How to Show People They Matter in 3 Small Moves | Zach Mercurio

Welcome to The Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host, and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, changemakers, and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science-based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work, and lead with more joy, health, love, and meaning. On today's episode of the Flourishing Edge podcast, I am joined by Zach Mercurio, one of the leading voices on the science of mattering. And here's the question at the heart of our conversation: What if the biggest performance unlock in our organizations isn't another strategy, tool, or technology, but helping people feel significant and that they matter. Zak shares a powerful story of a university custodian whose entire career was transformed by one supervisor who helped her see the true impact of her work. One small interaction became a 30-year source of meaning, pride, and performance. In this episode, we unpack why mattering is not a soft idea. It's a fundamental human need and one of the most overlooked drivers of motivation engagement, retention, and wellbeing. Zach gives us practical ways leaders can create small moments of mattering every day by noticing people, affirming their unique gifts, and showing them exactly how they are needed. This conversation is a powerful reminder that people don't need to feel valued after they add value. They need to feel valued so they can add value. Let's dive in. Zak, I'm so excited, my friend, to have you on the Flourishing Edge podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Yeah, thanks. It's good to do this.

So look, I've been a huge fan of your work on mattering, and I wanna first start, Zak, by asking you what first drew you personally to this idea of mattering?

It was a journey, and it was seeing a pattern that kept repeating itself over time. When I, when I would interact with people who were thriving in work, they tended to have one person, one, one person who showed them that they were worthy and that they were capable, that truly saw them for who they were, that truly heard them. And that was consistently there for them. And it usually just took one, one person, usually a leader who helped people remember how they were significant. And on the other hand, when we looked at people who were languishing in work, they seemed to have the absence of these interpersonal interactions. They seemed to not have an environment around them, which showed them the evidence of their significance. There was no way for them to regenerate the energy they needed to perform. And that we first saw this. And what first drew me to this concept of mattering was in a small study we did when I was a PhD student. And we embedded ourselves with a group of janitors at a university and we cleaned with them. We went to their break group when that— with them, we observed them. We were trying to understand in a very difficult, often overlooked, often job that's rendered invisible by their shifts. I mean, they're scheduled overnight, so people don't see them. How do you, how do you experience meaningfulness in your work? And again, what came about was that people, custodians who experienced meaningfulness, had someone that showed them the evidence of their significance. And the story that I always go back to is the story of a custodian named Jane, who was near homelessness before she got her job. She had a young son at home. She was a single mother. She applied for 15 jobs. Nobody would hire her. During her first few weeks on the job, she kept saying to herself, why couldn't you have done something more with your life, Jane? Why are you just a janitor? She said that that was when there was one supervisor who did something really interesting. He took her into a break room. He noticed that she was struggling.

Hmm.

He opened up a dictionary for her and had her read the definition of the word custodian as a person responsible for a building and everyone in it. And then What he did is he brought her out into the hallway and he said, look at, look at all these students in this dormitory that she was cleaning. And he said, just like your sons, like these are all someone's precious child and they're counting on you to make sure this place is clean. Um, and she said to me, she went into the break room and she broke down and started crying because it was the first time in her life that someone showed her that she was worthy. But she said it was that one moment of seeing the difference that she made. Of being shown the proof of her impact that she was needed by someone else that charted a 30-year career. She had been at the university for over 30 years. She was one of the most sought-after cleaners. She had the highest efficiency scores. And how do you go from, I'm just a janitor to staying somewhere for 30 years? It was one moment of mattering. And since we've done research with thousands of people, 22 different industries on what are the leadership behaviors that consistently predict things like motivation, low turnover, engagement, and it really comes back to leaders who create these small moments of mattering.

I love that story for many different reasons, but I think the first one is there are so many people, right, who show up, who work, right? I remember I was serving a client, Husqvarna. They have a huge plant in Orangeburg. They make tractors and chainsaws and all of these. And if you asked many people who are just kind of on that station working, they don't make the connection to the bigger impact that they're having. And in that moment, that job becomes just a way for them to earn a paycheck versus a validation of the impact that they're having in the world. And being able to just make that simple connection of the impact they're having in the world and the impact that they actually are having on everybody around them displayed back to them, here's why you matter, here's the impact you're having, can completely transform that, right, job. And as leaders, it's a responsibility. I feel it's an obligation for us to help people make meaning from something they spend majority of their waking hours doing.

I like to say that leaders are architects of meaning. They are able to show people their impact. There's a Scottish theologian, his name was Oswald Chambers, and he wrote, A River's Source Knows knows nothing of where it leads. It's very hard as human beings to imagine our downstream impact. We need someone else to reflect it back to us.

Absolutely.

We can come to believe that we matter on our own, that we matter, but it takes others to show us how we matter. And leaders are that other that show people that evidence of their significance in their environment, and they don't let them forget it. You know, something that you brought to mind for me was also that this happens in small moments. You know, what, what we found, like that small moment with that janitor. I asked her, I said, do you remember the supervisor's name? And she couldn't tell me his name. He, she said he got reassigned a few months later, but it was a small moment of him noticing that she was struggling before she said it. It was, it was a small moment of him taking an action to affirm her worth through proof of impact. He didn't tell her that she mattered. He had her read a dictionary definition, right? So he gave her proof of impact. She can't sit there and argue, well, that's not my job. No, it literally is your job. And then she, he walked her out and showed her these students and showed her that she was needed, that she was relied on by other people, that there's a big difference between telling people that they matter and the skill to show them exactly how they matter. And so there's a lot to unpack in that little moment. And then one other thing that you said is, I think that we get this wrong a lot. We confuse the meaning of work with the meaning in work.

Yes.

So the meaning of work for somebody in their life might be to put food on the table, and that's a worthy purpose itself. But the meaning in work is what they experience when they're there. And that leader got that. So yes, Jane was working for a paycheck. I mean, paycheck. She literally needed to provide for— she was near homelessness. She needed a home. She needed to provide for her children. She was doing a difficult job, but the meaning in work was what she experienced when she was there. And that supervisor understood that.

Yeah.

That, that we have control over that experience, regardless of how people got into the door of the plant or the company, we have the responsibility for what people experience while they're doing the work.

Absolutely. So define mattering for us and the 3 critical ways in which we can show people that they matter.

I think it's important to define mattering because it's a, it's a word that a lot of people are unfamiliar with, but mattering is the experience of feeling significant to the people around you. That comes from two primary experiences psychologists find: feeling valued and knowing how you add value. But mattering comes from having the need to matter met. And the need to matter is a fundamental human instinct. I always think of my newborn son when I met him. Huh. When I, when I talk about mattering, reaching his arms out and grabbing onto my index finger really tightly, you know, and as we were researching mattering, That grip I felt is called the grasp reflex. It's one of our automatic actions we take. So to matter, to be important to someone is a survival instinct. You and I would not be here if at some point in our lives we didn't matter enough to another person to keep us alive.

Absolutely.

It is that visceral. And just like the instinct to sleep or eat doesn't go away because we go to work, the instinct to matter doesn't go away because we go to work. It turns into this need to be seen, heard, valued, and needed by those around us. And so mattering happens when that experience is met. When we do feel seen, when we do feel heard, when we do feel valued, and we know exactly how we add value. It's different than things like belonging or inclusion, which I think gets, gets misconstrued. We focused a lot on belonging or inclusion in the last decade. Belonging is feeling part of a group. Inclusion is being invited into the group. Mattering is feeling that the group wouldn't be complete without you. So belonging is feeling part of something. Inclusion is being invited into something, but mattering is feeling important to the people around you. You can foster belonging through a program or an initiative. You can foster inclusion through a program or an initiative. You can only foster mattering through an interaction, like the interaction that janitor had with their supervisor.

Yeah, I love it because, you know, you're specifically highlighting two key components, right, in that definition of mattering. The first is feeling valued by those around us. It's a reflection of like, hey, I value you. Here's what you're doing. Here's how you make us better. But it's also about knowing how you are adding value to the people around you, right? So it's, it's two ways. It's not just one. And collectively, when we do that, that makes us feel significant.

Yeah. And, and those two areas, I think it's worth noting. And, you know, in my conversations with the psychologist that really codified this, Isaac Perletensky, he, I remember him telling me, he's like, Zach, you can't have one without the other. So he actually thinks that one comes first. And when looking at evolutionary psychology and biology. And one of the things that's really important is that people don't need to be valued once they add value. So this is how we've structured a lot of our companies. People, when they add value and they perform well, we give them stuff, perks, pay, promotions, new positions. But psychologically, the opposite is true for a human being. People don't need to be valued to— because they add value, they need to feel valued to add value sustainably. And I think this is very important. So while there's two components, one builds on the other, because when we show someone that we see them and hear them and value them, we give them the confidence they need to add value consistently and the energy, the energy they need to add value consistently. Because when I see you, hear you, value you, you develop two beliefs that are most predictive of sustained performance and productivity: self-esteem, the belief that I'm worthy, and self-efficacy. Now, we'd like to believe that we can sit in our office and build our own self-esteem, but that's not how it works. You know, when you think of what makes someone confident, it doesn't come from them sitting in their office chanting self-affirmations to themselves.

Yes.

It happens when we know someone has our back, when we can try, fail, experiment, take risks, learn, and we know we have a secure base in which we matter to come back to. And leaders are that secure base. And so when you create that secure base, you give people the energy, the confidence, the self-belief they need to add value. The more they add value, the more they feel valued. And this is the upward spiral that results in all the byproducts we say we want— motivation, engagement, well-being, performance. And so I think it's worth— I'm glad you highlighted those two areas, but I think it's worth noting that people need to feel value to add value. People will not care if they don't feel cared for.

Absolutely. And it is so critical because, you know, in our culture, from a very young age, right, people trade their worthiness or the feeling of being worthy, of feeling worthy to what they do or what they have, right? I have money, I have a title, I have success, hence I'm worthy, or I do these things. And this notion of being worthy for who you are is lost, right? And I think in this case, you can say, okay, you do all of those things and hence I'm going to now make you feel like, hey, you add value, Zak. But I can actually acknowledge your worthiness as you are, that what you do matter, but who you are matters even more. And then we put that place in it, it creates, right? That feeling worthiness comes and creates. You are gonna do more and more greater things.

And what I like is that too, is that, is that you're out. So if you, if you're just achieving, acquiring without feeling valued for who you are by those around you and knowing that, you're basically out exploring without a secure base to come back to. You become a nomad. Yeah. You could become a like psychological nomad. You're always trying to find the right place. You're always scrambling to find a home. You're always out exploring. It's just exhausting. But when you have the secure base to come back to, when you have that place where you feel that you're seen, heard, valued, and needed so that you can go out and explore. I mean, that is important. I would say like, when you look at the research on flourishing in life, really all flourishing in life is, is being able to explore life from a secure base. And the problem is, is that over the last 25 years of our obsessive use of technology to replace the interactions that create those secure bases, those secure bases, those secure relationships have decayed for individuals. And, and we're, we're chasing other things to try to give us the sense of mattering that used to come from being in places and being with people that showed us the evidence of our significance around us.

Beautifully put. And look, there is all the research you highlight in your book and tie mattering to all the things that matter to leaders, right? Performance, lower attrition, higher well-being, better medical health results, et cetera, et cetera. And so we know it is critical. We've talked about this a lot on this podcast. I wanna actually go into the specific practices that you researched that leaders can use to make people feel like they matter.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, let's just do, let's do some research right here. So everybody just think about when you've most felt that you mattered to someone else in your work and think right now about what they were doing, what they were saying, what was going on. Okay. It's very unlikely you are thinking about getting your direct deposit or getting a, getting a big award or getting some big promotion. You're probably thinking of a very small interaction in which one of these three things was present. And this is what we find through researching thousands of people. When people feel that they matter, one of these three things is almost always present. One, when we feel noticed. So when we feel seen or heard. Two, when we feel affirmed. This is different than just appreciation or recognition, right? Appreciation is showing gratitude for who someone is. Recognition is showing gratitude for what someone does, but affirmation is showing someone how their uniqueness makes a unique difference. So it's like when somebody shows reveals to us a strength we didn't know we had and shows us the difference that we make. That's a special kind of appreciation. It's called affirmation. And then when we show people how they're needed, when we feel that we're needed, so when we feel relied on. So those three areas also turn into the three practice areas. So as Lee, as are you doing to notice people, to be a noticer? What are you doing to be an affirmer? What are you doing to show people how they're needed? And what we've done is we've been able to codify 25 skills. And practices across those three dynamics that help us to show people how they're significant and ways to scale those across organizations. And so I'm happy to start wherever you wanna start.

Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask a meta question first. As you looked at this research around these three key dimensions or key three moves, right? Skills set underneath that of noticing, affirming, and needing. Where do you see the biggest gap? Is there one that there is a, this is, you know, overall is where the biggest gap is? And I would like to start there.

You know what? The, the last one. So in the Western, in our Western samples, so we've now have over 1,700 leaders who have taken this assessment. In our Western samples, the needed portion is lower, showing people that we rely on them. And why is that? Well, I think that we've lived in this world where we've been taught to help ourselves. We've been taught to optimize and actualize ourselves for 25 years. You know, self-help influencers tell us no one's coming to save you.

Yeah.

What if there were? What if there was someone coming? What if, what if we had a support system? What if you could do hard things and have people that saw you, heard you, showed you how you were needed? So I think it's very hard for people to show people that they rely on them. I mean, for example, right now, think of someone you rely on. Think of someone you rely on. And now think about the last time you told them explicitly. Oftentimes we don't use those words. So, I mean, you know, one of the things that we found in our research is some version of these 5 words really go along the way. If it wasn't for you, or saying because of you, thinking of someone you rely on saying, hey, I wanna let you know because of you, this, this happened. Another thing we're pretty bad at doing is showing people that we miss them when they're gone. Yes. I coach a lot of leaders and a lot of leaders, I ask them, what do you do when someone's not at a meeting? And they say, what? And they don't think about this as a leadership practice, but I go, what do you do? And they say, well, nothing. One of the things we found is that people who experience a high level of mattering have people that show them how they were missed. So if someone misses a meeting, instead of just going on like normal, writing down some notes and saying, hey, Ashish, I missed your perspective at that meeting. You know, you're really good at asking these types of questions. I wrote some things down that I wanted to get your perspective on. See, you're smiling right here. I mean, right? Because it feels like, like I was missed. So knowing that our presence and absence just means something to one other person. Is very powerful, but that's a leadership practice of showing people—

Absolutely.

Showing people what's missed when they're gone and how they're needed and using that language, if it wasn't for you, and showing people specifically how they and their uniqueness is needed for something else. So that needed portion is one that people rate themselves significantly lower on than the affirming or noticing one.

Yeah, I love that, right? If it wasn't for you, it does require people to step out of this automaticity, this busyness, the back-to-back running around. To one, notice, two, write it down, and then go back and circle. But again, it's these small moves, right? Like if you go do that, right, with somebody else, it's a powerful— it's way more powerful than spending 6 months creating purpose, which, you know, purpose statements and having, you know, go do all of that, which is like this corporate exercise versus our day-to-day interactions. I love Jane's work around high-quality connections and says, it can take 30 seconds, right? But how I'm gonna show up, what I'm gonna say to you, how I'm gonna make you feel, it doesn't need these massive acts.

Yeah. And you know, there's a story that people always share with regard to purpose, and it's when John F. Kennedy was launching the Apollo missions and he went to the space center and he said, hey, what do you do here? And the janitor said, oh, I'm putting a person on the moon as they were mopping the floors. And everybody like uses that to say this is the power of a purpose., but nobody likes to look at Andrew Carton's work at the Wharton School. He did an archival study of NASA during that time, how they got 300,000 contract workers to believe in this other-centered purpose. And they had rigorous, and, and it was a purpose that they were 10 years away from. It was a purpose that many of them wouldn't even be contracted with NASA when they achieved it. They had small functional areas. I mean, how do you get all these people to just believe in this thing? And what they found was that on blackboards at NASA facilities, there's a study called I'm Not Mopping, I'm Not Mopping the Floors, I'm Putting a Person on the Moon. That's the title of the study. They, they looked at photos, they looked at meeting minutes, they all had a daily ladder to the moon. So the top was, the top of the ladder was to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade to advance science, this big purpose. But at the bottom of the ladder was that group's daily tasks. And the next rung up was a tangible, measurable objective that that task was needed to accomplish. The next rung up was a tangible, measurable objective that that task was needed to accomplish, all the way to putting a person on the moon by the end of the, end of the decade. So Again, good leaders tell people that they matter, that they have a big purpose. I mean, great leaders, truly great leaders have the skill to show them exactly how they matter and measurably how they're needed. So, you know, nobody can argue with it. I mean, it's right there. I know my ladder to the moon. Like today I'm doing something that's needed for this. I can see that. I can see how it's needed for that. I can see that. And they don't let— leaders who do this well don't let people forget it.

Yeah. Such a powerful way, visual way, right? I'm thinking about— I spend a lot of time in factories and people have job aids and like, this this is how you do a job. But imagine if, in addition, you actually had the ladder of mattering. Every person, it was front and center. They could see what they're doing here, how that's actually contributing to the greater good. One of the rungs on that could be how they're contributing to the company's whatever, profit, revenue, et cetera. But there's a bigger, right? And I think all the way laddering up to that, I think it would make, I think, a difference.

Yeah, so you can tell someone they have a purpose or show them measurably how they're needed for a purpose. And again, I call it, and this kind of, we're working backwards, but this kind of goes into our affirming piece, which is, you know, when you affirm somebody, you're showing them proof of impact.

Yeah. No, this is beautiful. So let's actually go in the order. Let's start with noticing and let's talk a little bit about 2 or 3 skills. If you're a leader, what are some ways that you can help people feel seen and heard?

Okay, so one of the exercises we do in our work with leaders is we have them get into pairs and we have one of the partners share something at work they're proud of, and then we have the other person make them feel that they matter, and then they switch and we have the person, the other person share what they're proud of, but then we have the other person make them feel that they don't matter. What do you think, Ashish, I'll put you on the spot here. What do you think the first thing that the people who are trying to make the person feel that they don't matter as they're talking, what do you think the first thing they do is?

Those that show people what they don't matter. Well, I think either they'll share their own story of, oh yeah, I experienced it too. So they'll very immediately go into their own self.

Yep. We found that they, we found that they phones, they take out their phones or they look at their watch as the first thing to not make someone feel that they don't matter. So what does that mean? Well, it means that when we don't feel that we matter, the first way we know is because someone's not paying attention to us.

Yeah.

And. Because if we're going to act that way, we've experienced it. And everybody knows how to do that second part of the exercise because we've all experienced it. And it's that attention. So noticing is the deliberate act of paying attention to the details, ebbs and flows of someone's work and life, and showing them that you're paying attention. So attention is the currency of mattering. It's the foundation of mattering. And so one of the things that we've seen leaders do who are really good at this is they have some process. To observe the details of the people around them, to train their attention by noting down what they observe and by having a cadence of sharing back what they notice. My favorite example, and again, everything that I've learned in my research is from a real leader doing it. We do observational interview-based research. And so there's this leader in this manufacturing facility and she had this ingenious idea, low-tech idea, but she had 27 people. She was having trouble keeping track of all the details of their lives. So she had these notebooks and she would write down each individual's name. And write down one thing she wanted to remember about them from the past week. Every Friday she would do this. She had 27 people. If they were nervous about a meeting, she'd write it down next to their name. If they were struggling with a piece of equipment and she promised they'd get it fixed, she would write it down. If they were going on vacation, she'd write it down. And her ritual is every Monday morning, she looks at that notebook and schedules a 3-minute check-in with each of them. She says, you know, I remember, hey Ashish, I remembered last week that you were struggling with this piece of equipment. Did we get that fixed? For you? And she said that what she's learned is as a leader, that there's magic in being remembered. Now, I was asked to go work with this manufacturing facility because they scored really low on their employee engagement scores, except for one team, and it was her team. And all her people said, it's, it's our leader. She just gets us. We do anything for her, but it's because she remembered that she didn't leave it up to chance. She had a practice. So having some practice, you don't have to keep, you know, you don't have to keep a noticing notebook as we've called it. But you should have some deliberate practice of retraining your attention to note down the details of people, of things you want to remember about people and having dedicated time to share back what you observe. You could do this right now. Think about last week. Think about a conversation in which maybe someone was frustrated or excited about something. Just note down that you need to follow up with them after you listen to this podcast, give them a call and say, hey, I, I was thinking about this conversation you had last week. I remember you were frustrated about that meeting. How did that go? And watch what happens to your relationship. There's magic in being remembered.

There is magic in being remembered. It's beautiful. You know, one practice, Zak, that this reminds me of, right, of really noticing is I had one leader who always, whenever somebody else came on, right, the conversation was about them, right? It wasn't like he would have his regular check-in in the first 5 minutes. Everybody shows up because they wanna talk about what they've done, the gaps, et cetera, et cetera. And he just wanted to talk about how they are. How they are. And then he would ask again, how are you really? And just have that conversation. And they're like, I'm fine. Like, no, tell me about. And he, yeah, I mean, he would like, tell me about what's going on with you. How's your family? What did you— like, it was a conversation truly about, I want to know the whole of you, not just the VP of engineering that is showing up and having a conversation. So again, this powerful move of seeing the whole person. We talk about Be the whole person, but we actually never, half the time, don't even know the stories that people have and that have shaped them.

And we actually aren't very good at getting the data to notice people. So we tend to ask pretty bad questions. I would say another, another move that we've seen leaders do is they tend to go beyond the greetings and ask really good questions, quality questions. For example, how are you? How's it going? How's work? How are things? Those are greetings. They're not questions., right? And what we've found is that leaders who are great noticers, they tend to ask questions that have 3 characteristics. They're clear, not vague. So a vague question is like, how's work going? Right? There's no way the brain can come up with an answer because there's no object and there's no timeframe. So the brain is lost in space. So ask questions that have an object and a timeframe, like what has your attention this morning? I can answer that because there's an object, my attention, and there's a timeframe. I was just on a networking call a couple weeks ago and I got asked the best question. I'm an introvert, so I struggle with small talk sometimes, but he gave me a Ashish Kothari, because he asked, what were you working on 5 minutes before we connected? Right. That's now you're getting clued into what I did. That's why I asked you that when we got on today.

Yeah.

Because my brain, I can answer that question. I was just doing it, but we, so ask, ask clear, not vague questions. The second is ask, you know, open, not closed questions. We get taught this a lot in elementary school. Like instead of, hey, did you like the podcast? What was the most insightful thing you'd learned in the podcast? And then, but this last one is really sneaky, especially in high-performance organizations. Ask more exploratory questions than you do evaluative questions. So an evaluative question is any question in which you have the power to judge the quality of someone's response. So, you know, if my kid comes home from soccer practice and I say, hey, did you hustle today? He's probably not going to be like, nope, dad, I actually did not. Right? Sure. If you ask your, if you ask someone who's working on a project, hey, you're going to get that done by Friday for the client. They're probably not going to be like, nope, boss, not going to happen. They're going to give you a self-protective answer. You're not going to get all the data, but If I ask my kid, what's an effort you're proud of from last practice, from this practice, he can answer me. And I'm probably going to get the same information about his effort. If I asked, hey, uh, what's an improvement you noticed since the last practice? If I ask the person who's working on that project, instead of, you going to get that done by Friday? I ask, hey, what's getting in the way of you getting that done by Friday? Anything I can help with? Now I give the power back to the person because they're the expert in their experience. And I'll get better data. So this is one of the easiest ways to start opening up the space, asking clear, open, and exploratory questions. Try not to start your meetings with, how's everybody doing? Good? Because can you imagine if you were good?

Yeah, what a waste of time.

Would you say, would you be in the back saying, no, not me, or I hope everybody's doing well? You know, those are good greetings, but we find that great noticers tend to go beyond the greeting. They ask really good questions.

Yeah. And it's a real skill. I think we've lost, you know, our ability to ask good questions. Questions get beaten out of us from a very at a young age, right? If you look at the number of questions kids ask as they go through primary school, I think there's a precipitous drop.

But no, no, go.

Still remember there's a, there's a really beautiful book I call, it's called A Beautiful Question. I don't know if you've actually read that book. It's an amazing book. It just says, how do you ask beautiful questions?

I gotta check that out. I mean, one of the, one of the, the things that I do with some of the leaders I work with is I have a phone, I do a phone call test. And the phone call test is I ask them, I say, if you called your direct reports out of the blue today, in the middle of the day, what would their first reaction be? Do you think?

Yep.

And, uh, if it's some version of fear, terror, what's wrong, you have a problem. And the problem is not that you're a bad leader. The problem is that too many of your questions are transactional. So they're extracting. So you're asking things from peop— uh, from people. You're asking for updates. You're extracting things from people versus I think what you mentioned earlier, checking in on how the people are doing. Right? And I, I had a leader in a workshop last week who said to me, well, it would be terror. I think people would feel scared if I called them out of the blue. In no other human relationship is that acceptable.

Yep.

So we have to find ways to make sure that we're not consistently extracting from people in our interaction.

Yeah, it's beautiful. It's, it's beautiful. I'm, I remember I once called one of my associates. I was at McKinsey.. And I could sense like this, oh my God, Ashish is calling me. It's like I said, hey, how are you? He's like, I'm good. Like, what do you need? I said, no, I don't need anything. I'm just calling to see how you are. You've been on the study for 6 weeks. I want to see how things are going for you. What's working? What are some things that you think we should do differently? And there was like literally this pause, which seemed like so long. And then he said, you know, I worked here for 7 years. You're the first partner that's called me and hasn't asked about a deliverable. But is asking for my point of view on how things are going and what can be different.

That's really powerful. And actually, as I think about it, it's quite hard-hitting because think about the millions and millions of people out there who have never been seen.

Yeah.

And I call that, you know, it's like since I did that study with janitors, for example, I'll go and if I'm in the airport, I'll go into a bathroom and if I see a custodian, I'll see, I see people like pushing past them. And I'll say to them, hey, I just want to thank you. Everything looks great in here. And there's this— it's just what you mentioned. There's this pause. There's this, wait, what? And it's like people are shocked now to be seen. It's like this shock of being seen. And think about what that signals about how we've built work.

Yeah. And again, going back to our original point, right? And most of the time, people's worthiness is tied to what they do. So, you know, I will check in on what you're doing, what you're delivering, say great job if you did something. But yeah, we have dehumanized. I always say we don't live in a severance world, right? This is not like my work identity, my home identity. And I think it's powerful. So I love noticing. I think it starts by really getting curious about your people, letting them know when— really, really noticing them, letting them know when you miss them. Keeping track of what's going on in their life. And you show up and you say, hey, I want to check in with you. It can be a work struggle they were working with, something that they were working that were top of mind, but it can be something personal. But it's the circles, it's the loops, right, that really, really matter. And then really asking great questions and training ourselves to ask more open exploratory questions. I love those moves that you highlighted. Let's talk a little bit about affirming. 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 when we asked people when they most felt that they mattered, they, they didn't really talk about appreciation or recognition as much as they talked about this special kind of feeling significant, which came when somebody specifically named their unique gifts and showed them how their gifts made a difference. You know, I once had a coach that told me, Zach, you can't read the label when you're inside the jar.

Yes. I love that.

Right. I love that because he was seeing something in me that I didn't see in myself. And those, I think you mentioned this earlier, those reflect what the, in the psychology, they're called reflected appraisals. So what's reflected back to us is sometimes what we are seeing about us for the first time. Like, it's very unlikely that your people are waking up every day thinking about their unique gifts that they offer, the unique difference they make. They're probably thinking about how they're gonna get through the day and get home to pick up their kids, or how are they gonna get through the day and get home and have dinner, you know? And so you as a leader are in a role to illuminate in others what they may not see in themselves. So there's two, two parts of affirmation, revealing people's uniqueness, Showing them how their uniqueness makes a unique difference. I'll start with that latter one, showing people the difference they make, because it's very hard for the human brain to think about your impact down the line, that downstream impact. Sure. One way to do this is to really collect and tell stories of significance and show people proof of impact. My favorite example comes from a National Park Service supervisor that I was asked to work with. He was responsible for a group of parks in the West. They had morale issues. They had a very difficult time recruiting people. It was low pay. A lot of governmental pressure, remote environment in these national parks, sprawling infrastructure. And he took over and within a few months, you know, things started changing. And since I was doing some coaching with leaders there, I got to go talk with him and he had this practice where he would go around the park and he would take pictures of projects his team worked on. So if they worked on a bridge, he would take a picture of people walking over the bridge and he would store it on his phone. If there was a trail that was open, a new trail, he would take a picture of a family walking on it. If there was a bathroom that had a shorter line because now a bathroom was repaired and there was a shorter line for this bathroom, he took a picture. He had this ritual every Friday morning. He sent this email. The subject line was, look what you did. There was no body to the email and he just attached like 50 photos and he sent it to all his maintenance teams. They loved that email because he said to me, my people cannot question whether they matter. I give them photographic evidence. So one of the things on that side of showing people the difference that they make is where When and how can you document and show proof of impact? Let me, let me show you the difference that you made. Hey, Ashish, you know, you gave, you gave that perspective in that meeting. You gave me those ideas. Here, come to, come to my computer. Let me show you where that went, right? That, that is how you show people the difference they make. They start to feel significant. And one way we can do that is actually just giving a better thank you or good job. We go to countless workshops on how to give critical feedback, how to have crucial conversations. When I ask an audience, tell me, raise your hand if you've ever learned the skill of giving someone meaningful gratitude and none of the hands going up. Crickets, right? But there are 4 major components. When you, whenever you're thanking someone or giving, showing them good job, make sure you describe when and where it happened. So be a noticer, describe when and where the situation or what you're thanking them for happened. Make sure you name the behavior. What did the person actually do? But then third, and this is really, really important, name their gifts. So every human being brings us at least 4 gifts. They bring us their strengths, what they love to do and what they're good at. What are the things people ask them to do? Where do they light up, get excited, get energized? Have you named those back to people? Second is they bring us their purpose. This is what we talked about. What's missed when they're gone? Purpose is someone's unique impact on a team. They bring us their perspective, how only they see the work and the world, and they bring us their wisdom. So when you're thanking somebody, wisdom is something that's only someone else can teach you. Because they've lived their life. So when you're thanking somebody, make sure you name, hey, we really rely on your experience in this way, or I can really see how your perspective and ways of asking those questions did this, and name those gifts. And then finally, show people the impact that it made. This is how it made me feel. This is how it impacted me. This is how it impacted someone else. Describe the setting, name the behavior, name the gifts, and show people their impact. We say thank you and good job all day long. But instead of just telling people thank you or good job, show them the difference they make and exactly how they make it. And again, it's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar. So you're likely giving, giving someone a gift of seeing something in themselves that they had not seen. And that's what regenerates the energy we need for people to consistently add value. They need to see exactly how they uniquely do it.

Yeah, it is beautiful. And how, how people shortcut thank you, I appreciate, or even just do, hey, this is manager appreciation week once a year.

Yes.

And we're gonna give some gifts and we're gonna I'm gonna cut a cake. And I think those things have almost no impact in the day-to-day. And it's these small things. I loved your example of sending photographs, like what he did. Find ways, if you're a leader, to make the connection about the work that people are doing and the impact that it's having out there. It's so powerful.

I think your insight is important there because appreciation, you can show appreciation, which is valuing someone's presence and role. You can do it through a program or an event. It's like Teacher Appreciation Week. You can give somebody an award through a recognition event or, or show, elevate what they do, but you can only affirm someone through an interaction. Absolutely. So I, I liken those things. There's two things in organizations. There's symbols of value. These are things like money, awards, perks. Those are symbols that you're valued, but they're inanimate objects, so they actually can't value a person. And what happens is the reason why those symbols of value are meaningless, because they try to replace the daily experience of feeling value. Yes.. And so the question for organizations are, are you investing in symbols of value or are you investing in the skills amongst leaders to make sure the daily experience of feeling valued in everyday interactions is there? And oftentimes there's a gap when both of those are present, when people feel valued every day, when people feel seen and heard and valued, and they get these symbols, perks, pay, benefits, all of those things. That's where some magic happens, but nothing can make up nothing. No symbol, no perk, no pay increase, no promotion. Can make up for the daily experience of feeling unseen, unheard, and undervalued.

And so many are right there, right? They feel unseen, unheard, and undervalued. That is why our workplaces, you know, consistently when we look at flourishing surveys, we find only 20% of people are flourishing. This is one of the big elements that's often missing, right? People don't find meaning at work, and they don't feel that they're valued, that they matter. One of the top reasons, you know, when we looked at this research at McKinsey, why people leave is they don't feel valued by their boss or by their company. It's like the number one reason. Yes, pay matters. Yes, you know, kind of where they're going matter. But this shows up and this is consistently underappreciated by companies. So we did a two-part survey. What matters to you? And we asked leaders, what do you think matters to people? Why do they leave? And this was one which was the least underrated and the most rated by the people. So there's a big gap in exactly this.

And I would say that, you know, the way to redeem work is to focus on the interactional level of organizations. So there's the organizational strategic level. This is where most of the attention goes. You see it right now. You see, you see this in the AI strategy movement, right? We're focusing on big strategy at the organizational level. There's the team level where you're focused on how teams are working together, but then there's the interactional interactional level, which is how individuals interact. You know, in the, in the Gallup, latest Gallup survey on engagement, we're more disengaged than ever despite the billions of invested in recognition platforms. And, you know, we're outsourcing recognition now to platforms, this $50 billion industry. And, you know, despite, well, DEI programs, wellbeing programs, perks, pet care benefits, everything, you name it, people are more disengaged. The data point there, just 39% of people in that sample could strongly agree that someone at work cared for them as a person. That data point Dropped 12% from 2020, and it's had the most precipitous drop. You can't solve that through a program. You can only solve that through an interaction. This, this interactional level and reskilling people. You know, everybody talks about technical upskilling. We need social upskilling, right? Reskilling people to see, hear, and value one another is the way that we're going to rebuild the energy needed in our organizations to do all the things we need to accomplish in an environment that makes it hard to accomplish them.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. Well, I'm deeply passionate about that, Zach. In fact, that's one of the big reasons one of our main programs we run with organizations is all about unfreezing the middle. And fundamentally, it's about upskilling the middle managers to have completely different interactions, right? Increase their ability to coach others, increase their ability to show that they matter, increase their ability to what I say, you know, like everybody can choose to be a transmitter, transmitter of stress, expectations, et cetera, or they can be a transformer. You can take and actually show up differently. You know, again, people leave job— people don't leave jobs, people leave bosses. People don't leave companies. And it's this middle that if we are— if we think about interactions, which is where it's at, interactions fundamentally require the middle of the organization that touches most of the organization. That's where the center of gravity is. It is not at the top. And yet most leadership programs, most one-on-one coaching barely permeates beyond an N-1 or an N-2 level.

Yeah. It's like an upside down triangle when it comes to investment in leadership development.

Yeah. And yet all the way down to the front line, the biggest impact and interaction is actually the other way around.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And again, the other thing we have to understand is that we've been silently losing these skills for about a quarter of a century. You know, the social skill decay is real. Every time we use a platform or technology to replace a human interaction, we lose the skill to interact. So we're in this place where organizations, and it's not happening in education, unfortunately, reskilling these social skills. We teach kids what to do as human beings, not how to be a human being. And so it falls to the organization to reskill people to see, hear, value, and show people how they're needed. And the biggest rebuttal that I get is, well, We won't even have an organization if we don't perform and survive and produce and, and, and make profit. Right. But the goal is not, you don't, it's not either or you, you show people that they matter so that they, they, they have the energy needed to perform. And I liken it like, you know, there's, there's 4 quadrants at the upper right is you want high mattering, high performance standards, right? You want to expect hard things from people in an environment where they feel seen, heard, believed in, valued, understood, needed. And you know, if I were to summarize the, all the parenting and leadership books really over the past half century. There's really only one leadership style that works. High challenge, high support. There's only one parenting style that works. High challenge, high support. The problem, of course, why you and I have a job, is we've over-indexed on challenge and under-indexed on the skills of support.

Yeah. You know, the book that really brought it to life for me was David Yeager's, I think, 10 to 25, right? Like he really powerfully talks about that idea. That's it.

That's it.

Right? Of what, how can you actually grow? And I have to tell you, I'm very much a learner in that. I have a 16-year-old, but it's, it, it, you know, it, it's a constant practice of I don't want to lower my standards and I want to be able to be the most supportive that I am for what he wants. And my standard is around what he wants, right? It's not about where I want him to go to school. I'm like, you want to go here, this is what's required to get there. I'm here to support you to get there. But in the end, the journey is yours rather than shaming, blaming, right? Which are the kind of—

Yeah, but I mean, you apply, you even apply that. Some of the stuff that we've done, like, you know, notice, noticing some things, you know, being able to notice, like my kid, he wants to play, he wants to play soccer in high school and he wants to play soccer in college. I mean, and so, you know, one of the things I said to him yesterday, you know, we were, he was out in the backyard and he goes, hey, like, I just wanted to say, like, I've noticed, I've noticed that you're struggling with like the keeping up with the juggling thing that your coach wanted you to do every day. Like what's getting in the way of that? And he's like, well, I get tired when I come home. Home from school. Like, okay, what can we do? Like, what can we do to get some more energy? And he's like, well, let's look. Maybe if I just have a little downtime before I do any training. I was like, okay, so schedule in some time. Let's go read a book and I'll help you. I'll help you hold accountable for that. 20 minutes after you get home, you're going to read a book before you do anything else outside or anything like that. That's right. The difference between— so noticing things, seeking understanding, having people be part of their own solution. Those are the little moves that make a big difference rather than saying, why Remember, keep up with your juggling, keep up with your, with the touches on the ball. Why aren't you doing that? Fine. If you're not going to do it, forget it.

Right. Well, listen, thank you, Zach.

Yeah. Thank you.

This powerful, you know, powerful work that you're doing to bring the power of mattering. I think we are, I think we have 3 forces, right? That are actually anti-mattering forces that almost every person in the workplace is living right now. So the 3 anti-mattering forces. One is we are constantly distracted, right? We've become dopamine addicts. There are more interactions, more phone calls, more emails, more interruptions coming. So like there is this constant distractions that keep us from presence, which is a foundational element of being able to notice. If I'm constantly distracted, I'm not here, right? I'm not present. I think the second is this busyness. Epidemic, right? Back to back to back meetings. I have many leaders who have 2 or 3 meetings on top of meetings, right? So when you're constantly on the go, your ability to focus, again, notice goes down. But more importantly, you don't create the space to actually then do the closed-loop communication of the example that you just gave, right? Hey, you weren't here, or here's— checking in on people, right? We just become, how can we do more, more, more? And it just becomes a way. It was funny. Most people, if you ask them, how are you, a very standard answer is busy. Because as a busyness is what we are rewarded. So I think this busyness epidemic and things are only getting, you know, getting more and more busy. And I think the third one, which is a huge anti-mattering force right now, in our drive and thirst for AI, we are more and more consciously and unconsciously showing people, oh, this can do so much more than you can, or this is better than you, and it's gonna get there where you're gonna. So I think that is a real fundamental anxiety, but also feeling replaceable for humans right now. And as leaders, I think what I'm taking away from our conversation, and I appreciate you for the 25 skills, the frameworks, and so well that you organized this to say, you know, look, you can do your own assessment. You can see the moves that come naturally to you. Only you as leaders, as individuals, can be the force that kind of overrides these antimattering kind of forces on us. And make people feel seen, make people feel valued, right? Noticed, affirmed, and needed. So thank you. I think it's a powerful way to restore humanity back and through that, actually drive all the outputs, higher performance, more creativity, more innovation. But we need to actively make this work. So I really hope people pick up your book, people actually read it together as teams, and they start to integrate mattering as a core skill, as a core foundation on which they build the future organizations. So thank you.

Thank you, Ashish. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

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