How Positive Leaders Use Purpose and Meaning to Create Extraordinary Organizations with Kim Cameron Part 1

Employees are willing to give up a quarter of their salary if they have meaningful work to perform. People are willing to give up a quarter of their lifetime earnings in order to have meaningful work that has a profound purpose. And so on.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations to to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Hello friends. I'm Ashish Kothari, the CEO of Happiness Squad and I welcome you to our podcast where we share practical tips to make flourishing your competitive edge and help you achieve stellar performance powered by well being, not at its expense. I'm on a mission to help a billion people not just experience happiness as an emotion, but but really use it as a tool to unlock their fullest potential. If you're interested in learning how to make happiness your competitive edge, please make sure to follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter@happinesssquad.com today I'm honored to record the first episode of our two part series with one of my big time heroes in the field of human flourishing and positive leadership, Dr. Kim Cameron. Kim is one of the co founders of the center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan and and has dedicated his career to studying the power of virtues like gratitude, kindness and compassion in the workplace. With over 130 academic articles and 15 books, Kim is recognized globally as one of the top 10 organizational leadership scholars. In today's episode, we explored the concept of positive leadership, emphasizing its role in emphasizing and enhancing organizational performance and well being. We discussed the heliotropic effect that positive virtuous leadership practices have, including the critical importance of meaning and purpose in the workplace, the inherent human tendency towards generosity, and the power of appreciation and gratitude. By the end of this conversation, you will be equipped some real practical tools that you can start to implement right away to make flourishing your competitive edge. Let's dive in. Kim, it is so lovely to have you with us. Thank you for spending your precious time with me and our Happiness Squad listeners today.

Well, you're very kind for and I'm flattered to be involved. I know you've got very important and well known people. I'm not one of them, but thanks for the chance.

Oh my God, they're so humble. So Kim, you know Your work, your lifetime's work is so inspirational. And it's all in the domain of positive leadership. Now, leadership is one of the most bandied around words, right? Everybody's a leader. And there's so many different frameworks I want to, like, dig into for our listeners. When you say positive leadership, what are you referring to and what that means?

Yeah. Thank you. The word leadership. If you log on to Amazon.com, you find 60,000 books on leadership. I mean, holy cow. And lots and lots of adjectives, qualifiers that go before that word. Humble leadership, transformational leadership, and so on. Servant leadership. So this idea of positive leadership emerged from, really, from research on what are the factors that explained how organizations do so very well when they shouldn't. So, for example, I was doing research on organizations that were downsizing for about 10 years. There was. The results of that research have been confirmed by many other people, just not me. Is that downsizing almost always predicts deterioration in performance. Trust goes down, morale goes down, communication channels get restricted. Leadership anemia, it's called really difficult to lead an organization that's traumatized and stressed. And about 80 to 90% of organizations we studied that happened. However, that left 10 or 15% of organizations that flourished after downsizing. And the question is, what was the difference between the few that got lots better and almost everybody else that didn't? Now, I didn't at the time, I didn't have empirical data, but it became very clear to me that there was something unique about those organizations. And at the time, what I referred to that as virtuous practices and positive leaders. Well, what in the world does that mean? I mean, we didn't have any data that suggested that was the case. But for the most part, positive leadership ended up being a very prominent attribute of those organizations. And again, at the time, no empirical data. But since that time, we've gotten a lot of studies, conducted a lot of studies where the outcomes are extraordinary. So far, no disconfirming evidence has occurred. That is, when the organization has a positive leader. And that has to do with energy, it has to do with behavior, has to do with role models. It has to do with the extent to which, in fact, maybe the best summary, short definition is if other people, when you behave, your behavior, helps other people learn more, do more, dream more, become more, that's a positive leader, positive energizing leader, and a positive behavioral leader. That is, he helps other people do much better than they would have otherwise, and the organization does much better than it would have otherwise. So there are lots of attributes of that. But that's how all this emerged is, holy cow, there are some organizations doing far better than they should, far better than everybody else. Now let's figure out why that hurt, why that happened, and that's how all this emerged.

You know, I love it for a couple of things, and I think they're important nuances that I'll point out when you talked about this research, this study. Right. It's not that, you know, there are these organizations that let people go and these people who hadn't. Right. They all went through, you know, downsizing is never easy. They all went through it. But I think the point is, it's not the absence, but it's despite that, certain organizations did better. So I think it's important to recognize. Right. Because sometimes, you know, I think this whole world can become like, oh, you know, because people shrink. They're doing something that is not good. Right. Sometimes the business is needed. But I think the second thing that I highlight also for you is they perform better and they perform better because individuals perform better. And through that, organizations perform better. I love this notion of leadership that helps individuals learn more, do more, dream more, and become more rather than stay on status quo. Right. And that's what creates this notion of truly creates more positive outcomes. Right. And I love the words you call. And I want to talk a little bit about this notion of positive deviance. Right. And when I read that first in your work, I was like, yeah, like, you know, always we think about deviance one way. But I let you talk a little bit about why are these organizations. Right. Positively deviant, and in what ways, like what financial results were you seeing that showed that for sure there was something magical here.

Thank you, Ashish. The idea of positive deviance emerged because at least in English, the word deviance has a negative connotation. If I call you a deviant, that's normally a criticism.

Yes.

But deviance just means an aberration from the norm, unexpected, not normal behavior. So you can think of negative deviance. You can also think of positive deviance. That is extraordinary, spectacular. Not the norm at all, but on the positive side. And what's interesting is, I don't know for sure exactly the number, but 90% or so of medical research focuses on negative deviance. That is illness, heart disease, not doing so well. I'm feeling terrible, Covid. And so on. That's where medical science spends their time. Psychology is about the same.

Yeah.

Up until recently, especially. But for the most part, the field of psychology is focused on the negative that is depression, anxiety, stress, burnout, schizophrenia, and so on. As soon as I'm normal, as soon as I'm healthy, soon as well being is okay. I'm, I'm happy, I'm doing fine. That's essentially where psychology has stopped doing research. But on the right hand side, there is, or that is on the other end of a continuum, positive deviance. Physically positive deviance would be the ability to run an Ironman competition, 5% body fat for men, the ability to do 400 push ups, and so on. Psychology. There was a book written some years ago by a person who just passed away a year ago, Mike Shikszentmahi, entitled Flow. And you simply described a condition where people are so immersed in a task they care about, they lose track of time, they lose track of physiological needs. If you put electrodes on your brain, you're using more of your brain capacity than normal. It's not zoning out in front of a screen. Well, there's not much research on that. There's a little bit, but not spectacular cognitive, emotional, behavioral demonstrations. We don't spend as much time on that as we could. But that kind of performance, that kind of condition is typical of organizations who we ended up, we end up finding are positively deviant, they're spectacular, they perform far above the industry average, far above expectations, and individuals flourish and so on. So that's where that idea of positive deviance came from. Organizations and individuals who are significantly above the norm and unexpectedly. So.

Yeah, I mean, it's so, you know, in our own research, you know, I've been looking across, you know, all the different. I mean, there has been. You're absolutely right. First of all, most people study negative deviants, by the way, if I could say so, you, you are a positive deviant and I would love to be a positive. You know what I mean? Like, you're a huge inspirational model for me on how active you are, how much you've contributed, how much and the impact. Right. That you are able to create all through your life in so many different ways. You are in service to the world, to the students. I've seen you at the center.

You're very kind. You're very kind.

But Kim, you know, our research shows the same. Right. I was looking across and I always say, you know, the, my business case for flourishing is really simple. It is. You can get 2x more returns, you can get 12 to 30% more productivity, you can get 20% more profitability, you can get 65% lower attrition and 3x more creativity through this Work and we are seeing it. We looked at the Oxford research that just came out a year and a half ago. They looked at 100 plus companies in that portfolio and how that out competes others. We have Alex Edmond's work that looked at causation. I mean you've got 20 plus years of work. I mean it's. To me it was interesting as I actually started digging into this literature, how early this started and I am curious about this. When you started studying this, Kim, this wasn't like even in the consciousness. Right? Remember as you said, even in psychology. Positive psychology started 20 years ago with Marty saying, hey, we should maybe study what helps people flourish, not just what's helped, why people are languishing. What inspired that shift for you?

You know, it resonates with what sort of feels good to me and right to me. But the more I began immersing myself in this topic, the more it became confirmed in the following way. What I learned is that every living system, every human being, every plant, every single cell organism is attracted to and flourishes in the presence of positive energy. Yes, that is the right hand side of life giving energy. Einstein was the person who said light is simply nature's way of distributing positive energy. So everything is attracted to and flourishes in the presence of light. If you put a seed in the ground, it will grow toward the light. Photosynthesis, life happens only in the presence of light. Well, as it turns out that began to become very obvious that in organizations positive energy, positive emotions and so on create more flourishing and people are attracted to that. That is they tend to flourish and do better in that kind of environment versus a negative environment or even a neutral environment. So that became, we began to confirm that. I mean now there's all kinds of research having to do with brain waves, having to do with heart rhythms, having to do with the extent to which people are able to learn and have their brains expanded. More availability to more information. I mean lots and lots of work has now begun to confirm that people flourish in the presence of positive life giving energy. So once some of that research starts emerging, then you say to yourself, holy cow, I mean if this is real, if the heliotropic effect, meaning everything is attracted to light, the light or life giving energy, positive energy. If that's true, then it has big implication for all kinds of things and you know, incentive systems and how we rear our children and kind of relationships we formed. So it was not difficult once we found some evidence beginning to emerge to say gee whiz, we got to pay a Lot more attention to this. We got to spend some time and be really serious about research for the most part, by the way. I mean, I don't know of those 60,000 books on leadership, I don't know the percent, but I'll bet 90% of them are more are storytelling inspirational events. I mean it's, you know, the research or empirical evidence is very rare, very rare to read. Here's the experiment, here's the empirical data, here's the validated findings. Do this and you're guaranteed results. That doesn't happen much. So that's the sort of focus of this whole movement on positive leadership and positive energy. What's the data? What's the empirical evidence? How can I be very convinced that sure enough there is a theory and that there's an outcome that's been confirmed?

That's what I've loved about you and your colleagues, Jane and Bob, Quinn and Monica and so many others. And really the broader ecosystem of researchers that you're all pulling into and supporting in the center. So we can keep building on this work and really bring that evidence based practices and that are so critical versus just nice stories that don't, you know what I mean? Like they can be inspirational, but that's all it is, doesn't mean it work. Now at the heart of this work, you know, this heliotropic effect, these positive leadership organizations is what you said, they're virtuous. Right. There's a high degree of you do the right things even when it's difficult.

Yes.

Talk to me a little bit, Kim, about that concept of virtuosity and maybe bring it to life with me for a story of a company or a leader. Right. Who kind of really exemplified that.

So thank you. That's a wonderful cue because most of us know we have an idea about what virtuousness means, but essentially in the original Latin and Greek, it means the best or refers to the best of the human condition. The highest aspirations human beings have for themselves is a virtuous state. So if the world was virtuous, there'd be no war, no poverty. Everybody be well educated, we all get along. That's the. And so we're in an absent condition of virtuousness. But virtuousness means literally the best of the human condition. Well, what does that mean? That means people are kind to one another, they're compassionate to one another, they tend to forgive one another, they tend to be grateful to one another. It's grandmother's advice. You know, it's the kind of Thing we say, that's really the best we can be. Now of course there's the opposite of that, but permeates our environment. But for the most part, virtuousness is a demonstration of these attributes that we all consider to be admirable and kindness and love and forgiveness and compassion and so on are examples. So one of the things we've done is study organizations and trying to identify the extent to which those practices are evident or that they implement those practices. For example, in the United States there's a very well known financial services organization, it's called Prudential Financial. Well, Prudential was struggling financially in their retirement business. And the problem with that is if your retirement business is in trouble, that's essentially the should be the biggest part of the financial services organization. I mean, I'm not playing the stock market to try to earn a living. I'm rather just investing in a retirement account. Well, most people do the same thing.

Yeah.

Well, they knew because of consolidation in the industry that they were going to have to consolidate or merge with another firm. The other firm they selected was called CIGNA Retirement. They said they characterized that merger, that potential merger as like merging the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox baseball teams, bitter enemies, clashing cultures and so on. But they said, we have to do this if we're going to survive both of us. Well, the CEO of Cigna was appointed as the CEO for the merged organization, which they called Prudential Retirement. It just so happened he was a graduate of my university, so ended up showing up for some kind of an event and learned about what we were doing with regard to positive practices and positive organization leadership and so on. So he asked us to come and help him create a positive culture in this merged organization. We got two very different organizations. We're going to put them together. We want a positive organization. Well, we spent two or three years with them, helping them embed in their organization practices and a culture and so on. And John ended up saying, I'm not sure I can quote him exactly, but essentially this. He said, look, when I took over this organization, this positive theme just seemed like just being soft and soupy and syrupy smiles sing a happy tune. I discovered, however, that was very different than that. It changed our strategy, our incentive system, our culture, our approach to business, our way that we handle customers and so on. He said it's sort of revolutionized almost everything in our organization. And he said, we've gotten to the point where now our aspiration is to have our employees and our customers Rate us as well above average in all the technical aspect aspects of our business. But then he said, to succeed, above all, understanding we're so good, nobody understands how we got there. That's the aspiration. And then he said, we don't debate about how we're going to do it. We just take initiative. And then he said, if I wanted to control this movement, I couldn't. Way beyond my control. Well, as it turns out, within about three years, growth rate was 20% a year. That's five times industry average. Profitability was up, turnover was down, 90% of the clients stayed and so on. And maybe the big test of that was that five or so years later they attracted John away and had him become the president of the world's largest mutual insurance company. And that's a test because now come here comes a new CEO. Out with the old programs, in with the new programs and so on. They didn't miss a beat. His statement is well beyond my control was true. The culture had just taken this way beyond the single demand of a CEO. And the CEO, the follow up CEO Chris Marks, just fell in line. I mean that continued to continue to flourish. So that, I mean, that's one of an example. Let me give you one other quick one, please. We took 40 financial services firms and the reason for that is financial services has one goal. Show me the money. I mean, I don't care how you manage, I don't care how you treat employees. I just want a return. I mean, if stock price is not going up, I'm not going to buy your stock. So 40 firms we met with the senior executives, exposed them to positive practices. The theory, here's how you can do it in an organization and so on. Spend a day or so with them. And then we said, what we want to do is conduct a study about what happens to your output that is primarily financial performance, but also employee retention and productivity and so on, but mainly financial performance. We want to check and see what happens over a two year period of time. They said, okay, well some of the organizations implemented them and some of them didn't. So we measured the extent to which positive scores on positive practice have went up. And then at the same time we also measured financial performance. We could account for 45% of improvement in financial performance if the only variable, the only predictor, was the extent to which their scores on positive practices were going up. In other words, 45% of their outcome was due to positive practices. I mean, does anybody know how to predict 45% of Wall street performance? You know, so there's those kinds of studies that ended up becoming very compelling. And we essentially said we gotta know more about this.

Enjoying this episode. If you think someone you know could benefit from these insights, why not share the podcast with them right away? A quick share could make a big difference in someone's day. Thanks for spreading the happiness and being part of this happiness revolution with us. You know, I love it. And in both those examples, you know, especially the first one, I think Kim, you echo a core belief of the work we are doing at Happiness Squad which it comes to flourishing. I spoke about this at the COO Summit last week where I said flourishing and well being of employees has to go from being a side hustle to a core part of the strategy of the company. It has to permeate through. And it's no different by the way, I grew up in the field of operations. It's no different from how Toyota's production system was not just a production system for manufacturing or improvement initiative. It was the heart of the strategy. Six Sigma did the same for ge. It wasn't just a continuous improvement play. That was the heart of the strategy. And it takes time, right, to execute. And that's where we have to go. You know, you talk about most organizations I see wellbeing spend is up, we're doing a lot. But again where are we spending money? We're spending money on helping those who are struggling. Again, EAP programs are great examples. Or we have, you know, wellbeing seminars that we're running as things that people can join. But most business leaders don't think about that as the heart of their strategy. And I think that is a big massive shift. But if you do it to your point, 45% prediction is a pretty good deal, right? It's a pretty big bet. And this is the bet that I would make. I mean, which else things account for that much? I'll give you. It was funny you said 45%. You know, I was looking at Alex Edmonds work and I was doing a compounding effect. So his research on causation found 2-3 and a half percent incremental shareholder return year over year. Which if you compound over eight years, right. Again it's 30 to 50% incremental shareholder value creation. I don't know of any other strategy that actually can promise that. And I bet Kim, even though it wasn't there was probably another 20, 30% of the performance that was as a result of when you have an organization with more positive heliotropic leadership where we are lifting our game individually and collectively. In effect, you are creating a tighter connection between strategy and execution. So it's also amplifying, right, or in certain ways eliminating the disturbances that get in the way of great strategies not delivering the results they want.

Well, you've made big impact on lots of people because of all, because not only the work you've done, but because the work you summarize for others make, make available.

You're terrific now. Thank you. You know, and that's, I mean to me that's what I'm trying to do is look, you know, this is a 10 year field for me as I've dug into it. But I have, you know, 20 years of practice experience. I'm like, we know how to make at scale change happen in ops. And so imagine if we could create the next human operating system implementation approach just like we did when it came to operational improvements. Let's do it to our human assets, our people. So your all work is, you know, is so, so central to it. I want to dig into two practices today and maybe as part of another episode we do together, can we cover the other two? But I want to start with meaning and purpose and how it's such a critical strategy. You know, it's a positive leadership practice that can make a difference. So talk to us about why from your point, positive meaning is so important in the workplace.

The idea of meaning has been investigated in various ways. And one of the things I have a colleague who did some studies essentially surveys and discovered that employees are willing to give up a quarter of their salary if they have meaningful work to perform. Another one of those statistics he discovered is people are willing to give up a quarter of their lifetime earnings in order to have meaningful work. Work work that has a profound purpose and so on. That is having something that I feel like I'm making a difference, something I care about, something that's important to me and I can actually influence it. Something more important than just my own reward ends up being a very important motivator and a very important aspect of the human condition. That is human beings tend to be generous, tend to have, tend to be attracted toward making difference. Let me give you a couple of studies, please, that are not related to organizations at all. And then I'll come back because there are some wonderful organization studies. So this particular study is done with children ages 19 months now as it turns out, a 19 month old child is at the peak of having temper tantrums or physical aggression when they don't get what they want. I didn't know that, but that's the, that's the age. So they took a bunch of 19 month old children and the experiment was you put a child on a, on a floor with a tray in front of the child and then there's a barrier. On the other side of the barrier is an adult who drops a fruit treat in the tray. Okay, the question is, what will the child do with that fruit treat? Now there are two conditions. One is the adult reaches for it, desires it. The other one is the adult doesn't even pay attention. Well, when the adult doesn't pay attention, in only 4% of the cases does a child offer to give it back, otherwise they eat it. When the adult does reach for it, a large majority of the time the child will give it back to the adult. That is, they tend to be generous. Now the most important part of that study was, I think they had these children, at least some of these children miss lunch. So now it's 2 o'. Clock. I was supposed to eat lunch at 12, I'm 19 months old. If I don't get what I want, I have a temper tantrum. Adult drops the fruit tree in the tray, what happens? Answer. The child does exactly the same thing. Most of the time the child will hand it back to the adult. Even when they're starving. That is inherent. I mean, starting in 19 months or earlier, inherently there is this tendency to be generous, to contribute to somebody else. Here's another study. This is a study done with children who are ages three months to eight months. I mean, long before you're socialized, long before you learn language. So they put a child on a caregiver's lap, have them watch a puppet show for maybe 20 seconds. So a puppet tries to walk across the stage, tries to climb a hill, tries to open a box. Then you have two other puppets. One puppet tries to help support, encourage the other puppet tries to hinder, puts a block up, you can't make it up the hill, jumps on the box, you can't open the box. Then after 20 or 30 seconds, you bring these two puppets out, put it in front of the child, and the child can select whichever puppet he or she wants to play with. More than 90% of the time, the child select the puppet that tries to help rather than tries to hinder, that is, from the time you're three months, long before you learn language, you're socialized, any of those things. There is an inherent human tendency toward the positive, toward giving, and that's confirmed by another couple of studies. And I'LL stop with these. They're just interesting to me. This study was done with multiple sclerosis patients. Miss. Half of these people were assigned to receive a phone call once a week expressing love, support and concern to somebody. The other half of these patients were assigned to place a phone call once a week expressing love, support and concern to somebody else. Two years later. They measured self efficacy, confidence, competence, physical activity, hope, depression, so on. Eight fold difference. Those people who placed the phone call were eight times healthier than those people received the phone call. That is physically and as well as many. There's many other studies that confirm as human beings will flourish in the presence of generosity, kindness, consideration, contribution, and so on. All right, so that's sort of the inherent tendency toward, you know, virtuousness or meaningfulness, purpose. So in organizations, when you can get people to understand that there's something more important than just what I'm doing or my own benefit, the same thing happens. Here's one other study. This is more relevant to organizations. So one of our doctoral students who as an undergraduate had been employed as a telephone solicitor, telemarketer. I mean, does anybody like those people? I mean, we, we're just bothered by them and we hang up immediately.

You get a call and you hang up, right?

That's right. I mean, 95% of the time, people don't even hold a conversation. They hang up and so on. And of those who have a conversation, it's normally some old person who hasn't talked to anybody in a week. They just want to talk. Regardless. It's not easy. 325% turnover rate. I mean, it's not a great job. You can do this rapidly and enthusiastically or you cannot. You can just be lackadaisical and do it periodically. All right, well, today in the University of Michigan, I'm sure there's a bank full of people, students with telephones calling alumni, asking for money. That's what his job was. Well, here's the experiment. Half of these people were exposed to a student who came in and said essentially the following. I have to thank you so much, you telephone solicitors, for what you're doing. Because I'm attending the University of Michigan with financial aid, there's no way I could have afforded to come to this institution without the money that you're raising. That helped me get here. Tell you what, it has changed my life. I'm the first one in my family ever to go to college. I'm the first one in my small town, my small community, who's ever gone to college. I come back for Christmas vacation and people come out on the front door, front porch and wave at me and hey, congratulations, Congratulations. I mean it's changed my entire town, not to mention my, my family. And it's all because of what you're doing. So I just want to tell you how important it's been, how life changing has been for me that you're doing such a great job in what you're doing. The other half of these people didn't get that message at all. Then they simply have this doctoral student simply measured one week later. Two different factors. One is how many telephone calls were made in a certain, maybe in an hour. I mean, you can do this fast or you can do this.

They measure it all the time. I have a friend who runs the global call centers customer service or Wayfair. I mean they measure continuously. So I can imagine how much data he had.

It's true. Well, turns out three times higher productivity. Essentially those people who heard this student, three times more phone calls made then the surprise. The surprise was now let's measure how much money they gathered. I mean you still have to do the script, you still have to read the dialogue and so on. But how effective were you? Turns out twice the amount of money, three times productivity, twice the money and you'd say okay, fine, a week later. I mean it have an impact, but it wears off soon. Well, they measured it a month later, exactly the same results. Three times productivity, twice the effect of that's twice the output. That is once you have some sense this matters, it's more important than just having Mike dial these numbers or whatever, right? It matters. And there are many others, but those are two illustrative studies.

Amazing, amazing. So here's how important, right? Like knowing that I'm making a difference in somebody else's life is right, is. And that's such a, such a big part about it. You know, there is so much. This comes up in my conversations with folks. They're like, yeah, I can find meaning outside of work. For work for me is just a way to earn a paycheck so I can find meaning outside. What do you say to those?

So as it turns out, I'm banking on the heliotropic effect. That is human beings will respond and will do better in the presence of positive energy. And positive energy ends up being attached to or synonymous with, with contributing to the well being of others, helping other people flourish, dream more, become more, do more and so on. That, that actually is a human, an attribute of human beings. So for example, A colleague in the psychology department here at Michigan did the following study. She took entering freshmen who are just coming in at the beginning of the school year, ask them to identify their goals for the year. Now, everybody has lots of goals. But she categorized the goals into two types. One type was called achievement goals. I want to get good grades, I want to be popular, I want a girlfriend, I want to make the team, whatever. The other kind of goal was called contribution goals. I want to make a difference. I want to have something, get better because of what I've done. Everybody has both kind of goals, but some people are dominated by one, some are dominated by the other.

Yes, trust.

So she put people in two groups depending on which type of goal was dominant. Then the study was she simply followed these students for one year, one academic year, measuring things like, for example, how well they got along with the roommates, how many times they got elected to a club office. So do popularity measures, social factors, how many minor physiological symptoms they experienced, got the flu, got headache, got Covid, missed class, and so on. Physical factors, what their grade point average was, what their test scores were at the end of each semester. So cognitive academic factors. On every single dimension, contribution scores were more predictive of performance than were achievement scores. That is, it's what people contributed that redounded to their own benefit. They did better socially, they did better academically, they did better physically. I mean, the whole notion is human beings will flourish in the presence of virtuous or kindness or compassion or contribution. That's confirmed by a number of other studies. But another study was done of individuals who were. All of these were widows. They lost their husbands within the last six months. Now this is more complex than I'm going to describe, but essentially some of these women were heavily involved in supporting, helping, contributing to the well being of somebody else. Some of these women had a very well developed support system. Other people nurturing them, other people supporting them, other people helping them adjust to the fact they just lost their husband six months later. They simply measured the extent to which these women had experienced a deep clinically diagnosed depression. In the first group, 0%. In the second group, 70%.

Wow.

Contribution matters a lot. So the whole notion about creating meaning is closely tied to making a difference in somebody else's life. Not just me. Now there are many other parts of meaning of now.

I love that.

But that's a practical one that it's easy to embed in organizations.

Absolutely. You remind me of something that Viktor Frankl said in the 50s. It is more true today than it was Even true then. And when he said, today we have more means to live, but less meaning to live for. And I find that we did this research when I was at McKinsey two years ago, and we found meaning. And what percentage of leaders found their work to be meaningful? They found purpose. Work gave them purpose. It was like close to, you know, 80, 89. 90%.

Wow.

When we asked that question to the frontline and managers, that number was 19%. Oh, like only 20%. So think about this, right? We know as humans, we are driven to contribute. It gives us meaning. We benefit personally. And our organizational performance, as you mentioned, you know, from the research, right. Benefits, you know, the call center study is a great example of that. We know that all of that benefit happens. So why is not the role of every people leader to find and help individuals in their team connect more meaning to what they're doing? Because here's the fact, right? Here's the hard, cold fact. If there is any revenue that, that a company has, I'm not even talking profits. If the company earns a single dollar in revenue, the company is making somebody's life better because of which that person is sharing that dollar, right? And so it doesn't matter which level in the organization. Maybe you're just changing, you know, servers in a little data center or you are putting the cog in the manufacture of a tractor. Helping people connect. Similar to that story of here's what I benefited for the call centers. Helping people connect to how as part of this organization, you're making a positive difference in the world is so easy to do and is such an unutilized lever because we never talk about it.

It's true. Well, you're the leader of the pack. You're a genius when it comes to those kinds of outcomes and those kind of principles. So you're having a big impact on people. I just sit and look at the numbers. You're making a difference.

Yeah, but you know, we stand on the shoulder of giants, Kim, and you're one of those, right? Without the research, without the really targeted interventions, how would be possible? So I think this is a really big deal, right? So talk to me a little bit, Kim, around meaning and how one of the organizations, right, that you might have worked with, where maybe this was an unleveraged lever and you helped them really implement this. Like, how did you implement this and what effect did that have?

I'll tell you, there are several examples. But here's one story. Near Boulder, Colorado, 16 miles west of Denver, Colorado, there is a place called The Rocky Flats nuclear arsenal. Now as it turns out, There was for 50 years or so a cold war after World War II going on primarily between the US and Russia in which they were stockpiling nuclear weapons. Russia was, we had to a Soviet Union. It was not just Russia, a Soviet Union. So the United States had to stockpile nuclear weapons. They had I think 90,000, we had about 50,000. We had enough. So if somebody sent a rocket ship over there, we're going to get one back, you know. Well, the trigger that goes into the nuclear weapons was manufactured in a place called Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal. So they were dealing with the most dangerous materials in humankind. Plutonium, enriched uranium, transuranic acid and so on. Things that go boom. Well, enormously safe environment. It was more secure than a maximum security prison keeping people out instead of keeping people in anti aircraft equipment across on buildings. You don't want any terrorists to get a hold of any of this material. You don't want any non authorized people to get access to anything in that site. Well, they became among the best, maybe the best manufacturers of nuclear triggers in the world. But because they were doing that job, they weren't monitoring pollution, for example. So nobody knew for sure whether or not the ground soil surrounding Rocky Flats, several thousand acres of buffer area. They didn't know if that was polluted. Nobody was testing. They didn't know how much radioactive material went up the chimney and into the air. Because if you get a particle of plutonium in your lungs, you're going to get cancer, guaranteed. Well, nobody knows that people in Denver 16 miles east is going to have cancer 20 years from now. And so on. Well, the Environmental Protection Agency began suing in the federal courts to get partial jurisdiction over Rocky Flats because they were prohibited from showing up on site for security reasons. Forty years later, they got partial access to Rocky Flats. And then to the surprise of everyone they brought with them, the FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation walked on site, said to people, step back from the equipment. You may not touch anything until you prove to us you're not polluting. Now that means 3,500 employees drop whatever they're doing. If they got a particle of plutonium in a tray, they got transuranic acid. If they got nitric acid, which is how you keep plutonium stable. You have these barrels full of nitric acid, that's where you put plutonium. Everybody steps back in the equipment, you don't touch anything. So 10 minutes after hot shut, that's called a hot shutdown. 10 minutes after hot shutdown, it's a lot more dangerous than 10 minutes before hot shut down. In 10 minutes before we're, we're handling this stuff, we're monitoring and so on. Ten minutes after we step back, nothing happens. So it becomes pretty dangerous. Well, nobody in the history of the world has ever cleaned up and closed a nuclear arsenal. I mean, the half life of plutonium is 26,000 years. Wow. Once you've got it, it's not going anywhere. So he just can't get up and walk away. I mean, you have to secure things 20,000 years. All right, well, that's the circumstance. So literally. And by the way, it still costs $700 million a year to keep the security there, to keep fans running, to keep the water moving, to keep this place from blowing up. That's 700 billion times six years. That's $4.2 billion is being spent for no reason, or at least nothing's happening. So the federal government finally said, look, we just can't keep writing checks. So. And nobody knows what to do. So we're going to bring a Blue Ribbon commission together, the experts all around the world in nuclear energy and ask them to give us an estimate about how long it's going to take and what's going to cost to clean up and close Rocky Flats. Because the President then said, cold War is over. We're not going to produce any more nuclear weapons. We've got as many as we're going to ever have. So we're going to actually shut down Rocky Flats. We're not just going to clean it up and start it again. We're going to shut it down. All right. The Blue Ribbon Commission gave them an estimate. The Department of Energy published this estimate. They said it's going to take us 70 years and $36 billion. Now, I interviewed the Secretary of Energy, the federal government. He said that is a gross underestimate. We really assume it's going to take 200 years and several hundred billion of billions of dollars to clean up and close Rocky Flats. But you can't send that an RFP for 200 years. Nobody's going to bid on that contract. So we had to publish 70. But nobody believes we can do this. All right, long story made short, they finished the job. The company, the organization that got the contract, finished the job 60 years early. $30 billion under budget, 13 times cleaner than required by federal standards. It's cleaner now than it was when they started. Wow. Now the question is, how in the world did they pull that off? Well, there's a book we wrote a book on that because it was so dramatic and under and amazing. But one of the major explanatory factors was they had to convince the employees that what we're really doing is we're saving the lives of our children. That is, a generation from now, nobody's going to have to be exposed to radioactive material. Nobody will be worrying about transuranic acid in the soil. Nobody will be worrying about groundwater being polluted. That is what we're doing now is blessing the lives of the next generation. So, you know, we've been doing this for 40 years, but we have to do what we're going to do for somebody else. Meaning was the issue.

Thank you for joining us in this inspiring conversation with Dr. Kim Cameron on the power of positive leadership. We've just scratched the surface of how positivity can transform organizations and lives. In our next episode, we'll dive deeper into specific practices and interventions that can help you as a leader, infuse more positive meaning, create a positive climate, generate positive emotions in the workplace, and create high quality connections that can help you make flourishing a competitive edge for your organization. Don't miss it. Tune in for part two 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 benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care 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.