good at it either. And, and it makes me miserable. And it won't, that pain won't stop until I realize this is actually not my talent. What is my talent? And then let me start to do that. And you know, indication of talent is things like being in the zone, losing track of time, looking forward to it, things like this. And so the first thing is to say, am I in the right job or in the right work or profession? In that, does it correspond with a combination of my talents? If you don't know what your talents are, ask around you. People notice the talents that people have right away. And so we often know other people better than we know ourselves because we're not very contemplative. So ask around family, friends, coworkers. They will tell you if you ask for advice, people give you super great advice. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is maybe you are in a job that, where you have your talent and you're disengaged because you experience a resistance to, you experience a resistance to excellence. So our work is supposed to build on our talents and then we're supposed to become masters. Look what they used to call a master at something. We still call it a master's degree, but you're supposed to become a master at what you do. And mastery, like excellence is very difficult. It requires a lot of time, a lot of sweat, blood and tears to get really, really good at something. And we have a natural tendency towards mediocrity. And the key to find out when you're disengaged in your work is to distinguish between you being you trying to fire on a cylinder that is not your talent, and that's why you're disengaged, or you firing on a cylinder that is your talent. And you are being tempted by mediocrity away from the effort it takes for you to become really good at it. Because becoming really good at it means that you stay at the plateau and work on it until you go to the next one. And instead, you know how human progress can be tedious that way. And that's why we have such a great admiration for people in certain sports or in certain crafts where they become a craftsman or something that. Where this is only with thousands of hours of practice and. And we are all called to this maybe namely the practice of being ourselves, but being ourselves on the level of excellence, not on the level of mediocrity. And so you have to break through your shield. Yeah. Do you have to break through the shield of mediocrity to break through which is going to be tough. And it pains. It's. It's pain that often comes as this. A sign of disengagement.

Yeah.

To break through this and invest what you need into the excellence that is actually you. So there's that discernment to be, to be made.

Is there anything on that that you. Any advice that you would. You would give someone who maybe feels like. I do feel like I'm in the right place. I do feel like this is what I care about, But I do feel disengaged.

You know, I once met a pole jumper. I. I'm. I'm a tall guy. So I always. I admire people who do pole jumping because I could. I couldn't get off the ground. They run with that thing and they go, and. And I said, this is incredible how. How high these people go. And I met this guy and I said, how do you. I mean, how do you even. As you go up there, how do you even anticipate not hit, not kicking it down? And he says, I never think of it. I always think already on being on the other side. Yeah, this is it. Visualize success. And even here to say, this is like what we're talking about to say, should you start your company or should you take the plunge? And what I'm saying is, visualize what happens if you do this in one year, five years, 10 years. What happens if you don't do this in one year five, year, 10 years and then put the failure in the middle of it to say, what happens if you do this? And it fails in one, five and 10 years. What if you don't do this and therefore you won't have it in one, five and 10 years? I think this kind of discernment, which is non emotional discernment, which is what we need to make rational decisions, it always makes clarity for me. Sometimes I need a day or two break to get a, you know, get out of the woods a bit, but this works for me. Our challenge is always to have more faith in ourselves, meaning to see who we could possibly be. And what I mean here is not, you know, to be the king of the hill and lord it over others. That's not the excellence I'm talking about. The excellence I'm talking about is somebody also functioning. Nobody does business alone functioning in a team where I have my strengths and my weak meeknesses or non strengths, let's say, and then somebody else has strengths. When I have non strengths and that I'm in, I'm a part of a team that creates this miracle of work, I want to call it, because it is an abundance that's created in teams where people have strengths, you know, cover each other, each other's non strengths with their strengths. When you have a team like this, then you start to be super productive and then that's when you start to have one. And one is not two, but it's three, four, five. Yes, excellence. I don't want to stop at individual excellence. I want to go towards team excellence so that we have the kind of purity of thought of saying, I don't just want to be, be, you know, just king of the hill and be my own thing. And that's not the excellence I mean, I mean you flourishing in a team that becomes larger than the part, the sum of its parts, right? And you have to answer this question, can this happen in this company? And you have to answer this question, can this happen in this job that I'm doing this kind of work I'm doing or should I change the work? And even there I'm not telling anybody to run, to drop their job and run out and go somewhere else. But you can transition to start what parts of my job do I love most? And then do more of that because then you attract more of it.

So to bring it full circle, how would you summarize the insights that we've just talked about?

This all goes back to the first principle, that the economy is for people, not people. For the economy. And this makes sense on the level that in my entire career, what I learned, I think the net net of what I learned is that if you're looking at all the investment opportunities you can have as an entrepreneur or as a business leader, investing in the excellence of the human person of your employees is the only investment you will ever make that has infinite returns on investment. It's the only possibility of infinite return. This is a no brainer. The best thing you can do is to actually invest, trust and invest in your employees.