Driving Deep Organizational Change with Robert Quinn

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential, integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host, Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the best selling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode, we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for happiness together. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Happiness Squad where we share tips and strategies to make flourishing your competitive edge. Today we are honored to have Professor Bob Quinn, a distinguished professor from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and a co founder of the center for Positive Organization scholarship. With over 18 books, including the influential Deep Change and the Positive Organization, Bob has reshaped our understanding of leadership, organization, change and flourishing at work. In today's episode, Bob shares his profound insights on achieving true happiness through pursuing one's highest purpose, the distinction between incremental and deep change, and the crucial role leaders need to play in fostering well being at work. Bob also shares his own journey of personal transformation from his young years as a missionary and the dark nights that resulted in him pursuing, or should I say creating, the field of change management which was practically nonexistent at that time. Get ready to be inspired by Bob's vision of a world where work can be a source of fulfillment and growth, where leading chains means embracing risk, learning faith and courage. This conversation, dear friends, was more than just an exploration of concepts. It offers a roadmap for personal and organizational transformation throughout, filled with actionable and specific tools that you can deploy right away to truly create an environment of flourishing at work for yourself and for the organizations you lead. Hi Bob. It is so amazing to have you with us to share your insights from your lifetime of work on flourishing and change. Thank you for joining us.

It's a pleasure to be with you, my friend.

You know, there's so many different definitions, you know, of happiness and flourishing and thriving and well being people Throw around all these different words. I just want to one start with a very personal definition for you. Right. What does happiness mean to you? And over your years, how has that actually changed?

I think in the conventional language, for most people, happiness is pleasure. It's the absence of pain, it's being joyful. I think that definition's fine. But it seems to me that there's a much more meaningful definition of well being. And that is I'm in the state of pursuing my highest purpose. If I have a highest purpose and I'm having a good day, I pursue my purpose. If I'm having a bad day, I pursue my purpose. And if I pursue my purpose on a bad day, the bad day becomes a good day. Now, what that definition does is it takes us from helplessness. That is, happiness is an accident. If everybody's treating you well on a given day, then you're happy. The boss is not yelling at you, you're happy. It's quite a different thing to, to have that come from the inside out. And I think that's what purpose does for us. It allows us to become internally rather than externally driven. And it changes the very meaning of happiness, of success, of all those kinds of words.

Yeah, I love that. Right. Purpose and meaning shows has shown up in every wisdom tradition forever, Right. It's in the Stoics philosophy, but even way beyond. You know, there is this notion in Hinduism and yoga sutras around Swadharma, which is, what's your reason? Right? What is your purpose? What are you pursuing? And Nietzsche talked about those who have a why can survive anyhow. Right? I love this notion of when you are tuned in, a happy life is a meaningful life. If you want to cultivate happiness as a state, pursue meaning not just on your good days, but even on bad days. Because the pursuit of that makes that bad day has the potential to make that bad day at least a meaningful day, if not a happier day. Right. So you are one of the deepest experts, the most, I think you're in the top, top 1% of the people who are quoted on change in every research work that has been done over the years. And you in your book, you wrote a book, Deep Change, and you really articulate how change is different from deep change. And the key tenants of what makes something a deep change share that insight. Because I found that so powerful, that distinction.

Most of the time we're engaged in incremental changes. Something disrupts us. That means we have a problem. We enter the state of problem solving. We use the logical mind to Return to equilibrium. And we do that all the time. Incremental change would be, I'm in third grade and, or whatever grade and they teach me that two plus two is four. The next day they teach me that three plus three is six. That's an incremental step forward. If I understand two plus two, then three plus three makes, you know, it's a logical next step. I've learned something. If the teacher says, how much is three times three? Well, I'm in big trouble because that's an entirely different paradigm. I don't understand multiplication as opposed to addition. In our lives, we develop theories of who we are, of what the world is and how it reacts. It's a very hierarchical theory. It's very ego driven. We have a name for it. We call it exchange theory or transactional theory. And one of the first assumptions is risk management. In fact, we have a scientific concept called the conservation bias. And what that means is if you say something that disrupts my belief system, I work very, very hard to defend my belief system. That is you. And I have a bias towards past equilibrium.

Yes.

And preserve. So that means everybody, everybody on the planet has that tendency. So to have a purpose is to see something in the future and to go after it and not know how to get there. You get there through learning by experience. So you hold your purpose, you take action, you reflect, you fail or you succeed. You assess the difference, you institute another experiment and you go forward. Learning by experience. None of us want to do that. We want to be in control. We want predictability. We want to minimize risk. Now, another basic way to say this is everybody understands that knowledge comes from learning. So learning is, is the parent of knowledge. Knowledge hates its parent. Right? It doesn't want. Once we know something, we don't want to learn. If we have enough to get by, we can satisfy. Transformational learning is being engaged in learning from experience, pursuing a purpose or fending off a crisis, and because of it, having a dramatic set of insights around the things you're wrestling with. It is a new perspective, a new way to see the world. When that happens to you, you feel an enlargement of consciousness. You feel an increase in positivity. You feel that you have capacity you didn't have just a few minutes before. That is there's an instantaneous shift where you stop living in fear, where we all live all the time, and you start to live in confidence. I see this thing, I can learn my way into this thing, and you enter a new life state. When I talk about that People listen to me from the fixed worldview and they say, no, no, it's not a. This is not about the fixed worldview. This is about the fact that we live in continuous change. We are constantly dying, if you will, because we deny the fact that we need to make deep change. When we do make deep change, our contributions in the world go up dramatically. So we're talking about a kind of change that happens to us but that we usually deny and that we don't understand very well at all.

Yeah, it's beautiful. And I love this quote from you that I'm going to read. I think it says, I think the land of excellence is safeguarded from unworthy intruders. At the stand, at the gate stand, two fearsome sentries, risk and learning. The keys to entrance are faith and courage. That really spoke to me. Right. We are risk averse and we only learn. In fact, there's so much of confirming bias even when we do learn, want to try and learn. And so I think this notion of faith, bigger purpose and courage. Right, courage. We are going to feel out of control when we try to make shifts away from the land of what we know, the land unknown, and to be able to walk, that is how we get to where we need to go. Right.

Yeah. In 2020, in the year 2000, Kim Cameron and Jane Dutton and I launched a new field of study called positive organization scholarship. It was about the same time that positive psychology was launched. And the basic argument we made was social science is very good at telling us about the middle of the curve, what's normal. It's very weak at telling us about the right side of the curve. That is what is excellence? We said we have to begin to ask the question, what does individuals, groups and organizations look like at their very best? Well, a lot of people bought into that. There have been many, many studies. And we've come to understand a lot about the right side of the curve, about excellence. And the reason that quote, I think resonates with you is excellence is always out there. It gets denied for a lot of reasons, but it is not normal behavior. Excellence by definition is deviance from the norm. And so you have to go someplace you've not been before to experience excellence. And that's a terrifying notion because you have to trust the process of learning.

Yeah. And I love your work. Right. I mean, I discovered that work too late in my transformation consulting career. It's a shame. I think it should be a must, must read, frankly, the amazing work you all are doing. For anybody who enters their first year in consulting, not for, not to discover it 20 years into it. And I actually think, you know, as much as I think positive psychology is talked about, right? And how many people quote positive psychology? I think the work that you and Jane and Kim have been leading is actually more powerful and more needed because individual change without organizational change is just not possible. It's just not possible. And in fact, that's part of the reason why many well being interventions today fail. They all focus on the individual. But unless we actually change the organization and move it towards the positive deviant, deviance of excellence in pursuit of that excellence, everybody is going to try and get us to the base, right? Get to the average. So talk to us a little bit. You know, you had shared when we last chatted, Bob, your own personal story of how you got to kind of fall into this field and then really dedicated your life to this, your own personal story. So share a little bit of that. Your own experience of transformation and deep change and how that inspired you to pursue this work, your life's work.

Well, the early in my life, I was 19, I was a missionary. I had been gone through a conversion process and that work was brutally difficult. And I went through several dark nights of the soul. The first one involved committing to the work, buying the purpose to the point that I was willing to endure the pain of doing the work. That was a big decision. And it came out of a dark night of the soul. Another dark night of the soul came around the process of learning. And I ended up getting a notebook and every night assessing every interaction I had that day and asking, was that effective or ineffective? Why and what should I do differently? And then from those notes, squeezing out a set of action principles and then formulating a strategy for the next day to interact more effectively. And doing that day after day after day after day. What happened is I became deeply attuned to human interaction and what it is that differentiated effective communication from normal communication. And I began to apply those principles. And it made a big difference. But I still wasn't successful. So here were two major decisions. Still not successful. And then I went through a third, dark night of the soul. And the discovery was I had to transcend my own ego. I had to do what I did for your sake, not mine.

It's a big shift. It's a big shift.

Oh, it's a huge shift. And the moment I did that and I put those three things together, commitment, learning and ego transcendence. Everything changed overnight in miraculous ways. Suddenly the impossible was possible. My relationships were different. And I had profound experience far beyond anything I could have previously imagined. And then the two years were up, and I went back to school, and they handed me 101 English and 101 math. And I was absolutely alienated it because it was so meaningless compared to what I had experienced. And I got depressed, and someone told me that. I said, oh, I'm not depressed. And he walked away. And I said, I'm depressed. And I said, I've got to figure out what I'm going to major in. And I went through. I used fasting and prayer and all the tools I could find, and I couldn't solve it. And then one day, I was fasting and praying, and I was walking across campus, and it was like I got hit by a bolt of lightning. The lightning was a question. The question is, what was the most significant thing you've ever done in your life? And I could answer that question instantaneously. It was when I talked to someone in the fashion I just mentioned, and they went, oh. And they changed their life dramatically, forever. It was clear to me that was the most significant thing I ever done. And as that answer went to my head, this voice inside me said, major in change. That was absolutely exhilarating. It pulled together everything I'd ever done. It made perfect sense. There was only one small problem. There was no major in change. So basically, I was now in a Buddhist cone. That is, you know, what's the sound of one hand clapping you? You can't solve that. You have to be with it until it solves itself. Well, as I was with that answer that I was so excited about, I began to formulate rules. As a sophomore in college, I was a better teacher than almost any professor that I took. Now, that sounds like a ridiculous statement. The professor knows 10,000 times more than I do. How could I be a better teacher? Well, the difference is the professor knew content. The professor did not have a theory of human influence, a theory of great teaching. I did. So I made a rule. I would not ever take a class. I'd only take professors. That is, I would only sit in the classroom of great professors. Now, to do that meant I had to fight the university. The university does not want you to be a proactive consumer. It wants you to say, yes, ma', am, yes, sir, and do what it tells you to do. Well, now I was fighting the university for my education. I was a proactive consumer. I had to figure out my own path to get into those classrooms. I had to. So anyway, I did that. I started to go to Public lectures, because they were about change. I never went to a public lecture. I read every book I could find. By the time I finished my undergraduate education, I had a major in change. My certificate said major in sociology, but that's not what I graduated. I graduated in change. That was an astounding thing. I had structured my own education. It was exhilarating. It made me different than all the other students because. And then it just made sense. At that point, organization development was being born. I went to graduate school, studied that, and then, you know, I did research on change. I wrote papers on change, I consulted on change, because I had this one word. Everything was synergistic. That made me different than all the other assistant professors. So it was a very, very important journey at a very young age. Yeah.

And such an inspiration. You know, I speak quite often at the University of Colorado at the Leeds School of. And, you know, I'm going to share this podcast when it comes out with them because I think your story is a big inspiration, should act as a big inspiration. Right. Is really first tune into what is it that you really want to do that are you being called to do, and then have the courage to pursue it. Right. Recognizing that our university systems and others are not designed necessarily to support you, but if you take the charge, if you take the initiative, you can make that happen. You know, I had the same experience when I was at McKinsey, you know, our programs, you know, at many of the consulting firms, it's the same. You know, you grow up, you become a partner in a particular field, either in a sector or in a function. And then, you know, as a, as a partner, you know, you grow that practice or do you use that expertise to drive more impact and through that, more sales and more success for yourself and for others who work with you? You know, I had my own fight with the dark knights, so to say, in 2016, you know, that was about 14 years. That was about, I think, 12 years I'd been at the firm. I was a sixth year partner, so it was a very senior partner at that point. And, you know, when I found my calling to really dedicate my life to. To helping individuals and organizations integrate. Not research more, but practice more. Integrate what we knew could help people flourish into their lives and completely change, you know, and the firm wasn't designed for that. But yes, it took a couple of years of fighting, but then as I became more and more successful because I had the courage to carve my own path, you know, I got all the blessings from the firm to Go do that. Till one day I outgrew the firm and decided to start Happiness Squad. But this is something that, you know, I wish more people did. People did as early as students. Because what we don't control is the fact that we have to work hard. But we can at least work hard climbing our mountain versus some other mountain that we reach at the top in our late 30s, 40s and realize, oh my God, wrong mountain. Let me start over again. But listen, you know, I am really, really excited about this because we are at a very interesting point in time. You know, the post Covid world is very different than the pre Covid world because it forced the whole world to stop, right? And that in that stopping naturally people became introspective because there wasn't a lot of things out there to distract ourselves or to keep ourselves busy. And people started looking for meaning and people started asking questions around, you know, how are things going? And not liking the answer. You know, the field of flourishing, wellbeing, all of a sudden, lots of momentum, lots of movement towards that started happening. But with that is also coming a lot of disillusionment, right? Spends have gone up, outcomes haven't. You know, there are lots of things happening. And as you know, Bob, at the heart of what we are trying to do with Happiness Squad is really to drive that change. And I truly believe the nature of that change where we don't do flourishing outside of work, but we change the work. So flourishing is an outcome, is a type of change that is really deep change. It requires taking risks because leaders can force their people to work all night, all day, use control, command to get productivity, or lead differently around some of the practices that we are creating. And you've been at the intersection of both these fields, flourishing through all of your positive organization, scholarship, work and change. And what advice would you have to these change makers? You know, all of these people who are doing well, being chief Happiness officers, Chief well being officers or other individual practitioners, HR leaders who really want to make well being integrated into the workplace. What advice would you have for them? What are some steps you might suggest they take?

That's a huge question, but a very good question. And the basic problem is that from the time we're at our mother's knee and she says, because I told you so, we learn a theory of social life. And that theory we can call conventional theory or transactional theory. And it's about hierarchy, it's about power, it's about obtaining power, it's about survival, it's ego driven, it's Self interested in fact. If you say to the economists, what are the first three assumptions of economics? The answer is people are self interested, rational actors, resources are scarce, conflict is natural. Now they make those negative assumptions because they do thousands of studies. That's what they find. That's the real world. If you talk to, you know, starting in 2000, Kim Cameron and I circled the globe many times talking to audiences about social excellence and positive organizing and positive leadership. We would be with a group of executives for a week. They would sit on the edge of their seats. They loved every word we said. On Friday morning. I would say, what are you going to go home and do differently? And instead of doing this or this, they did this right. They had a look of terror. And it took three years to figure out, why is this consistently happening?

Why are they terrified?

And the answer is they know that if they go home on Monday morning and they say, I want to try this new process technique concept that there's two people on their team who are going to roll their eyes and the eye rollers are going to say something like, oh, did you learn this last week at that seminar? Executives, highly educated, powerful, well paid people, live in terror of that sentence. That's called negative peer pressure. Our organizations are filled with legions of people who are oriented to fear. Everyone is, and threatened by learning. And when you suggest, let's do something differently, they're going to manage you, the culture is going to punish you. That's why behavior aggresses to the meat. That's why organizational change is so difficult. That's why most of the time change efforts fail. And so I get trapped in my own fears and I don't. Even if you just think about the eye rollers, I'm a team Leader. I have 100 ideas this week about how to improve the team. But every time I have to stop and think now, if I introduce this idea, what are the eye rollers going to say? Now just stop for just one second and think about that story and what it implies. Who's running the company? It's not the team leaders, it's the eye rollers. And so everything gets nailed to the status quo. And so if you're going to lead change, you're going to have to leave the middle of the curve. You're not going to do that. In fact, I've interviewed hundreds of executives about this. I said, why don't you know, why is it that executives are managers and not leaders? Why don't they lead change? And they say, well, if I'm being Asked to lead this change, I don't have all the skills I need, and if I fail, I will be punished. So the first answer is fear. The second answer, I haven't seen my kids for a week. I am exhausted, right? Where do I get one more moment of time? Number three, I know the change they're asking me to make is going to do positive harm to my direct reports or my suppliers or my customer. And they won't listen. I feel full of shame. Number four, in order for me to bring about this change, I have to deal with people beyond my silo. Those are my peers. I don't have any authority over them. They think this is a tournament. What do I do about that? I have no power. Number five, I have a boss. My boss says he or she wants me to lead change, and then they behave. So I can't behave. Lead change, and I can't talk about it. Number six, culture. The culture is a living system that punishes deviants from the norm. It punishes negative deviants, and it punishes positive deviants. So I feel fear, I feel shame, I feel exhaustion, I feel conflict. I. Down the list, right? I can't say in a public setting, I. I'm full of fear. I can't say that in an organization. I can't say I'm ashamed. I can't say my boss is a hypocrite. In other words, I can't tell the truth. And I live in fear. Now, when I feed those back to executives, the room goes deep, deadly still. You can hear a pin drop. They all know that that's true. That's the world they live in. So we have people who know for sure, because they've got 20 years of experience, that they're going to be punished if they ever lead. So why would anyone ever lead? Now, the only answer to that question is, I care more about a purpose than I do about my ego. It is only then that I will endure the pain of leadership, which means the pain of learning. And, you know, there was. I'm going on too long. But let me just summarize with one quick story. I'm at a major company. There's a wonderful woman from South America, very gentle woman. She says, we have 1600 executives. I said, that's a lot of executives. She said, when I meet them, they fall into three groups. The first group's very tiny. It's made up of leaders. I know they're leaders because when I meet them, I want to be like them. The second group's huge. It's Made up of managers. They intellectually understand leadership. They can talk the talk of leadership. They just don't do it. The last group is very tiny. It's made up of technicians. They may never understand leadership. When she said that, it blew me away because for 45 years I've been going into organizations. I've seen that for 45 years. I was never smart enough to articulate it. She articulated it beautifully. So basically what we're saying is that hierarchies, for many, many reasons are anchored in the status quo. Leadership is punished. We seldom ever see leadership in organizations and this really offends people. They say I'm a leader. No, you hold a position. You may be the CEO of a company. That doesn't make you a leader. That means you have a position. You may be the team leader. You have a position.

We hope you're enjoying this episode. If you'd like to start building habits and integrating the Hardwired for Happiness practices into your life, come check out Rewire our program on the Happiness Squad website. Rewire contains 35 minute micro practices that can help you truly build habits for a happier, healthier life filled with more love and meaning. The program uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to support you in moving from knowing to doing to being. Now back to the episode. And the converse is so true too, Bob. In this work, which is you might not have a position, but you can be a leader, right? You can be the creator of that positive change.

That is the single. You know, if I were to boil something down, I mean, that's kind of the central message of positive leadership, positive organization scholarship, is that you can lead. And they say now that's why you get this reaction, right? That is they know they can't, but you're telling them they can. I'm telling them they can. And the way they do that is they have to become positive deviants. But they're not going to do that if they stay in the theory taught to them at their mother's knee, the one that dominates social life.

Yeah. In this work, you know, I'm seeing more and more where you can show up. First it was about belief or like this is the right thing to do. You go to the heart. Now we have the data from the science of flourishing and well being and the impact, right? We know organizations that are flourishing have 2x stock market returns. They have higher profitability, higher productivity, they have lower attrition, they have more creativity. We know these are causations, not correlations. Right. But to your Point, unless we actually get to the heart, to the fear, to the emotional state that keeps people stuck, we're not going to make the change that is so needed that leads.

To the next problem. And the next problem is, you and I, again, are trained from the time we could talk, to engage in rational persuasion. Basically, the lowest level of consciousness and influence is logic. And yet we live in the world of logic. We absolutely engage the expert role. And that's how we approach each other in organizations. We attempt to persuade each other. When that fails, one of us goes to political power and we impose our will in some way on the situation. So basically, you have rational persuasion and then coercion. Rational persuasion, coercion. All of that revolves around that theory we talked about, that transactional theory, which embraces the notion of authority. The alternative path goes from authority to inspiration. If people are afraid, if they have a belief system that leads to the status quo, you're basically in the process of trying to convert them. That means bringing them to a new worldview. That's like a religious change.

It's a deep change. It's a deep change in your belief system.

Exactly right. And executives don't know how to do that. There's one CEO, I just love this. He says to his executives, I do not want you to hold your people accountable. I want you to have your people hold themselves accountable. Now that's, you know, that sounds cute. That sounds funny. It's interesting, but it's really unfair. It's unfair because the people he's talking to, his direct reports, have no idea how to do what he's asking. How do I get my people to hold themselves accountable? That means I'm not controlling them like widgets. I'm inspiring them as human beings. I don't know how to inspire anybody. I did not take Inspiration 101 in my MBA program. Right. We're talking about something that's outside their conventional paradigm. And as change agents, we see the same thing. The consulting firm you worked with, 90% of what was done was gather information, make rational arguments. While they should engage this strategy as opposed to that strategy, they take the consulting report, they pay a million dollars, and they throw it in the garbage can. They repeat that process over and over again. Because the consulting firms don't know how to inspire people to change. It's, you know, it's just a problem that's ubiquitous. It's everywhere on the planet. And so I'll just stop.

Yeah, no, I think so. Yes. And, you know, the work that I was inspired, you know that I did learn, you know, and what I would say is we know how to. But again, many people, many projects don't have the courage to deploy the toolkit. So you know, this four part behavior model, you know, in all the work that I led Bob, once I learned it, you know, we integrated it into every program and that's how transformations, you know, flip the order of transformational success, right? So the four part model was number and they literally hit on all the different elements you just talked about. The first one was you had to explain the why people needed to understand why status quo was not an option and why change and why moving forward under uncertainty, as scary it was, was the only choice, right? So you had to explain the why. Because to your point, without it, people will go back to what I've always done because that's what's felt safe, right? There is no learning possible. The second was that they needed to know how you want them to do something different. You need to teach them because it's not taught, right? You have to teach them and you have to let them experiment and create an environment where it's okay to fail because nobody will get it the first time. You will make mistake. How do we create fail to safe experiments? Number three was if you wanted people to change, you needed to either create financial or other incentives, carrots and sticks. You needed to clearly articulate, you know, and measure it. Because to your point, unless we recognize and rewarded and celebrated the change makers eye rollers win. And the fourth, which was we found to be one of the most important factors and least actually implemented was as a leader, you want others to change. Be the change role model. Because if I tell you hold your people accountable, but then I'm holding you accountable to hold your people account, right? Let your people hold themselves accountable. But then I'm holding you accountable to let your people hold themselves accountable. I'm not exactly role modeling what I'm asking you to do, right? So when we found these four things in place, magically, we actually were able to move mountains. But if it didn't, you know, one, two, most of the time people did the first and the second, you know, they got the report said here's the reason why we need to do it. And then they did some training, but they didn't address the other two. And oftentimes, you know, you get this rise and then you get fall because as you said, the status quo, like our systems are designed to go back to the base, the normal, not positive or negative deviant, right? They don't stick around.

Yeah. I think that it's a matter of semantics, but I really think that the first step is the fourth step. If we're speaking from the point of view of leadership, as a leader, I've got to make that change first. What is the change? Well, I have to know what the why is. Most people I encounter, organizations cannot even conceive of an authentic purpose. Every company has a purpose now on their website, but it's a PR statement. It has nothing to do with reality. The notion of having a purpose that's the arbiter of every decision, therefore, an anchor of integrity, of collective integrity, is incomprehensible to people. In a world of transactions and survival that's amoral. The notion of a purpose that integrates everything is just not imaginable. But when you look at those companies you were talking about that are flourishing, they in fact have taken that step. If you boil that down to individual leadership, the reason I take on the culture is I've clarified my own why, and I'm stepping into my own commitment and learning process. And now I'm inviting you into it with integrity and with integrity, I'm inviting you. I'm helping you explore your why. I'm making it safe for you to fail to speak up. What I am simultaneously challenging you. One of the most interesting things about the research pattern is that the great leaders are high on task. They are not soft. They're very focused, and they're high on people. So they are showing people the why and the how. They're making it possible for people to learn by failing. In fact, if we look at the transformational leadership literature, there are four factors that hold across the world. Number one is idealized influence. Basically, I am transcending ego. I'm leading in a selfless way. I'm your servant. Number two, individualized consideration. I know who you are, and you know that I know who you are. You're a human being. You're not a widget that I'm manipulating. Three, inspirational motivation. I'm connecting you to a better future. I see potential in you you don't see in yourself, and I'm linking you to that. Number four, intellectual stimulation is a poor label, but basically, I'm extremely challenging you. Ask me a question, boss, how should I do this? I say, what do you think? I constantly challenge you to think for yourself. I give you assignments beyond your ability. I'm constantly pushing you to do more. And what happens? Well, if you feel that I'm absolutely selfless, that I'm not with an agenda, two, that I care about you, three, that I'm linking you to a better future. And four, I'm challenging you to live. That what happens to you, you begin to flourish. That's when you flourish. And if you're flourishing, you're more likely to invite others to flourish. So again, it's a matter of semantics. But I think someone, Peter Block once said, all social change begins when one person makes the private public. Now that's an incredible sentence. All social change begins when one person makes the private public. So we're bringing that private statement into the. And it's almost always a moral statement. Leading change is a moral process. Managing an organization is an amoral process. And our what we teach in business schools is amoral. It's about being smart, being clever, doing the best cost benefit analysis. It has nothing to do with selflessness, concern, inspiration and challenge. Right. That's not even a part of the model.

Right.

So it's an uphill battle, but the world is on your side in the end.

No, I love it. You know, in fact, the research there was this last year, McKinsey published this research. They were looking at 1800 companies. Bob. And I think this point that you're making is a really important one because in this field, oftentimes people do think about if you're creating a flourishing culture, you're soft. Exactly. Otherwise your performance. And here's the research that they did, which was really powerful. What they found was they looked at companies, they did a two by two companies that are performance drivers, companies that are people drivers, companies that drive neither performance or people. Right. There are those two, but then there are those who drive performance through people. And what they found was that companies that drive are both winners on performance and people, you know, profitability slightly higher, not much, 29 versus 28%. But you know what? When it comes to likelihood of outperformance, the positive deviance, 4.2x versus 3.3 point x. When it came to resilience, higher level of resilience compared to just performance. When it came to retention, significantly higher level of retention. And when it came to economic profit creation, way higher. So, you know, I think what you are inviting folks to think about is not think about these as polarities, like it doesn't have to be that way. Right. There is a way to drive performance through people, but it needs courage. You need to show up differently.

Well, I think it goes back to your word. I think you uttered a very important word in your initial statements when you said integration.

Yeah.

The logical mind differentiates Hot and cold, tall and short. When someone walks in a room and they're different, whether race, gender, age, the logical mind differentiates, no matter what the policies of the company say. We used to talk about diversity. We now talk about diversity and inclusion. That was an interesting step. I can hire someone in a group that's considered minority group. Let's say it's a woman. I bring her in and then I treat her as I've been socialized for 3,000 years to treat a woman. What I've done is made the company worse. I've got an angry woman, right? She may or may not be able to express it, but she's angry. I have more conflict. If, on the other hand, I bring her in and I treat her with respect and dignity and I listen to her and I make it safe for her to say what she feels, I now have a diverse opinion on the table, a diverse idea. In those teams you're describing, everybody is safe saying everything they feel. In the average meeting, in the average corporation in the world, the meeting looks like this. Everybody's sitting there like this.

Why are, why are their hearts crossed?

Yeah. Because underneath the table there's a herd of elephants. And the manager is terrified of those elephants. She doesn't know how to resolve conflict. And so everybody's got their arms crossed because no one trusts anybody. In a great team, that leader reaches onto the table, pulls up every elephant, sticks it in the middle of the table, and we talk about it until we resolve it. And when I have a leader and a team where all the elephants are gone and the arms are unfolded, now I have a magical outcome. Your brain and my brain and the brain next to me are all wired. Instead of having five different minds at the table, I have one mind at the table. Five brains working on one thing versus five individual brains in conflict. Yes, that's what those great companies look like. All the characteristics you just described, they stay because of that. They perform because of that. They take on hard tasks because of that. And the conventional ego driven mind, as taught by the theories of management in the world, cannot comprehend it. Right. It's simply not accessible to ego driven theory. So that's why in 1977, Abraham Zeleznick wrote an article in Harvard Business Review called the Twice Born Leader. It became the most controversial article in the history of the Review. People were furious. His basic argument was, until you're twice born. Now, twice born meant usually a crisis of some sort in your life. Maybe you got transferred to Mexico and you don't know Spanish. That's a crisis. Maybe someone dies, there's all kinds of trauma. But in that process, the ego dies. You know, you become vulnerable, the ego dies and you discover that you still exist. And at that point you become capable of leading. Now there were hundreds of letters saying, this is trash. They were really angry. Today, 50 years later, we have all kinds of literatures that say, you know, the post traumatic growth literature is excellent example. He was absolutely right. Now, once you've been through that rebirth once, the key is not going a second time through crisis, but by choice. And there are tools to help you and I to stay connected to emotional reality and material reality and expanded consciousness, to be in the state of learning and creation. But economic theory and management theory will not get you there right, because they are all based on ego.

So this has been an amazing conversation, Rob. I want to end with you saying a little bit about the latest project that you're working on and maybe even use this platform as an invitation to get some stories that you're looking for. So talk a little bit about your current project, please, and then we'll end with that.

I'm working on a book, trying to put together all all the other work that I've done in my life. So pulling on the 18 books and the many papers, research projects, and hundreds of consulting efforts, I'm trying to put all that together into a statement that makes sense. And the title is the Transformational Moment. And each chapter takes a piece of that. But at the end of each chapter, I'm asking a person to reflect on the chapter. Not intellectually, which would be the normal thing, but for them to find some word, sentence, phrase or paragraph in that chapter that helps them think about their own dark night of the soul, their own transformation, and to share that very vulnerable, intimate transformation, and to close their reflection by reflecting on the other such events and to share with us their insights about their own personal journey. The reason for that reflection is to help the reader do that reflection as well. So the purpose of the book is to get people past their blind spots, past their cataracts, and to see reality as it really is. Because reality involves the material world and economic theory. It also involves that which does not yet exist, but is coming into being. And that is also real. And in order to facilitate that, we have to be able to see beyond conventional theory. So I'm hoping in this last effort to produce a product that people can say, oh, now I get it right. So we'll see if that happens.

Well, thank you. I can't wait to read it. I hope you're able to get lots of stories the Transformational Moment thank you, Bob for just such amazing wisdom and for your lifetime, frankly, of just unbelievable work that you've been doing and your other colleagues, Jane and Monica and Kim and the rest of the staff and faculty at Michigan Ross and Positive Organization Scholarship Group. I'm really blessed to know you and to benefit from all the amazing research you all have done. So thank you and thank you for spending time.

What you're doing is deeply important, my friend.

Thank you, thank you. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care of and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.