Disengaged Employees Aren't Unmotivated. They're Unseen.

Once you become someone who's gone through this journey, you become the lighthouse for others. Your light, once you've revealed it, becomes a guide for others to do the same. And so the way you sustain your light is by shining on others, not to be the brightest one, just to make sure you guide others on the path.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion That sleep cannot fix. It happens when you're succeeding on paper but slowly disappearing from your own life. You're hitting the targets, running the meetings, earning the praise, getting the promotions. You show up, but you no longer arrive. My guest today, Tony Martignetti, believes brilliance rarely disappears inside organizations. It goes dormant when people learn that only a narrow fragment of who they are is valued. Tony is a leadership advisor, keynote speaker, and author of Illuminating Hidden Brilliance. He helps leaders create environments where people can perform at a high level without losing themselves in the process. In this conversation, we explored why disengagement is often an identity problem rather than a motivation problem, why certain human capabilities become even more valuable as AI expands, and how leaders can awaken the hidden brilliance in their people. Sustainable human performance should not make people feel smaller. It should truly help them come alive. Tony, it is such a pleasure to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast, my dear friend.

It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Well, look, you had me at hello when I had read your provocative idea. And your idea is brilliance in people rarely disappears. It goes dormant. It gets shelved because the environment only ever asks for a narrow part of who they are. It struck home with me because I've seen this so many times. So I wanna start there, but I wanna start with this powerful story that you shared with me about this executive who was hitting it out of the park, and yet there was something missing.

Yeah, it's interesting. I've got a lot of stories like this where sometimes success can hide things that are under the surface. This particular executive saying that she showed up To work and she showed up to all the things, but she doesn't seem to be arriving. And what I mean by that is that there's a sense of aliveness that goes away in the way we show up as executives sometimes. You know, her manager had started to tell her that in conversations, she was reading people and as like something deeper, something below the surface. It wasn't a soft skill. That was something that was a lot more intuitive about who she was. Nothing was broken in her. The environment had— was never asking for that particular skillset, but it was something that her boss was seeing in her, and that was making her work come alive. But the reality is that wasn't always the case. It was just the fragment of her that was basically asking her to just not do all the things that was asked of her. Her title was not necessarily that. She was a senior director that was really asked to do, hit the numbers, to do all the things, but it was never about the people aspect. And what she found out as she started to dig deeper is that there was more to it than that. There was a sense of, you know, looking beyond those numbers and seeing something that was not necessarily on the surface. And in our conversations, I got her to see the underlying pieces of what was missing, you know, that she had this hidden brilliance, as I like to call it, that needed to come to the surface. And it's interesting because I always say that like the dormancy isn't just a metaphor for the way we work. It's actually something that's Deep in our biology, we have this tissue that lies in us that sometimes we just need the conditions for that tissue to be brought back to life, to be enlivened. Those cells need a place to breathe and to grow.

Yeah, I think there's a couple of elements of that story that really kind of caught my attention because I see it all the time in the workplaces, Tony. The first element was what you just talked about, that there was an aspect of her, there was a strength of her, there was an ability of her to notice the people, to see what was going on. But that she was choosing not to necessarily harness directly.

Yeah.

Because that was not her role. But I think there was a second aspect that is equally important, which is, you know, as you said, there's so many people who go through their days at best numb, at worst completely stressed. They're not alive. They are living, but they might as well be like zombies walking. Because they're like pushing themselves to all levels to hit the numbers, and they end the days exhausted going back. And so there is an element of aliveness, both in terms of a part of us that we are not harnessing, but our whole experience of life is not what you would call alive. It would be dead.

Yeah. I like to say it as like we're outwardly successful, but inwardly numb. And I think that if we wanna live fully and bring more of ourselves to the work, We need to connect with why are we feeling that emptiness on the inside and how do we ensure that there's an inside-outside reflection of who we are?

Yeah. One of our podcast guests called it being miserably successful.

I love that. I love that.

Right? There's so many people walking out there miserably successful.

Yeah. And I can connect to that, my own story of that's one of the reasons why I got into this work is that I felt that emptiness. And it led to a moment when I literally walked out of a boardroom and said, I'm going to leave the room to change it. And just to give you a little more context to that, I spent 25 years working in industry in high-tech and then biotech as a finance and strategy professional. And that moment was a buildup over years and years of feeling like there's something missing, asking the questions of like, is this it? Is this what my life is? Feeling the burnout. of showing up, trying to do all the things I can to please all the people around me and realizing I left myself out of the equation. And so that day that I walked out was a sense of, okay, I've done some of the work to figure out what was missing. Now it's time for me to have the courage to actually do something about it. And that's what I did. I didn't have a plan. I just said, okay, I've seen enough of poor leadership. People who are focused on themselves and what's right for me and me being right. And that moment is what really defined it and said, enough. We need to do better as leaders. And so I got up and walked out and said, OK, now it's my turn to figure out how I'm going to make that little dent in the universe on my own terms.

I think it's beautiful. So let's dig into that because all of your work that you're doing now is around this notion of inviting organizations and leaders to create conditions where the brilliance of their people is not dormant, but instead, the humans who work in the organizations are alive, creative, and have the permission— in fact, I would even say there is an obligation— to bring the best human parts of themselves to work. What are some things that people do that make those conditions for that brilliance to really shine?

Yeah, and I just wanted to highlight, you said permission, because I think that's something that people will just do the things that they need to naturally do. But oftentimes they're looking for someone to say, is it okay for me to do this? And, you know, not to go on a diatribe about psychological safety, but obviously there has to be a sense of feeling like it's safe to be myself in the world of work because we're hired for our titles. And then we feel like we have to play to that phenotype of this is the title. And so therefore, like to use the example of a finance executive, You think I have to be analytical and that's the marker of success, being super analytical. But the reality is, you know, in this day and age, being a finance person, you need to be not only analytical, but you have to be a great storyteller. You have to be a great networker. You have to be a great connector. There's so many things to that job that is a lot more than just being analytical. You have to be creative.

This actually resonates. I had a CFO who said, listen, you know, he's a very nice guy. He loves the arts. He does a lot of other things. But he said, you know, at work, my job is to be the hardass. If I'm not the hardass, they'll spend the company's, like, all of the money. And I'm like, what is the cost of that for you at work? I know you're alive at home. You paint, you play a guitar, you do so many things, but what's the cost you're paying in the longest hours of your waking life that you spend at work?

Spot on. I mean, I think that's so, so important. And it is, there's a cost. It's almost the cost of really silencing a part of you and As someone described to me, like, how awful is it that we take part of ourselves and say, okay, you stay home and I'm going to go to work. And then you spend most of your life at work and as a fragment of yourself.

What dimensions do you find people often retire?

I'll tell you a lot of interesting ones, because I've been collecting stories. One of them is the artist, which is an important one. People feeling like the ability to be an artist in many different factors. is not important, or the sense of humor, or one of them that I really found valuable is the being an immigrant, which a lot of us come from different places and having that mindset of an immigrant inside of a workplace where you're not from originally, we silence that because we feel like we have to hide that we're from a different place. Well, the reality is there's a— that identity is powerful because with that comes, I'm not from here, so I have a learner mindset that comes from coming to a new place. I have the baggage and the value of knowing what it's like to come into a new world and having to build from the ground up and the bridging, the ability to bridge from one world to another. So there's many things that I could get into, but those are some of the more common ones. The other one is having something like an analytical background, but being in a creative space and knowing that that actually is valuable too. You don't want to be just flighty and thinking like, oh, I'm just going to continue to move from space to space. space, but not have the grounding in how to operationalize, how to execute on things, which comes from people who often have a technical and a little background. We need that. So, I think oftentimes those things have to have that polarity pull between the different worlds that we live— we've lived in. And so, just to quickly come back to your original question, I'll say, if you are someone who wants to see more of this in people, it really comes down to, you know, spending the time to Open the aperture and ask the questions of, you know, when was the last time you felt most alive in your life? Not just at work, but in general. And when people start to answer some of those questions, listen to them deeply and understand it's not just, oh, when I was doing that spreadsheet, it might be, hey, I built this website when I wasn't here at work that does this thing or that thing, or I play video games outside of work and I love building worlds. That's interesting.

I love that question. Tell me about a time when you felt most alive.

It's simple, but it's also so revealing. And if they're feeling a trust with you, there's, they're gonna share something that, you know, you're hopefully gonna get something unexpected. They're not gonna say yesterday when you gave me the assignment to go do X, Y, and Z, they do that, then they're not really being open. They're not going deep enough.

Yeah. And I think it's an invitation. I think it's, I love Khalil Gibran. And I love this word that he says, work is love made visible.

Yes.

And that's not the experience of most people. Neither is the experience of feeling alive at work. And so I think, as leaders, if we think about creating environments that truly make people come alive, they will create better outcomes. They will create better customer experiences. They will create higher shareholder value through That foundation of flourishing, of feeling alive and growing versus feeling dead and untapped.

Yes. You can't get more productivity out of a tired employee. What you need to do is you need to give them the space to, you know, drop out of the productivity hacks and see what's been sidelined and bring that element back to the table. Because what happens is people become productive when they're feeling like they're being fully expressed. And that's where true leverage comes from.

Yeah. Look, I loved another perspective that you've shared, which is most organizations treat disengagement as a motivation problem. But you believe it is often an identity problem. Untangle that for us.

Yeah. I mean, we're good at reading which fragments that people want. So again, it comes down to this. This wiring that we've had over years and years of programming of being in the workplace. And so because of that, people in general, we do it ourselves. We start to say, OK, well, I know what this particular job requires of me. So therefore, I'm going to do more of that. But I think we, as individuals and leaders in general, have to sometimes break the pattern, break the code, and say, wait, if we want different results, if we want to get something different out of the people, What we might need to do is see what else, what, how can we break the pattern and see what else is under the surface? And one of the best ways to do that, and I'll just throw it out there because I think it's so interesting, is that people talk a lot about play and they say, oh, you know, we should do more play as adults. And I think I'm a proponent of that, but I think there's something about doing play inside of the workplace in a more intentional way. that allows people to explore these identities and these ways of showing up. When we do it together, it becomes a great exploration place because we're not trying to perform. That's exactly the way that this becomes a great unlock moment because of the fact that when we get together, let's— one of the things that I do with people is I get them into doing drawing and painting. And at first I'm like, I'm hit with the eyes of like, oh my God, we're going to do that. I don't want people to be artists in the way that they need to be perfect. What I want them to do is to drop out of their head and get a little more into this childlike moment of creativity that allows them to express themselves through a medium they're not used to, and then connect with other people through it. And what happens is that's where things that they haven't expressed in a long time come out. So That's really the gateway that in many ways allow us to get more engaged. We get to connect through a medium that we're not used to.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? I mean, I, for a long time, also used to believe, oh, I'm not that creative, and I definitely will not call myself an artist. And then, as I was going through my coaching program, I realized that every individual is an artist. And why are they an artist? Because what does an artist do? Artist creates things.

Yes.

Right? If you don't create, you're not an artist. It might be something you create, a poem, a drawing, something, a sculpture. You create something, and that's why you're— that's what we say. When we can see them create something out there, we say that's an artist. And then in there, it's implicit a judgment of how good it is, which, by the way, we know art is in the eye of the beholder, but let's Yeah. Put that aside for a moment. Well, every one of us, through the words we use every minute, create new possibilities in the world. We are creating worlds through our acts of speaking every moment. And so if creation is the definition of an artist, we all are artists because we are creating worlds and we can choose to create worlds of flourishing, or we can choose to create worlds of suffering.

Yes. And that's a beautiful way of describing it. First of all, you know, I couldn't agree more. And, and, and it also gives back the agency to people to say like, look, but you have more choice than you think to create that world through your words and actions by just saying, okay, I could do it this way, or I could create something a little more aligned with who I am and in the way that I want to do it. And I'm just going to pull a tiny thread there because I just wrote a piece about this that's coming in a newsletter of mine about the how of work can make a big difference. You know, we've talked about the why Simon Sinek made it so popular. And I think rightfully so, it was exactly what we needed at the right time. But the how of work is what can be interesting because how one person does something versus how another person does something could be completely different, even if it's the same task. And that's great because we get to decide, how do I want to bring my unique ability to a task? And how can I be creative in that? And I think the how of work is going to be so important as we move forward. It's going to be the one place where we can say, the way that I decide to do a task is completely up to me.

Yeah. And so ways of working, I think, is at the heart of it. So look, I want to ask you this question. If you're a leader and you have— you're working with a team or let's say an individual, How do you know if the performance gap is a motivation gap, it's a capability gap, or it's an identity gap?

It's a great question. I think there's a multitude of things you have to look for, and there's no simple answer to any of those things. Number one, I often think about the burnout element that you can see. People check out sometimes because they're burnt out and they've been overloaded with work. And you've got to check the symptoms of that by saying, okay, is this person Just got too much on their plate and we've been giving them more and more, especially as we started to lessen our workforce. So first and foremost, am I giving, are we giving that person way too much? And they're not able to do things on their own terms. In other words, they're just triaging and that burnout's real. Boreout is the other one that I always think about. And that is that they're just going through the motions. They've kind of lost their spark. For the work. And that shows up slightly different. It's, they're still performing, they're still getting it done, but you can see that they just, they're just not showing up the way that they used to. Maybe they're not quite as lit up about their work. And that you can also see it. You see it in their enthusiasm. The disengagement is often coming from the bore-out because people feel like there's something missing in their work that doesn't really engage them any longer. And so, and then the third part of it really is to think about how is it that they're, you know, the team in general is really feeling that person's presence? Because they may show differently to you as a leader versus to their colleagues. So, how is it that their dynamics of interaction with others? And so, how can you check in with the team dynamics through whether it be skip-level conversations or just generally getting a tone and the temperature? for how the team's interacting. And so that might not necessarily see one individual, but then you know that the tone has changed.

This conversation is brought to you by Happiness Squad, where we help leaders build new mindsets, new habits, and transform their ways of working to truly flourish. If you're ready to unleash the untapped human potential in your organization and operate at your best, Come visit us at happinesssquad.com and start your journey today. So I loved your question of when did you feel most alive? What are some other questions like that as you go about your discovery conversations with them and with others who work for them to reveal that that person has shelved an important part of themselves?

Yeah. So another great question is, what is something that you do day in and day out that you find is, could be done differently, or that you feel as though you could do on autopilot, but you know that there is a different way of doing it. If you know that there's a sense of everything's fine, if they say things very quickly, then you know that there's probably a reason to ask again, ask the question a couple of times. So, if they do something on autopilot, then maybe it's time to challenge them to say, okay, why do you do that on autopilot? Why do you do that so, you know, systemically? Maybe it's time to challenge the things that we put on autopilot. So, that's the next question I would ask. The third question is, what's missing in your work? What's missing? And that simple question is, it's very vague for a reason, because you want to invite in the things that they might say that's beyond the typical stuff. Like, oh, well, what's missing is I don't have time. What's missing is I don't have X or Y, but they may say something in there that is completely unexpected. So asking what's missing is a really great question.

What makes you most alive, or when were you the most alive? I love the question of what are you missing? And I love your question on how could we do— what would you change in the way you do work today?

Yeah. Yes.

Right? And you can even add that to say that could bring more aliveness. That could bring—

Same goal. Yeah.

I love it. So look, it would be— and talk about how could we change, what could be changed about what you do has never been more relevant than today in the world of AI. Because there are so many different ways in which each one of us needs to be thinking about leveraging AI to remove those things that cause bore-out, to automate, to really use it as a co-intelligence.

Yes.

So I want to go there next. As AI becomes more capable, from your perspective, What are the human abilities that are becoming even more valuable?

Yes, I love this question. I mean, there's so many things about this, which I love because of the fact that, A, I think AI is such a wonderful thing. Even if I didn't say it was wonderful, it's there. So we have to live with it. But there's 3 things I always think about. First of all, integration. Now, integration, you may think, oh, I can integrate many things. But it doesn't integrate the different parts of the story and the, the, the ways that we can look at the different parts of what we do in the full capacity of, of what we need. So, humans integrate really well. They can look at different worlds and say, if I wanna make a bridge from this, um, from let's say the arts and technology and business and many different arenas, integration is required. And so, you have to be able to connect the dots.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, very skillfully, and that often comes, integration comes from experience and having seen things. So integration is a big one. And then I think this, the cousin of that, which is, you know, really interrelated is meaning-making. We have to be good meaning-makers. So if you can't make meaning of what the system, the AI is making, then you're going to have a hard time being able to take some of the in— taking some of the output and doing something with it. But let's not get too far away from the fact that we have to be able to give it good inputs. And that comes to my third piece, which is we have to be great at asking good questions. And that is so critical. If we're not asking good questions, we're never going to be able to elevate ourselves into— in the equation of where the world is going. Asking the best questions is the ultimate game changer.

I love those. And I wonder, because so much of the rhetoric in the workplace is about efficiency and the gains from efficiency. But as I step back, I think about what happens if efficiency improves, but meaning declines.

I want to speak to that just for a moment, because I think it's also an element of efficiency can be very, very double-edged. It's like a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to middle management. You know, people think, oh, that's great. We'll give them all these tools and people will go out and use it to generate work. And what happens is People are generating all these reports and content and all this stuff. And what happens is middle managers get all the inputs or the outputs from people who are generating on the, on the, from the front lines. And then they're going to have to like make meaning of that or figure out what to do with it. And then they have to kind of push it on to the next level. So, they become almost a bottleneck where they have to figure out what to do with all this ghost work, you know? And so, let's just not, you know, it's becoming inefficient. To have efficiencies. And so we got to be careful about what we think is efficient. We have to make sure that we're doing work that is meaningful still. And so that when we automate or we use AI, that we're actually using it for the right things. And we're not just creating more work by using bots or using tools to just do more stuff.

So as more and more agents start to appear on our org charts, Where, in addition to managing humans, you're managing bots doing some or all of the work. What's your advice for leaders around how they redesign roles so that people aren't just merely supervising machines?

Yeah. Yeah, you have to start from the first principle idea is like, why are we here? What do we— what's our goal in terms of being an organization? And what are we driving towards? I mean, these are the things that You know, if you don't start with the right roadmap, you know, all the things that you, that you ask people to do, the directives you give them are all going to fail, or they're all going to just create more churn and burn around these agents or around the tools. Tools are amazing, but they have to be directed at the right things. So it's going to require, we're going to require even better leadership than we have had up to this point. And I'm not saying that we've had bad leadership, but I think it's going to require a more skillful leader to navigate us into the future because it's going to require them to eliminate a lot of the inefficiencies of their thinking.

Yeah. I think you've spoken about this powerfully, Tony, around this notion of leaders as not just people who direct the work, but leaders that actually are environments and create environments that actually result in the humans doing the work coming alive or not. So talk a little bit about that quality of leaders, environment creators, and what would be your advice to leaders on actions that they can do to create more flourishing environments?

Yeah, I mean, this is an all-day discussion. But I would say the starting point, and this is one of the ideas from my upcoming book, the idea of presence engineering. How do you create the right presence for yourself and for others so that they can be in the moment and and creating the right presence for relationships, presence for their own embodiment of who they are, but also the space that they're going to show up in, the actual environment. I mean, the physical environment. And if that physical environment is not in an office, it still has to have the intentional elements of how are we meeting? And when we meet, are we creating the meeting environment that actually supports the people who are showing up? So, there's all those things we have to think through that we don't just slap things together and just hope that magic happens, that we have to actually be intentional about creating the right containers for things to happen. And that's what really creates flourishing is that people feel like they're supported in every moment by the right containers of relationships, of the ability to show up as themselves, but also to know that the spaces that have been created are meant for them to show up and bring their presence, they can focus, and they can connect.

I love presence engineering. And you have a powerful framework you call the Illumination Framework.

Yes.

Walk us into the components of the Illumination Framework through which we can create environments for people to be more present.

Yeah, so I mean, first of all, who doesn't love a good framework, right? But the Illumination Framework, first of all, it was born from this idea that You know, we are often walking around feeling like there's something that's missing in terms of our own inner spark. And the illumination comes from us finding that, discovering what's missing, which is the first part of illumination. And discover, that first journey is the most important one. Discover is looking inside and just seeing what's been left behind. This is the part where people are saying, okay, what is, What have I sidelined? Maybe something in the past, an identity or a thing that I've kind of said that didn't fit into my professional persona, didn't fit my title. So discovery is the first part of the framework. The second part is distill. It's like, how does that thing that I discovered, how can I find a place where it serves my current purpose? How can I use what I've learned and discover and apply it in the world that I'm in, in the container that I'm in? And then there's the next part, which is design. Design is, you know, really gets into that presence engineering in a very big way because what it— if you just take a person who's discovered all these pieces, starts to play with them a little bit, but they don't have the support of the right people and the right environment, then what's going to happen is they're going to struggle to find ways to bring that to light. So environment is such a critical part, designing that with intention and bringing the right people on board to support you, critical. And then the last part is deliver. Deliver is really about making sure you're taking the steps day in and day out so you can create the path so this can be a sustainable action. One of the things that I talk about in the book, and this is something that really is important, is once you become someone who's gone through this journey, you become the lighthouse for others. Your light, once you've revealed it, becomes a guide for others to do the same. And so the way you sustain your light is by shining on others and not to be bright, not to be the brightest one, but just to make sure you guide others on the path.

You know, the ikigai model for purpose and meaning, something we use quite often in our work. With organizations. I think discover is looking at what do you love and what you're good at and where are you using them or you're not, right? And how could you? There's a story of a client of mine, and this was a foreman who worked in a manufacturing site, really driving this one part of the operation. And every Thursday, he used to leave early. And that was just, that was how he worked. And he left always early.

Yeah.

And we were doing some work with them, and we actually asked, like, hey, what happens Thursday afternoon? You're really, really— he's always gone. And he said, well, I love coaching. So I coach the kids' baseball team. Not his kids' baseball. His kids are all grown.

Oh, that's so cool. Yeah.

Right? He teaches the kids' baseball team. And I said, why? What about it? He said, I really love it. And so the idea became, so you love— Do you like coaching baseball? She said, no, I like coaching. I like seeing these kids develop into something, get better over time, et cetera, et cetera. Now, this was a factory that employed 1,000 people. They had new people they were bringing in. And we said, what if we could create an opportunity for you to coach here, not as a replacement for your baseball coaching, but actually a big part? You've been here for 15, 20 years. He said, nobody expects me to coach. That's not expected of my job. But if I could do that, I would love that. And he had so much to give because he knew the factory for 20 years. In fact, his father worked at the factory before he did, right?

Brilliant.

And I think that example of that shift where he discovered it, he designed it, he distilled it to like, yeah, here are some ways in which I can actually integrate into the new hire onboarding program. And really highlight how things are done, resources that are available. He designed it with the help of his plant manager to be able to make it happen. And I think both the attrition numbers for the people coming in has gone down. He feels more alive because he's really harnessing a strength that he had and what he loves into his workplace that actually otherwise would have gotten untapped.

Yes.

And I love this SMART framework because I think it offers a good roadmap for so many others to actually go do that, take the power in their hand to come alive.

Thank you for saying that. And that's such a great example too. One of the things that had me, has me thinking about in this moment is, you know, people often say like when you have like a side hustle or when you have something that you do outside of work that gives you joy, when you come to work, you actually feel energized. Right. You've heard that before, right?

Yes.

And so this is the same things at play here, right? But what's great about it is that you don't necessarily have to be off doing it in some other compartmentalized part of your life. You can actually do it as part of your work. It's almost like bringing the, it's like bringing it all together and finding a way so you don't have to be like, well, if I don't find time for that other thing, I'm actually bringing that other thing into my work. And it's becoming something that I can feel as though I don't have to actually leave my other part of my life. I can actually bring a little bit of that light into my work.

Yeah. And, you know, Tony, for our listeners who are listening to this example and listening to your framework and still are not believers, look up the work of Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski at Michigan Ross at the Center of Positive Organizations. who have shown over the last 25 years that job crafting is one of the most powerful interventions around high-performance cultures where people feel alive. It's giving people the agency to task craft, change their tasks, to relationship craft, and to cognitively craft to infuse more meaning at work, rather than spend the majority of your waking hours doing something That has no meaning other than earning you a paycheck. So it is not just Tony's crazy idea or Ashish's one-off story. They've shown job crafting works in all jobs, in all industries, from janitors to surgeons to engineers to construction workers to teachers. This is present in every industry.

Yeah.

And as leaders, running a session and actively creating an environment and helping people come alive is the biggest gift That you can give to your people, to yourself, to your customers, and to your shareholders, because it is truly allowing you to grow the pie.

Love that. And one of the things I'll just add to this, and this is something that I haven't mentioned in a very long time, because I used to, when I got into this work initially, I was thinking to myself, like, you know, everyone always focuses on, oh, how do we keep our employees engaged? And how do we keep them, you know, staying longer or what have you? And I'm like, well, that's all fine and great, but I think there's an element of this that really is missing. And that is, how do we enrich the lives of the people in our work, in our workplace? And that enrichment element has been at the back. It's been in the back of my mind since, you know, probably at least 8 years now. And now that I'm in this, you know, talking about this particular book and this idea and the things that I'm working on now, I'm seeing it in full, fully on display because that enrichment is what we want for people. We need to leave people who come into our work, into our workplaces, Better than we found them. Give them an opportunity to make their lives richer by allowing them to advance their own sense of who they are. Don't just engage them, enrich them.

Yeah, I love it. And here's the reason why. I'm borrowing from something I read from the book by Bob Chapman, who I deeply admire. He wrote a book called Everybody Matters. He said, you need to do why, and you need to enrich them and enrich their lives because every one of them is somebody's child. And wouldn't you want that? for your child, that the work that they do, the time they spend at work is helping them grow, get nourished, and not just create riches in bank accounts, but actually to live a richer life.

That's a mic drop moment right there. I'll just say it. I love that. You're spot on. I mean, I think this is exactly how we'd be thinking.

I think it's brilliant. I love that you're focusing so much on that because I think that message needs to be so echoed. So many people think their job as employers is just to pay people and give them benefits. And they're completely missing such a big impact that they can have in the lives of the humans that work there. Yeah.

And I'll just say that people probably would work for far less money and far less benefits if you give them the opportunity to enrich themselves.

Yeah, absolutely. So Tony, as we bring our conversation, we could talk for hours, my friend, together. I would love to, at some point, host you in Boulder for something we do together. But what are 3 practices you might invite leaders to do this week, right now, when they listen to the podcast, that would help them enrich lives, be more alive, and truly light the spark that lives in all humans?

So I'm going to start with the first practice, which is my 2-list practice. And the 2-list practice is somewhat simple. But it's probably going to be a challenge for a lot of people. The decisions that only you can make, that's the first list. You know, sometimes you prefer to do certain things because you've been doing them over the years, but like take 5 minutes and pick one item and hand it over to someone else so that you can put on your team and outsource it to them and give them creative license to do that. You know, this making that list of just of everything that only you can make, sometimes you'll find out that Maybe not all of the stuff that I'm doing are only for me. And if I gave it off to somebody else, that might give them that spark that they need to be able to take on something interesting. When you make that first list, then you're going to have a list of what am I going to pass on to somebody else? And that list is like, is going to be hopefully much longer.

Yeah. So this notion of what are some decisions you make, put them into list number 1. These are the ones only you can make. You have the capability. They're too big. They're too risky. They're the big, bold moves. Keep them with yourself. You have a second list, which is you prefer to make them, or you might just be making them right now, just not because you prefer, but that's just the identity you've given yourself.

Yeah.

And Tony, your invitation is take that second list and start with one. Try— take the smallest one there, give it to somebody, see what that enables for you. And if that works for you, then do the next one. Do the next one till your focus is on the decisions that only you can make. And by passing these to others, you're actually allowing others to grow, step up, learn, and scaling your leadership and passing life energy to others while keeping your life energy because now your cognitive capacity is not being directed to things that you don't need to do.

Yeah, exactly. Our second practice, name one capability that you have that you're willing to claim that you haven't claimed before. It could be something like, uh, you know, I'm someone who is great at bridging between people. I'm a great bridger. We'll use that term. Or it could be something like, you know, I'm more creative than I might, than I'm giving myself credit. And I'm going to just claim that. Or, so that's one part of it. The other part is do that for somebody else. What are you noticing someone else that they may not have said to you, but you've noticed it in their work? And allow them to know to take that capability and play with it more at work. Use it in their work. Find projects that can be applied to that capability. So that's the invitation.

I think it's brilliant. This notion of asking people, you can ask people, hey, what is, what is something that I'm really good at also?

Yeah, absolutely.

And then telling them what they're good at. And you might assume that they know, but you'll be surprised how many people might not actually realize it. I'm reminded of that first story you started with. that her boss noticed, but she maybe noticed it, but kind of silenced it. And by actually noticing and leveraging more of that, just created something that, you know, was already existent. You don't have to go create new things, but use it in a different way.

Permission to allow that to show up more. And that's exactly what that embodies. So it's like giving that, it's, you're starting to create an environment That allows people to express more of that capability, but naming it, oftentimes we're witnessing it in people, but they're not claiming it. Now we're giving them the permission to claim it and then apply it.

Love it. And what's practice number 3? Bring us home, my dear friend.

Yes, it's a question. So it's changing at least one question that you often ask yourself. So in your next team meeting, instead of what's your status or what's the status update? What surprised you this week? You know, changing the way that you're asking questions so that it actually brings in a little more of the aperture of what's possible. So instead of like, hey, you know, how's that project going? You know, what about the project is interesting to you? What are you finding that's really surprising about that project? Changing the way you're asking questions changes the way you look at the things that you're doing.

It's a lot more beautiful question. And I think you've given us lots of beautiful questions. To practice with as we go through our day. What makes you most alive? What are we missing? How could we change the way you do things or we do things? And now this one, what surprised you this week? Tony, thank you for doing this powerful work around changing our workplaces and teaching leaders how to enrich the lives of those that they employ to make them feel more alive and to truly create organizations where Work is love made visible. Thank you.

Truly a pleasure and honor to be here. Thank you so much and looking forward to more conversations, my friend.

Thank you for joining me on The Flourishing Edge. If today's conversation inspired you, share it with someone who's ready to flourish too. Subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected for more tools to achieve breakthrough performance through flourishing. Until next time, keep learning, practicing, and growing into your fullest potential.